Well. ACTUALLY, it’s very simple you see every time you spin up a new linux box a little piece of Linus Torvold’s soul get’s imprinted in the CPU registers and then that fragment handles everything from there.
“It’s called a shovel,” said the Senior Wrangler. “I’ve seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical.”
—Terry Pratchett: Reaper ManIt’s a series of files (tubes)!
And files that can be deleted while even in use just because.
Why would a file not be deletable while in use?
I took an operating system class in college that involved basicly creating a baby OS. Lot of fun.
I creating my Meshtastic network and was having trouble setting a node with the right settings and wanted to plug in the unit into my Lenovo laptop running Fedora installed from the factory.
I click serial connection. The web app recognized the connection. Click connect. Failed. Tried different plugs and ports. Failed. Searched online and I need to do a bunch of things in terminal to get it to work properly.
Normally I would spend a few hours figuring it out. Instead…
Pulled out my 15 year old PC running win10. Plugged in, instantly worked.
I reeeeally want this to be my primary laptop, but man. I am just struggling on some basic things.
Ah, permissions chicanery. Had to deal with that with connecting a Switch 2 controller with a WebUSB enabler. To be fair, once you add the right udev rules (it is a bit of a pain, yes), it should work for any other devices of the same type (I think it’s any with the same USB ID so like same manufacturer and model? Don’t quote me on that though). Still, I wish Chromium (since Firefox as far as I know still doesn’t support WebUSB) could sort it out by itself (like just have an “allow” button rather than writing udev config files yourself) or at least be a bit more helpful in pointing you the right way with a helpful error message.
You do have to get used to weird edge cases like these throwing a spanner in the works, just like you have weird stuff on Windows (trying to get some older Android devices to communicate in fastboot mode in Windows makes me feel like Odysseus).
Asking around and screwing around usually gets you places though. Eventually you find something.
My PC just programmed all the units in my mesh in around 5 minutes. It would have likely taken longer trying to fix the USB connector. I should figure out how to fix this edge case so I don’t have to take my old PC out again.
udev? WATCH -N 1 CHMOD A+RWX /DEV
it will never be your main mschine of you don’t use it as your main machine.
If it can’t do everything your main machine needs to do, it can’t possibly become your main machine.
But it CAN do it, it just needs a bit of work, be it by yourself oor by someone on the devs’ side
Counter argument. What is the goal of owning a computer in the first place? Needing to do “a bit of work” with the OS or actual work.
I don’t want to be a Linux developer. I want to do work. Sometimes I feel like I’m too much developer.
If you get Microsoft office to install and function, let me know how you did
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Whoa man. You ok?
What they are talking about is an open source piece of software (Meshtastic) that’s using a well-known (if specific to Chromium) standard, WebUSB. It’s a genuine pain point, and stuff like this needs to work out of the box, no manually written udev rules required.
That’s me, who started using Linux 5 months ago. I’m like, “I use Linux btw” to everyone.
Who cares, be loud and proud about it.
Personally I’m just going to ramp up being annoying to my friends until they switch because they’ll thank me in a couple years and also because they deserve it
This is the way.
Fresh knowledge is not to be underestimated.
On a client-server model turned single-user desktop, running on seven layers of abstraction. And the interface of choice is full of bugs and limitations. But we’ve got nothing better currently, that also works on the next computer, due to compatibility issues caused by misplaced secretivity of the vendors.
The more you know about computers the more you realize its just magic rocks, and that magic, rocks.
its all transistors man all transistors
Everything’s a file.
except that thing. …and the other thing. that thing used to be a file but it’s not anymore. that’s only a file if you use this specific shell. that one is a file system, but there’s no files in it. oh don’t touch that file, that’s deprecated. oh that’s only a partial file, you need to open this one too otherwise it breaks.
Linux: You’re a file.
Windows: No! You’re a file!
*Linux smiles maliciously*Lots of things are files. See Plan9.
24 years exclusively running it.
Short answer: magic.
Long answer: a stressful full week trying to get everything right, followed by a long, blissful period forgetting how hard it was to get it up and running like magic.
my experiece is just stuff getting fixed and breaking rsndomly tbh.
So many factors at play.
The number of packages installed, the use of externally unsupported repos, the distro you use, reliability of their packaging system, how much you deviated from the baseline customization, and probably more.
Keeping track of everything off what and how much you changed may prove difficult. But it helps taking notes of how you solved the more complicated issues.
With time you learn to live with the inevitability of something breaking. You update less often, and only when you really have to. Repairing stuff becomes less overwhelmeming with time.
Those weeks were a lot more stressful, and longer than a week, when I used Slackware and started installing stuff that wasn’t packaged for Slackware. I would dread new software. It was the Unifi controller that finally put me over the edge: I wasn’t even willing to give it a shot. I ran the controller on my Kubuntu desktop for a few weeks until I switched the server to Debian.
It felt like a house of cards. Nudge one of those cards by, say, updating a library, and you could easily break something else.
“If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user,” is the old saying. It’s true…we had to know, because we didn’t have a choice not to know.
After a dozen of those stressful weeks I decided to write down everything new I learn if I can.
What I tell people: “When you get used to using an operating system that respects your rights, you don’t wanna go back.”
I’ve been on Arch full time for 6 years, I still get frustrated, sometimes I get stumped, but I NEVER want to go back to windows
How about an operating system that respects your time?
Cause Linux aint that if I have to sift through dozens of badly documented online manuals just to get something small working the way it should.
Windows is much better in that regard.
Good for you, stay where you are
So are you immediately trying to pull the conversation away from ethics, because you know Microsoft has no leg to stand on in this regard? Who cares that the founder of MS is heavily implicated in the Epstein files if you (supposedly) save a little time, right? Or I guess it doesn’t matter that that same company is actively providing surveillance tech support to Israel in their genocide of Palestine? That they censor their employees emails from speaking about the very atrocity they’re complicit in? Or that the same surveillance infrastructure is being used at home in service of an authoritarian regime?
That’s not even getting into all the gritty details of all the little annoyances and rights abuses - which have been accurately predicted by free software advocates for decades now - that inevitably stem from proprietary tech companies like Microslop, which collectively we are now calling enshittification.
But even ignoring the massive pile of shits about Microsoft and Windows to address your argument in a vacuum, does Windows respect your time? Really? Does Windows respect your time when it forces you to go online and sign up for an online account, and login to that account to enable their at-home spyware, just to install their operating system? Does it respect your time when you have to go through a potentially hours-long painful update procedure on a fresh install? How about when the OS runs awfully sluggish even on great hardware? Does MS respect your time when you have to go out of your way to research and install multiple tools and scripts to try in vain to gut all the spyware, AI garbage, adware, and bloat, and run 3rd party system tools to suppress other elements of the OS just to make the damn thing halfway usable and have the illusion of being something that can be trusted?
Even on your own little point, where is this superior documentation you speak of? Because every time I’ve run into a problem on Windows, their support pages have only ever given me the most generic troubleshooting answers that have been completely unhelpful. Please show me documentation that comes even close to the thoroughness and quality of the Arch Wiki.
Assuming any of what you said is even in good faith, and that you’re not just a shill or simp, here’s what you need to consider: Windows is something that most people have been using all their lives. When you’ve been operating something that long, it feels easier. You’re more able to ignore the pain points because habits are already deeply settled, and you know your way around. That’s the biggest reason Linux feels like such a hassle at first - learning new things takes time, and is always frustrating. I know this experientially because at one time I struggled to use Linux systems too, but now I have the reverse problem. I’ve been using Linux long enough, and Windows has devolved and changed enough, that on the rare occasion I try to use that piece of shitware, it is the most frustrating thing in the world. Windows 7 was something I was used to. But Windows 10 and 11 are new and unfamiliar to me, and consequently feel damn near unusably bad.
Does Linux have things it needs to improve? Of course, but at least it’s something worth improving. You’re trying to compare imperfect, yet a remarkable collection of software, to something that is literally just malware at this point. If anything, virus scanners should be adding Windows to their definitions lists.
It’s just files, how hard could it be 🤷
“What’s a file anyways, more than a bunch of bytes in a specific order?”
I fucking wish
There is a kernel of truth to this.
Check out dbus and notify.
And then unpack your dracut initrd.That killed a Plan9 (and 9front) fan.
I understood that reference!
🙋♂️: “How does Linux work?”
👨💻: “…does it?”
