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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2024

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  • You did say “I don’t use Windows” which sounded like you were saying you didn’t know if what they were saying was technically plausible or reasonable, and without knowing what you do or don’t know about Windows or DOS, figured I’d respond with the presumption that it’s possible you’re only really familiar with *NIX systems (which is not a judgement).

    I find it kludgey and unnecessary to shut down that way, but it’s not exactly a bad idea, and it does not require admin rights.

    And there’s no reason it wouldn’t be supported: when you run the file, it opens it in a terminal window, it’s exactly like if you manually opened it and typed it from a technical point of view.

    And if someone malicious has the ability to edit a file on your desktop, they could do a lot more dangerous things, pretty much anything you could put in the batch file, more or less directly.

    Really, the only issue here is that you’d always be force closing your programs when you shut down which increases the odds that eventually they might corrupt one of their files… Not a huge risk, but non-zero.




  • Yep. Linux is as easy or often easier to install than Windows. The main difference is people rarely install Windows, it’s just there, by default.

    The Big issue, I think, is the tyranny of the default.

    The rest of the usability issues will get fixed with greater adoption rates if they come.

    But yeah, once you get over the hurdle of going against the default, the deluge of choice is overwhelming, much like why Mastodon and Lemmy didn’t see huge usage spikes when Twitter and Reddit went to shit, but Bluesky did.




  • I’d take it a step further that by “by enthusiasts, for enthusiasts”, they’re really meaning “it’s for the elites”. They like that it’s hard, they had to work to learn it and they’ll be damned if anyone should get it easier, and also it’s a way to flex on people.

    I may be overstating this person’s take on it and reading more into it than is there, but that’s my general view of this enthusiast (elitist) mindset, and really, it isn’t doing anyone any favors.

    Regular joes can’t really hurt the direction of this ecosystem; corpos are limited in the influence they have over it, and anyone can exclude their contributions (even systemd can be left out still). But more people using it means more resources available to improve things and more interest in that happening. It also means more direct support for mainstream programs rather than just a hodge podge of companies throwing out minimally usable versions as a proof of concept and not bothering to go further with the work of Wine, Valve through Proton and Steam Deck, and CodeWeavers, to pick up the slack and try to get things to mostly work right.

    Anyway, tl;dr, I agree with you… The Gentoos and Arches aren’t going away just because there’s more mainstream interest, if anything they’ll get more enthusiasts to join because they got the itch from the easier distros, much like a gateway drug.