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?).
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.
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.
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.
If you have a driver’s license, do you know a car works besides the basic maintenance that is checking your oil and keeping the tires inflated? Some people don’t even do that last one, while it’s a thing you should check regularly.
I think it’s a good thing the general public is able to use a computer without knowing the inner workings, but it also shouldn’t be obscured from them if they want to know/learn.
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?
Ok so what exactly is the big advantage you get when installing updates from a terminal as opposed to installing it via GUI? If I read your analogy, one could think it is faster, but I don’t think it is.
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…
Let’s also not conflate “ease” with historical behavior.
Taking previous experience out of the equation, it is easier to type apt upgrade and reboot to update your entire system than to click through 300 times in the system and multiple apps with reboots.
That is a fact.
Huh? 3 clicks to update Windows, Adobe, Office, that random text editor, VSCode, Steam, on and on and on…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
And on some distros you can also just reload the kernel without rebooting
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…
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.
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
This is a requirement for Immutable Distributions, not that Mint is… But others.
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.
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.
I haven’t had a DLL issue in Windows in like 20 years.
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.
What? An OS install isn’t the same as installing / uninstalling something. Xp, 7, 10… I don’t restart when installing shit.
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.
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
I maintain a bunch of PC’s and 2 of them won’t update anymore with some vague error code that only has a microsoft community forum post as search result. I’ll get it fixed, but Windows update is not quite flawless and a non tech person would be lost at this point.
People seem to be having a hard time grasping that most of the time it works great on both Windows and Linux. Majority of people will have a solid experience. But on both platforms, when things go to shit, you need to get your hands dirty. And with that final thought, I like to add that because of it’s openness, is usually easier to troubleshoot an issue on Linux because it doesn’t obscure what it’s doing unlike Windows (“Please wait…”, “Setting things up”, … dafuq u doin, it says 100%, is it doing anything still or is it hanging?). Windows’ vagueness has been a pet peeve of mine and it’s only getting worse. I’m perfectly ok shielding it by default, but give me a verbose option.
I haven’t had a driver issue except for Nvidia where the driver exists, but it sucks
What’s so hard about sudo pacman -Syu
Is easy
No sketchy website like having to go to Firefox.com to download Firefox. Ughhh
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
Ah yes, downloading builds from unvetted third parties and running their installers as root. Truly the Linux way.
and this is different to windows how …?
u do realize that u can (and should) read the PGKBUILD file? and check the git url which it’s cloning. or check the sha if its a binary package.
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?
Yes, true.
The whole “OS update when I want an app update” is because of how dependencies work on Linux. A library is installed once and referenced by any app that wants to use it. This way, an update in the library benefits all apps using it, as bugs het fixed. Also less storage is used when the one library is used by many apps.
Windows programs keep their own versions of a library and hard link to that one. That makes the app more flexible. You can copy the app and it’s dependencies around and it will keep working. In this scenario multiple copies/versions of the same library can exist in the system, which takes more space.
Of course there is some nuance. Both operating systems can have/use shared or hard linked libraries, but this is the general gist of it.
