Firefox alienating its users
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@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
Keep trying another OS based on Linux until it works.
I tried Windows 3.11 and it was a fuckin piece of ugly shit, zero security and no stability, so Windows is a piece of shit
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@admiral_p said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
Honestly, the last time I tried Linux (Mint, even), it was slow, ugly (made Windows XP look like a pinnacle of design), unstable (yes, you didn't have to reboot for updates. But you had updates daily, many of which broke important parts of the system like sound or other programs. Or just didn't install right and had to be fixed on the command line), a pain to use (frequent use of command-line and text-config file editing), and lacking most of the programs I use frequently. And this was this decade, even. Before that it was way worse. I wrote my dissertation on a Linux machine. That thing gave me more pain....
Updates breaking stuff only happens on rolling releases these days, and even then, it's usually the aggressively cutting edge ones where users are expected to be OK with being testers basically. Slow, I don't know. It depends. It's not slower than Windows usually (games excluded) and it can often be leaner (which usually means "have a last-decade UX with an otherwise up-to-date OS"). Frequent command line use is not an issue for me, I don't dislike it. I actually prefer it for many things. For example, installing software, I never do it through the store app. It's just pointless, it takes more time and clicks. Ugly, I wouldn't say that, with the right DE/theme/font choice, desktop Linux is ugly. It tends to lack polish, but it's not necessarily ugly.
Excuses.
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@sweaty_gammon oh all right then piss off.
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I think I've touched the CLI on Linux Mint maybe three times ever, and it was because I was going into power user territory. Normally a web browser is about all I need.
Now at work where I have to deal with RHEL and CentOS and Ubuntu, I spend approximately 99.999% of my time cursing at the CLI and wishing the Internet could give me accurate documentation that wasn't from an archived mailing list from 1999. But at home, with Mint and basic home-use scenarios, things actually Just Work once the OS is installed. I wish we could use Mint at work, but "Mint isn't for business use because it's free so we need to pay a billion dollars for RHEL" or something.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
@admiral_p said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
Honestly, the last time I tried Linux (Mint, even), it was slow, ugly (made Windows XP look like a pinnacle of design), unstable (yes, you didn't have to reboot for updates. But you had updates daily, many of which broke important parts of the system like sound or other programs. Or just didn't install right and had to be fixed on the command line), a pain to use (frequent use of command-line and text-config file editing), and lacking most of the programs I use frequently. And this was this decade, even. Before that it was way worse. I wrote my dissertation on a Linux machine. That thing gave me more pain....
Updates breaking stuff only happens on rolling releases these days, and even then, it's usually the aggressively cutting edge ones where users are expected to be OK with being testers basically. Slow, I don't know. It depends. It's not slower than Windows usually (games excluded) and it can often be leaner (which usually means "have a last-decade UX with an otherwise up-to-date OS"). Frequent command line use is not an issue for me, I don't dislike it. I actually prefer it for many things. For example, installing software, I never do it through the store app. It's just pointless, it takes more time and clicks. Ugly, I wouldn't say that, with the right DE/theme/font choice, desktop Linux is ugly. It tends to lack polish, but it's not necessarily ugly.
Excuses.
Of course they are. I'm not saying it's perfect. These excuses mitigate the fact that some pain points exist. If you stay onto a stable distro and use it as intended (stay within the repos, or if you really need the newer software, try sticking to containerised software or trusted and reliable third party repos) it is extremely stable.
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@TimeBandit said in Firefox alienating its users:
@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
Keep trying another OS based on Linux until it works.
I tried Windows 3.11 and it was a fuckin piece of ugly shit, zero security and no stability, so Windows is a piece of shit
In the past I have used:
- Slackware
- Debian
- Fedora
- Suse
- Ubuntu
- Mint
- Arch
Each one was a massive waste of time. I still have machines that run Linux however they are either things like my Orange Pi or they are virtual machines in the cloud hosting applications.
Linux works fine. Desktop Linux is a mess, continues to be a mess and will always be a mess because of nature of the community that surrounds it.
I have tried a few distros in a VM on my machine and the same issues were present even though 10 years have passed.
Complaining about windows is pure whataboutery.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
Complaining about windows is pure whataboutery.
ROFL
Yeah, you're right, Windows doesn't have any issue. Glad you're loving it
I'll stay on my Linux mess for now, thank you.
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@sweaty_gammon the nature of desktop Linux is "a mess" because there are very few distros that focus exclusively on the desktop use case, and none of them big. To make a good desktop OS you have to want to make one. For most distros desktops are either sort of an afterthought (RHEL, Debian) or something for tinkerers and power users (Fedora, Arch). Some desktop Linux distros exist (Mint, Elementary) but they're little more than one-man-bands and have their own issues. Ubuntu may come closest but they're actually a middle-of-the-road distro which is best at nothing. (I don't mind Ubuntu anyway).
On the other hand, there is a small or no business case for a desktop distro. A company focusing on desktop Linux needs to have a big, stable staff not only of developers (who may be found cheaper if they believe in the mission) but also graphic designers, UX specialists, etc. (which for cultural reasons would never take the challenge). It would need to also provide certain kinds of software (a Photoshop alternative, a Logic/Cubase alternative, a Premiere alternative, good graphics backend, a good Office alternative) and to do so effectively they'd probably need to tie their distro to their own computers a la Apple, at least at first, in order to ensure bug-free functionality. For this you need a crazy multibillionaire who wants to spend millions on such a thing just because, and accept that he may end up throwing money down the drain (and if he wants to keep the FOSS ethos, have a harder time making everything profitable - even though I believe that today access to the source code, with the scale of such a project today, would be a moot point).
Therefore, Linux is what it is and you either accept its limitations (which are rarely showstoppers, which is why many people still prefer Linux) or you use something else.
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@admiral_p said in Firefox alienating its users:
Therefore,
Linuxany desktop OS is what it is and you either accept its limitations (which are rarely showstoppers, which is why many people still preferLinuxit) or you use something else.FTFY. They all have issues.
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@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Tsaukpaetra the release cycles are very different
Not any more!
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@loopback0 of course, in fact I feel totally handicapped when I use macOS. I don't like its interface paradigm and it's extremely clunky once you go beyond the borders of how the OS designers want you to use the system (which is basically as a basic user). It's pretty but not that pretty.
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@admiral_p said in Firefox alienating its users:
it's extremely clunky once you go beyond the borders of how the OS designers want you to use the system (which is basically as a basic user)
Hardly. It's just like the rest - you need to adjust slightly at first if you're used to something else but then it's no worse than the others.
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@loopback0 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@admiral_p said in Firefox alienating its users:
Therefore,
Linuxany desktop OS is what it is and you either accept its limitations (which are rarely showstoppers, which is why many people still preferLinuxit) or you use something else.FTFY. They all have issues.
Yep. They do.
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For anyone else curious: there is no
candycrush
package on Ubuntu repos.
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@dcon said in Firefox alienating its users:
@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
NVMe drive
(I have a 500G one)
I got a 1TB one from Amazon during the Black Friday sales, it's silly fast.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
Honestly, the last time I tried Linux (Mint, even), it was slow, ugly (made Windows XP look like a pinnacle of design), unstable (yes, you didn't have to reboot for updates. But you had updates daily, many of which broke important parts of the system like sound or other programs. Or just didn't install right and had to be fixed on the command line), a pain to use (frequent use of command-line and text-config file editing), and lacking most of the programs I use frequently. And this was this decade, even. Before that it was way worse. I wrote my dissertation on a Linux machine. That thing gave me more pain....
My mom uses Linux Mint. I installed it for her since Vista went EOL in April 2017. The latest theme looks cool, and no updates have broken anything. She's not very computer savvy and has no problems with it.
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@Zecc said in Firefox alienating its users:
Unfortunately the link in that post has expired. But the picture and "looking for Grumpy Cat" both come from that Mozilla user study.
Thank you Internet Archive!
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@TimeBandit said in Firefox alienating its users:
@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
Complaining about windows is pure whataboutery.
ROFL
Yeah, you're right, Windows doesn't have any issue. Glad you're loving it
I'll stay on my Linux mess for now, thank you.
I never said windows didn’t have problems.
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@marczellm said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
Honestly, the last time I tried Linux (Mint, even), it was slow, ugly (made Windows XP look like a pinnacle of design), unstable (yes, you didn't have to reboot for updates. But you had updates daily, many of which broke important parts of the system like sound or other programs. Or just didn't install right and had to be fixed on the command line), a pain to use (frequent use of command-line and text-config file editing), and lacking most of the programs I use frequently. And this was this decade, even. Before that it was way worse. I wrote my dissertation on a Linux machine. That thing gave me more pain....
My mom uses Linux Mint. I installed it for her since Vista went EOL in April 2017. The latest theme looks cool, and no updates have broken anything. She's not very computer savvy and has no problems with it.
I guess it's like Mac. As long as you don't push anything and only stick to the "well-supported" path, things work fine. But walk outside that path and...
I had all kinds of trouble with Linux Mint back in 2013 or so. Lots of little things, more than anything. Not big crashes, just programs that didn't work, hardware that worked...sometimes (especially printers). And a constant need to either dig around in poorly-defined GUIs or on the command line (or google arcane commands).
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
(especially printers)
I was shocked when my Mint PC found my network printer and Just Worked. I didn't have to install anything or setup anything at all. I went to print (main PC was busy with the Windows Updates Complete OS Reinstall nonsense) and it was automagically there.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
hardware that worked...sometimes (especially printers)
That's all printers ever regardless of what you're connecting them to.
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@loopback0 Linux user spotted.
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@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
(especially printers)
I was shocked when my Mint PC found my network printer and Just Worked. I didn't have to install anything or setup anything at all. I went to print (main PC was busy with the Windows Updates Complete OS Reinstall nonsense) and it was automagically there.
Oddly, I've found network printers to be the most reliably-found things. I had a USB all-in-one printer at the time. Basic functions usually worked fine, but scanning and copying only worked when they wanted to. And it tended to forget them pretty frequently IIRC.
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@pie_flavor said in Firefox alienating its users:
@loopback0 Linux user spotted.
Alternate universe user spotted
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@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
(especially printers)
I was shocked when my Mint PC found my network printer and Just Worked. I didn't have to install anything or setup anything at all. I went to print (main PC was busy with the Windows Updates Complete OS Reinstall nonsense) and it was automagically there.
The most recent shock was Skype. Skype on Windows always claims I don't have a webcam or microphone. Lots of rebooting, enabling/disabling stuff in Device Manager, or changing sources will eventually get it working. Sometimes. No other application has any trouble with my webcam.
One day I got fed up and moved the webcam over to the Linux Mint system and installed Skype. And it Just Works there!!
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@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
The definition of insanity is using that goddamn "definition of insanity" saying at all.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/in-therapy/200907/the-definition-insanity-is
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@TimeBandit said in Firefox alienating its users:
I tried Windows 3.11 and it was a fuckin piece of ugly shit, zero security
You should have used Windows 3.1. It didn't have any networking. You couldn't get on the Internet and thus couldn't be attacked by outsiders. Very secure.
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@TimeBandit said in Firefox alienating its users:
@pie_flavor said in Firefox alienating its users:
@loopback0 Linux user spotted.
Alternate universe user spotted
Particle of light spotte--- no wait, wave of light spo--- oh goddamnit make up your fucking mind.
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@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
(especially printers)
I was shocked when my Mint PC found my network printer and Just Worked. I didn't have to install anything or setup anything at all. I went to print (main PC was busy with the Windows Updates Complete OS Reinstall nonsense) and it was automagically there.
This is something that amazed me when I first experienced it. Of all the possible combinations of things, I'd have picked "printers" and "Linux" dead last for "most likely to Just Work™ without any problems"
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@Deadfast said in Firefox alienating its users:
@admiral_p said in Firefox alienating its users:
(Italians and military incompetence, I can smell it coming already).
Bad example. That’s about the only poorly designed weapon the Italian army used in WWII. (Yes, conventional wisdom is their rifles were far too short. Now look up “Sturmgewehr 44” and look at the short Carcano rifles in that light.)
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@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
Normally a web browser is about all I need.
You write your novels in Google Docs?
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@Gurth
Word365 duh
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@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
@TimeBandit said in Firefox alienating its users:
@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
A very bad version of Windows
Until they do updates like Windows Update does, it's still better than Windows
If you honestly think desktop Linux is better than windows you are mentally ill
If preferring Windows over Linux is sanity then I don't want it.
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@Gurth said in Firefox alienating its users:
@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
Normally a web browser is about all I need.
You write your novels in Google Docs?
Writing is basically one of about three things I do that absolutely require Windows.
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@admiral_p said in Firefox alienating its users:
@TimeBandit I'll be honest and I'll actually make a list (as a daily Linux user) of what is somewhat worse than Windows
- in general, "fit and finish" (even the best DEs, which basically are GNOME and KDE, are less refined aesthetically than Windows)
Where being refined means minimalist crap that relies on pop unders for critical interactions? (Ever tried to use a smart card with a browser in Windows?)
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@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
@TimeBandit said in Firefox alienating its users:
@sweaty_gammon said in Firefox alienating its users:
Desktop Linux environments have never worked properly, never will work properly
Proof you're wrong : https://www.kde.org/
Lmfao
Sorry what happened when they went from kde3 to 4. Oh they basically decided to rewrite everything. The same happened to gnome with 2 to 3 transition.
One word: Windows 8
8 is a number
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@hungrier said in Firefox alienating its users:
@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
(especially printers)
I was shocked when my Mint PC found my network printer and Just Worked. I didn't have to install anything or setup anything at all. I went to print (main PC was busy with the Windows Updates Complete OS Reinstall nonsense) and it was automagically there.
This is something that amazed me when I first experienced it. Of all the possible combinations of things, I'd have picked "printers" and "Linux" dead last for "most likely to Just Work™ without any problems"
The Universe can have "Linux + Printers Work" or "Good Discourse" but not both at once.
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@boomzilla said in Firefox alienating its users:
Ever tried to use a smart card with a browser in Windows?
Frequently. IDs are smart cards around here. You use them to authenticate yourself with a bunch of websites, like paying your taxes or fines.
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@Luhmann said in Firefox alienating its users:
@boomzilla said in Firefox alienating its users:
Ever tried to use a smart card with a browser in Windows?
Frequently. IDs are smart cards around here. You use them to authenticate yourself with a bunch of websites, like paying your taxes or fines.
Do you use Firefox? Or a browser that uses the built in MS stuff? Because it's the built in MS stuff that pops under when you need to enter your PIN. And unless you've unfucked the default setting to combine windows, you don't even see that popunder in the taskbar.
FF doesn't have anything built in, so you need to use an add on. We use OpenSC, which is not only smart enough to not hide the UI you need to use but it's also smart enough to pick the correct certificate to use.
Fuck you Mi¢ro$oft,. Fuck you.
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@boomzilla said in Firefox alienating its users:
Fuck you Mi¢ro$oft,. Fuck you.
In that case, better protect yourself
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@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Gurth said in Firefox alienating its users:
@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
Normally a web browser is about all I need.
You write your novels in Google Docs?
Writing is basically one of about three things I do that absolutely require Windows.
I wrote my dissertation on Linux. In LaTeX. Worship me.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Gurth said in Firefox alienating its users:
@mott555 said in Firefox alienating its users:
Normally a web browser is about all I need.
You write your novels in Google Docs?
Writing is basically one of about three things I do that absolutely require Windows.
I wrote my dissertation on Linux. In LaTeX. Worship me.
Oh yeah? I wrote my own word processor for my novel-writing.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
I wrote my dissertation ... In LaTeX
Nope thread is
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@loopback0 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
I wrote my dissertation ... In LaTeX
Nope thread is
Compared to writing it in Word and dealing with citations and floats, it was decidedly the easy way. I had a style file that took care of the silly formatting issues the college demanded.
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@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
@loopback0 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
I wrote my dissertation ... In LaTeX
Nope thread is
Compared to writing it in Word and dealing with citations and floats, it was decidedly the easy way. I had a style file that took care of the silly formatting issues the college demanded.
My university offered a style file for LaTeX, for writing your thesis/final project. Too bad for me, it was still easier for me to type my thesis in notepad++/gedit and then format in in Word.
The only Firefox extension I routinely use is NoScript. Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing out on. But not enough go and try out random extensions.
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@acrow said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
@loopback0 said in Firefox alienating its users:
@Benjamin-Hall said in Firefox alienating its users:
I wrote my dissertation ... In LaTeX
Nope thread is
Compared to writing it in Word and dealing with citations and floats, it was decidedly the easy way. I had a style file that took care of the silly formatting issues the college demanded.
My university offered a style file for LaTeX, for writing your thesis/final project. Too bad for me, it was still easier for me to type my thesis in notepad++/gedit and then format in in Word.
The only Firefox extension I routinely use is NoScript. Sometimes I wonder what I'm missing out on. But not enough go and try out random extensions.
In physics at least, everything is done in LaTeX. Journal submissions especially. You just submit your entire set of
.tex
files and supporting images and they replace the class with their own special- style file. So rewriting in Word (and fixing all the sillynesses) would be acutely painful. Heck, the only thing they complained about was that in one of my many references I used 2 spaces after a period instead of 1. On page 120-something.
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I don't mind LaTeX. For scientific writing, there is no tool that does the job better. If there is, I haven't seen it. For stuff that has very precise styling, it's also very good, because you don't have to take care of it (as @Benjamin-Hall said). Plus, I really love the default font. It's elegant, it's classy. (Yeah, I know you can use it elsewhere).
Styles in Word (or any other word processor) are fiddly. They have so many gotchas and weird shitfuckery and they never work as expected. Of course, a full-featured word processor is very handy to have when you have a very long text and you need to deal with indexes, paragraphs etc. but that can be done in LaTeX too.
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On an unrelated note, I'll concede that Vim and Emacs (both of them) are really beyond my reach. To me they are absolutely impenetrable. I've gone through the tutorials countless times, by the end of the tutorial I'm invariably groggy, with a slight headache and I've forgotten how to spell my name. And how to do the basic stuff on page 1 too. Considering the amount of people that use them proficiently and swear by them (well, not both at once, let's not get ahead of ourselves), I conclude that I must be challenged. I use nano. Or gedit.
Yank! Yank!