I've been very unhinged this week. Completely nuked a decade long friendship and I've been arguing in Youtube comments about Linux for majority of the week.

I'm sick of hearing people say steamOS is arch or like arch

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Heh, there's been a lot of discourse about SteamOS this week. The one that annoyed me was the Linus video showing an incredibly convoluted way of (currently) installing SteamOS because Linux is apparently way harder than Windows to install.

Which may have been true once, but just isn't today if an influencer like Linus pointed his viewers to something like bazzite which is equivalent to a Windows install in difficulty as far as I can tell* and even with an nVidia card for me the games 99% of the time just work as if they're Windows.

*I suspect 90% of Windows gamers have probably never installed Windows either, so anything would be difficult and Linus just doesn't see that having installed it himself probably hundreds of times or more.

[–] Fizz 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

What annoyed me is that he told his massive audience to install a distro that is not setup for general use. SteamOS lacks so many drivers needed for decent desktop compatibility. This just leads to a lot of people trying steamOS on their computer and concluding "linux is broken"

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 1 points 1 week ago

Exactly, it was basically a complicated guide to installing a handheld OS on a desktop that unsurprisingly worked like a handheld OS on a desktop.

[–] Dave 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I've installed Windows and various Linux distributions many times, and they experience is basically the same. Write to a bootable flash drive, press a key in BIOS to boot from said drive, follow the instructions to install, remove flash drive and restart, then you land on your fully working install of Windows/Linux.

You're right, most Windows users have never installed it. It is a little technical to do. But most major linux distros have the same setup experience (I've never used arch 😲 so not sure about that one)

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, I mean setting aside non-graphical OS's (DOS, various flavours of *nix) that i've installed, i've used linux, windows & macs in the last 10 years and done the OS install on each of them and there is essentially no difference between the three that would hold back anyone who has done an install using one of them to do any of the others.

I can't accurately assess how difficult it might be for someone who has never done an install, ive been using & breaking computers since the 80s so have done it so many times that any quirks that pop up are just quirks, not deal breakers.

[–] Dave 1 points 1 week ago

For someone who can follow instructions, I think the hardest part of the process for any of them is booting from the install media. Every machine is different. On one you need to hold Del while it boots, another you need to press F2, another it's F8. Sometimes you have to go into the BIOS and other times it's a dedicated boot menu. And if you mess it up you have to turn it off and start again. It's been a long time since I've used a Mac but I feel like that was some keyboard compo you had to hold on boot.

I would say the two things you need to be someone who can do it are: Confidence (you aren't scared of irreparably breaking it), and good Google skills. The number of people with both these things I think is pretty small, even though the actual process is simple.

[–] pkboi@venera.social 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

@Dave Frustration and success. We managed to install a replacement router from OneNZ after many attempts and eventually accepting that the DSL connection on the router was for the phone connection from outside the house (which is why the plug wouldn't fit). Internet is working fine, but it seems we don't have a landline phone connection any more. Virtually no one uses it any more apart from the mother-in-law so she'll have to learn to ring my wife's cell phone. It will save us $9.99 a month.

[–] Dave 1 points 1 week ago

I ended up with my own fancy router after frustrations with an ISP one. Really nice but cost a fortune. We haven't had a landline in I think about 20 years.

I've also just gone through the ISP change thing, dropping one as part of a regular changeover, partly because I didn't like them and partly because they put us behind CGNAT, then finding both the new ones are behind CGNAT, but I managed to convince the new one to drop the 12 month contract I agreed to because they hadn't started yet. Have signed up to BigPipe, got me a static IP (one off charge - way nicer to pay $45 once than $12 every month). Price is comparable to others. I suspect my ISP hopping days are over, all these small ones seem to just be reselling the same Devoli service these days.

[–] eagleeyedtiger 2 points 1 week ago

In dishwasher news, our dishwasher still seems to work however we seem to have lost the hydraulics? spring? that keeps the door from dropping fully open. I guess we can still live with it for now, just have to be careful when opening it.

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Watching the cricket and wondering if sanity prevails and Auckland opts for a downtown football shaped stadium for football codes instead of upgrading Eden Park (again), could they revamp the stands? Reduce some of the size, move them around, change it up such that Eden Park could become a better sized cricket ground?

[–] TagMeInSkipIGotThis 2 points 1 week ago

(I am not a construction / civil engineer)

If they pulled the first 10 rows of seats that’d probably add 5m in each direction which while still a small ground internationally would make it pretty comparable to other NZ grounds.

Our big cities don’t need dual purpose stadiums, Dunedin & Hamilton have proved that.

[–] Dave 2 points 1 week ago

I'm a tad late posting today, but it's still the same date so surely that's close enough.