• Delilah (She/Her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 day ago

    I’ll say it once, I’ll say it forever: Windows has better backward compatibility, period. Even compared to linux. Rebuilding an old open source linux app to work on a modern distro can be done, but it’s a process that could take hours or days. And if you don’t have the source code you’re shit out of luck. Have fun getting that binary built against a 1 year old version of glibc to work. This, incidentally is what things like flatpak, docker and ubuntu’s nonsense competitor to both (of which our hatred is entirely rational no really stop laughing) are trying to solve.

    Meanwhile microsoft office still handles leap years wrong because it might break backwards compatibility with old documents. Binaries built for windows xp will usually just work on windows 11. Packages built for ubuntu 22.0 often won’t run on ubuntu 23.0. You never notice this because linux are a culture of recompilers. Rebuilding every last package once a month is just how some distros roll. But that’s not backwards compatibility, that’s ongoing maintenance.

    • VitabytesDev@feddit.nl
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      23 hours ago

      I think this is because Windows developers are bored to remove old code and as a result Windows 11 is an added layer on top of Windows 10, 8, 7 and even XP.

    • scumola@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      Windows 11 isn’t even backwards-compatible with 7-year-old CPUs! Run a 32-bit or 16-bit (dos) exe on Win11/x64? Think again. Windows drivers are always a pain in the butt. Load up an old driver for your favorite peripheral? Probably won’t work.

      • Delilah (She/Her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        23 hours ago

        Ah yes, because linux drivers never break!

        You might not understand the pain if you don’t own a tv tuner card but trust me, it’s ROUGH!

        • scumola@sh.itjust.works
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          18 hours ago

          The old hauppage TV tuner cards work great with Linux. I actually have some old-school hauppage (old 4:3 TV signal) tuner cards and they work great under a modern Ubuntu install. I also use a couple of hdhomerun units (which do hd) and they don’t really require drivers and also work fantastically with Linux. With Linux the drivers are (mostly) part of the kernel. If they don’t work, it usually means that they’re very new. Linux driver support is leaps and bounds better than any windows support, which is usually discontinued and forgotten about.because the companies go out of business and have closed-source drivers. Linux drivers are open source and if they don’t work, the community fixes them even if the company goes under or hasn’t been around for decades.

    • itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      But is that desirable? I’d rather break things in favor of something better, and provide a way to make the old thing run, than be stuck with ancient baggage

      Also, while that’s true for software, compatibility for old hardware is horrible under Windows

      • el_psd@sh.itjust.works
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        22 hours ago

        I’d rather break things in favor of something better, and provide a way to make the old thing run, than be stuck with ancient baggage

        Windows is office software first and foremost, designed to be used by people who neither know nor care what an “operating system” is. Every last one of these people is entirely incapacitated by even the most lovingly-crafted and descriptive error message. If Microsoft ever considered a policy like this, the city of Redmond would be razed to the ground inside twelve hours

      • Delilah (She/Her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        Rebuilding the app for the newer version is an objectively better solution, because it allows you to take advantage to new features. 64-bit migrations are a game changer for example. But its an ungodly amount of effort. Every single sodding package has a person responsible for building it for every distro that supports it. Its only because its on the distros to make a given program work on their distro that the system works at all. I agree that I’d rather it be rebuilt to fit into the new system. But that’s a lot of work. Never forget that.

    • Panamalt@sh.itjust.works
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      1 day ago

      I heard this concept somewhere once of “Technical Debt” wherein a thing gets made and it works really well but then it gets updated or new features are added and something breaks, but rather than tear the whole thing apart to fix the issue, a patch or bandaid gets slapped on to ship the thing. Then the next update comes along and this time it takes two bandaids, one to ‘fix’ the new problem and one to keep the old bandaid on. The next update takes three bandaids, then four . . . and so on. The accumulation of all these bandaids is known as the Technical Debt, and it must always be repaid, somehow, someday.

      Microsoft stubbornly refuses to repay their technical debt at all costs, Apple is terrified of letting anyone ever get even a glimpse of their mountain of technical debt, and Linux bathes in a weird soup of refusing to let technical debt even happen and dispensing bandaids so fast they make the RedCross look like a joke.

      • Delilah (She/Her)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 day ago

        Linux has technical debt. The kernel only just stopped supporting the i386. I can’t imagine what patches upon patches were required to make the same code run on even 2 processors released 40 years apart, let alone every processor released in between.

  • Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    My favourite thing about updates on my work Mac is when you say ‘try in one hour’ thinking it’ll ask you then an hour later it aggressively closes your programs. I use Linux, Mac and Windows regularly and Mac has by far the worst update experience out of all of them imo.

    • Marty_Man_X@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Yes but it also reopens everything exactly as you left it, meaning you can update and not loose anything mission critical; ymmv ofc but in my personal experience MacOS has the best update experience from mainstream OS

    • CameronDev@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      I’ve clicked the “install updates tonight” button a bunch of times, it consistently fails to update and then I have to force it to update the next morning. Incredibly poor experience.

      • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Every day, for weeks, my Apple Watch notifies me about available updates when I put it on after charging. Why didn’t you install the updates while you were charging, then?! It only stops when I put it back on the charger and manually tell it to update.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 days ago

    You can also remove the fr*nch language pack via rm -fr /

    But in all seriosity, i tried to install Linux dual-boot with Windows on my dad’s computer last weekend, and it broke the windows install because it doesn’t support bitlocker (apparently). Maybe i could have gotten it to work, but i abandoned the project after the first failed attempt. Still a bit salty about that. Especially since it was meant to be a demonstration how “quick and easy” installing Linux nowadays supposedly is.

    • Illecors@lemmy.cafe
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      2 days ago

      It is quick and easy. Maintaining any other OS side by side is always a bigger ordeal than not doing it. It breaks the other way around as well - If you were running some linux distro and then tried dual booting by installing windows - no way you’d be able to boot into linux without extra tweaking.

  • Comtief@lemm.ee
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    2 days ago

    Linux: i can’t stop dumb users (me) completely destroying everything with a bad console command

    • JuxtaposedJaguar@lemmy.ml
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      1 day ago

      I much prefer that to Apple’s approach of “you probably didn’t want to do that, so you can’t”. I’ve literally had to boot into Linux to fix things on Macs. Fucking infuriating.

    • ugh@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      I did this. Luckily, nothing was lost because I was only using it to learn at the time. It oddly boosted my confidence because if I could break the OS, I could learn how to use it.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
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      2 days ago

      I’m pretty sure that if you use elevated privileges to run commands you don’t understand, you can break Windows just as much as you can break Linux. Windows might pop up an extra “Are you sure?” box or two though. It’s been a while since I did anything on that OS.

      • NightmareQueenJune@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        But that’s in my experience sadly very necessary especially in the beginning when you are getting into Linux. So getting into Linux has quite a steep learning curve because not knowing what you are copy pasting can have terrible consequences, but understanding everything before you copy paste is very demanding.
        When out comes to my main rig, i never had the experience of everything just working out of the box. There was always something that required me searching for obscure fixes, hoping for the best.

        • JustAnotherKay@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          Very necessary

          No it absolutely is not. When you’re looking up guides and come across an unfamiliar command, don’t copy and paste it and find out what it does. Google it. Man it. Research it. Stop copying and pasting commands you don’t understand.

          • NightmareQueenJune@lemmy.world
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            1 day ago

            My point is that if that is the case (and I do understand why) then i can’t possibly recommend Linux to people that don’t want their OS to be their hobby, because as for my experience they will come across something that needs some command line input.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Speaking of not being able to delete system apps, a friend of mine with a Pixel phone says Google Play cannot be uninstalled from it. Anybody know for sure?

    • EngineerGaming@feddit.nl
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      1 day ago

      It’s a Pixel… Y’know, the phone universally supported by degoogled OSes including Graphene? The ease of unlocking the bootloader is the only reason I have one at all!

      • Darren@sopuli.xyz
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        24 hours ago

        I moved from 16 years of iPhones to a Pixel 9 purely so I could put Graphene on it. It’s been a couple of months so far and I’m loving it.

  • halva@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    have you like

    ever actually tried installing an old app on linux
    or accidentally had a power outage during an update

    it literally can’t update without breaking and can’t install old apps lol

    • Steve Dice@sh.itjust.works
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      2 days ago

      Can’t you just bury your head in the sand like the rest of us? Linux is literally perfect if you ignore all of its flaws.

    • Hawk@lemmynsfw.com
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      2 days ago

      Yeah I’ve installed heaps of old apps, it depends on dynamic vs static libraries etc but some people still use Emacs 25…

      I have lost power whilst updating, can be a nuisance depending in the distro, but snapshots (zfs and btrfs both work well for me) have been life saving.

      Mac and windows simply don’t have a lot of quality of life features. Working with them is painful. As self a documenting systems they are fantastic though, however, when I was younger we had things called schools that served to address that gap, these have fallen out of favour in modern times.

      • halva@sh.itjust.works
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        1 day ago

        it depends on dynamic vs static libraries

        why must the user think about this shit? i can grab a windows app made for XP and run it on 11, and it’ll run perfectly fine, and i don’t have to think about the way its dynamic loader figures it out

        ill have lower chances of running an app made for RHEL8 on RHEL9 than that

  • kekmacska@lemmy.zip
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    2 days ago

    Android hate not tolerated. Android can delete system apps, if you aee root. On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

    • superkret@feddit.org
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      2 days ago

      On linux you can"t install or uninstall anything if you are not root

      Wrong. You can install Flatpak apps as a user, which are very similar to apps on Android.

  • otto@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    I find it hilarious that the first architecture change in 10 years, that happened seven years ago, still causes anxiety and pain for people who don’t even use that operating system and probably never did.

    I wonder how much Linux usership is owed to people being completely incapable of dealing with a minor inconvenience they once encountered (or only saw a meme about) on an apple product.

    The sun puts out less energy than is wasted by people hating on Apple for completely and utterly irrational reasons.

    • OpenStars@piefed.social
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      2 days ago

      It’s probably more likely that they just needed to find something bad to say about Macs, and were too lazy to find one of the actual legitimate reasons (like it being closed source or something? probably bc the one used “sounds better”, to someone who can’t recognize that it is gaslighting).

      The amount of purity whinging in Linux communities generally makes me sorry whenever I respond to one of these posts. On the other hand, I am not smart so here goes once more into the fray… 🤪

  • Clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    I was trying to delete a KDE program that I’ll never use, but Discover seemed to want to remove the whole pile of KDE Apps. I’m sure there’s a way.