Technology

Computers are like cars. People want a car that goes from a to b, like every other car, with no fuss. If you’re really going crazy maybe you look for a manual transmission. They don’t want to mess with computers. They don’t want to know what’s under the hood. They don’t want to have to understand how the CVT works, or how to update a broken repository link via command line. That’s 99.5 of people.

How often do broken repositories happen? Often enough. Biggest reason would be not updating systems and the old repository closed. “BuT WhY wOuLd AnyOnE NoT UpDAtE!!?!” You might ask? Because updating breaks shit. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had a distro set up exactly how I want, apt-get, now my gnome desktop isn’t working. Or Wine doesn’t work. Or whatever.

Only thing you use is tied to windows… See, that’s the thing. You just tossed that out there like all the windows software has a direct and equally capable equivalent on Linux. That’s not true, and I refer back to my car analogy that 99.5% of people don’t want to screw around with trying to sort out workarounds.

As far as drivers go it’s not just NVIDIA, but everything from touchpads to Bluetooth to fingerprint ID unlocks don’t all have Linux drivers. I actually find NVIDIA to be fairly well supported and haven’t had too much difficulty with it since Steam and gamers have decided that maybe Linux isn’t so bad and have made a lot of effort to keep things updated and compatible.

Out of touch… maybe. Take a trip through the Ubuntu forums some time. Probably the most popular and relatively easy distro to use. There are a ton of posts that just don’t get answers, where people just give up, or have multiple command line entries suggested that deal with everything from permissions, different command modifiers, and extremely basic stuff that doesn’t work like config or make. Again, think about that 99.5% that simply doesn’t want to deal with that shit, much less open a terminal window. They probably don’t even know how to open an admin level CMD window on Windows or even the task manager. Think how computer illiterate most people are where even changing a setting in their cellphone is too much trouble.

Look, we could discuss this all day. One of my chief complaints about the Linux crowd is that they just toss out that everyone should switch while completely ignoring the qualifications of the user base they’re asking to switch and putting that up against the thousands of choices and ways to break Linux that exist. That’s why people like Apple products. They’re hard to break by messing around with settings because Apple won’t let you do anything with the OS. You can still break windows, not as easily as one could before, and linux still breaks itself whether you like it or not.