24 years exclusively running it.
Short answer: magic.
Long answer: a stressful full week trying to get everything right, followed by a long, blissful period forgetting how hard it was to get it up and running like magic.
Those weeks were a lot more stressful, and longer than a week, when I used Slackware and started installing stuff that wasn’t packaged for Slackware. I would dread new software. It was the Unifi controller that finally put me over the edge: I wasn’t even willing to give it a shot. I ran the controller on my Kubuntu desktop for a few weeks until I switched the server to Debian.
It felt like a house of cards. Nudge one of those cards by, say, updating a library, and you could easily break something else.
“If you want to know how Linux works, ask a Slackware user,” is the old saying. It’s true…we had to know, because we didn’t have a choice not to know.
my experiece is just stuff getting fixed and breaking rsndomly tbh.
So many factors at play.
The number of packages installed, the use of externally unsupported repos, the distro you use, reliability of their packaging system, how much you deviated from the baseline customization, and probably more.
Keeping track of everything off what and how much you changed may prove difficult. But it helps taking notes of how you solved the more complicated issues.
With time you learn to live with the inevitability of something breaking. You update less often, and only when you really have to. Repairing stuff becomes less overwhelmeming with time.
After a dozen of those stressful weeks I decided to write down everything new I learn if I can.
I guess it’s been about 16 years for me! Seeing as I first rolled up my sleeves to Linux as a Mac native around 2010. Though it’s been my personal PC daily driver for only about 3. It was all work and projects stuff until then. I learned Linux nuts and bolts on the job in-person from a very good mentor.
What I tell people: “When you get used to using an operating system that respects your rights, you don’t wanna go back.”
How about an operating system that respects your time?
Cause Linux aint that if I have to sift through dozens of badly documented online manuals just to get something small working the way it should.
Windows is much better in that regard.
Good for you, stay where you are
So are you immediately trying to pull the conversation away from ethics, because you know Microsoft has no leg to stand on in this regard? Who cares that the founder of MS is heavily implicated in the Epstein files if you (supposedly) save a little time, right? Or I guess it doesn’t matter that that same company is actively providing surveillance tech support to Israel in their genocide of Palestine? That they censor their employees emails from speaking about the very atrocity they’re complicit in? Or that the same surveillance infrastructure is being used at home in service of an authoritarian regime?
That’s not even getting into all the gritty details of all the little annoyances and rights abuses - which have been accurately predicted by free software advocates for decades now - that inevitably stem from proprietary tech companies like Microslop, which collectively we are not calling enshittification.
But even ignoring the massive pile of shits about Microsoft and Windows to address your argument in a vacuum, does Windows respect your time? Really? Does Windows respect your time when it forces you to go online and sign up for an online account, and login to that account to enable their at-home spyware, just to install their operating system? Does it respect your time when you have to go through a potentially hours-long painful update procedure on a fresh install? How about when the OS runs awfully sluggish even on great hardware? Does MS respect your time when you have to go out of your way to research and install multiple tools and scripts to try in vain to gut all the spyware, AI garbage, adware, and bloat, and run 3rd party system tools to suppress other elements of the OS just to make the damn thing halfway usable and have the illusion of being something that can be trusted?
Even on your own little point, where is this superior documentation you speak of? Because every time I’ve run into a problem on Windows, their support pages have only ever given me the most generic troubleshooting answers that have been completely unhelpful. Please show me documentation that comes even close to the thoroughness and quality of the Arch Wiki.
Assuming any of what you said is even in good faith, and that you’re not just a shill or simp, here’s what you need to consider: Windows is something that most people have been using all their lives. When you’ve been operating something that long, it feels easier. You’re more able to ignore the pain points because habits are already deeply settled, and you know your way around. That’s the biggest reason Linux feels like such a hassle at first - learning new things takes time, and is always frustrating. I know this experientially because at one time I struggled to use Linux systems too, but now I have the reverse problem. I’ve been using Linux long enough, and Windows has devolved and changed enough, that on the rare occasion I try to use that piece of shitware, it is the most frustrating thing in the world. Windows 7 was something I was used to. But Windows 10 and 11 are new and unfamiliar to me, and consequently feel damn near unusably bad.
Does Linux have things it needs to improve? Of course, but at least it’s something worth improving. You’re trying to compare imperfect, yet a remarkable collection of software, to something that is literally just malware at this point. If anything, virus scanners should be adding Windows to their definitions lists.
I’ve been on Arch full time for 6 years, I still get frustrated, sometimes I get stumped, but I NEVER want to go back to windows
I tried slackware when win 3.1 was hot. I would have went a lot further a lot sooner if I could have gotten my modem working
When Linux is working, one does not tempt fate by asking why.
One does not ask how the Linux is working, one only asks if.
As someone who uses Linux every day for work, I don’t know how to fix shit. I’m not paid to troubleshoot
It’s magic
libmagic is just one tiny part of the linux ecosystem
Touche
20 years this year and I still am not sure how it is supposed to be pronounced (in english)
I think it’s /ˈlɪn.əks/ It’s horritic tho, tbh
Line-yoox.
Gah Nuu plus Line-ucks
“As I’ve taken to calling it”
Loon - icks
So close the lunatic then.
Loin-ughs
Lean-uggs
Lin-ix
except it’s derived from Linus’s name, which in finnish is pronounced as Lee-noos, so technically it should be Lee-noox.
In reality tho? Nobody cares
I just say liinus. Or liinuksi.
It’s pronounced like Liminiux. Lominoliux is also acceptable.
actually, it’s lomi-lominux
That’s the thing, his pronounciation there is eerlie similar to what I’m used to spanish (where it is pronounced just as it is spelt) that my ol brain kind of does a short-circuit and can’t assimilate the fact that it’s just kind of the same thing in both languages and if it’s in the middle of a sentence I have to go back to speaking my crappy non-native english
Not sure if this helps, but in English (my native language), I would pronounce it with a short “i”, like in “sit”. You could also pronounce it with a Spanish “i” (same as Finnish “i” to my ears). I would not pronounce it with a long English “i” because the vowel length is too long and doesn’t sound right.
linux
The linux is silent
it’s pronounced
gifguy over here trying to start a war
Now I just wanna know whether
GNUisGuh-nooorJuh-nooorGee-en-yooWildebeest
It’s
Gee-nyooa newt?
Gnu like the animal
the U is silent
I haven’t used Linux regularly since 2006, which either means I’m out of the loop or an ancient bearer of lost knowledge:
I think it’s “G’noo” like “G’day” or “G’night.”
G’noo be my distro of choice, m’lady
lmao
The GNU project has a page on it:
It seems he got it correct without knowing.
yiff*
/ˈlɪnuks/
LIH-nucks (rhymes with “tin bucks”).
It is pronounced like that but they don’t rhyme at all
This gon be another gif or gif situation.
“It just works, so who tf cares?”
I took an operating system class in college that involved basicly creating a baby OS. Lot of fun.
Everything’s a file.
except that thing. …and the other thing. that thing used to be a file but it’s not anymore. that’s only a file if you use this specific shell. that one is a file system, but there’s no files in it. oh don’t touch that file, that’s deprecated. oh that’s only a partial file, you need to open this one too otherwise it breaks.
Lots of things are files. See Plan9.
Linux: You’re a file.
Windows: No! You’re a file!
*Linux smiles maliciously*
Real
That’s me, who started using Linux 5 months ago. I’m like, “I use Linux btw” to everyone.
This is the way.
Who cares, be loud and proud about it.
Personally I’m just going to ramp up being annoying to my friends until they switch because they’ll thank me in a couple years and also because they deserve it
I compiled Linux last week and I don’t even know how it works
First you get a file(kernel source), then use another file to change the file, then you have a kernel, but the kernel(file) in the the file system, then use a magic boot file to run the file. That’s basically it?
I’ve installed Debian on a 16 year old iomega nas drive single board arm system. Special drive format, with blanking the first 32 bytes with zeros for a weird boot process. Installed OpenMediaVault on top of that.
I don’t know how any of it works, I just search the web and cobble stuff together.
It’s like asking “How does toilet paper work?” Meaning to say you don’t have to know all the details about how it comes to be but can just use it and appreciate it does work. And you also know it would be really messy and with poor hygiene without.
Maybe not the best metaphor but I approve your message
It was a shitty, yes. I probably would have said “it’s like asking how food works” if I had been eating when I wrote it
OK but you can start a great argument by asking a group of people how many squares of toilet paper they use per wipe
