but the PC driver model of “I found this in a closet and I don’t know how to code and I want to spend my afternoon with it because I have a social contract with it existing” has lots and lots of adherents for a reason, and it’s impressive how little has changed in 30 years
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In other words, you’d say that the long hardware support Windows gets compared to Android phones is an illusion – that in practice, you receive quality updates from the vendor just as late and abandoned as quickly as they do phones, but it ends up as an invisible hole, or Microsoft carries a big chunk of that burden? (and I know they have an enormous shim system for all this, too).
Gonna be honest, the pen thing is a big deal to me. I just kinda feel locked to Windows because I don’t want to buy everything again. Still, being able to rotate a brush would be so nice
yeah, honestly, Windows rules! most of the time I’m impressed with Apple it’s as a second or a third device (that is, counting a phone) and I feel like that’s the really financially exclusionary part, the per-device prices are honestly more reasonable than people act, it’s that they don’t/won’t do all things for all people the way Windows does for better and worse
they’re much closer than they used to be though (as is Windows)
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Well partly, but mostly I just mean that due to all of the above (driver bugs and the local state model and the security model letting apps poke into other apps’ business), stuff kinda isn’t guaranteed to work properly on Windows and users need to learn “troubleshooting”.
I haven’t heard the word “troubleshooting” in a while, it’s starting to sound like a dated term, right? It’s a sign the phone OSes raised the bar on quality. Android’s reputation for quality issues is only in comparison to iOS, anything above a <$150 budget phone is more reliable than desktops (even Macs in my experience – my 2020 MBP randomly had a system crash just two days ago for instance).
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equally, every all-in-one Windows PC I have ever encountered in friends/family/office settings in my life was basically making a mad dash to being a piece of shit from day one (most laptops included, let’s be honest), and that’s roughly the same hardware model Android is dealing with (far better). it’s made to have random shit plugged into it, you basically can’t trust anyone else to do that once and for all
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The one all-in-one my family ever had was a lemon immediately, and, ironically, is maybe the only reason why I know how to do anything with computers because I had to learn how to cajole it into functioning.
Perhaps I’ve had excellent luck but I’m a few Windows laptops deep in my life and they’ve all been absolute tanks. Even the one that eventually started bugging out because a little water got into it, all I had to do was disable the WiFi card and it worked fine after that lol.
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a dell all-in-one was what convinced my folks to switch to an imac like ten years ago and i haven’t had to do tech support since
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I woke up one morning and there was a brand new, surprisingly capable/cool Gateway all-in-one in my house because my mom saw one at her friend’s house and thought it seemed cool.
An utterly bizarre, out-of-character move for her, which should have been a clear sign for all the fuckery I would endure on behalf of that machine.
edit: Jesus I just looked it up, look at this thing
It had a built-in subwoofer, what was it with Gateway and subwoofers coming standard
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Same here, my family stopped bothering me for tech support once they all got Macs. Also that’s when they all stopped talking to me, hrm, maybe for the best? Maybe not.
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is that s-video and coax out or in
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Yes and an FM radio tuner
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As a Linux desktop user since '97, dropping in to say that the Linux Desktop is good and has been since the early 2000s. If using Linux frustrates you, then consider that maybe it is because you spent your formative years learning something different. Windows and Mac OS frustrate me.
Hell, in 1997 the Linux Desktop was already better than Windows 95. It just didn’t work with a lot of existing hardware. Also, sound was hard to setup. But at least I didn’t have to reinstall Linux from scratch every six months or do other arcane things just to keep my system stable.
The reason that the Year of the Linux Desktop never arrives is because the parameters for succeeding at that is for Linux to be a drop in replacement for whatever other technology that particular person is most comfortable with.
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Gnome c. 2016 was actually very cool but WSL and Electron pretty much ate its lunch again, it’s mostly downside and very little upside for me these days
Linux doesn’t frustrate me so much as it frustrates everyone around me when I find myself converting Debian packages to Arch when I should be putting a movie on
my most routine and irreplaceable use of the Linux desktop is putting GParted on a USB stick every nine months for something or other
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nice to see Oibaf PPA is still going though!!! Updated Open Graphics Drivers - since 2011! : Oibaf
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look just because my current 10 installation hosed the EFI boot partition and I had to manually rebuild it and now Windows doesn’t see itself as a bootable OS and can’t boot into safe mode and thus constantly fails updating itself doesn’t mean Windows is bad or Linux is better
in fact, I would argue that
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This is the only reason my sister hasn’t bullied my mom into an iPhone, now that I’m thinking about it. She knows she’ll become the first phone call as soon as my mom can’t figure out how something works on it. As long as she’s using an Android, Mom calls Mikey
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I’ve had to do tech support on relatives’ macs even though I don’t use a mac
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