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posted by
mrcoolbp
on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:19AM
from the dagnabbit-stupid-freaking.... dept.
from the dagnabbit-stupid-freaking.... dept.
A 37-year-old Colorado Springs man was cited for discharging a weapon within city limits after shooting his Dell computer 8 times with a 9mm handgun. The police report said that he "was fed up with fighting his computer for the last several months" and shot it in a back alley behind his home. What was not mentioned is exactly why he was so "fed up" with his computer. Could this senseless and violent tragedy have been avoided if his PC were running Linux instead?
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Colorado Man Ends Battle With Computer by Shooting it 8 Times
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It would save me a lot of time if you just gave up and went mad now.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 22 2015, @12:12PM
What the heck distro are you guys using and what are you trying to do with it? Either you push the bleeding edge of alpha releases or you're trying to multitask running a steel foundry's controllers while playing UT and mining bitcoins or something.
I've been running linux for a long time, too, 17 years, and the past 10 have been a breeze. Drivers are no longer a problem, the software universe is vaster than I could ever need, I code, browse, experiment, and never have a problem. Every 6 months or so I run into something I haven't seen before, but help is a google search away and hey presto I'm consulting the guys who live in the deep, dark caves of the OS, obsessing endlessly about the minutiae of email servers or somesuch.
I'm honestly intrigued that anyone would be so frustrated with linux these days that they'd ever think about shooting their computer.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday April 22 2015, @12:34PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:17PM
That is correct, but I think that's still by far the most common case. By about 2002-3 the PITA factor for x86 started to fall dramatically, and the last 10 have been easy. Sure, once in a while you run into wrinkles now, but compared to what it used to be it feels like an opportunity to keep me on my toes, to learn something new about the OS, and reconfirm the experience that on linux, I *can* fix it.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Funny) by G-forze on Wednesday April 22 2015, @12:58PM
Or they have, like me, tried installing vanilla Linux Mint and run into different problems each time. At the moment, my secondary monitor refuses to display anything in higher resolution than 800x600. It's a standard 17" 1080p monitor, connected with a VGA cable. On my last install, it worked fine, but something else was so fucked up I decided to clean install a newer version of Mint. I've used far too many hours trying to correct the issue, probably close to 20. Makes me want to shoot that POS too.
If I run into the term "SJW", I stop reading.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:08PM
Every OS has it's own, unique problems. In the case of Linux, it is this: Things that used to work, break. If they don't break, they change for no good reason.
One minor example: A few months ago, I installed Ubuntu 14.04 on my laptop. This laptop is frequently docked and undocked, attached to projectors, etc.. Under Ubuntu 12.04, Mint 14/15, or any other older Debian distribution, display autodetection worked flawlessly. Now, in all newer Debian distros, there is a bug in a library. Not even disper will work - I have to select displays and resolutions manually every single time. This bug is well-documented, must surely affect zillions of people, and has gone unfixed for nearly a year now.
Two steps forward, one step back. Two nifty new features added, one important old feature broken. Yep, that's Linux.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:50PM
Thank you for the warning. I considered updating Ubuntu on my laptop, but I'll refrain. I certainly use that laptop for talks a lot. Until that bug is fixed, no newer version for me.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday April 22 2015, @06:11PM
That's interesting. Maybe it's not so much that linux doesn't have its foibles but how you feel about them based on the computing ecosystem you're accustomed to. I can see how that would be annoying, even more so if one's expectations had been set on a Windows or Mac platform where everything "just worked" because vendors lived or died on whether their products did that on the Windows or Mac versions current at that time. To me, that sounds like a minor issue that on linux you can solve because "you can make it work." But then I've been using linux for a long time and in the early years getting anything to work was like belly crawling through broken glass. Nowadays it feels like a total breeze in comparison; if you don't change anything, everything will run until the wheels fall off the car, so to speak. Wrinkles like the one you cited feel more like opportunities to tinker, have fun, and learn something new about the OS.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday April 22 2015, @01:37PM
Blocked packages in Gentoo : P
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 22 2015, @03:11PM
Exactly right. If you use Linux on weird hardware, expect problems, but if you install a mainstream distro like Mint on vanilla hardware, it's as easy as pie. My wife uses Mint on her Dell laptop and I never have to mess with it, except for the times one of the cats sits on the keyboard and screws up the browser.
Even Netflix works these days, with Chrome.
The only time I have to actually delve into the innards of the OS is if I'm doing something entirely non-mainstream, such as when I want to make my PICkit2 USB device programmer work without needing sudo. For people who just use Facebook and Gmail and write some office documents, it's more than adequate, and extremely reliable to boot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @08:40AM
...My wife uses Mint on her Dell laptop...
Does she need to keep a 9mm handy for the BSODs?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 23 2015, @09:18AM
What the heck distro are you guys using and what are you trying to do with it?
You know, the one where you get paid by large corporations to pretend to be normal people on the internet!