folkrav @ folkrav @lemmy.ca

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2 yr. ago

Chlorine levels so easy to test for, I’d be curious to see such a measurement… This sounds like a class action waiting to happen.

If we want to keep going with car comparisons, I’ll try to make it illustrate my point once again - do those people happen to learn that R doesn’t mean “Really fast” by being snarkily told to RTFM by a car enthusiast or they aren’t a real driver?

I was specifically addressing the “Linux users need to RTFM or they aren’t Linux users” affirmation. It’s not defending ignorance to point out that it’s gatekeepey as hell.

I’ve also helped plenty of technical folks install Linux on newer hardware, and some had difficulties and I had to provide support more than once. One of my grandparents understood Ubuntu/Unity immediately, the other had trouble. Anecdotes don’t say much.

Feel free to point out where I was “offended”. I thought this was merely a discussion, as these communities encourage to have.

As for what was actually said, even re-reading the comment I was answering to, your interpretation of what was said is still not what I’m reading, at all. Quoting verbatim: “You aren’t a Linux user if you don’t like to RTFM”. How is this not gatekeeping? You use Linux, you’re a Linux user, that’s all.

There are cheap NASes/home servers to be bought/built for a couple hundred bucks, with very limited RAM, while TrueNAS recommends 8GB minimum. It’s also often much cheaper to have the option to buy mismatched drives on sale and expand your storage over time, than having to buy matched drives, and having to plan long term for potential expansion of else have to replace a whole set of drives at once if you need more. But fair enough, yes.

Yup Steam Deck is a great example of Linux falling in end-users hands in the right way to drive adoption. The average person doesn’t even have to care that it is indeed running on Linux.

The incentive is still there, it just presents itself differently. Nothing prevents them from withholding major changes so they happen every 13 months either. If anything, I would at least expect yearly major versions to have large changes, while they can technically do whatever they want during the year I pay for, including not pushing any updates whatsoever.

If what you didn’t see were examples of gatekeeping, read this very thread lol. But again, rather anecdotal. Spend some time talking to anyone trying the OS now and see their experience. Read threads made by newbies.

Which was exactly my point. Most people see their computer/OS as the thing that lets them log in and launch their programs, that’s all. Which comes back to expecting most people that launch Linux to do it being an unreasonable ask. We don’t ask people to be specialists of their cars’ mechanics to drive it.

Okay. But did any of these users need to read the manual to use Windows? My point was not that RTFM is a bad thing per se, but that pretending people aren’t proper Linux users if they don’t is absurd. They have Linux in their machine? They’re Linux users.

Yeah, we’ve admittedly come a very long way. My Hardy Heron setup took days to get to a usable state on my hardware, back then, and even then, my laptop couldn’t hold a charge, sleep didn’t work properly, and there were so many crashes lol. Nowadays it’s pretty much smooth sailing on most of my machines without really having to think about it. I still avoid Nvidia like the plague, but Intel/AMD stuff are usually a pretty safe bet.

Those early years were really formative, but I’m glad of all the progress that’s been done. I just wish the gatekeeping would stop. It’s one of the major hurdles to adoption, IMHO. I don’t want people to convert necessarily (I still use Windows and/or macOS for things) but to stop being afraid to try, and these people really don’t help…

I genuinely have a hard time believing you can both have been “using Linux for a very long time” and never had to fix an issue lol. If you’ve legitimately been using it for that long, you’re also probably the type to RTFM, so I probably wasn’t talking about you…

This is merely one way to view it. The other is the one I gave. An OS is a tool for most people, they don’t even understand nor learned Windows, it’s mostly the gateway between them and their actual work, i.e. the software they use. They want a computer that runs their software, that’s it.

The “we don’t need them as Linux users if they don’t want to RTFM” line of thinking you’re exhibiting was exactly my point. Why do you interpret making things better for everyone as “lowering the bar”? Unless you genuinely think it’s a good thing the technical barrier is there, I don’t know how you rationalize this opinion.

Mine was 2007 too. Almost two decades later, and we still have the people playing gatekeepers.

One time purchases are not a sustainable income source for long living and updated software products like unraid.

I’m always left scratching my head every time I hear this line. Software subscriptions are a relatively new trend. The majority of software has been single-purchase until then over the last handful of decades. Why did it suddenly stop being sustainable to do so?

It’s the same model JetBrains has for their IDEs. You pay for a year, you get a perpetual fallback license. You pay again, get another year of updates.

JetBrains (accurately) still calls it a subscription though.

Yeah, but that wasn’t my point nor the one made by the person I was answering to. My point is, those users eventually hit the (inevitable) bump in the road, ask for help, get told by people like the person I was answering to that they have to RTFM or else they aren’t real Linux users, so they go back to Windows.

I don’t have half the world’s RAM to give to ZFS on my budget NAS tho, and Unraid allows mismatched drive sizes, which is pretty attractive to budget users. TrueNAS is definitely great though.

And this, folks, is why there will be no “year of the Linux desktop”. The technical difficulties, and the surrounding gatekeeping.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a dev, I RTFM, but for most people, their computer is just a simple tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver, that lets them do the actual work they have to do. They aren’t any less “real” Linux users. Just users that will go back to other OSes cause it doesn’t work for them and they keep getting told that it’s their fault for not reading the manual.

Unraid’s “killer feature” is the ability to mix and match disparate drive sizes and only requiring the parity drive to be at least as large as your largest data disk, a la MergeFS/Snapraid. Also ZFS chugging RAM like there’s no tomorrow so not really an option for underpowered devices like some NASes. But yeah, TrueNAS is nice.

It’s a self fulfilling prophecy at this point. CEOs explaining their pay being so high by “it’s high everywhere, and if you really think about it we’re managing millions of dollars and big important stuff so it’s not like we stole it or anything right”. Their comp gets higher and higher, we’re getting to the point where they’re now making multiple lifetimes worth what their own employees are making, and it’s all supposed to be normal that they do, cause they’re working oh so hard, aren’t they.