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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I meant it quite literally. Another multi-billion dollar company needs to be willing and able to spend the same level of resources and time. Wal-Mart or Costco itself would have to be willing to produce their own hardware.

    Yeah, I fully realize it’s never going to happen. It’s a hypothetical to illustrate just how high of a hurdle it is. It won’t happen organically, there needs to be a strong driving force with the financial backing that rivals that of the competition.


  • “Nobody cares” is how Linux will eventually win on the desktop. It becomes viable for most people when they no longer “need” whatever they were using before. As Linux is free, it will win when it becomes “good enough”.

    The largest barrier is the fact that the end user is expected to install the OS themselves. Having an OS work 100% of the time right out of the box with a default install is impossible. Windows and OSX have a huge advantage by being installed on the factory floor. The manufacturer guarantees that the drivers work for the hardware they decide to install and that the default applications on the OS work as they should.

    Linux needs an equivalent to Microsoft or Apple that can put Linux on shelves at WalMart for average people that buy $600 desktops.





  • Have you seen the Reddit Linux communities? People don’t care how many tools or useful information you present them. They will ask the SAME “which distro” questions day after day after day.

    There are 3 reasons you see repeat posts.

    1. They are extremely lazy and can’t be bothered to find their way through a maze of information.
    2. The maze of information is legitimately confusing and they need help. But they are bad at formulating good questions so it looks like point #1. I very rarely see people take the time to explain what they’ve tried and why they failed.
    3. They want a conversation and getting their question answered is only one half of it.

    Also one other thing I noticed is that if you do form a good question and create a wall of text, it can also scare people away. So people deliberately ask very vague questions and then slowly reveal more as they get asked for specifics. At that point you’ve hooked some people, they are a little more invested in helping and you can info dump on them.




  • The reality is that to the average user all browsers are the same. A lot of technologies have sort of peaked for regular people and browsers are one of those. There was a time when you needed plugins to do basic things like view PDFs or videos, to play games (flash, java) and there would be a new major change to HTML or CSS every few months etc.

    That’s no longer a problem. All browsers are near equal in their ability to render pages. So people are naturally going to go with what feels familiar. We lost the battle for market share the minute Google decided to advertise Chrome on their search page.




  • moon_matter@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlGamedev and linux
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    1 year ago

    It surprises me how many indie devs avoid some of the higher level / more popular engines for this reason alone. But I assume they just must enjoy that sort of stuff much more than I.

    The problem with indie devs is purely a lack of knowledge and resources. They don’t feel comfortable testing and packaging binaries for distribution on Linux. A decent number of them are also self-taught and actually have almost no exposure to desktop Linux at all. So it’s actually a much higher hurdle than you think.



  • It’s kind mind boggling how often you have to ask the OP to actually post the command they tried to run or the full error message and some of them will actually try to argue that it won’t help. The people that frequent the forums start to get a bit annoyed at having to beg for bread crumbs and they eventually either become toxic or burn out and leave the community.


  • moon_matter@kbin.socialtoLinux@lemmy.mlI feel called out
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    1 year ago

    Sometimes they can afford to not know because they have a relative who can manage the device for them. In which case they really wouldn’t be installing software on their own really.

    You would be surprised at how many people cannot even change the volume on their tablet.


  • Is this even a legitimate problem? Lots of people, myself included, have a “local” configuration. All of the services and credentials mentioned in the config are running on my personal machine for testing only during active development. None of those credentials refer to any sort of “real” service that’s on 24/7 and accessible via the internet. It’s effectively dummy data to the rest of the world and I imagine there are a ton of false positives like what I just described.


  • Windows auto-recovers from almost any issue the average user might encounter. It cannot be understated just how hard it is for an application or driver to break modern Windows. It goes much farther than just fixing a kernel panic. It will reset to a serviceable state for almost anything you can think of ( e.g. bad display settings, borked application install) and even in the worst situation will still give you some sort of GUI and try to walk you through the problem.

    Linux sort of just gives up and lets you shoot yourself in the foot if you really ask it to. It’s up to you to then figure out how to fix things and that usually involves diving into the terminal. But even ignoring that, a lot of Linux applications have a serious UI/UX problem. I cannot count how many applications just do things like throw a config file at you even for common tasks and expect you to read a doc page in order to figure it out. I have better things to do than read yet another wall of text just to do something simple like remapping key bindings (e.g. mpv). That would be an unthinkable thing to do to a Windows user.

    Linux developers seem to want to develop software for other developers. Windows developers develop software for average people. The fragmentation of 1000s of Linux distros, each with their own quirks only make matters worse by further complicating where and how to get help.