IDK, but I more often had issues with installing apps to Linux than to Windows, usually dependency-hell related ones, but once I had trouble enabling snap on Linux Mint.
If you’re enabling Snap on Mint, you might as well install Ubuntu.
but once I had trouble enabling snap on Linux Mint.
Seems like a win
When you make fun of something that really isn’t an issue it just makes your side look worse. Windows has real problems, but installing shit ain’t it.
My dad can install anything on windows with clicks, he can’t do shit with a terminal.
I’m a power user and love GUIs. I’ll use git desktop all day everyday, instead of typing shit in a command line. It’s one button press vs typing paths and hoping you don’t misspell shit.
I don’t really get the whole command line fetish, there are no extra points in life for doing things the harder way.
A simple analogy is, would you rather have keyboard with a-z and symbols you can use to build words/sentences, or would you want a wordlist you can scroll and click, while expanding words in groups, and having to find non-frequent words with a lot of difficulty to make up sentences.
Command line use is harder if you come from gui. But the main use case of command line are:
- automation: anything you can do in a command line, can be copied in a script,
- uniformity: every software now has almost the same format of use,
- flexibility: gui almost always has less options than command line, and many times options are hidden within a lot of tabs and options.
- Auto complete: whenever someone complains about terminal being hard to use and spelling mistakes I think about this. I think many people that come from GUI don’t know about auto-completion on terminal. It’s easy to see which options are available, easy to choose files, wildcards for multiple files, and all that
- piping: command line allows you to chain one command with another. You have a command to list all your music files, chain that with a search command to search files within them. Now if you need to search in a python code, you use the same search command, just different command to read the file. You basically have lego blocks (old ones) that can be used to make anything.
I can understand people being afraid of command line when they start, but I think many people come with biases and don’t use good terminal and other tools to make things easier.
Yay -S app is hard? Or apt install app? Or flatpak?
Being used to a habit doesnt make the habit the default way. Humans adapt quickly.
All of that is harder than a double click, yes.
Ok i double clicked on my desktop, nothing happened. Can you elaborate?
You’ll figure it out. You seem very bright.
You don’t
Check the name of this community again.
Power users are just regular users with an ego.
GUI is like fast food, sure you can eat it and enjoy it, and you will live to see another day, but it’s inferior in every way to everything else. The real problem is that people start acting like fast food is the default food and start looking at people who eat raw or cook their own food or pay for food at a restaurant as being full of themselves.
There are countless real advantages to CLI over GUI, but allowing people to use their computer effectively by fumbling around isn’t one of them.
I think mixing app and system dependencies is a bad idea, and Linux desktop is still fighting that.
When all the apps on a consumer laptop is expected to depend on the same dependencies, the system likely run into dependency hell, which means many apps needs to be downgraded in order to keep older apps working.
This mixture of system dependency and app dependency also prevents users to use the the latest version of an app on a hyper stable base system.
Flatpak basically aim to solve this problem, where each app chooses their own dependencies, so you don’t need to downgrade all your app just because one app depends on python 2.7.
I can’t remember the last time I got a DLL error on my Windows laptop, honestly. I don’t think that’s ever happened on my current computer.
The last time I got a DLL error was back in Windows 98 ffs.
I got one on my work laptop this week. It’s controlled by a shitty management software that is used by our IT, but still.
I got this when I didn’t have the correct .NET installed
Been using Linux off and on since 2003-ish. I remember the days of having to compile applications and having to download various dependencies. Linux now is so streamlined and easy. Minus gentoo.
Edge (Microsoft browser) thinks the Microsoft Teams exe installer FROM MICROSOFT SERVER is malware, no joke.
It is.
I like how you specified “Microsoft browser” 😏
Broken clock and all that
This was made by someone who has never used either
Eh, Windows complaints tend to get pretty hyperbolic much of the time. It’s slow and annoying but I’ve always worked with it
But the description of the Linux update process matches my experience with mint, pretty much. I even use the GUI update utility because it will put a little icon in the bottom corner of the screen. It’s quick even if I’m using a program that’s going an update, and if the kernel gets updated it’s just like “hey remember to reboot buddy!”
Besides missing dependencies or repositories for more nice software this kinda closely matches my experience though.
(Ignoring winget, becaust it is not really the mainstream way to install windows software)
What is your specific issue with this?
Mostly that this hasn’t been my experience with Windows for like 20 years.
They might as well bitch about dropping their punch cards.
I still (have to) download scetchy executables on Windows when I want to install most programms, while on debian I can install most programs via apt and a few repositories. Even when it’s not a standard repo I still prefer it over random executables because while the security is just as bad at least I get updates without having to open the program itself.
But what resonated with me most have been the restarts for updates. Happened way to often that I wanted to stop working but cant just shut down windows without updates and the accompanying reboots. (If I don’t check up in between to decrypt the disk on startups it’ll just sit there and run out the battery and I have to do the restarts on the next workday). On debian I just klick the power button, it hibernates (or I shut it down if I’m in the mood) and os updates are completely seperate from that.
What sketchy executables are you downloading?
What makes downloading steam from valve more sketchy than allowing a Linux repo to run arbitrary code as root on your machine for every single one of thousands of pieces of software maintained by strangers?
I remember going to source forge to download MPC-BE
Later found out that they were adding adware to executables
Literally
My desktop/laptop experience for both is as follows:
Windows update, at least since the inception of the concept has never required me to go to a browser (unless you count w98 “everything is a website” concept for the desktop or the far in between instances were a PC was offline/having issues and you need to download update packages)
It also updated windows applications (ie office) but yeah it never intended to upgrade other stuff, all other software had their own auto update check
I’ll concede the restart because yeah it does all for that
But yeah Linux install is not without issues, and I’ll just remind everyone of how difficult it was/is to install a component driver when it’s not automatically found (wifi cards, disk controllers, and Realtek drivers anyone?)
Yeah it does update your apps, as long as you have the repos, and restart wise I distinctively remember that you do need to do restarts after updates, be it major distro or not.
Simple commands? I’ll concede that, as long as we remember the average Linux user is used to a less user friendly experience. Complain ask you want but for the average user, windows update experience works
Thankfully I don’t need to deal with all that stuff now
Windows update, at least since the inception of the concept has never required me to go to a browser
In xp it still was an website which required IE due to activex used to do the updates.
I haven’t had a driver issue except for Nvidia where the driver exists, but it sucks
NVIDIA is the second biggest wankstain of a thing on my computer, unfortunately AMD didn’t put high end GPUs in laptops so there wasn’t a whole lot of choice.
What’s so hard about sudo pacman -Syu
Is easy
No sketchy website like having to go to Firefox.com to download Firefox. Ughhh
winget install firefoxWhoosh?
What the actual fuck are you smoking?
At least update this meme to the 2010s if you won’t go to the 2020s
get an antivirus that actually works and then use either policy plus or group policy to delay windows updates
Delay feature updates by 365 days
Delay quality updates by 30 days
semi-annual channel
Disable preview builds
then use O&O shutup10 ++ to disable the bullshit and you’re golden.
“Here have this brand new house!!”
“But you still have to smack down a few walls, disable the cameras we added, find a way to go trough your door without having your anus print registered with us, and keep us from moving your furniture to our warehouse, all for your convenience ofcourse.”
As soon as I realized that Microsoft laughs at people trying to harden Windows I switched to Linux and never looked back. Microsoft doesn’t care about you hardening it and they don’t care about cracked versions in the slightest. You’re a statistic with an advertisement in your home and you’ll still be making money for them.
I’m not paying for pro
Are people still buying Windows after the invention of KMSPico ?
i love when i need to search for dll files
I haven’t had a DLL issue in Windows in like 20 years.
I did
I didn’t
I haven’t had to restart to install / uninstall anything since WinME.
Found the guy who never updated his windows since ME
What? An OS install isn’t the same as installing / uninstalling something. Xp, 7, 10… I don’t restart when installing shit.
Only thing I can think of is installations that include drivers. And even then, not all of them.
Anything that hooks into explorer.exe tends to require windows to reboot.
Or just kill explorer and let it instantly reload.
If you kill explorer.exe manually it doesn’t respawn. You have to star the process yourself again.
Unless something changed in the past year.
Nah it’s auto restarting since at least windows 10 (2015)
No. It’s not. I spun up a vm and killed explorer.exe. How long should I be waiting? Cause I"m several minutes in and explorer hasn’t restarted itself yet. Also tested it on my VR computer (only non-linux physical machine in the house).
Here I’ll even stream it for you. <removed>. I kill the process at basically 16:00(MST) it’s been 5 minutes now and the stream is going.
Edit: Over 19 minutes now… Still waiting for it to restart…
Edit2: Over an hour now… Still waiting for it to automatically restart. BTW the machine is windows 11. Latest patch/update.
Edit3: pulling the stream. Ran it for over 4 hours. The point is proven. It doesn’t restart itself.
Open terminal
See whether the app is in my distro’s repos, flathub, or snapcraft (It’s not)
Go on the internet, search up the app’s name
Download the AppImage (might be a virus)
LibFuse2 is not installed (fuck me)
Install LibFuse2
Install Gearlever to integrate AppImage into my desktop
I can finally launch the app
> doesn’t use arch/nix
“why cant i find my package in the repos?”
Ah yes, downloading builds from unvetted third parties and running their installers as root. Truly the Linux way.
NixOS builds are all vetted
People can also use the Nix package manager on any distro, and run their apps using nix-shell, so that they don’t need to install as root.
and this is different to windows how …?
u do realize that u can (and should) read the
PGKBUILDfile? and check the git url which it’s cloning. or check the sha if its a binary package.Most windows stuff can be installed as non-admin these days.
Fuck, I hate AppImages so much. Never heard of gearlever, thanks i hope this helps a lot.
Edit: Ok Gearlever is pretty great! Now I can finally open Heroic normally. That pissed me off for so long.
Even if that’s needed, you can update apps w/o reboot usually (when sandboxed), and move opened files around (seriously wtf, Windows)…
When the hell would I need to update my Windows because of an app update? I only restart when there is a system update, which you have to do on Linux too if you want your kernel to stay up to date.
Well, it was what happened the last time I touched Windows in ‘22 (for work) – maybe a policy thing that a corporate app had elevated access and that’s why it forced a reboot on me for (some of the) “regular” app updates?
That’s more likely.
Good to challenge misconceptions regularly, so thank you! :D
On that topic… I assume not being able to move opened files (my “go-to” use case was a PDF in Acrobat) is still unfixed though, right? Seems like that’d require a major OS and applications change to be made possible.
Why would you want to mv, not cp, a file that is actively opened by a file system. Is that even possible on Linux? I could swear I’m regularly blocked from manipulating things with open file descriptors.
Like tsugu said. Have a file open for editing or whatever and realizing you’d like it to go into another directory. Of course you could just wait until you’re done and then move, or close, move and re-open… but that’s less convenient (e.g. throwing away current file’s edit history) and/or a risk of forgetting to actually do it, at least for me, lol.
Not sure about Linux, but I grew up on Unix (macOS), which forces applications (at least GUI based ones, CLI apps do whatever they want) to be able to deal with this, so that’s why I expected Windows to be able to do that as well. Alas…
That I can confirm. Windows won’t let me move files if any app is using them. I sometimes do it by accident when I’m editin an office document, realize it’s in the wrong folder so I try to drag it to Documents. That won’t work. But I got used to it pretty quickly.
Let’s not cherrypick scenarios to try and pretend Linux is easier than Windows. Most normal people are nervous interacting with a GUI pop-up that gives them two options, never mind putting them into a terminal window where they could seriously fuck up their machine. What about clicking the download link on a webpage, clicking next a few times and having them software on your machine, compared to having to build something from GitHub (how many people here have never had to do that?).
Compiling from GitHub is cherry picking the worst case especially for “most normal people” and frankly they should be using the software store GUI in their DE to install and update software with nice easy buttons to click.
Frankly software management for a normal person generally is easier on Linux than it is on Windows for stuff made to run on Linux.
But don’t worry someone will respond with nvidia’s shitty proprietary drivers.
Most normal people only ever use the browser. Even image or video editing is niche for the average person
This applies to pretty much all “Linux good, Win/MacOS bad” memes. I just assume that people either aren’t really serious about them and it’s just tongue in cheek, or they don’t have any contact with regular people.
I used to work as a(n assistant to the) sysadmin and the things I got called over never stopped to amaze. For instance, there was a case when software was updated on the work machines and I got called because some lady couldn’t use Adobe Acrobat. “It is asking me something, I don’t know what”. I come over and it’s just a TOS Accept/Decline window.
Some people do not understand computers to an extent that they can lock up in a state of confusion when a button has been moved 100px in any direction from its usual position.
or they don’t have any contact with regular people.
This gets my vote, the memes are so disconnected from reality they feel forced and not funny
Naah, i think they’re just ragebaiting all the MS fanboys.
It works too judging by all the shit in this forum.
The meme isn’t funny; but some of the reactions it provokes are hilarious. Though some of them are obviously counter-ragebait too. “Akshually i never have to restart to update windows since 2008”. :)
Most normal people are nervous interacting with a GUI pop-up that gives them two options, never mind putting them into a terminal window where they could seriously fuck up their machine
Maybe this is a problem that we should be addressing, rather than just making technology more of a black box, and raising generations of people who have no fucking concept of how any of it works.
Lots of people don’t care enough to learn
Those that do probably don’t go to linuxmemes though.
and raising generations of people who have no fucking concept of how any of it works
Only two generations were got to be technologically literate.
Greatest and Silent generations helped create computing, Boomers helped create important software such as DOS, Gen X and Millennials helped develop the Web, Gen Z is still going into computing and development jobs and Gen Alpha is too young to consider
There’s also many people who can’t afford technology, you know?
Unless you have a system without a GUI, you don’t need to open a terminal in order to update or install stuff. There is a GUI for that. And no, you don’t need to build stuff from GitHub for normal user stuff…
Not using the terminal is like buying a race car and not using the higher gears. I mean, you can, but what’s the fucking point?
I have a lot more fun in my performance car avoiding the top gears, actually. Like after 3rd im already losing my licence on the spot and getting bent over by the law, higher gears are just that but worse.
I tried that on linux, it doesn’t work if you want to do more than browse the web and other basic stuff.
You can do some seriously advanced stuff on windows using only GUIs
We were talking about normal user stuff that normal users do, not “seriously advanced stuff”… And I agree that most normal users probably don’t want to use terminals because they are not familiar with them. But normal users probably don’t and shouldn’t do “seriously advanced stuff”, no?
Yes, if you are trying to do “serously advanced stuff” (whatever that means), chances are you will probably need a terminal (or a terminal will at least be easier), but you shouldn’t be doing “seriously advanced stuff” unless you know what you are doing anyway…
I just wanted to install steam, but it wasn’t in the package manager list.
Then I tried apt-get and that didnt work, I forgot why.
You don’t have to do seriously advanced stuff on linux to run into issues without using the terminal.
My point was, even if you actually do some advanced stuff on windows you still don’t have to use the terminal.
It’s not realistic that you don’t have to use the terminal on linux if you want to do any more than web browsing and some text editing, etc.
That doesn’t mean that linux is bad, but let’s be realistic about what it is.
To install Steam on most distros with popular DE’s, you click the software store to open the software store. If Steam isn’t listed in the front page then just click the search box and start typing Steam.
When you see it, click the install button.
When it is done open it by clicking the Open button or pressing the Windows (or Super) key and type Steam. Click it when you see it.
That experience is highly dependent on the Linux distro you’re using. Steam comes preinstalled on gaming-centric distros like Nobara or Pop!_OS. More “general purpose” distros like Mint or Ubuntu might require adding an apt repository before you can install steam from their GUI package managers, but adding an apt repo can be easily accomplished with a GUI as well.
Basically, if there’s no guide for installing steam for a given distro, or the process of installing steam is more than a couple easy steps, that specific distro probably isn’t well suited to run steam.
Weird, I would expect Steam to be in the Ubuntu repos (assuming that’s what you were using, since you mention apt), but maybe not. As for apt, or apt-get, they are just the terminal equivalent of the GUI package manager (synaptic? it’s been a minute since I ran ubuntu), so if something isn’t in the repos, apt at the terminal won’t find it either. If it’s not in the repos, you should be able to download and install steam from the website just like you would in windows. It gives you a .deb file which will launch just like an executable installer in Ubuntu. But to your point, yes, sometimes things in linux take a little extra thinking to get to work. Getting accustomed to the way Linux works can help overcome hiccups like this. Windows has many quirks as well, it’s just that if you use WIndows often you know your way around them.
been using linux for a few years both on servers and my pc and I never had to build sth myself
Let’s also not conflate “ease” with historical behavior.
Taking previous experience out of the equation, it is easier to type
apt upgradeand reboot to update your entire system than to click through 300 times in the system and multiple apps with reboots.That is a fact.
You don’t even need the terminal. There is a interface to update if you are using a DE.
Like 3 clicks lol
Huh? 3 clicks to update Windows, Adobe, Office, that random text editor, VSCode, Steam, on and on and on…
- Open powershell
- Type Winget upgrade --all
- Hit enter.
It’s the same as most Linux distros, just different commands / syntax.
Huh, looks like that would do my list above except the Adobe Suite. A shame that’s not on by default. Good info.
Let’s not cherrypick scenarios to try and pretend Linux is easier than Windows. Most normal people are…
Let’s not cherry pick users then. I don’t care about your normal users. My experience is better on Linux.
Most normal people are nervous interacting with a GUI pop-up that gives them two options
Sadly no. They should be nervous if it’s about making changes to their system. In reality however Windows conditioned them to just click the button labeled “Yes” or “Okay” without even reading the pop-up in the first place.
WinGet: Am I a joke to you?
Yes
WinGet, choco, scoop, &c, they all have strengths and weaknesses, which is why I had to write this: https://github.com/brianary/scripts/blob/main/Update-Everything.ps1
It’s also why I use Linux at home.
You need to update a bunch of separate things on Linux too, though. For example, apt or dnf, rpms and debs that aren’t in a repo (although Deb-get handles some of those), Flatpak, Snap, fwupd for firmware, plus language-specific things (npm, dotnet, cargo, Python, etc). At least the UIs handle a lot of it now.
That’s why I use NixOS. 100,000 packages so you really found something niche if it didn’t have it
Winget-ui is great, except Microsoft hasn’t figured out to conceptually make two installs of the same product get treated the same – absolutely pathetic that if you install VLC from their website you can never ever ever use Winget VLC without uninstalling the other.
That does work for me in general, might be a problem with the specific app where the 2 builds are somehow incompatible
Happens on…maybe 30% of installs
No restart require on Linux is a joke, right? Because I get updates that require restarts as often as I get them on Windows when updating Mint.
This is a requirement for Immutable Distributions, not that Mint is… But others.
It is often needed on OpenSuse TW.
Unless you’re updating the kernel itself, there is little chance you actually need to reboot your machine. Just restarting whatever service or application you’re using should do the trick.
Just following the update manager instructions
You do you, it can’t hurt to reboot and work on a fresh restart. But if for some reasons you need to keep your machine up, you’ll know it is less of a problem than on windows typically
Kde neon made me reboot Everytime it updated. Turns out there was a setting I could disable. Afterwards I was never bugged about rebooting.
Used discover for updates
Maybe you have such a setting?
This is the same on Windows, you can just carry on and then complete an update when you go to shut down the machine. Can’t remember the last time an app install or update required the whole OS to be restarted immediately.
I tried installing rust which required some Visual Studio compiler on a Windows machine configured to reset itself when rebooted. It decided I needed a reboot. I’m glad I didn’t have unsaved files…
Needless to say I could not run my program on that machine. Why does it need a reboot? I don’t know. It’s just meant to be a compiler.
Except when it force closes your computer when you dismiss the windows update too many times
I remember what it’s called, but at some point there was an app for windows that would check if your machine actually needed a restart or not. Basically the “restart your machine” prompt is mostly just a boilerplate. It’s very rare that those installers touch anything that can’t actually be loaded without a restart.
Even with kernel updates, you can use something like ksplice or kpatch to update it without rebooting. It’s usually only used on servers though.
And on some distros you can also just reload the kernel without rebooting
Yeah, but you’re going to pay for that.
Not necessarily, you can use
kexecYeah, when you use Arch, you may not pay in money, but you are going to pay, lol.
Been running endeavouros for over a year on two machines. The only time I couldn’t boot was when the Nvidia drivers decided not to work with the LTS kernel anymore. So I just started the normal kernel and changed that to the default in my boot manager. This is the only issue I’ve had with it and it’s arch based. I really don’t understand the bad reputation.
Also the arch wiki is applicable to most distros with only slight changes.
That’s just a doc, kexec is also available on Fedora, Debian, Centos, etc.
Yep. Every kernel update. Granted that’s less often than Windows requires a reboot.
Besides a kernel update… Which one?
Honest question, as I usually just restart to be sure I haven’t missed to restart a service or something, but theoretically I could restart every program and service, that got updated.
Maybe Mint is very conservative here…
Probably driver update, like nvidia?
Ah yeah, mostly kernel module updates go along with a kernel update. But you are right, yeah.
Although, should be possible to just reload the module and restart X/Wayland, no?
Fedora requiers them all the time. Sometimes there is a driver update in there.
they’re not required, only the update manager thing wants you to. if you update via dnf you don’t need to restart 90% of the time
Really? I need to restart my Windows less often, Fedora asks me every other day restart my PC to install updates
There should be an option in the settings to disable restarting to apply updates (though I only kno2 it exists on KDE)
Fedora issue. I restart my Debian machines maybe once every 4-6 weeks.
“Issue” implies that there is something wrong with it it’s simple a different release model, Fedora just got the newer packages, for example Gnome 43 on Debian vs Gnome 47 on Fedora (obviously I’m talking about the stable releases). If you prefer the Debian way of doing things that’s great but I don’t.
I have the save experience with popos
Yep. I’m on EndeavourOS which is about as far as you can get from Mint without going to like Slackware, LFS, or BSD. Basically every single run of pacman prompts for a reboot. I’m sure I could restart individual services or subsystems instead, but that’s not what the OS popup says.
Afaik mint just says you have to restart but don’t forces you. Iirc it was there to avoud any glitches which could be caused by apps interacting with each other in different versions(say some system app got updated and desktop environment is still the old since its loaded before update then cause gui mismatch due to different versions of ui toolkit)
I mean, in this case Windows doesn’t force you to restart either, you can just keep chugging along with the restart icon at the bottom right… That icon can stay there for weeks on my girlfriend’s laptop
But that is update and restart. The update is not at all installed and will only install if you restart. And it takes a lot of time. But here it is already installed and you can actually reopen apps ti get them in the updated state
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Redhat is not the original. Just of the ongoing projects, there is both Slackware and Debian, which are both older than Redhat. Redhat stands out because they are a commercial, for profit company, so they have more money and resources to invest in Linux development than most organizations, and they have a vested interest since it is their product base.
