If only Linux wasn’t a confusing mess of dozens of variations that all seemingly exist only to trash eachother.
Been a while since you tried it huh.
I heard a guy saying that linux was trash, he had tried it once but it didn’t have drivers for anything and what did exist was difficult to install
So I asked him when it was that he tried itI think he said something like 1998…
I genuinely had an experience like this myself. I suggested Linux as a solution for something to a friend of mine who was a physicist doing a start up. This was around 2015-2016. He went on an angry rant about frustrating Linux was and nothing would work. His last experience with it was in 2002.
It was shit in 2002. It was shit in 2015. It’s shit in 2024. Why are you so angry?
Why do you think I’m angry? You (and my buddy) are just comically wrong, don’t wanna learn and get frustrated and mad when you run into trouble, like a cartoon character trying to open a can with a hammer.
I use Linux for everything, it’s stable, easy, fun I’m WAAY more comfortable in it than I ever was in Windows. Your opinion doesn’t change how well Linux works for me and has for decades. It’s definitely NOT shit, you just don’t know what you’re doing.
You’re like a dude talking to a professional race driver saying “Why drive manual, automatic is SO much easier, and therefor better and manual is harder and therefor shit.” Like dude, you’re talking to a room full of professional drivers. Like think about that for a second before you keep going the way you have been.
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Always a pleasure debating intellectually. Enjoy
Don’t make the mistake of confusing the Linux community (an absolute mess, just read the comments here) with the software itself (Actually cleaner and better organized than Windows).
As a Linux user myself, I understand what you are saying. Every distribution has its advantages and disadvantages, and you can’t expect regular people to know which one is best for them. Saying it’s not confusing to the average consumer is disingenuous.
Having said that, if you want to make the switch, go for Linux Mint and be happy. In my opinion, it’s the easiest Linux distribution by far, and everything just works.
dozens of variations
this is like saying windows 10 and 11 are completely different operating systems that can’t run the same .exes
except windows binaries are actually forward compatible.
even with the most popular distros, for example if you tried to take a typical gui program from say, ubuntu 22, and run it on ubuntu 24, it won’t work. even worse for other distros.
Also Linux’s package ecosystem are not cross compatible.
Bro do you even alien?
I didn’t know about alien, that is pretty cool.
However this bit from the readme is hilariously on brand for Linux:
"To use alien, you will need several other programs. Alien is a perl program, and requires perl version 5.004 or greater. If you use slackware, make sure you get perl 5.004, the perl 5.003 in slackware does not work with alien!
To convert packages to or from rpms, you need the Red Hat Package Manager; get it from Red Hat’s ftp site. If your distribution (eg, Red Hat) provides a rpm-build package, you will need it as well to generate rpms.
If you want to convert packages into debian packages, you will need the dpkg, dpkg-dev, and debhelper (version 3 or above) packages, which are available on http://packages.debian.org"
Highly disingenuous comment. I run older and newer software side by side in Linux all the time. It mostly just works.
Are you using snap or something?
Nope, but for as many programs that you claim still work, I can show you even more that don’t. I wouldn’t consider that disingenuous.
Seriously, give me some examples. I’m genuinely curious because I’ve run into this problem like… once, ten years ago. Twice, if you count trying to run Heroes of Might and Magic III for Linux that came out in like… 1999, and I eventually got that to work too (I needed an emulator) and I’ve been an almost exclusive Linux user since 2001.
I said disingenuous because my lived experience is like “wtf is this guy doing wrong?” and so you REALLY come across like you’re just trashing Linux and talking out of your ass.
I’m not trying to be insulting, just giving you feedback about how you’re coming across.
Well first we need to establish what you would accept as proof… what counts as not being forward compatible to you exactly? For example system libraries such as libpng, openssl or ffmpeg change versions and/or APIs between major distro releases, this inherently makes the old binaries no longer compatible by default. Is that such scenario acceptable to you as proof? Because I can list countless examples of those even just with one library being the issue, and there’s so many more that fail with multiple.
I’m not trying to trash Linux or act like I don’t know what I’m talking about, I just disagree that most older programs work without any issues, especially GUI programs that rely on ever-changing system library versions, for the reasons I stated.
Give me an example or two of a GUI program that you’d want to run, that doesn’t have a maintained version that will run fine in a modern environment, that you’re actually frustrated because you can’t run it.
We can bitch about how dependency systems work all day. I want to try to install something with a sane use case and see what we’re on about, since this is literally a scenario I have barely run into. I gather that for me to run into it, I would have to practically go looking for it. Which to me, sounds like a very specific problem for a very specific subset of users, not a general problem worth paint brushing the entire ecosystem with.
I don’t agree with the prerequisite of “doesn’t have a maintained version” because I don’t feel like that makes a difference with the premise of specifically running older software, whether it has a new version available or not.
But anyways… I will try to adhere to that anyways, and use Ubuntu as an example as that’s what I use.
7yuv: This and every Qt4 app for example no longer runs because Ubuntu 20.04 and above (and probably many other distros) does not provide it anymore. 7yuv is still available for download, but has not been updated, and does not run on my current 22.04 box.
Dia: Same story here. No longer developed. The remaining binary deb package was built for Ubuntu 12.04 and no longer runs due to a dependency on libpng12 (the current version is 16). Yes I could possibly recompile from source if the API hasn’t changed, but the discussion was specifically about running older binaries.
I don’t think it’s the options that make Linux a hard pill to swallow. For me it’s the lack of support for hardware and most software. Sure there are alternatives or WINE but that’s usually a big downgrade from just running it on windows.
My Ubuntu box I use for browsing/watching videos and listening to music just barely works and was frustrating to get properly configured. Linux for the dozen professional softwares I use for work is basically impossible. As much as I hate it I had no choice but to stick with windows.
It’s not the fault of Linux developers. The hardware and software companies just largely do not support it still.
My Ubuntu box I use for browsing/watching videos and listening to music just barely works and was frustrating to get properly configured.
Something is wrong. Have you tried Linux Mint? -Someone who has used Linux as a daily driver since 2001.
I haven’t. I doubt it would solve all of the problems I experience.
Anybody downvoting me can share their experience running protools with multiple hardware fader interfaces and 18 input DAW interface, pci SDI cards, and 6 separate display monitors.
Adobe software, Davinci Resolve, 3ds Max and its 20 plugins. None of these work or work seamlessly in Linux.
I can’t even get my surround sound to work properly in Ubuntu without having to manually adjust multiple convoluted conf files.
That’s the truth. I love Linux. I use Debian and Ubuntu on a bunch of servers I run. But fanboys need to stop deluding themselves into thinking it’s easy or even worthwhile to use Linux in lieu of Windows for anything and everything. I would be ecstatic if that changed.
Your surround sound, I’m sure it could be done. I’ve set up some pretty successful visual / audio stuff with Linux. I did IT for an Indy film festival four years in a row and we used Linux for all kinds of stuff (mostly because the festival was broke and didn’t want to spend money on new computers or software). We would run into hardware and configuration issues and our philosophy became “if you can’t solve it in two hours, distrohop.”
For the rest of it, I couldn’t agree more. If you need the tools that lock you to the platform, you need the platform FOR THOSE TOOLS. I have Windows and OSX machines (although it’s been like a year since I couldn’t do something on Wine, even if it’s glitchy). My Windows machines dual boot and I haven’t booted the windows partitions in literally 6-8 months. One OSX machine gets used almost exclusively for video conferencing (just because it’s in a convenient place) and for Garageband. The other OSX machine literally… just runs linux VMs that I can connect to over the network for various projects. I had other plans for it originally, but someone gave me a 6 year old Dell all in one that now runs Linux Mint and performs better than my actual Roku TV anyway. It’s a bit smaller than the TV, but it doesn’t matter to me. The TV disappeared into my wife’s office and now she’s the only one that uses it.
It’s cute when you pretend like you know what you’re talking about
