moon_matter

KeepassXC is bundled with a CLI tool. But it doesn’t have to do anything special for SSH. It’s ultimately just text and there are multiple ways to paste text into an SSH session.

What does that mean for Windows though?

I meant it quite literally. Another multi-billion dollar company needs to be willing and able to spend the same level of resources and time. Wal-Mart or Costco itself would have to be willing to produce their own hardware.

Yeah, I fully realize it’s never going to happen. It’s a hypothetical to illustrate just how high of a hurdle it is. It won’t happen organically, there needs to be a strong driving force with the financial backing that rivals that of the competition.

“Nobody cares” is how Linux will eventually win on the desktop. It becomes viable for most people when they no longer “need” whatever they were using before. As Linux is free, it will win when it becomes “good enough”.

The largest barrier is the fact that the end user is expected to install the OS themselves. Having an OS work 100% of the time right out of the box with a default install is impossible. Windows and OSX have a huge advantage by being installed on the factory floor. The manufacturer guarantees that the drivers work for the hardware they decide to install and that the default applications on the OS work as they should.

Linux needs an equivalent to Microsoft or Apple that can put Linux on shelves at WalMart for average people that buy $600 desktops.

You should use whatever the majority of the team is using. If you want to use Linux then you need to make it a priority to find a team that has at least a few people using it. You don’t want to be the only person having issues setting up their local dev environment.

I hate that the developers of secure messaging apps in particular are deaf to this. It’s so easy to just add SMS as a fallback and yet they refuse to.

Software also looks at future dates, so the problem is actually going to start to occur much sooner. The kernel will be fine, it’s all the other random software floating out there that you should worry about. A lot of in-house calendar and booking software is probably going to start to blow up soon.

Have you seen the Reddit Linux communities? People don’t care how many tools or useful information you present them. They will ask the SAME “which distro” questions day after day after day.

There are 3 reasons you see repeat posts.

1. They are extremely lazy and can’t be bothered to find their way through a maze of information.
2. The maze of information is legitimately confusing and they need help. But they are bad at formulating good questions so it looks like point #1. I very rarely see people take the time to explain what they’ve tried and why they failed.
3. They want a conversation and getting their question answered is only one half of it.

Also one other thing I noticed is that if you do form a good question and create a wall of text, it can also scare people away. So people deliberately ask very vague questions and then slowly reveal more as they get asked for specifics. At that point you’ve hooked some people, they are a little more invested in helping and you can info dump on them.

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You’re still stuck when it comes to anti-cheat in multiplayer games. Some do allow it to work on Linux, but a significant number don’t. Hopefully the tides slowly start to change thanks to the Steam Deck.

At least when it comes to Git I’m not too concerned. What could MS possibly do to you? Maybe vendor lock in via the issue tracker? They aren’t using it and it’s not exactly that hard to migrate off of it in the first place.

It surprises me how many indie devs avoid some of the higher level / more popular engines for this reason alone. But I assume they just must enjoy that sort of stuff much more than I.

The problem with indie devs is purely a lack of knowledge and resources. They don’t feel comfortable testing and packaging binaries for distribution on Linux. A decent number of them are also self-taught and actually have almost no exposure to desktop Linux at all. So it’s actually a much higher hurdle than you think.

Popularity makes all forms of support infinitely easier. I’d struggle to come up with any technical reason that could be worth giving up the ability to easily google for issues or install software. That doesn’t mean I think you shouldn’t use other distros, just that I believe Ubuntu is the best choice for a default install targeting average people.

It’s kind mind boggling how often you have to ask the OP to actually post the command they tried to run or the full error message and some of them will actually try to argue that it won’t help. The people that frequent the forums start to get a bit annoyed at having to beg for bread crumbs and they eventually either become toxic or burn out and leave the community.

Sometimes they can afford to not know because they have a relative who can manage the device for them. In which case they really wouldn’t be installing software on their own really.

You would be surprised at how many people cannot even change the volume on their tablet.

Is this even a legitimate problem? Lots of people, myself included, have a “local” configuration. All of the services and credentials mentioned in the config are running on my personal machine for testing only during active development. None of those credentials refer to any sort of “real” service that’s on 24/7 and accessible via the internet. It’s effectively dummy data to the rest of the world and I imagine there are a ton of false positives like what I just described.

Windows auto-recovers from almost any issue the average user might encounter. It cannot be understated just how hard it is for an application or driver to break modern Windows. It goes much farther than just fixing a kernel panic. It will reset to a serviceable state for almost anything you can think of ( e.g. bad display settings, borked application install) and even in the worst situation will still give you some sort of GUI and try to walk you through the problem.

Linux sort of just gives up and lets you shoot yourself in the foot if you really ask it to. It’s up to you to then figure out how to fix things and that usually involves diving into the terminal. But even ignoring that, a lot of Linux applications have a serious UI/UX problem. I cannot count how many applications just do things like throw a config file at you even for common tasks and expect you to read a doc page in order to figure it out. I have better things to do than read yet another wall of text just to do something simple like remapping key bindings (e.g. mpv). That would be an unthinkable thing to do to a Windows user.

Linux developers seem to want to develop software for other developers. Windows developers develop software for average people. The fragmentation of 1000s of Linux distros, each with their own quirks only make matters worse by further complicating where and how to get help.

I hate myself for saying this, but the only way forward is to treat PCs like a highly moddable console. They need to come with some “exclusive” software that only makes its way to other platforms at a later date. They also need to be built for a specific purpose (e.g. media centre, gaming) with the expectation that most people won’t want to leave the comfort zone.

I’ve been using Linux for so long that it’s hard for me to give an approximation of what a new user might find challenging

The average person would fail on step 0 of Installing the OS. In fact 90% of the problem could be attributed to Linux distros not coming preinstalled on PCs sitting in big box stores.

All of Linux’s success stories for the average user (Android, Steam Deck, Chrome book) have one thing in common. They are low cost, simple, purpose built for very specific tasks with a bunch of exclusive games/software that people want to use. We need to start looking at PCs almost like they are highly moddable game consoles. It should come with the expectation that most users don’t want to leave the comfort of the walled garden.

We need the equivalent of what Android is for phones, but for the desktop. A preinstalled, very opinionated OS that completely eliminates issues 2-4 and is supported by a major corp. We need someone like Valve to take things a tiny step beyond some combination of a Chrome book and the Steam Deck.