duckiegobrrr

wait… Arch neofetch but Windows 11 taskbar, tbh I first noticed the Edge icon up top than the taskbar but ok

I mean, to be fair, user groups and services really aren’t a thing that a “normie” would be messing with on any platform under most circumstances, and if they would be then there’d be some understanding that it’d involve some sort of “hackerman tooling” as one might call it, whether it’s Windows’s service manager or the magic black window with a blinking cursor in it.

I, for one, had no idea what svchost.exe on Windows did (thought it was just M$ bloat, really) until after I started using Linux and had already made several systemd units on there and realized that Windows kinda-sorta-but-also-not-really-sometimes has that as well.

A bigger problem imo is how Linux always seems to have a point-and-click way to do most of everything that your “average computer user” needs to do… but then somebody (cough Canonical and their snapd stuff cough) fucks it up and makes it so that you can’t just say “you can install everything using the app store”, which results in encounters like this one.

Oh, and your “why is this even an issue anymore” things like (shameless plug) this. Seriously.

don’t worry though, it’s meh-ish on all distros, and nobody automatically sets it up for you (as easy as I made it out to be on NixOS, it’s not, and it was only “easy” because I’d already dealt with the driver before… in fact I had to carry over my old systemd suspend/hibernate restart script for it because it doesn’t really cooperate with waking up from sleep)…

…unless your reader just isn’t supported at all, in which case yeah nope

This only really works for people who have hardware whose fingerprint readers are supported by upstream fprintd; would be interesting if they (or another distro; haven’t seen anybody implement this yet) add a “just works” option for installing and setting up e.g. libfprint-tod-vfs0090 or python-validity (which I use on two of my machines actually), similar to how some distros (Mint included I believe, but haven’t dealt with it in a while) give you an option for installing Nvidia proprietary drivers (or just make it work out of the box).

However these drivers are extremely sketch at times so… I guess there’s some good out of it not being preconfigured for people (because you have to look into it yourself and realize just how terrifying they are, both security and stability wise, python-validity especially)…

(though now I’m on NixOS where I have it pretty much “just work” through not that much effort, at least not as much as on Arch, and definitely not as much as on Mint which was painful because PPA fuckery)

only works for fingerprint readers supported by upstream fprintd,

I mean I have to wipe out my ~ relatively frequently on some machines at times but that’s for “actual” “reasons”, LLM hallucinations not involved