I got tired of Microsoft. I had seen that Linux was now good enough for what I wanted to so, so I decided to jump ship.
It wasn’t a quick decision. I only transitioned from Windows because I finally got around upgrading the PC.
So far? I mean, there was the kerfuffle with the AUR recently. And I still haven’t figured out a few issues here and there. But damn it just works and there is no worrying about updating or not updating or anything like it.
I think that with enough community effort, it could.
Some of what I think is missing is just community documentation (manuals, tutorials, troubleshooting pages) that are easy to find and recent. While yes, solutions from 5 to 10 years ago still work, they often don’t reflect the full recent reality, never mind the tendency for CLI solutions (which are great, but plenty of people are intimidated by the CLI).
The other thing that I think is missing is polish around things that are just off the beaten path… the kinds of things that not everyone will do, but that most will do at least one of.
I missed not having to think about Samba to share a drive with a Windows machine.
On the other hand, I was rightly pointed to better alternatives for my use-case, so perhaps the learning will make the pain worth it?
Standardized parental controls would be great, actually. But it should be proper parental controls, not whatever this is. Because at the end of the day, the parent* should be involved in what their child is up to, and allow (or not) based on what the child needs and/or wants, instead of whatever we are doing now.
Or, to put it another way, if your teen has read Games of Thrones (the physical books), I don’t see much of a point in forbidding them from going to the wiki of it, and I’d be hard pressed to justify stopping them from talking about it online with other people who have read the books. The tools should allow for this kind of nuance, because actual people are going to use it and these kind of situations happen all the time.
* some parents are awful and would abuse this, see LGBT+ related things, but that’s a social issue, not a technological issue.
Sure, and using the AUR is something to pay attention to when you do. You are right on that1.
But, here is the thing: I just don’t have to update anything if I don’t want to. There is no Windows Update saying “next reboot we’re going to update and you don’t get a choice”. That is what I meant when I said that I just don’t worry about it.
Though I guess that says more about what one gets used to when dealing with Windows, than necessarily being high praise for Linux. My work machine has been having issues with a bt headset for reasons I cannot phantom despite working for years, so forgive me if the joy of being able to leave well enough alone has got me excited.
1 I would argue that updating in general has become more fraught with danger, so I don’t really see the AUR as particularly dangerous in comparison, but my tolerance for danger may just be out of whack. See Notepad++ vulnerable versions, or just npm in general, for non-Linux cases.