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Most of my day to day work is on a Thinkpad running Fedora. I also have a work laptop running Windows, and a personal macbook pro. Two quick points: 1. The emp
by flkiwi 4y ago
Most of my day to day work is on a Thinkpad running Fedora. I also have a work laptop running Windows, and a personal macbook pro. Two quick points:
1. The emphasis in this website of "you can change what you want" targets a pretty small population. Anecdata of the worst sort, but the vast majority of people in my orbit absolutely do not want to manage their computer. They want it to largely disappear so they can work and watch cat videos. Most of them think customizing their computer means changing their wallpaper. And that's fine! I never lead with "I can customize this machine to do what I want." I lead with "Eh, I got tired of forced reboots and disruptive updates and privacy issues so I switched to Fedora and it doesn't do any of that. If I want to fiddle with something I can [and I very, very much do tinker], but I don't have to."
2. I laughed at the notion of using linux to bring an ancient 5-year-old computer in the closet back to life. I mean, yes, that is one of the great things about linux, but the macbook pro I'm typing on right now is 5 years old and it runs like it's new. The hardest thing to convey about Apple equipment is that the TCO is lower because you can easily upgrade on a 5-7-year cycle, pretty much as long as Apple gives security updates. Expensive at the front end (though competitive with similar Windows machines), but not as expensive over the lifespan. (And, emphatically, I'm not saying you can't experience long ownership cycles with PCs, but, from experience, it's harder.)
On the other hand, when this MPB runs out of gas, I'm probably going to replace it with a thinkpad, or possibly with an ARM Mac running linux.
- m10k 4y agoLet's be honest, "you can change what you want" should really be "you will have to change certain things". Which is fine for developery people and people with a lot of time and patience on their hands. But for the overwhelming majority, even fiddling with the contents of /etc or $HOME/.whatever is too much of a hurdle. People don't choose Windows or Mac despite not being able to change things, they choose it so they don't have to change things. And let's not forget that, eventually, "you can change what you want" becomes "you have to change what you want" because the developers of your distro / desktop environment / window manager / UI toolkit decide to change the default behavior (if they don't change the entire thing).
- vanviegen 4y agoI don't understand? What are these things you have to change? Your second paragraph mentions changing defaults. Of course software evolves over the decades. You may not like every change, but evolving along is always an option, of you don't want to tinker. Also, most UI config is stored in dotfiles. Upgrading doesn't apply the new defaults to an existing account.
- humanistbot 4y agoUbuntu is terrible for this. Every new version comes with a UI redesign, and the 20.04 switch was particularly painful.