I haven’t owned a Windows machine in over a decade. If someone wants help, this is my response because I have not kept up with the changes, for lack of any need or desire to do so.
“Can you help me with my computer?”
“If it is running Linux or BSD, or you want it to, sure. If not, I’m not the guy for the job.”
IDK. I’m to the point where I don’t touch anyone’s phone or computer, because if I glance at it from a speeding car, I’m suddenly responsible for everything that suddenly “now doesn’t work” in their entire house, probably including the dishwasher.
My wife was telling me that she saw an article about Microsoft supposedly planning to add a “small” banner for advertisements to the desktop on Windows and the essence of this meme was my precise response.
My daughter wanted to do something trivial with windows, but did not know how. Online help referred to a button that did not exist in the application. I know at least three ways to accomplish the same action on Linux, and I know they just work.
In an effort to relieve her PC of constantly deluge of virus and malware, I switched my Mom over to Ubuntu in the 2000’s. She lasted a month.
The experiment ended when she called me in tears because of her silent 4 week struggle with the OS.
She couldn’t get her scanner to work reliably, and none of her “print shop” software was compatible.
I know more now than I did then, and the distros have come a long way since, but I don’t have the time to retrain her and at 70 years old, I just want her to use what she’s comfortable with, even if that means I have to occasionally scrub her PC.
Wow this article perfectly captures the early 2000s experience of trying to teach parents how to use the internet. Internet access wasn’t very widespread in Australia yet, and my parents weren’t really interested in it and thought it was too difficult to use.
Things from that article that really stuck out to me:
Not being able to type searches directly into the address bar. This confused me as a child, and I was really excited when browsers started to incorporate the feature
Mentioning the use of a pager
Knowing that all the photos in the article are of real people and not AI because it’s from 2002
The difference is that with Linux, it’s possible to become smart enough to fix all the issues. Windows is designed in such a way that there usually isn’t a way to fix its problems to avoid format and reinstalls no matter how much you know.
I have a fairly “bleeding edge” laptop with an RTX3000 series GPU and an AMD CPU/APU and I have been surprised at how well it runs on Linux.
Not only is my battery life consistently better but it handles the GPU switching flawlessly and performance in games is also consistently noticeably better than what I experienced running Windows on the same hardware.
Even in just the last year or two the advancements in Linux support have been downright incredible! (At least in my personal experience)
Of course I’m using Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, but I was in Windows too and my experience has only improved by switching to Linux.
I tried installing it on my 3 years old (at the time) Surface Book and while some things worked they certainly didn’t work as well as in Windows. I messed around with a specially crafted Linux kernel for the Surface devices and that was a bit better but the wifi routinely stopped working after resuming from sleep. The touchscreen worked but not with the pen. The device also consumed huge amounts of battery life when sleeping. Would not recommend.
I remember in 2008 when I was in university trying to use Linux on my laptop. I had to run a script at the command line to connect to my uni’s wifi, because the UI always failed to connect. Then I had to keep wpa_supplicant running in a terminal window the entire time.
That can be applied to most hobbies in general. Not using an automated coffee machine? Time worth nothing. Cooking rather buying takeout? Building your own pc rather than buying prebuilt? Drawing rather than generating with AI? Time worth nothing, that’s why.
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