Lol no. I’ve been using Linux for 10 years and it’s been a continuous dumpster fire. Constant issues l, especially with Nvidia, across many different machines. Issues with wine, no X11 (or Wayland) after updates, games not starting, etc, etc. Across Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch (and derivatives).

Yet I almost exclusively use Linux nowadays. Why? Because it’s a dumpster fire I can influence. Windows is going to shit, they were taking my PC hostage, installing spyware, ads, forcing updated without my consent. On Linux I have to invest hours to fix shit, on Windows I can get fucked whenever something happens that I don’t want.

With proton advancing, Wayland working somewhat usable even with Nvidia,my threshold was passed. I’d rather fix the fixable Linux issues that cost me time than deal with Windows any longer. But for the layman I’m not sure I’d recommend it. I’m a computer scientist. I can fixodt issues, it’s just a question of time and energy. But that doesn’t go for everyone.

Even people who’ve been at it for years. I am skeptical of the AI hype bubble as much as anyone here, but it’s been very useful for fixing things in Linux. Just in the past years it helped me (among others):

• Find an obscure bug that was reported that same day in the kernel, and helped me switch to the LTS kernel to prevent these issues.
• Help me setup up a random 35mm film scanner that I found with cups, and then help me set up a win XP VM when that didn’t work out
• Help me fix bluray playback yesterday after VLC suddenly randomly started to refuse playing it.

I’ve been using Linux with Nvidia for 10 years and it’s been a constant dumpster fire. The Nvidia driver constantly caused issues over these 10 years, especially during updates. Currently I’m having the issue that the entirety of Wayland, including all open programs, crash when I run out of VRAM because the Linux Nvidia drivers cannot fall back on RAM when running out of VRAM. It’s making my gaming experience very frustrating.

I haven’t tried them, so I cannot judge, but I’m just afraid I’ll run into issues when I will have to go off the beaten path. Inevitably I’ll have to do something hacky in order to fix some obscure software that the maintainers of the distro didn’t think of, and that’s currently already a big pain. But in such a strict setting it will be even more difficult. There will be no documentation and probably no guide or questions/answers on any forum either.

I’d be willing to try it for a productivity setup if I needed a reinstall, but not for my main PC because I just rely on too many hacks to get shit working.

And Julia!

The “Forgetting How Your Own Code Works” is real. I’ve looked at code, thought to myself “what fcking idiot wrote this garbage”, only to see my own name next to it. It’s a very humbling experience

I was just about to post the same thing. I’ve been using Linux for almost 10 years. I never really understood the folder layout anyway into this detail. My reasoning always was that /lib was more system-wide and /usr/lib was for stuff installed for me only. That never made sense though, since there is only one /usr and not one for every user. But I never really thought further, I just let it be.

Sometimes I look at the memes around here and wonder wtf y’all are doing. Like, neither my code nor the code at the place I work at are perfect. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen a merge do this. Maybe some of the most diverged merges temporarily had a lot of errors because of some refactoring, but then it was just a few find + replaces away from being fixed again. But those were merges where multiple teams had been working on both the original and the fork for years and even then it was usually pretty okay.

I’m on Arch (actually a converted Antergos) and I have an NVIDIA card as well. My first attempt a few months ago was horrible, bricking my system and requiring a bootable USB an a whole evening to get Linux working again.

My second attempt was recently, and went a lot better. X11 no longer seems to work, so I’m kinda stuck with it, but it feels snappy as long as my second monitor is disconnected. I’ve yet to try some gaming. My main monitor is a VRR 144Hz panel with garbage-tier HDR. The HDR worked out of the box on KDE Plasma, with the same shitty quality as on Windows, so I immediately turned it off again. When my second monitor is connected I get terrible hitching. Every second or so the screen just freezes for hundreds of milliseconds. Something about it (1280x1024, 75Hz, DVI) must not make Wayland happy. No settings seem to change anything, only physically disconnecting the monitor seems to work.

I bought a ThinkPad new in 2014 for my study for like 1200 euro’s. She’s still happily purring today. Around 2019 I made the mistake of emptying a cup of tea into the ThinkPad accidentally and then holding it upside down to get the water out. I think I should’ve just let it leak out of the bottom since the laptop has holes for that, but I panicked. This broke the keyboard, but not the rest of the laptop. I got an official new keyboard for like 100 euro’s which came with a tool and the simple instructions, and since then everything has been working flawlessly.

So I recommend ThinkPads, although I can’t really say anything about compatibility of new models

True. Guess I misread. I’ve already switched to 36 hours and I totally aim to go lower once I earn more. Work to live, not live to work

Disagree. I used to spend time on more energy-intensive hobbies like programming and music production. But I’ve had mono and COVID in 2020 and I’ve never felt the same thereafter. Also working 40 hours a week drains a lot of energy

Yeah sports were my first attempt to solve it. I’m running twice a week usually and have done a few half marathons now. It’s helped a bit, but my energy is still not amazing. It’s probably related to having issues with mono and COVID in 2020, I’ve never been the same since then. Working 40 hours per week didn’t help either.

You call it “quick to judge and superficial”, but imo that’s the wrong attitude. Every tool we use as humans should be designed to be as intuitive as possible. It makes it easiest for people to learn how to use a new tool. That doesn’t mean that a tool cannot be complex or customizable, but the default experience should make it easy for new users to quickly achieve something. Once they grow accustomed to the tool they can tailor it their own way.

No tool has to do this, but if it wants to be widely used then this is kinda necessary.

There’s a reason why there are whole fields of study into human media interaction, and why software companies hire UI designers. Everything that doesn’t have to be explained in words and text because it is intuitive saves mental overhead for the user and makes the application more accessible.

I’m supposed to have energy as an adult?! I have way more time than energy. Most of that time is spent doing useless shit like watching YouTube because I’m too exhausted to do anything useful

I recently tried to get Wayland working. Followed a simple guide to enable some NVIDIA boot parameter. Somehow it fucked my complete grub and I couldn’t boot until I messed around a fair bit with live usbs. Cost me a whole evening.

So I guess what Wayland is missing is normal support from the GPU manufacturers.

Can, but not by default. The default setup is what leaves an impression on most users. Most users opening GIMP for the first time expect to be able to find stuff that they need, not have to first spend a lot of time getting familiar with all of its options. It shouldn’t be needed to first spend time opening all the sane default windows and re-aliging stuff every time you boot it for the first time. At least, that shouldn’t be the case of GIMP wants to be as popular with non-technical users like Krita is.

Also, the tool bar still doesn’t have the nice separations between tool functions, and it still feel a bit more chaotic. Not sure of it’s the icons or the order.

Now admittedly I’m not someone who often uses drawing programs, but my biggest issue in GIMP is that I never seem to be able to find what I’m looking for.

In the two images you posted you can actually see an example of such a case. In Krita all the tools (or whatever you’d call them) in the bar on the left are ordered in a logical way, and separate types of tools are also visually separated by separator lines. The bar with tools is also only 2 icons wide, which makes scanning for the right tool a bit easier, since you can mostly just scan along the vertical axis. In GIMP it’s just a pile of low contrast icons in seemingly random order. Unless you’ve used it enough to know the order, you’re gonna have to do a lot more searching. And searching will be way harder since you’ll have to search horizontally and vertically.

It’s like reading a website where the text is taking the whole with of the screen and without paragraphs (GIMP) vs reading a website where the line length is constrained, the text is horizontally centered, and there are proper paragraphs.

I feel like this example reflects my personal experience with both. I’ve used quite a few different types of image editing programs, and with most of them I can fairly easily find the stuff I need. Using GIMP however, I used to be quite lost. Nowadays it’s gotten better because the windows are not all floating around and I’ve used it more. But still, I only found Krita after using a fair bit of GIMP, and yet I felt instantly more at home because the UI was easier to navigate.

Edit: That being said, GIMP is a very cool program. I don’t want to hate on it too much. It’s helped me countless times. The UI has already improved a lot since the floaty window days, and I hope that continues.