Many of us are notorious fence-sitters. This video attempts to explore some of the psychology of our profound hesitation when switching operating systems. I will share my personal experience, talk about some of the fears we face when making big changes, offer some warm encouragement, and do it all without a whiff of the elitist technobabble that tends to rear its ugly head in Linux discussions.
The day I don’t want to jump ship to the latest new tech is the day I stagnate into an old person
The irony being that some Linux users fear change (or at least fight it tooth and nail) more than any other computer user.
unix is about doing one thing and doing it well, which is why systemd, baaad
…what do you mean ditch x11 in favor of wayland? no no, we need to preserve x11, the famous one-thing-well-doer
It can find and load your ssh keys. Does it just do one thing well?
Use plan 9.
I was a windows fanboy for more than 20 years. Going back every couple of months feels strange. Windows has changed, feels intrusive and uncandid to me. Linux is still new and sometimes a little strange to me, I miss my perfectly customized music player but apart from that, it’s so much fun to use. I can’t ever go back. Looking at Windows-user struggling makes me unconformable because i know they will never experienced how using a free OS feels like. They are so used to smartphones and computers shoving stuff down their throats instead of being the best tool you can come up with.
Same here, saw the writing on the wall after 7 and tried Linux gaming a few times but it was rough back then so I always came back. I did however start at least dual booting with 7 onwards so apart from gaming I was a convert at that time.
This year finally got tired of all the crap, them trying to railroad AI junk in, ruining the control panel, absolutely BURYING settings, turning ones back on with updates, the entire operating system is a dark pattern when it used to be so much more streamlined. Switched to Bazzite and it feels like I’m almost back to Windows 7 except I don’t have to install drivers or anything, just install it, add any apps through the store and you’re off. What they’ve done to windows is ridiculous to me and I’ll never come back.
Out of curiosity, what was that perfectly customized music player?
Foobar! I tweaked it for years to be as simple yet powerful as possible. It counted plays, the date when songs were added and last played, which is lost now. It had a beautiful waveform-view I miss every day. And it converted and renamed files exactly as I told it to. I found some workarounds, but nothing comes close. Rhythmbox is good but misses the waveform view. Other applications are beautiful but offer too much bells and whistles, I like it simple. Feel free to recommend stuff!
I was really hoping you’d say it was Foobar2000! You can run Foobar2000 using something like Wine/Bottles, but the UI gets all screwy. Recently, somebody released a Foobar-alike called Fooyin and I love it! Here’s how I styled my layout:
Fooyin definitely has some growing to do, but I think it’s the best you can do on Linux if the goal is the ability to play bit-pefect music with a similar setup to Foobar2000.
Wow, I installed it today and it’s perfect for me! I tried Deadbeef and wanted to like it, but it couldn’t replace Foobar. Fooyin can, thanks for the recommendation.
Awesome, I’m glad to help spread the good word! Fooyin is still in its infancy it seems, but I’m hoping we’ll get some more features in it soon- I’m hoping for spectrogram/waveform visualization as well as EQ.
i too merely flirted with linux for years until my windows me started boot looping and then i was forced off that fence 25ish years ago and has been the biggest reason i’ve been able to stay employed since then.
the video is right about the reasons why people don’t want to switch and part of me wishes he used a sink or swim story like mine since the worst case scenario is trying to swim again later on when it comes to linux.
