this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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[email protected] - Oh my gosh I just figured it out.

Okay, all you open source evangelist people: your knee-jerk reaction to come at people who are talking about a problem with whatever commercial software they use and suggest Your Favorite Alternatives™ is exactly like saying "why don't you just buy a house?" to someone complaining about their landlord.

[email protected] - Actually, to borrow from @DoubleA, it's worse than that.

It's like talking to someone who is in a crappy apartment as though they have the agency and skills to stake out a plot of land and build their own home.

You have to be at peace with the fact that some people just want to exist and not worry about so many things. And they still have a right to complain about their situation.

Link to thread: https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111539959265152243

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[–] [email protected] 64 points 11 months ago (28 children)

@morrowind funny to find this here when I wrote my reply just a while ago:

"It's like talking to someone who is in a crappy apartment as though they have the agency and skills to stake out a plot of land and build their own home."

Maybe if you're suggesting them to install Linux From Scratch, then yes, it is.

If you're suggesting them them to install any of the many very simple (and very usable OOTB) distros like Fedora, then it's not.

In that case it's like the house is free, already built and furnitured, and right next to their own; but they have to move their personal belongings from one house to the other and learn a different room layout.

Sure, they still have the right to complain about how their landlord treats them like crap. But they sound pretty damn stupid if they do so while having an available free house right next door, and refusing to move because they don't want to learn a new room layout.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (16 children)

How many times have you setup Fedora or any other Linux distribution and have every single thing working from the get go?

I'm talking drivers, audio, networking, libraries, DNF, repositories, plugins, runtime dependencies, ...

  • That house isn't furnished.

And don't forget, plenty of popular software isn't even compatible. Meaning you got to use alternative software that doesn't always do what you want it to do.

  • So buy a new couch, cause that one isn't getting in.
[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (5 children)

I think you are talking about the situation that might be true 15 years ago, vut right now you'll be hardpressed to find anything that doesn't work out of the box on any modern distribution. I don't know what plugins and dependancies don't work on your machine, but I assure you it's not a universal experience, far from it.
Also, most of the software that you use on Linux is free, so you don't "buy" new couch if your old is built specifically for your old house, you learn to sit on any of the new ones that you can get for free at any moment

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I say this over and over again, but I'm going to say it again. I disagree firmly with the second point because there is such a lead and usability and ease of use for popular commercial software such as Microsoft office and Adobe software. It's available in so many languages, it has so much functionality, and yes, both surpass FOSS solutions by a wide margin in functionality.

If you don't need Excel, I think Linux and libre office might work fine for a lot of people, but there are still gaps in usability and accessibility. I don't really see the same for anything Adobe does in the Linux space however.

Linux is like 90% of the way there, but these are people with jobs and families and shit. You can't expect them to spend time having to overextend themselves with technology.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I wasn't saying that we have everything available for Linux. Not yet, anyway. I was saying that whatever we have there is usually free and very customisable.
People committing from Windows and especially Mac infrastructure think that since they spent hundreds of dollars on software they use, they will have to do that again if they will swith to Linux. For a lot of people the thought of free software just never crossing the mind

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