4 ms·

The most absurd things seem "obvious" to you. What is obvious is that you have not had to support friends who keep getting viruses, keep running out of free spa

by lake99 14y ago

The most absurd things seem "obvious" to you. What is obvious is that you have not had to support friends who keep getting viruses, keep running out of free space on their massive disks, keep complaining about slower and slower performance.

klibertp 14y ago
I had the pleasure of supporting such people - believe it or not, they used different OSes, from old Windows versions to shiny new Mac OS (which, I admit, I couldn't help with) and they all had the issues you talk about - running out of free space and worsening over time performance and more. It makes no difference which OS do you use if you have fifteen copies of the same 10Mb bmp image in different places. It also makes no difference if you never uninstall anything and keep piling shareware/freeware apps like a Pokemon Trainer. I'm sorry to break it to you but users of PCs generally should NOT own a PC, because they have no time nor intention to learn about using such a machine properly, and large percentage wouldn't be able to even if they wanted. That's why shift towards tablets is a good thing. Anyway, sufficiently non-tech-inclined user WILL kill his OS rather sooner than later, no matter which OS he happens to have. If you want to stop supporting these users just go there and disable all the features they use to make a mess of their PCs and lock them down in a sandbox, which is perfectly doable with every modern OS I'm aware of, or just persuade them to use tablet or chromebook. And stop hating decent OSes just because your friends are unable to use them properly.
- lake99 14y ago
  When I wrote about disk space problems, I did not refer to user content. I agree that there is no easy fix for people keeping fifteen copies of bmps, etc. Instead, I was talking about disks getting filled by OS components, and by other software made by Microsoft, Apple and other large companies. This is something I have not seen on the Linux distros that I have come across. As for "sufficiently non-tech-inclined user WILL kill his OS rather sooner than later", well... some OSes and distros are more resilient to abuse than others. Ubuntu seems to be one of the best ones around. I'm an Arch-er myself, but that's because I'd rather give up some resilience to stay on the cutting edge.
mattdeboard 14y ago
But that's not the fault of the OS. That's the fault of the user.
- slasaus 14y ago
  I tend to develop more and more by the "it's never the users fault" pragma in order to build software that is perceived as "it just works".
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

by lake99 14y ago

klibertp 14y ago

I had the pleasure of supporting such people - believe it or not, they used different OSes, from old Windows versions to shiny new Mac OS (which, I admit, I couldn't help with) and they all had the issues you talk about - running out of free space and worsening over time performance and more. It makes no difference which OS do you use if you have fifteen copies of the same 10Mb bmp image in different places. It also makes no difference if you never uninstall anything and keep piling shareware/freeware apps like a Pokemon Trainer. I'm sorry to break it to you but users of PCs generally should NOT own a PC, because they have no time nor intention to learn about using such a machine properly, and large percentage wouldn't be able to even if they wanted. That's why shift towards tablets is a good thing. Anyway, sufficiently non-tech-inclined user WILL kill his OS rather sooner than later, no matter which OS he happens to have. If you want to stop supporting these users just go there and disable all the features they use to make a mess of their PCs and lock them down in a sandbox, which is perfectly doable with every modern OS I'm aware of, or just persuade them to use tablet or chromebook. And stop hating decent OSes just because your friends are unable to use them properly.

lake99 14y ago
When I wrote about disk space problems, I did not refer to user content. I agree that there is no easy fix for people keeping fifteen copies of bmps, etc. Instead, I was talking about disks getting filled by OS components, and by other software made by Microsoft, Apple and other large companies. This is something I have not seen on the Linux distros that I have come across. As for "sufficiently non-tech-inclined user WILL kill his OS rather sooner than later", well... some OSes and distros are more resilient to abuse than others. Ubuntu seems to be one of the best ones around. I'm an Arch-er myself, but that's because I'd rather give up some resilience to stay on the cutting edge.

mattdeboard 14y ago

But that's not the fault of the OS. That's the fault of the user.

slasaus 14y ago
I tend to develop more and more by the "it's never the users fault" pragma in order to build software that is perceived as "it just works".
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]