Re: Happily
While I'm not the OP, I fully endorse the sentiment. Linux desktop is absolutely fine for a non-Linux person - assuming they never want to touch anything other than Firefox and LibreOffice and whatever the photo viewer is called these days; one needs zero learning curve for that. For absolutely anything else though, as a non-kernel-developer, you hit a brick wall. And I'm not talking about having to use the CLI, as bas as that already makes things - I could live with that. No. It's just a matter of time until you stumble into something that most definitely doesn't work as it should, it cannot be configured to make it work, and the bug report(s) concerning the problem sit either unanswered for half a decade or straight-up wontfixed. That's assuming there is anyone still in charge of that piece of software at all of course.
Yeah, Mate is nice - so how does one go about having a "systray" indicator of received mails that isn't either Thunderbird running all the time or a Gmail-only thing? Because "Mail Notification" is deader than dead, broken, and nothing else works. I never had that problem under Windows. Or - how does one enable direct feedback from mic in back to the headphones, a thing that used to be trivial in the Windows XP mixer, still fairly easily doable under Win7 if you know what checkbox to tick, and flat-out impossible under any GUI mixer in any version of Linux I've seen (and just barely doable in alsamixer text-mode, in a sort of semi-accidental glitchy way)...? The official stance seems to be "just listen to the sampled input played straight back into the output" conveniently glossing over the horrible line delay that doesn't exist with the hardware-based mixer loopback.
And there are hundreds of these paper cuts - I _am_ trying to use Linux and I'm fighting them far, far more than I am actually getting on with what I came to _do_. Invariably, it turns out that the only way to get them to work would be to learn the ins and outs of the software package in question (and all the frameworks it relies on) and code a fix yourself. If you can't do that for whatever reason from "C++ is incompatible with my brain" to "my entire lifespan wouldn't be enough to get all of this working", tough shit. It just won't work. And these are all problems I never had under Windows,,,
Biting the hand that feeds IT
