> (Is it just me or is there a lot of FUD in this thread?)
Lots and lots of 'this is why I haven't used Linux for N years (and thus don't know what it's like)'.
I have to use Windows at work, and the system is way, way less predictable and reliable then any Linux system I've run for a decade. Shit changes out from underneath me (Windows Update, policy changes) in breaking ways all the time, and there's often no rest to inspect or reverse what causes breakage. For every 'evening of Linux' I've had on my life, I have a few 'afternoons of Windows' (mostly hopelessly, blindly turning things off and on again) every week.
When I ask colleagues who are my more accustomed to Windows than I am about how to solve issues, how to achieve particular configurations, or how Windows does certain things, it becomes clear that actually managing their workstations like comprehensible devices which are substantially under their own control is a foregone conclusion to them.
The reality for Windows users is not a system that actually 'just works', but a deeply internalized helplessness that manifests as conservatism (attempting little, assuming many reasonable configurations are not possible), superstition (attempting and advising reboots, constantly, without being able to articulate a real reason), and blindness to the outrageousness of the situation (e.g., thinking it's perfectly acceptable that their laptop can't handle an uptime of 4 days before it starts falling apart, or 'I always shut my laptop all the way down at the end of the day so it'll run better').
It's no wonder that people conditioned by this kind of usage pattern don't have a sense of what reliability or mastery look like in the Linux world, how frequently issues like this do or don't occur, how easy or hard they are to avoid, etc. They live on a different planet, where mastery in desktop computing is worthless because there's just no hope for a predictable, transparent system that doesn't change out from under your feet. It'll just break tomorrow anyway. And on their planet, it doesn't occur to anyone to research hardware compatibility ahead of time; they never need to. So of course the thought of spending an evening rooting out a hardware incompatibility issue strikes them as some mixture of futile, extremely burdensome, and unavoidable/common for those poor Linux users— even when none of those things are true.
Lots and lots of 'this is why I haven't used Linux for N years (and thus don't know what it's like)'.
I have to use Windows at work, and the system is way, way less predictable and reliable then any Linux system I've run for a decade. Shit changes out from underneath me (Windows Update, policy changes) in breaking ways all the time, and there's often no rest to inspect or reverse what causes breakage. For every 'evening of Linux' I've had on my life, I have a few 'afternoons of Windows' (mostly hopelessly, blindly turning things off and on again) every week.
When I ask colleagues who are my more accustomed to Windows than I am about how to solve issues, how to achieve particular configurations, or how Windows does certain things, it becomes clear that actually managing their workstations like comprehensible devices which are substantially under their own control is a foregone conclusion to them.
The reality for Windows users is not a system that actually 'just works', but a deeply internalized helplessness that manifests as conservatism (attempting little, assuming many reasonable configurations are not possible), superstition (attempting and advising reboots, constantly, without being able to articulate a real reason), and blindness to the outrageousness of the situation (e.g., thinking it's perfectly acceptable that their laptop can't handle an uptime of 4 days before it starts falling apart, or 'I always shut my laptop all the way down at the end of the day so it'll run better').
It's no wonder that people conditioned by this kind of usage pattern don't have a sense of what reliability or mastery look like in the Linux world, how frequently issues like this do or don't occur, how easy or hard they are to avoid, etc. They live on a different planet, where mastery in desktop computing is worthless because there's just no hope for a predictable, transparent system that doesn't change out from under your feet. It'll just break tomorrow anyway. And on their planet, it doesn't occur to anyone to research hardware compatibility ahead of time; they never need to. So of course the thought of spending an evening rooting out a hardware incompatibility issue strikes them as some mixture of futile, extremely burdensome, and unavoidable/common for those poor Linux users— even when none of those things are true.