Worse, intentional malicious stupidity.

Tbf, every moderately old software product is a collection of built-up stupidity.

Eh, there are lots of utilities that will solve this problem very quickly and permanently.

The thing is that Unix will solve every problem, the only question is when. Year of the Linux desktop 2070?

I’m legitimately unsure if it’s appropriate to be running mission-critical systems on the Microsoft Windows platform nowadays, but transitioning will obviously take some time.

Why is that good?

We only use software that has existed before the past decade in this household!

I mean not really, Appimage has been around since 2004, flatpak/docker for about a decade now. But at any rate I don’t see your point, the person I replied to said it’s hard to run old applications on Linux and I gave him solutions on how to do that. What does their age have to do with anything?

1. Stop bothering with dead software.
2. You can repackage old FOSS source code into any of those containers and install and use it that way. Nothing is stopping you, the tools are free and widely documented. You don’t need to own the FOSS repository to repackage it, and actually a huge chunk of containers are packaged by people not affiliated with the development project of the software.

I’ve had poor luck with AppImage. Because of how it works, it has failed in the exact thing it was supposed to do, just werk everywhere. But I’ve heard it generally works well.

I mean to be fair, it’s likely you’d spend most of your time reverse engineering creative’s drivers with something like ghidra, which doesn’t need Linux 😄

Right but my point is that since some updates have broken their machines in the past, people have (somewhat justifiably) hesitated to update so readily. Imagine a surgeon prepping for the most complex surgery of their life early the next morning and is using the machine to prep… oops, the machine updated, the prep software no longer functions, now they stay up all night trying to fix their machine that wasn’t even broken to begin with, and the patient is at more risk than otherwise even if that works was successful. Ok so that’s hyperbolic but it relates (with less dire consequences) to so many far more common scenarios, like a teacher and their students all getting ready to go through finals week, but that very month sometime the machine decides it will not wait even a handful of hours until those busy people have a moment to update more risk free (maybe they are even responsible enough to not do their banking and such on it, so that access to their electronic notes is more important to them than some hypothetical risk of leaving a known vulnerability?).

Maybe I am missing something, like if forced updates only occur after years of choosing to delay the update (I left Windows behind years ago, except when forced to at work), but in general my own preference is that the machine should serve me, perhaps presenting me with a strongly worded warning if I do not comply, but the ultimate authority should be me, to decide my own timeframe.

And in case it’s not obvious, I am talking about personally maintained machines, not IT staff rolling out an update that they have properly vetted - that really is different, since while the check is external it still does exist, plus such a user does not really “own” that machine to begin with hence literally (read the contracts even) has no “rights” to complain, at least to Microsoft since that would be IT staff that made that choice, right or wrong.

Did you manage to get your system working again? Iirc I did the same on Arch a few years ago and it wasn’t too bad to restore the system after looking at the permissions on a fresh install (maybe a container or vm, idr).

Something can cost $0 and still participate in the market. The cost to use something can even be negative $ (e.g. Bing paying you to use it).

Because of the ginormous community, every problem has a solution in Windows.

If it isn’t a Microsoft sanctioned solution, then multiple third party solutions exists that fix it.

Windows has a hell of a lot more support than any Linux distribution does.

I was primarily noting that I usually don’t engage in unnecessary and unproductive customization, as there will always be some way you could meet your desires a little better, but unless you’re creating and documenting an automated system like https://larbs.xyz/ or even just “copy this file to ~/.profile” your customizations will eventually be lost when your system fails, leaving you with new reason to spend more time customizing.

As the video I linked said: if computers are as powerful as the universe and the universe was created in billions of years, you may only be done customizing billions of years from now (and at that point you will have had even more billions of years to come up with new ways you want to improve your customization).

If I’m spending time on something that won’t result in an update to a git repository, or a Lemmy comment, or even speaking to someone in person or me acquiring more property, I consider it more frivolous than not.

Hey, how’d you see what I’ve done to my Android phone?

Cause this exactly describes what I do to it. Then I get weird conflicts. Lol. I do it to myself.

If I was in your situation, I would try installing openSUSE or Fedora Linux on a computer where you don’t care if the entire disk gets wiped occasionally, using a flash drive you also don’t care about getting wiped occasionally. They probably have sufficiently comprehensive installers and installation instructions for you to succeed in using one of them, and if you don’t care about the content of the disks you use you’ll be more willing to experiment with the installation process (even though it’s unlikely your computer will work worse due to trying to install a Linux distribution). If you use a computer that has become slower and less usable than you’d like you will probably be pleasantly surprised by the results!

Also, you can back up your product keys and prepare a Microsoft Windows installation disk if being able to go back to Windows 10 makes you more comfortable with experimenting.

Overall, Linux enhanced my ability to to get productive work done, and also the opportunity to experiment and learn more about how to use computers to solve problems. I think learning how to use a GNU operating system is a good long term investment, though if you still need to keep around at least one computer that runs Microsoft Windows to protect your income I won’t disparage you.

Trying to use proprietary drivers and NTFS on Linux is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. People work hard to make it work and maybe it does with a little effort but the proprietary model and Linux distros just don’t mesh well together. If you make it a point to purchase hardware that has open source drivers and use open source software (and as a consumer, you probably should anyway), everything does just work. Obviously this may not suit your use case and Linux may just not be for you.

Ok, something didn’t work, I now have to figure out what driver wasn’t supported and what I need to download.

Unlike in Windows where you never need to download drivers. As executable binaries you have no chance of checking. Sometimes from very questionable sources. And actually you can be happy if it’s only a driver. Installing random 3rd party tools just to get basic functionality is a thing.

people on forums are helpful

Which also happens for Windows. But rarely. And if they really try… then there are still 10 different answers to a single problem and you have to test which one works for your specific version (no, chosing the most recent one sounds logical but is rarely the answer).

Now I gotta figure out this command line thing. Oh cool some people built GUIs for certain stuff so i don’t need to play with the command line

Which in what way is worse then editing random obscure values in the registry? Because it’s a window you type in. And in the worst case even the Windows help starts with poweshell nowadays, which is exactly the same.

And then at some point I got stuck because of file permissions.

That’s a solveable problem. Unlike in Windows where they put file permissions on top a file system not having them in a weird unintutive way. And don’t ever try to change the wrong permission as an administrator as that’s simply not allowed. After all you don’t own your Windows PC, MS just gratiously allows you to use it.

So, you see… it’s all a matter of perspective.

Similarly, about 90% of the complaints I see linux users make about Windows are actually limitations in their understanding or are just outdated and no longer apply.

Least gatekeeping Linux user