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So Linux is worse because you are more familiar with Windows?! Also I am running into all kinds of problems every day with Windows and end up on Google all the

by SuperSandro2000 4y ago

So Linux is worse because you are more familiar with Windows?! Also I am running into all kinds of problems every day with Windows and end up on Google all the time with way worse answers, no way to deeply debug most things and worst no way to fix them myself. I am way to often depending on some big capitalistic company to fix my problems and hope they feel like doing it. Linux is DIY capable. If I have the abilities and time to fix something I can most of the time do it myself. Also to answer some of your questions: - you want to use Pulseaudio, alsa has no usecase on a desktop - and use vim or neovim if you are into plugins. vi is just an old editor which got replaced by vim.

satiric 4y ago
With Windows, even if I don't know the exact steps to do something, I can figure it out because some smart people have done a lot of UI design work to make that so. Off the top of my head, I can't tell you the exact steps on how to change the mouse speed on either Linux or Windows - I don't do that often enough to memorize the process. But I know in Windows, it will involve navigating to the Settings app, so I go there. The mouse is a device, so I click on "Bluetooth and Devices" in the left taskbar. I then click on "Mouse, which takes me to the mouse speed. The process in Linux depends on your DE. If you use something like KDE, the process is similar to Windows; but if I'm using i3, I'll probably need to go into the x11 settings. But I can't google "how to change mouse speed in Linux", because again, Linux isn't an OS even though it gets treated as one. So the end result is the same, I can change the mouse speed in both OSes. But Windows definitely required no prior research, whereas Linux may or may not have required research depending on how the user set up their machine. And if I was new to Windows, I could google "how to change mouse speed on Windows" and get a straightforward answer. You could argue that on linux, I should have googled "how to change mouse speed in Ubuntu/Pop OS/KDE Neon/etc". The problem with that is that sometimes I can use generic Linux instructions, and sometimes I use distro-specific instructions. People actually point non-Arch users to the ArchLinux wiki! Incidentally, I looked at the general recommendations page on the ArchLinux wiki [1], and found it seems to recommend alsa as a default and pulseaudio if you want some more complex features. Maybe this is wrong, maybe there are differing opinions in the community. Again, there's no way in Windows that you would run into two competing ways for sound to be sent from programs to your headphones/speakers because of the unifying force of the company. (Personally, I've always wondered why audio isn't just part of X11 or Wayland, since X11 and Wayland seem to control everything else the user interacts with.) I also know from personal experience that Vim vs NeoVim is a complicated discussion and full of a lot of drama over the maintainers of Vim being hard to work with - yet another problem that wouldn't happen at Microsoft because you have a management structure that can deal with these sorts of problems without defaulting to the lazy open-source solution of "just give the customer more options." 1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations#Sound_system https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations#Sou...
satiric 4y ago
To your first point, yes this is a downside of Windows. And if I was in IT I'm sure there are many things about Windows that make it a pain for deeply debugging these problems. But the dark days of Vista are long over - my PC rarely crashes, and when it does it's pretty obvious what program crashed it. If not, Task Manager is hard coded into the OS to try its best to open. Linux has the shell, but the WM can freeze to the point where I cannot get to a shell to start troubleshooting. If I can, hopefully I have my phone on me to google the commands I need, because (perhaps luckily) my computer doesn't crash often enough for me to need to know the commands. "DIY capable" to me is code for "we didn't finish designing the system, so you have a bunch of choices to make that you wouldn't need to make on another OS." Yes Linux is great for those that love to tinker. But I don't, I just want a PC that works the way I expect it to.
glandium 4y ago
> you want to use Pulseaudio, alsa has no usecase on a desktop You'd be surprised how many people still swear by alsa-only. Other people prefer jack, and now you can add pipewire to the mix... plus the few people who like OSS4. At least old school OSS is dead for good.
- jraph 4y ago
  PipeWire is a solution for people who want it all though. It's replacing PulseAudio and Jack. It should simplify the stack. OSS4 seems anecdotal in the Linux world. People can still use ALSA directly, but people who don't care will have something that works well out of the box without having to care. Thanks to PipeWire, I can use my midi keyboard with no delay, still use my browser and music player at the same time, all this without having to tweak any configuration, messing with Jack and/or PulseAudio.

satiric 4y ago

With Windows, even if I don't know the exact steps to do something, I can figure it out because some smart people have done a lot of UI design work to make that so. Off the top of my head, I can't tell you the exact steps on how to change the mouse speed on either Linux or Windows - I don't do that often enough to memorize the process. But I know in Windows, it will involve navigating to the Settings app, so I go there. The mouse is a device, so I click on "Bluetooth and Devices" in the left taskbar. I then click on "Mouse, which takes me to the mouse speed. The process in Linux depends on your DE. If you use something like KDE, the process is similar to Windows; but if I'm using i3, I'll probably need to go into the x11 settings. But I can't google "how to change mouse speed in Linux", because again, Linux isn't an OS even though it gets treated as one. So the end result is the same, I can change the mouse speed in both OSes. But Windows definitely required no prior research, whereas Linux may or may not have required research depending on how the user set up their machine. And if I was new to Windows, I could google "how to change mouse speed on Windows" and get a straightforward answer. You could argue that on linux, I should have googled "how to change mouse speed in Ubuntu/Pop OS/KDE Neon/etc". The problem with that is that sometimes I can use generic Linux instructions, and sometimes I use distro-specific instructions. People actually point non-Arch users to the ArchLinux wiki! Incidentally, I looked at the general recommendations page on the ArchLinux wiki [1], and found it seems to recommend alsa as a default and pulseaudio if you want some more complex features. Maybe this is wrong, maybe there are differing opinions in the community. Again, there's no way in Windows that you would run into two competing ways for sound to be sent from programs to your headphones/speakers because of the unifying force of the company. (Personally, I've always wondered why audio isn't just part of X11 or Wayland, since X11 and Wayland seem to control everything else the user interacts with.) I also know from personal experience that Vim vs NeoVim is a complicated discussion and full of a lot of drama over the maintainers of Vim being hard to work with - yet another problem that wouldn't happen at Microsoft because you have a management structure that can deal with these sorts of problems without defaulting to the lazy open-source solution of "just give the customer more options." 1: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations#Sound_system https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/General_recommendations#Sou...

satiric 4y ago

To your first point, yes this is a downside of Windows. And if I was in IT I'm sure there are many things about Windows that make it a pain for deeply debugging these problems. But the dark days of Vista are long over - my PC rarely crashes, and when it does it's pretty obvious what program crashed it. If not, Task Manager is hard coded into the OS to try its best to open. Linux has the shell, but the WM can freeze to the point where I cannot get to a shell to start troubleshooting. If I can, hopefully I have my phone on me to google the commands I need, because (perhaps luckily) my computer doesn't crash often enough for me to need to know the commands. "DIY capable" to me is code for "we didn't finish designing the system, so you have a bunch of choices to make that you wouldn't need to make on another OS." Yes Linux is great for those that love to tinker. But I don't, I just want a PC that works the way I expect it to.

glandium 4y ago

> you want to use Pulseaudio, alsa has no usecase on a desktop You'd be surprised how many people still swear by alsa-only. Other people prefer jack, and now you can add pipewire to the mix... plus the few people who like OSS4. At least old school OSS is dead for good.

jraph 4y ago
PipeWire is a solution for people who want it all though. It's replacing PulseAudio and Jack. It should simplify the stack. OSS4 seems anecdotal in the Linux world. People can still use ALSA directly, but people who don't care will have something that works well out of the box without having to care. Thanks to PipeWire, I can use my midi keyboard with no delay, still use my browser and music player at the same time, all this without having to tweak any configuration, messing with Jack and/or PulseAudio.