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Meh, I loathe both. But after being unable to even _install_ the Win7 downgrade that was promised with my purchase of a Win10-only machine (several years back)

Meh, I loathe both. But after being unable to even _install_ the Win7 downgrade that was promised with my purchase of a Win10-only machine (several years back), I decided Microsoft's obsession with licenses and stuff was just getting in my way. I grabbed Ubuntu and haven't looked back. Linux is awful for its own reasons, not least of which is a flippant glee with which decades-reinforced UI reflexes are jettisoned in favor of someone's new window-management metaphor-of-the-moment. But those seem easy enough to opt out of, I can tweak a few things and I'm largely fine day-to-day. Updates tend to break things in weird ways, but I can always just reinstall, or decide it's time to try a new distro, restore /home/ from backup, and go on with my life. A Windows reinstall is usually a multi-day affair and barely works afterward. My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs. There's an image viewer apparently just called Image Viewer, and if you think that's fucking obnoxious to search for help about, you're right! Ditto with pretty much all the other default GUI tools. I think the file manager is probably called Nautilus but you can't get it to tell you that, you have to just infer that from googling error messages and finding them mentioned in issue-trackers for something called "nautilus". Aaaaagh.

kayodelycaon 4y ago
Apple loves giving things generic names, i.e. “Music”. The only reason they get away with it is you can search for “macos $APP”, “Apple $APP”, or “$APP.app”.
- myself248 4y ago
  Thankfully, they gave the Desktop iPhone Backup Program a nice obvious name. Oh no they didn't.
goodpoint 4y ago
> Linux is awful for its own reasons, not least of which is a flippant glee with which decades-reinforced UI reflexes are jettisoned in favor of someone's new window-management metaphor-of-the-moment That's just Ubuntu. > My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs Again it's Ubuntu-specific.
- akho 4y ago
  The application name thing is Gnome-, not Ubuntu-, specific.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    I argue GNOME is the problem on Linux desktop. I should say thanks for their massive work, but I feel everything is wrong on GNOME.
    - akho 4y ago
      I don’t use Gnome (want tiling, am able to set up whatever, only use like 3 applications), but feel it’s pretty amazing. My 6-yo with no prior knowledge of computing devices that aren’t an iPad can use it (to launch Scratch, watch videos I loaded, show around his photos, and keep an audio diary) after 10 minutes of explanation, and seems to prefer it for some things over the iPad. My 70+ yo parents (with computing experience starting from the late 1960s, but limited capacity for new bullshit) use it with no issues. My wife uses it for the few tasks she doesn’t do on her phone, and is fine with it. I occasionally use it (as a minimum, to show things to all of them), and it’s very easy to remember how. By comparison, other environments (I include Windows) are overwhelming and have tons of confusing stuff that only gets in the way. This is all re: vanilla Gnome, not whatever Ubuntu delivers.

kayodelycaon 4y ago

Apple loves giving things generic names, i.e. “Music”. The only reason they get away with it is you can search for “macos $APP”, “Apple $APP”, or “$APP.app”.

myself248 4y ago
Thankfully, they gave the Desktop iPhone Backup Program a nice obvious name. Oh no they didn't.

goodpoint 4y ago

> Linux is awful for its own reasons, not least of which is a flippant glee with which decades-reinforced UI reflexes are jettisoned in favor of someone's new window-management metaphor-of-the-moment That's just Ubuntu. > My biggest Linux gripe lately, and this might be Ubuntu-specific, is hiding the names of the programs Again it's Ubuntu-specific.

akho 4y ago
The application name thing is Gnome-, not Ubuntu-, specific.
- fomine3 4y ago
  I argue GNOME is the problem on Linux desktop. I should say thanks for their massive work, but I feel everything is wrong on GNOME.
  - akho 4y ago
    I don’t use Gnome (want tiling, am able to set up whatever, only use like 3 applications), but feel it’s pretty amazing. My 6-yo with no prior knowledge of computing devices that aren’t an iPad can use it (to launch Scratch, watch videos I loaded, show around his photos, and keep an audio diary) after 10 minutes of explanation, and seems to prefer it for some things over the iPad. My 70+ yo parents (with computing experience starting from the late 1960s, but limited capacity for new bullshit) use it with no issues. My wife uses it for the few tasks she doesn’t do on her phone, and is fine with it. I occasionally use it (as a minimum, to show things to all of them), and it’s very easy to remember how. By comparison, other environments (I include Windows) are overwhelming and have tons of confusing stuff that only gets in the way. This is all re: vanilla Gnome, not whatever Ubuntu delivers.