It always amuses me when folks give their insightful input in threads, adding comments about their last-century experience getting Linux going. It appears that this guy has a similar reaction.
Itripovermyownfeet shared his thoughts in the Linux Mint subreddit.
This is awful, when I install Linux on the desktop I'm expecting to be able to waste a solid 8 hours chasing down random issues that were solved on all other modern desktop systems by 2008. I went into this hoping and wishing to have to crawl through linuxquestions.org threads from 2006 to figure out why plugging in a second monitor doesn't work with X.org.
I want the peace and quiet that you can only get from spending 45 minutes trying to get alsa/oss/flavor of the week sound manager to work properly. I miss the subtle delicious pain of trying to figure out what I have to do to get Gnome 3 or Unity to provide desktop functionality that came standard with Windows NT 4.
With what you've done here I am no longer able to do any of these things. You've taken the awful travesty of an experience that trying to do anything production on a Linux desktop is supposed to provide and made it usable, sensible, and working out of the box. This is why I can't call Mint a Linux desktop. It's just a desktop... you monsters.
(I plugged a second monitor into my HDMI slot and it just worked. I have literally never experienced that since working with Linux since the days of Redhat 3. You've taken away a cherished time honoured tradition of having a terrible experience using a Linux desktop from me forever.)
Comments by other redditors include:
Gandalfx: Could "reverse trolling" be an appropriate term for this?
Crcr: I know what you mean, Mint has been this way for me since version 12 & it's starting to get old, the usability out of the box drives me nuts.
Foofly: I tried to explain to a friend that the installation experience is better than Windows these days. In addition to having way less driver issues in general. He didn't believe me since his last experience was almost 10 years ago.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Saturday November 28 2015, @10:38AM
One of my chaps from college tried installing it once because the professor in one of our classes was adamant that VM "is not acceptable for intensive daily computing," or whatever the hell was his issue. So while I used a VM for our assignments, he tried to dual boot with mint and ended up wrecking his PC. I know it's an anecdote, and there are plenty of distroes which will wreck your PC if you try dual booting, but because of his experience it has become something of a joke for us :)
Regardless, to make this somewhat on topic, what is a usable distro out of the box that supports Unity games (other than steam OS)? I will most likely stay the hell away form Windows for next PC. Windows 7 has served me well, but I just had to disable a lot of the updates to get away from the Windows10 style tracking, and I'm not looking to repeat that experience. I have used Ubuntu, but the talk around the watercooler is that they are a stone's throw away from doing same thing in order to "monetize" us.
(Score: 3, Funny) by mmcmonster on Saturday November 28 2015, @11:00AM
what is a usable distro out of the box that supports Unity games (other than steam OS)?
Have you tried Linux Mint? It's built on top of Ubuntu (which is build on top of Debian). It's fairly easy to install and gets the job done.
Would just remind you to pick a Long Term Service (LTS) release so your software repositories don't go out of date in a couple years.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Saturday November 28 2015, @01:13PM
He said it was Mint, or are you trying to be funny - as someone had modded you.
I'd avoid Ubuntu (and anything derived from it) because, as the GP says, they are steering their users down a path away from the rest of Linux and towards monetization. As you say, Mint is based on Ubuntu, based on Debian, and it is beyond my understanding why something like Mint cannot have been based directly on Debian.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday November 28 2015, @02:53PM
it is beyond my understanding why something like Mint cannot have been based directly on Debian.
There is a Mint based on Debian [linuxmint.com]. From the page:
Then it goes on to explain the difference between LMDE, which is a rolling release, and Linux Mint, which uses point releases.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Saturday November 28 2015, @09:23PM
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Sunday November 29 2015, @05:24AM
Faster, no. I timed startup and it was about 20% longer than with standard Mint.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @09:38PM
He said that a classmate had tried to dual-boot Linux Mint, with disastrous results. Linux Mint could still be suitable for what the poster is trying to do—although he understandably may be reluctant to try it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Nuke on Saturday November 28 2015, @01:06PM
he tried to dual boot with mint and ended up wrecking his PC. ..... there are plenty of distroes which will wreck your PC if you try dual booting
Wrecked it? What, left it a smoking pile of ash?
Seriously, what was the issue? Sounds like the Master Boot Record was corrupted, but that would be a long way from "wrecked".
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Sunday November 29 2015, @08:57PM
That's pretty much what happened. Something with UEFI.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by opinionated_science on Saturday November 28 2015, @01:46PM
I'll just mention that Micro$oft *actively* tries to torpedo dual-boot machines. The only safe option is to wipe Windoze. Boot linux. Enjoy life...
And if you *have* to play games, there is WINE or CROSSOVER that might help.
In the instances where I have had to use M$ Office, wine has filled the gap admirably.
I suspect this "article" is a troll....but windows is actually hostile to other OSes living on a machine!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @05:46PM
There have been some issues but that's due to a macbook pro not exactly being designed to run Windows ;). And none of those issues are due to Microsoft trying to "torpedo" stuff.
Those issues are not being able to wake up from sleep without a BSOD (wake up from hibernate is OK). IIRC it's due to hardware not being set correctly on wake - need a "boot" to get them set, and so a hibernate does that. And that could be because I put an SSD on my mac AND wanted it to be fast with Windows so I did other stuff. Long story.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday November 28 2015, @07:08PM
I use my computer almost exclusively for games and for CADCAM that only runs in Windows. As much as I hate Microsoft, what exactly would Linux do for me?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Saturday November 28 2015, @07:18PM
try using WINE or CROSSOVER for your applications, and see if you can at least reduce the footprint. I would suggest most folks go through a threshold of windows vs alternative. I know I did! But the straw that broke the camels back (for me) was being forced to pay for a phone cable since *only* windows would talk to the phone.
Now days I will not even look back. Libreoffice and latex are just fine for office. Any browser you like. Thunderbird mail client etc etc...
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Sunday November 29 2015, @12:12AM
Yeah, but the CADCAM. It's OpenGL intensive, won't run well enough in WINE, and there are no suitable Linux based alternatives. Oh, and it's the core of my career, so I can't just drop it.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Saturday November 28 2015, @05:01PM
PclinuxOS will run many Steam games both in the Linux client and Windows Client (using playonlinux) and it's very dual boot friendly :D
Alie
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @11:19AM
Systemd.
Ok. Forget that one. Has Linux sorted out the "suspend"/"standby"?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday November 28 2015, @01:44PM
Suspend/standby is more a hardware problem. Works on laptops, doesn't work so well on older desktops. Not sure about newer desktops. Manufacturers neglected that functionality on desktops, and many of them had bad bugs in the BIOS code that handles suspends.
3d accelerated graphics is still an issue. As someone else noted, Steam OS is an issue, and the two are related. The current most usable solution of just installing the proprietary driver runs smack into the very reasons why proprietary drivers are in general bad. Can you run a VM with 3D accelerated graphics? Still no? Want to run with the latest kernel, and still have fast 3D? Maybe you can, maybe not, depends on how quickly the graphics vendors patch their stuff. What about the next generation in system management of the graphics, the Wayland and Mir projects? Still pretty far from mainstream. Go with the open drivers? Then your 3D acceleration is slow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @01:55PM
"doesn't work so well on older desktops."
How old is old here?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday November 28 2015, @05:31PM
At least 5 years, likely more. I have 2 desktops that are 5 and 7 years old respectively. And suspend sometimes works. Mostly works the first time. But sometimes, not all the hardware comes back from sleep. By the time I've put the desktop PC to sleep for the 3rd or more times between cold boots, it usually hangs when I try to wake it back up. Good thing we have journaling file systems now.
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Saturday November 28 2015, @03:02PM
Suspend/standby is more a hardware problem. Works on laptops, doesn't work so well on older desktops.
Sometimes it doesn't even work on laptops, if Debian's pages are anything to go by (1 [debian.org]; 2 [debian.org]).
Want to run with the latest kernel, and still have fast 3D? Maybe you can, maybe not, depends on how quickly the graphics vendors patch their stuff.
How much of the requirement for vendors to "patch their stuff" so often is the fault of the architecture of Linux? I seem to remember reading that Linux developers refuse to publish a stable ABI for modules in order to encourage module developers to make modules free.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @09:42PM
When all the code is open, this isn't a problem.
It's the write-once-and-monetize-forever model that runs into problems.
Hairyfeet constantly harps on this "issue"[1] and continues to defend that broken support model and its closed, proprietary code.
FOSS guys simply refer to this as "unsupported code".
[1] Hat tip to Illop who gives Hairyfeet a mention below.
...and Nuke has an interesting related comment below. [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday November 29 2015, @01:26AM
It works out of the box on my Thinkpad T420. Running Arch Linux, even.
It ultimately depends on your hardware, some work well with Linux, some don't, and the same for Windows.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday November 30 2015, @02:00AM
Yep, I used Mint for some years, and it served me well.
Now I decided to steer away from systemd, and after trying some alternatives, I settled with Devuan.
I'm pretty satisfied with it. I found it to just work, no less easy than Mint.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @11:31AM
If its been 10 years since he tried something other than windows then praises ONE distribution of Linux as the holy grail, hes a fool. *everything* has improved installers now, and are for the most part painless now ( or no worse than windows ). Be it Linux, FreeBSD, whatever.
The only exception is OSX, as its always been a painless install, due to apples control of both software and hardware. ( tho stability has been becoming an issue lately...)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @11:50AM
who gives a fuck what some retards on reddit think?
(Score: 2) by n1 on Saturday November 28 2015, @06:30PM
I don't give a fuck what happens on reddit, but it's in the headline so the warning was there, it's also the weekend and a light-hearted /dev/random/ story.
During the week, this story wouldn't be my choice, but I enjoyed reading it in a weekend mindset. YMMV
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kurenai.tsubasa on Saturday November 28 2015, @11:53AM
Eh, just install Gentoo. At least the 8 hours will be spent productively, and you wind up with a vastly superior systemd-free OS.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday November 28 2015, @12:49PM
Last time I checked, systemd still gets installed as a non-init process. You have to specifically blacklist it, and use specific USE flags to avoid it entirely.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by iwoloschin on Saturday November 28 2015, @02:02PM
You could try Funtoo. I haven't had systemd pulled in and I haven't had to do anything special. OpenRC forever?
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Saturday November 28 2015, @04:08PM
As far as I know you have to go out of your way to use a systemd profile in Gentoo:
Having said that however, if you try to install Godless programs that require it, like gnome >= 3.8 those will try to pull it in, and you have to look for stuff like that, or hard mask it to make sure you don't accidentally install it. That's not the fault of Gentoo but rather the assholes who've been trying to stuff that POS up everyone's ass.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bradley13 on Saturday November 28 2015, @01:33PM
Eh, just install Gentoo. At least the 8 hours will be spent productively...
"Productively" - I don't think that word means what you think.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Bill Dimm on Saturday November 28 2015, @12:48PM
Based on all of the hype around Mint I tried installing it 2 years ago on a mainstream laptop (Dell Latitude E5430). Oddly, there were differences between installers for different desktops, but they all crashed at one point or another during installation [linuxmint.com]. I ended up installing OpenSUSE 12.3 (since 13.1 crashed during install). Maybe I just had bad luck, but it didn't strike me as being nearly as polished as all of the hype would suggest (reminded me a lot of my experience with Ubuntu many years earlier, when it was the the darling distribution).
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday November 28 2015, @12:53PM
Frankly, I've been happy since I switched back to Debian from Ubuntu.
The installer is still very old-school and firmware is a pain in the ass (unless you use a netinst-firmware image), but it remains rock solid. That being said, setting up dual booting, esp. w/ LUKS encryption is very non-straight forward; d-i is very long in the tooth sadly. Cinnamon is everything I want in a UI. The biggest headache is that a fair number of laptops lack Ethernet adapters, and almost all wifi adapters require firmware.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by Balderdash on Sunday November 29 2015, @09:03AM
Had a similar experience recently with Kubuntu 15.04 on a very small Dell laptop, maybe 6 years old. Was trying to set it up as a portable machine for my friend to use on the road.
Never the same crash twice. Crazy.
It runs Windows 7 without a tick.
Out of the 6 machines I have in front of me, only 1 runs Windows. And I have no fucking idea why Linux kept crapping on that laptop.
I browse at -1. Free and open discourse requires consideration and review of all attempts at participation.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @12:57PM
Congratulations to Linux Mint devs! They've finally reached parity with Windows 95!
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nuke on Saturday November 28 2015, @01:34PM
Congratulations to Linux Mint devs! They've finally reached parity with Windows 95!
Shit no.
Have you ever actually installed Windows 95? I install and re-install it from time to time in order to operate a scanner that has only Win9x drivers. It is a pain in the arse. I have three hand-written pages of instructions to myself to help me do it, learned from experience (in addition to TFM). You have to install it from DOS (which is installed from a floppy) into which you must hand install a CD-ROM driver in order to read the Win95 CD before you can even start. I've never counted the number of reboots the process requires, but woe-betide if you left that DOS floppy in because it will start all over again - and it does not tell you to remove it.
Let's not blame it for completely fouling up any previous booting arrangements you had, because multi-booting obviously never entered its authors' wildest dreams.
Few amateurs installed Windows 95 as the vast majority of installations were done at the factory.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @03:41PM
Why are you using Winshit for the scanner? It should work in Linux, if it doesn't there's plenty of help to get it working from the Linux community.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @07:51PM
Winshit? There is no need to write like a twat.
That aside, he likely isn't talking about a run-of-the-mill document scanner, but some expensive specialist bit of hardware which most likely won't have Linux drivers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @10:57PM
Winshit? There is no need to write like a twat.
OK. Wintwat! Are you happy now, Shitwin? Expensive hardware with only Windoze only drivers from Micro$orft? Not likely. Real hardware is POSIX compliant.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Saturday November 28 2015, @11:26PM
It is a Logitech PageScan Color
http://www.laughton.com/images/psc.html [laughton.com]
It is only A4, but it scans multiple documents fast, just keep feeding into the rollers. I and many others would be very pleased to find Linux or even Win32 drivers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 30 2015, @09:33PM
One wonders what would result if you made that hardware available to The Linux Driver Project.
As I mentioned in a previous subthread [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 4, Insightful) by mcgrew on Saturday November 28 2015, @03:49PM
Indeed. I went from DOS 6.2 to W95. It took hours to install. It would ask a question, churn for ten minutes, then ask another one. Same thing when I went to W98. When I discovered Mandrake I was just amazed. You answered all the questions up front, afterwards you simply changed CDs when it needed another (there were 3). Took maybe an hour or so, no babysitting needed.
I installed kubuntu dual-boot on an Acer laptop about five years ago, just as pleasant. Everything just worked.
Sadly, kubuntu has really gone downhill since then. They changed the desktop completely, having the task bar at the top drives me nuts, and googling it looks like you can't change it. Plus, I can't get to my network drive with it, even when the ethernet is plugged in. I can't connect to my own wifi hotspot with it, but can easily connect to someone else's hotspot.
So I'm still researching various distros. It will have to be dual boot, since the magazines all want .doc files and neither Oo or Lo outputs it correctly.
I'm an old man. Change is good when it's an improvement, but change for the sake of change, like KDE's desktop, is brain-dead stupid. Would you guys cut it out? Don't change the fucking interface unless it really is an improvement. That's been my biggest gripe against all MS products for fifteen years. That ribbon interface on their apps is awful. It's like going from a V8 to a two stroke four cylinder.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 4, Insightful) by hash14 on Saturday November 28 2015, @07:12PM
Indeed. I went from DOS 6.2 to W95. It took hours to install. It would ask a question, churn for ten minutes, then ask another one. Same thing when I went to W98. When I discovered Mandrake I was just amazed. You answered all the questions up front, afterwards you simply changed CDs when it needed another (there were 3). Took maybe an hour or so, no babysitting needed.
Indeed - as they say, it's good to be King.
I try explaining this all the time to people that I know who use Windows. Do you know why your operating system has all these silly issues that they could fix themselves but instead choose to make you work around? It's because they frankly don't care about fixing it - as long as its good enough and doesn't eat into their bottom line they'll just ship it out and who cares whether it works intelligently or not. It's not about you, it's about them - and their wallets more specifically.
You can't beat the quality of someone who's enthusiastic about his/her work with the money of a company the size of Microsoft - literally!
I'm an old man. Change is good when it's an improvement, but change for the sake of change, like KDE's desktop, is brain-dead stupid. Would you guys cut it out? Don't change the fucking interface unless it really is an improvement. That's been my biggest gripe against all MS products for fifteen years. That ribbon interface on their apps is awful. It's like going from a V8 to a two stroke four cylinder.
It's like that everywhere and it completely boggles my mind. Why do organizations waste so much mental and/or financial resources changing user interfaces that already work and making them worse? Instead of fixing their products and making them better, they instead decide to dedicate their efforts on UI design that's as scientific as alchemy or witchcraft - at best, they achieve nothing, and at worst, they come up with a children's toy like Windows Metro, Gnome 3, Unity or Australis piss off all their users for no benefit whatsoever. But as long as its trendy and looks modern, it's an improvement, right?
The worst part of all is that this idiocy has taken over basically every company/project: Ubuntu, Chrome, Firefox, Gnome/GTK, Windows, Apple, Android, and pretty much every site on the web. Many of these would be otherwise great projects if they would just focus on making their product good and not changing things that already work perfectly well.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Saturday November 28 2015, @09:41PM
I couldn't agree more with this. This change for the sake of change philosophy hasn't just infected the tech industry though. It occurs throughout the business world and politics. The world should live by the words "If it ain't broke, don't fix it.", instead it's more like, "If it ain't broke, break it, QUICK!" or "If it ain't broke, throw it away completely and start again.".
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Nerdfest on Saturday November 28 2015, @11:00PM
You're probably thinking of basic Ubuntu, rather than Kubuntu. While Kubuntu did a major DE update from Plasma 4 to Plasma 5, it remains extremely configurable, although it's not quite back to the stability level of 3 or 4 yet. Nothing gets in the way of getting work done, just minor hiccups.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday November 28 2015, @02:19PM
EULA, click, EULA, click...that's my faint recollection of installing a proprietary OS. Felt like signing another paper from a bank, or a lawyer, or a student loan company, and it always felt like nothing good would come of it, and nothing ever did.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @02:48PM
It's probably a short between the seat and the keyboard.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Illop on Saturday November 28 2015, @03:10PM
Hold up to the HairyFeet challenge? Also, Slackware FTW.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @03:36PM
If you can't install Mint then you are not tall enough for the Linux ride.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 28 2015, @06:22PM
Exactly. The OS for this guy is obviously WInblows. Stay with that. It's your speed. We don't require your participation.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Saturday November 28 2015, @07:31PM
rtfs : )
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday November 28 2015, @09:45PM
Installing Linux was with Yggdrasil Linux [wikipedia.org] (kernel v.0.96, IIRC) back in early 1993.
I wanted to dual boot, so I ran a low-level format [iu.edu] on my second RLL [wikipedia.org] hard drive. But it was late at night and I selected the wrong drive and wiped my existing system.
I finally reformatted both drives and then I reinstalled DOS/Windows 3.1 and then installed Yggdrasil on the second hard drive.
Yggdrasil was just as easy to install as DOS/Windows -- the real issues I had were with fatigue and the crappy low level format utility.
It's only gotten easier since then, IMHO.
In fact, installing Linux on an x86 box was simpler and easier than installing SunOS 4.0.x on a Sun-3.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr