• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • Learning any OS isn’t a trivial task, but that’s something people seems to forget a lot.
    But I get why people would say “just use Linux”, because if by chance you have the means to switch then why would you stay locked to a tool made by a company that doesn’t care about you or your needs ? It would be counterproductive. (Also getting more Linux users would be beneficial for the Linux community, it could even be beneficial to everyone if that number is big enough to make Linux a serious competitor but that’s more a distant dream than a close reality)


  • Yeah I did not expect to dump so much text 乁(•ิ◡•ั)ㄏ

    I did my best to shorten it and tried not being too vague but it’s hard with all the stuff I’ve tinkered with. Keyboard issues have been the weirdest and funniest experience I’ve had of them all I think, while printers are one of the worst.


  • This one is more a case of «it didn’t work on windows for a reason but worked on Linux for no reason» : More than a decade ago, I got my first Graphic Tablet (yeah another one), it was from a dead brand, their drivers were still online but not supported anymore. But the tablet still worked out of the box on windows 8, only… windows wasn’t able to detect pressure so it looked like I was drawing with a mouse, Linux didn’t have such issue. At that same period my laptop (wich was the first that I owned) turned half dead after an update, wasn’t as tech savy as now but at the time all that I knew was that the disk had some issue that I could not fix…windows would not work on it anymore and that’s how I tried daily driving Linux for the second time, I lasted with this half dead pc under kubuntu until windows 10 came out (mostly because by then I got my first desktop and proton wasn’t a thing for games).


  • Sure :

    • My worst/best personal one : had a Huion Graphic Tablet that would just refuse to work on my windows 10 pc, either with the drivers given to me on a small disk, or with the ones on the site, had to contact the company for help (eventually they did)…thought it would be a nightmare on linux…couldn’t be more wrong, it worked straight freaking up, even had the luxury to install Huion drivers that actually worked…or just a bunch of non Huion stuff to calibrate the thing if I needed to…although none of it was necessary…like how ??

    • More recently I got a Switch Pro Controller knockoff, thought I had to install some packages to make it work on Linux but no, worked out of the box wirelessly and plugged in, when I wanted to play with a friend who uses windows, had no choice but to plug it in with an awfully small cable (the only one my friend had at their house, didn’t bring mine), bluetooth refused to work whatever we tried…

    • Some years back I helped a friend to buy a decent microphone (don’t remember the brand)…only to have them call me the next day because windows didn’t detect it…the mic was your usual usb plug and play thing…spent an hour on the phone playing customer support. When I went at their house later, I plugged it to Linux for the fun of it and it just worked…

    On the more usual stuff there is the great classic of printers not working, that must be the thing people asked me for help the most, didn’t try Linux on most of them, but some (friends, family) I had to and never had an issue…and the comical thing is, for our printer at home I had to install some drivers through the AUR to make it work and even with that it’s just awful (making it work on windows is even worse but it works a little bit better). I also got called for webcam issues, keyboard issues, usb, drives… That’s the device part.

    Regarding hardware, it will be hard to be specific because I helped a lot of people with pc stuff over the years, it something I do on my spare time. What I can say is, each time I am called for something big like a pc (mostly old laptops) not working/dead, or some drives dying, or refurbishing some antiquities or part of them, I always bring my Linux laptop and a bootable usb stick with a bunch of distros on it, because I know it’ll be more usefull than using windows. I remember the nightmare of trying to reinstall windows on some laptops (that had windows, that are still within what should be compatible)…to no avail. Trying to get files on a dying disk to no avail, etc, etc. The only time I ever truly needed windows for this kind of stuff was to unlock an Iphone using Itunes.

    Tbh it’s just dead easy to give examples because with windows, manufacturers or whoever have to make their product work on the OS, and the drivers are not always up to date, so old they aren’t supported anymore, or can just be a pain to get or configure…while on Linux it can be a community effort, and a lot of stuff is already within the distro you installed so you often don’t have to do much. I am sure people can have the opposite experience though and I know some stuff just doesn’t work on Linux, but really my point is : a lot doesn’t necessarily work on windows either.

    Not what you asked but on an OS level, I could also mention people encrypting their pc by accident with bitlocker, windows breaking stuff, update issues, partition issues, and so on… when you spend time on other people issues you really start to notice how much of a mess it can be, far more than people seem to think.


  • Each time I go back on windows I realize it’s worse than I remembered, even though I never liked it. One thing I quickly realized after getting constantly asked for help about issues on windows : people tend to be greatly biased about how reliable it is, mostly because it’s all they’ve known for a long time.

    People often talk about compatibility regarding Linux, but are somehow oblivious to all the devices and hardware made for windows that somehow fails miserably to work when it has no good reason to…while Linux, despite most hardware and software not being made with it in mind, can sometimes somehow work wonders.

    Windows only «just works» because it’s made by a monopolistic monster of a company, with a ton of software and tools and stuff made for it because of how widespread it is, and despite that their OS is just plain garbage…




  • I swear it’s always the same mistake each time someone has an issue trying linux. It should be a rule at this point : never switch to another OS without knowing what will work and what will not.

    Going at it blindly is a quick way to get overwhelmed and discouraged.

    (Not pointing fingers here, had a friend who wanted to try it out too, didn’t listen to my warnings, didn’t wanna check if everything would work out and then spent three month of pure hell, with me picking up the pieces and fixing their pc all the god damn time…)


  • I never said that, actually just said exactly what you did : that Google pay them to still have a competitor.
    But that’s a big problem, because that make them competitors just in name, and using their browser won’t change that sadly. Another problem is the lucrative part of Mozilla that have made a number of bad decisions over the years with firefox, and are partly to blame as to how it fell out of favour.

    To be clear Firefox is far from being the worst browser out there, it’s not what I am saying, and it can have forks, we can also edit most of the crap out of it wich is great. But it would be silly to consider it a spotless software run by saints. That’s all I am saying.

    I would even go back to it or (better) a fork of it if I could get the features I use in Vivaldi without using countless and broken (or non savy) extentions, because I’d still find that better than using something based on chromium (even if there is a dedicated and seemingly good intended team behind it). But I would still not find it ideal, not without that lucrative side of Mozilla hanging onto firefox and that damn Google pay.


  • No need to support firefox, they get 1/2 a billion dollars each year from Google :D

    We’re at a point where most of the browsers are just rotten sadly, now it’s just a question of what is less worse than the others. With the coming of manifest v3 I don’t know if Vivaldi will still be worth it to me, I hope it will because even if I’d really like to use librewolf or another good fork of firefox…it’s just so lackluster compared to what Vivaldi offers, especially since I use a lot of its features.


  • I really don’t get why anyone would be annoyed about this specifically when recurring topics and posts are just pretty common… about litterally anything. I find it even more weird since it’s about people ditching windows (I mean how many topics and posts hating on windows, praising Linux, suggesting Linux, and whatever else…just lots and lots, and somehow people are fine with that, so why would it be any different here ?)

    Beside, people just want to share things, regardless if others did exactly the same an hour or a decade ago. Why care when it’s just so easy to move on to something you’d be more interested in ?

    One thing I do find tiresome more than anything within the Linux community though is talks about noobs like they are some cringe childs being boring and acting childishly…everyone have been noobs seriously, even you mentioned toxicity and the lack of openness/friendliness towards noobs if we ostracized them…yet you are suggesting it anyway. I get noobs aren’t always fun but come on ! And about newcommer posts…noobs will seek help wherever they can seek it, having another place to help them is not going to change that, so we might just as well help them and redirect them to helping sites anyway.



  • Shotcut is great if you never dived into video editing before, simply because it’s great for quick and simple video editing, it’s also fairly intuitive. But it can fall flat when you have specific (or more advanced) needs, like adding subtitles or specific effects, it’s doable, features are not fully the problem here…just that it can be a needless pain to use in such instances.

    Kdenlive on the other hand is more complete but less intuitive, yet if you want something a bit more advanced it will do the job more than nicely.

    So it widely depends on your needs and how far you want to delve into video editing.

    I’d say if you wanna go crazy go for Kdenlive, if you want something simple go for Shotcut. If you want to start simple and go crazy later go for both.

    They are both more than decent editing softwares, but Kdenlive is surely the best of the two, if not one of the best out there.