Reading this now on my 9~ year old laptop with Debian 11.

Good for him. Yay!

Weird, I don't think I said anything funny.

This made me laugh. Thank you. And thank you for not biting my head off, like everyone else has.

Welcome to the club. I have my entire family on linux since at least 2003. It has never been "difficult to use" or anything like that. And support is trivial through ssh sessions.

I didn't give them a choice in the matter, though.
Just like they don't have a choice in browsers. I mean, in theory they can install whatever they want, but in practice they use what I put there.

I admire your persistence, but what a completely pointless exercise.

Like with most things, it's friends, relatives and professional requirements.

When you need to do work for school or the Office from home, you more or less need to have the same programs. And even if there are alternatives, you most likely don't feel like learning how to use a different program for the same purpose all over again.

Also people still like to ask friends or relatives about their problems. When you don't already have a sophisticated Linux user in your circle, you are unlikely to even get the idea of using linux.

Also nowdays for the youth, more and more activites are online, also like gaming. It's not just about the gaming, but also about doing something with your friends(online). The proprietary Software used here is a stronger limiting factor here.

I would recommend an easy Linux Distro to my mother, since she doesn't use her computer much unless to browse, edit and print documents(which will be shared in printed form)

My father, while more techsavy, couldn't use Linux, due to all the proprietary software he is using professionally. Also since he allready knows his way around Windows, the differences would upset him. He wouldn't have enough patience to learn the different environment.

In conclusion, it's much easier to recommend (and get the person to learn it) Linux to an unsophisticated Computer user, rather than someone who already is used to handling his current OS. So at the root modern Schools, who often provide Windows and only Windows for free, are to blame for noone really using Linux.

Funnily enough many seem to just accept Windows has some shortcomings too, but if Linux is not 105% then it can't be used.

For example, Windows has some serious printing system security flaws right now, and my wife has given up printing on her Windows 10 machine to my HP printer on the LAN. Yes I've had some printing issues too when the drivers on Linux update, but the fact that she sends stuff to me to print, suggests that my Linux printing is actually still more reliable ;-)

It's true that many people just stick through thick and thin with what they know even if it is not working for them (no I didn't mean politics, but that is coming to mind for some reason now). Others love beta updates and trying something different. It is pretty well much the same with social media - those that feel trapped and moan about Facebook, and those that end up on Rambler and all sorts of other stuff (so how many Rambler users are in Windows and Facebook?).

So today it's really not the OS, it is human nature I suppose. I can keep a Linux machine running, but I can't paint a picture ;-)

It's at a lower level. Re-logging in also doesn't fix sound, though it does show missing batteries and sensors. The script that parses function key presses seems to get confused, and I think that's related to the machine's general ACPI spam. That might be fixable, if I can identify sequences to ignore instead of letting it build errors over time.

Thanks for the suggestion, though.

If you run Linux and have audio trouble, chances are you run pulseaudio, whose troubles can be fixed by running "puleaudio -k", which restarts it. For me, for some reason pulseaudio decided to select the wrong devices upon each restart, so I wrote a script that selects the correct ones which runs at startup.

Printing is easy. ACPI is hard. People who try Linux might be put off by shitty sleep or audio support in their new or niche hardware.

I put up with having to reboot to have audio because I got this machine cheap and it's really neat, and I'm too lazy to figure out if it can be fixed in software.

Other people won't put up with that. That's why they wouldn't stick with Linux: because it doesn't solve itself. Never mind that neither does Windows.

Most people never try.

Too many distributions to use. You know? :D
...For non-English speakers, it can be time-consuming and unstable to set up non-English input methods in Linux. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, ...

Fulltime Linux user since... 2010, part-time (dual boot) from probably 04-2010.

Hardware wise, I've never had any major issue. Nvidia cards sometimes cause relatively easily fixed issues. Some Linux distros such as Pop_OS! I believe come with Nvidia drivers and related packages installed, as well as Wine (useful for Windows programs/games).

As far as GUI goes: I stick with XFCE, Cinnamon or MATE desktop environments. Pretty familiar UI. Taskbar, menu, etc.

As far as support and fixing errors? Probably easier than Windows. My limited experience with Windows in recent (10 years) has been dealing with customers for a company that sold servers. Some users had Windows servers, but the company didn't have any specific Windows based staff/support available at all hours. Searching the web for the errors shown on their stuff would very frequently yield forum posts / threads with someone else asking the same question, but no one responding. Was incredibly frustrating at times. (And other times you'd find the answer, and it was a quick fix...)

Linux? Just copy/paste the error in your search engine of choice and you'll find a ton of discussion about that error. You'll find the resolution. You'll find someone else saying, "Well, that will work, but you can also do this." and someone else will respond giving you an opinionated history lesson on how the change from X to Y in a recent major update of the program in question was stupid.

Run Linux in a VM or try it on a USB stick first. If you kind of like it, then install it alongside Windows (dual boot).

I ran Pop_OS! for the first half of 2020. I liked it, and it worked great out of the box with my card and desktop build. I'm not a gamer by any means but I'll go through random spurts about once a year where I may spend a month playing Kerbal Space Program or City Skylines or something like that... and it all worked very well via Steam. I don't specifically recall any obstacle in getting it all to work that may be challenging to a newcomer, I think it all just sort of worked.

Or just use something like https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox

Crafting a bash script is very satisfying, especially one liner chained bash command.

I should probably get rid of that if in there....

https://videos.lukesmith.xyz/videos/watch/2ae80129-417b-41c1-80d3-d04e3adb2f3b

Cheapskateguide aka "I want others to provide solutions to my problems free of charge".

If that dude wants to see support for his hardware that old, he better write it himself. It's not locked in like the bullshit that Apple puts out.

That ship has sailed, too. I can make pretty much none of the things I use. I don't know how to build a house. I can't make a screen, toilet, frying pan, dish washer... looking around me right now, I see exactly zero things that I could have made myself. Not even a bottle out of glass or a simple book. Nevermind the clothes I'm wearing. I can't even make the fabric the cloth is made from.

Thinking back, it started around the time the pocket watch was introduced. So some 200 odd years ago? At least I think basically none of the people owning a pocket watch could have made it by themselves.

I don't think it's a bad thing, either. Someone that knows how to make pocket watches can make a living from it because basically no one else has this specialized knowledge. And everyone else isn't forced to waste time acquiring not only the knowledge, but also the skill to make a pocket watch. Everyone wins.

It's when there is major gatekeeping going on to prevent others from becoming pocket watch makers, that there is a problem.

I know it's hard to accept, for myself as well, but it seems that the following logic applies everywhere, and most apparent at high tech: If you can't make it yourself then you don't deserve to use it. How many of them individuals or small groups have the means to make their own hardware? But everyone seems to have the needs to use it, and the needs grow up with bloatware, as they always do under consumerism.

This is the computer I use specifically for testing software designed for old computers.

Then use an OS the software was designed for in the first place.

Our intentional built-in obsolescence

His Inspiron 5100 was released about 2004. That's a full life. Put it out to pasture.

I had one that old, and it died. My oldest working machine is from '08, and another is from '09, and they are showing their age with hardware errors. I expect them to die any moment. It won't be worth replacing components, even if it turns out to be cheap. And I personally couldn't, for example, replace capacitors on a modern computer without destroying it. They consume more power in a year than they're worth, anyway, so it wouldn't be cost effective, which his bullshit environmental analysis ignores.

At some point the one guy complaining his ancient box doesn't work will be the only one who notices, because he has the only working one.

That ship kind of sailed. Old hardware isn't useful for the things I do.

If only modern laptops (and desktops) didn't all had hardware backdoors. http://0gitnick.i2p/2021/01/22/article-you-should-be-using-an-old-computer/

It's not Linux, it's people. People have abandoned old hardware. Since it's Linux, you could just work yourself on making it compatible again. No one cares to do that.

Also, I don't have that problem. Void Linux runs just fine on my 20 year old laptop. Lots of slowdowns once you do stuff like browsing the Internet, but just opening vim and managing text works great. But yeah.. the thing is a brick and if modern laptops didn't all have shit keyboards, I wouldn't have bothered in the first place.

Original "research" paper here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/QiushiWu/qiushiwu.github.io/main/papers/OpenSourceInsecurity.pdf

Yes, that one. Here is less argument more lament wall of text that I liked.

Beginning, automatic computing was created to save human labour and to provide correct answers; this axiom has been forgotten, and people no longer truly understand for what reasons computers exist. A computer is not a series of digital levers, sparing users from flipping them by hand, but ability to have one lever flip activate all or none, or any other pattern the machine can be taught; following, the machine could be taught the meta-patterns of stimuli relating to these patterns, and to activate them automatically, soon running autonomously, until encountering situations so new a human operator must tell it how to proceed. The goal isn't to flip levers, but to be able to entirely forget them. Thus, when a man spends hours flipping digital levers, it's such an obscene act, against the spirit.

My chosen forgotten realms pursued this spirit of decreasing human labour. The fiefdoms, liars, and cults act against it. It would be inappropriate to express this disgust with computing history, and not mention UNIX, brimming with all three groups. It's responsible for teaching countless people to bend themselves to the machine, never daring to customize it in certain trivial ways, and then pride themselves on this obscenity; the liars claim it was the first operating system written in a higher-level language, they claim it had the first hierarchical file system, they claim an operating system panicking is perfectly reasonable behaviour, they claim doing something once in the operating system is worse than doing it in every program that uses it, they claim things must be this way or similar, and they claim yet other vicious lies; and those fiefdoms are built on these foundations, justifying complicated languages by making comparisons to the natural sciences despite there needing be no such complications in a human construct, taking joy in writing incomprehensible programs, and mocking the people with the good sense to look upon them with disgust, amongst other ways these fiefdoms attempt to maintain their social control in spite of evidence. Those who could stop them don't know better.

I'm forced to wonder if all wondrous technology goes through a phase such as computing currently is, in which humans create it, and idiots build a community around needlessly abusing it. Did operators of early printing presses forget what that tool was for, or find it fine to print illegibly given it was good enough; I know none of these incompetent programmers would enjoy it were operators of their water infrastructure behaving so carelessly, retorting that an advanced user always boils his water.

http://verisimilitudes.net/2020-09-24