transcript
tlirsgender:
Laptops are always so much more Fucked than phones in my experience. A laptop is like a beautiful horse that wants nothing more than to break all of its legs. A decently solid android phone will act normal.
A laptop is a living creature. It has weight to it. A laptop breathes and produces body heat. And it wants to die badly. Mobile phones are not sentient like that & that’s why they don’t experience mental illness. A phone problem is like “out of storage :(” or “charging port broke”. Laptops will cough weakly as they fade in and out of consciousness.
You will hold a laptop in your arms and it’s like “I can’t feel my legs”. And you tell it girl you never had any.
Aside from the app installation process being different, what’s to learn? The rest of it works like every other computer you’ve ever used
If all you do is most use a web browser and bunch of electron apps, sure. But as soon as you get beyond that as a slight power user, which many are who are trying to switch
As someone who has helped a few people switch to Linux as their main driver, it’s usually the toughest transition for those who go beyond their web browser and tweak their OS a bit more to learn OS concepts they assumed before that they are now seeing how they can vary with a new OS.
For a normal user, it’s basically the same, no? When you open the file browser there are links to Documents, Desktop, etc.
When would the average user run into this?
If you’re on Ubuntu, you click the button when it prompts you to install drivers. As long as users know to never install drivers like you would on Windows, it’s not an issue.
Hopefully users switching to Linux know to expect software selection to be different. If you stick to your distro’s app store, you’ll be good.
Don’t most distros have that in the installer?
What regular user is looking that deep?
Right so I started using the GUI interface for all of ten minutes, then as soon as I started looking for “how to” anything it’s all terminal commands. Especially since I switched specifically to make an environment to learn computer vision. So I spent an hour yesterday learning the difference between pip, pip3, and pipx then did something with snap. Tossed all that in the “figure it out later” bucket when I realized I needed to relearn how to modify my path and what that actually means.
It’s so nice having everything accessible to me as the user instead of locked behind some windows registry I can’t look at or some oversimplified settings panel. But I’ve also got 20 years of Windows conditioning to unlearn. It can be a lot to dive into at all once.
Having said all that, I’m excited and enjoying it
If you’re playing with computer vision, you’re going way further than the typical computer user. My parents, for example, just need an office suite, a browser, and a file browser. My brother also needs a few games to work, but otherwise is the same. My SO also needs streaming stuff to work.
All of that can be handled without touching the terminal or leaving the built-in app store. Even a gamedev setup could largely be done that way as well (Godot, blender, and a 2D graphics editor). Quite a lot of people could switch today and not need any hands-holding.
Yeah, some things require more extensive knowledge, but the common things are simple enough.
Installation, settings are probably something to learn. File system layout. Small things but enough of them can create a barrier to some.