Additionally, what changes are necessary for you to be able to use Linux full time?

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93 points
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I got tired of everything taking so much effort. I was almost always able to eventually wrangle what I wanted out of the OS, but every change I wanted to make and thing I wanted to try needed so much searching and learning. I wanted stuff that just worked, even if it was “dumber.”

That, and some parts of the community I ran into were really prickly. One that was especially memorable: I was asking for help on a big-ish project with a lot of followers and helpers and didn’t expect the lead dev to answer my question, but when he did, he felt the need to make a snide as hell comment about how I have no business being there if I’m going to forget to start a service. On top of the exhaustion I was already feeling, I had a massive moment of “okay my guy, I guess I’ll just fucking leave then.”

Anyway, it just feels better being a poweruser on windows. I know enough to keep it clean, safe, and slim (like using powershell to disable the bits they don’t expose to a settings UI, for example) – to truly admin my machine – without having to work so hard for it day in and day out.

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39 points
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Yikes, that is why I hate tech forums. Too many times I’ve asked an informed/thought out question I’m unable to find via search and the first replier basically says “hey go FUCK yourself.”

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14 points

I work in IT, this is how a lot of engineers and administrators are to be honest. I hate the dick measuring contests in my field.

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1 point

Hahaha, SO TRUE!!

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9 points

Unfortunately, those kinds of interactions are inevitable when the developer/user relationship is so close. And it goes both ways. I saw a thread just yesterday where a user reported an issue on github, a second user said they saw it too. Later the first user posted a workaround to the issue, and the second user came back with “took you long enough”, and that was the end of the exchange.

Some people in the world are just dicks, but that doesn’t mean we should reject interacting with everyone. Similarly, a community of user-maintained software is going to have some asshats, but that doesn’t mean we should hand our computing freedom over to one or two corporations. Just my two cents.

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7 points
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Some people in the world are just dicks, but that doesn’t mean we should reject interacting with everyone.

Corollary: Your personal aversion to corporations doesn’t mean users have have any motivation or obligation to keep trying when we’re getting pushback from both the software and those who maintain it.

Anyway, I’m not sure how you got that I reject interacting with everyone after my experience, but extrapolating my statement to that kind of extreme phrasing sure doesn’t fill me with confidence about future interactions, either.

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4 points

Hey there, I think we got off on the wrong foot. I’m not discounting anything you’re saying, I agree that it’s definitely a very real phenomenon, and didn’t intend to provoke a defensive response. I didn’t say that you were “rejecting interacting with everyone”, on the contrary, I’m saying that in the physical world you deal with people who act like dicks, but you specifically DON’T reject interacting with everyone. I’m drawing a parallel between that behavior in the physical world with how I believe we should also behave in the digital one.

I also did not say that I have any personal aversion to corporations, I owe most of my daily comforts to corporations, so I would be a hypocrite to say as much. But if I had said that “I don’t think we should stick our hands in blenders” that doesn’t mean I have a personal aversion to blenders.

Cheers

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2 points

Unfortunately everyone has a limit for how much work they’d like to put in.

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4 points

Currently my experience with 3D printing. It’s one thing after another, and the community, at least on Reddit and Facebook, fucking sucks. If I ask a question, it’s always “hey how about you go fuck yourself” or an essay that has zero relevance to what I’m asking. Made a post on Reddit the other day (I know, but have a single burner account until the 3D printing community here takes off more) and just asked to see some settings due to just constantly having issue after issue. Half of the responses were people just telling me they’re not fucking wizards and they need to know what kind of problems I’m having. I… didn’t ask for that whatsoever. I very explicitly just asked for someone’s slicer settings to compare to.

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3 points
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That’s absolutely the worst help forum experience, when you’re asking one question but everyone extrapolates the question they think you REALLY meant to ask and talks down to you about it.

And of course if you try to steer the conversation back to your actual question, you get painted as the unreasonable one placing all sorts of conditions on the generous free help others are allowed to bestow upon you.

The less reliance on others Linux requires, the better off it will be for general adoption.

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1 point

Haha your second paragraph sums it up perfectly. A few folks did share their settings, but they were for completely different printers/hardware haha. Most of the online guides I’ve found are written under the assumption that you’re already a master at the hobby, and it’s strangely spread out in random little nooks of the internet - there’s not really a ton of centralized discussion forums. Maybe the hobby is way smaller than I thought, or maybe I’m just in way over my head, but I fix tech problems for a living - did not expect this to be as much of a challenge. Never buy a 3D printer if you value your sanity and living stress-free. Sorry, I just needed to rant for a minute haha.

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everyone extrapolates the question they think you REALLY meant to ask and talks down to you about it

It’s true, but the “X-Y problem” is real.

The question may be “what’s the best way to do X”, when they actually want to do Y and they concluded, erroneously, that X is the best way to do it. Responders suspect this, so they want to steer the questioner to a best explanation to find out if that’s the case, just to watch the questioner’s tantrum when the immediate answer is not what they expect.

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1 point

did you level your bed first!?

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2 points

I’ve found this same type of animosity and superiority all over tech forums in general.

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3 points
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You’re not wrong, but running Linux directly correlates to more time spent on “tech forums in general,” so it’s still a bigger problem with that OS than others imo.

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2 points

Jeez that is nasty. What project was it?

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4 points
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I was trying to run my own personal-use instance of LiveJournal back 20 years ago when it was open source (and not owned by Russia). Just to see if I could, as is the spirit of a tinkerer.

There was a handful of paid staff as well as a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers, so I expected one of them to answer a low-priority newbie support request, not… what I got.

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2 points

Unfortunate, but to be fair, things have changed a lot in 20 years.

There are definitely still angry linux nerds on forums, but I think the experience is a lot more streamlined.

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