Two desktops and three laptops, they all work great. My biggest ongoing issue, and it is fair to say it is a problem, is VR. I have not tried recently, but that is one area that was smooth to set up in windows and I havent had luck in Linux.

when introducing new people to Linux it’s best to acknowledge there may be some tinkering and adaptation needed to get things working as they should.

Depends on what “should” means. My printer for example will not work with windows. It works fine with linux. So… that really is a printer driver issue. No matter which one it works with.

As for the OS out of the box, everything works on a fresh install of either - although linux is far more loaded with ready to go software, and windows requires you to add it. And any of the software you add to either can cause breakages, that is computing.

I noticed over the years that Linux works fairly well for people who did not start with windows first. Both have learning curves, but habits are habits.

I am going to take my linux laptop for an example: 2 years. No tinkering. There is nothing to do, it just works.

My other laptop (windows): damn thing need tinkering all the time: turn off this, regedit that, just to get the nagware and crap out. Won’t allow remote desktop with the license, needs drivers to be updated, software that came with it is bloatware garbage.

Okular can be set to do that, but it doesnt have a scroll bar, which you might not like. Firefox can do that as well, but I concede that browser PDF viewers are not ideal.

Yes mounting is different, but that is not a Linux issue. Same as when you boot into windows, but an EXT formatted drive will not appear AND it will never mount. Windows helpful choice is “unknown” and offer to format. These are just OS differences, not breakages.

Cinnamon might be part of your problem with shortcuts…

Yeah SMB shares can be tricky. I have issues with them in Windows as well, not linux specifically.

I am not saying linux is perfect. All computers rely on a person being able to deal with them. I just find it much more stable then windows ever was. You add bottles and Lutris into the mix, and now it is a third party software issue: just like plenty of software in windows as well.

I agree that computers can have issues. But none of these are linux only. Windows does all this stupid shit too. My printer wont work with windows, only linux (how the hell this can be true is beyond me). Bluetooth drops in windows, works fine in linux. The latest nvidia update on windows broke all games making it black screen until I used some regedit fixes. A windows update broke my firmware on a video card for a while, almost got RMA’d. I could go on, talk about Jankiness. I don’t use windows as my main computer due to it being so all over the place. I say this as a MSDN dev and windows server and azure dev and support person. I remote entirely from Linux, I need to have an OS that works.

My point is windows does this shit too.

But: That is your issues are a long list that seems to have a repeating theme: OpenSuse.

You don’t need to edit FSTAB to add a drive, there is a gui for that, for whatever that’s worth.

I have not had any of these issues on the 5 or so linux computers I use daily. I have had a few upgrades in Arch cause me to update grub or roll back, but that is about it.

Over the last two years I have found Fedora KDE has been amazingly easy to use and update.

I still can’t find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.

That one has me curious: what is that? (I mean by definition - scroll - that can’t be a thing, lol) But I am sure it is, got examples?

There might be a reason they are unpopular.

Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don’t have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.

AI? Look, I helped a friend fix a new install. It wasn’t Linux fault, it was a setting in the bios that needed to be changed. But the AI had them trying all sorts of things that were unrelated, and was never going to help. Use with a grain of salt. You shouldn’t really need to do much if you can get through the install anyways.

I am really curious what “system breaking problems” you have? My latest laptop over the last 2+ years has been so uneventful and boring. Never used a command line on it, but don’t forget when you see people share command line fixes, it is because it is the easiest way to directly share information. Not the only way to do something. My desktop has had a few hiccups over the last 5, but that is what I get for running Arch on it.

Yeah, I considered mentioning that there are alternatives, but there was a review just in 2024 by the FCC to see if they were going to continue to allow Galileo to be recieved. And even then I think it’s only two channels.

Which tells me the FCC could determine it illegal and force an update, at least to commercial devices like cell phones.

Take this with a grain of salt, its from memory. I would be happy to have someone verify this.

Waiting, sadly, for GPS to go back to being obfuscated again. It’s bound to happen. Want GPS? You gotta pay.

Seems off topic, I know, but they did this (hurricane) by turning off satellite feeds

You can go look at Netsplit.de for all IRC stats, and use the way back machine to compare. But the wikipedia article sums this up nicely:

After its golden era during the 1990s and early 2000s (240,000 users on QuakeNet in 2004), IRC has seen a significant decline, losing around 60% of users between 2003 and 2012, with users moving to social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter,[5] but also to open platforms such as XMPP which was developed in 1999.

And it is exactly this why it never recovered or came back. Too many other platforms that were easier to use and more mainstream. Like I said I love IRC, but most people are going to discord or something like it instead.

One client? Over what time period? This is really selective data, lol

I put the name of one of them in a conment. But seriously, this is basic information. You are basing your belief on not noticing. All evidence is to the contrary. Go look.

There are sites that track this information or you can use the way back machine. IRC is a quarter or less of what it used to be in say 2005-2010.

That is real data.

sms is not even an option for us; international texting costs a lot. Some people don’t even use a phone, they rely on internet connected devices only. Trying to coordinate all of this gets complicated fast.

That too, the number of users is way down.

Well no they are not. Netsplit follows IRC and tracks users and IRC servers. You can watch the decline over time. Quakenet alone had nearly 200,000 monthly active user alone back in 2005.

The split of freenode, the technical abilities of people, and the lack of a easy to use mobile client all made people turn away from IRC. Factor in discord and Reddit and you lose even more.

The number of servers from 2005 to today has dropped also. From 3500 to about a thousand.

I love IRC, but it has been on a decline for a long time. Particularly if you factor in the number of online users today versus back then in general. The percentage of them that uses IRC or even knows what it is, is much smaller.

I suppose you could argue that unpublished networks, onion sites, and other IRC outside of mainstream exist, but how many users do they have?

Did you get everyone to settle on the same thing, like Signal? We are spread out over about 8 countries, and with all the different phone numbers and plans, we use various methods, with several of us on Signal. Some on whatsapp, some on messenger. So we are not coordinated enough for a group chat. Which is fine, I dont really need to know everything all the time, we catch up when can, or get into small video chats occasionally. Luckily we do tend to physically see each other somewhat frequently.

Go look at the major irc chat hosts. Add up daily users. Then compare that number to the estimated users in 2005-10.

Lemmy isn’t social. It’s just forums aggregated. One could use it as a social app, and some people do, but it really is not necessary or even really welcomed.

I have seen estimates of a reduction of 50 to 75 percent in the number of forums over the last 15 years. There are certainly a lot less. People go to reddit or discord these days.

Same with IRC but the decline is even higher.

I would rather SMS than use WhatsApp. But even then if my family is far away, why am texting them at all very often? With the time zone differences I’ll call or email, or nothing. It’s weird how people got along just fine with letters that took weeks and suddenly we now need instant communication for some reason?

They live abroad and the cost of sending text messages abroad is not insignificant

Signal is free just like whats app. For text, calls, and video. So that isn’t a problem.

I too have friends and family in different countries, one of which is crazy about whatsapp. I simply tell them this is how we are going to do things now, and walk them through it. It is not hard. If they can’t do it, well then we don’t need to communicate this way. Whatsapp is not an option. It is that simple.