ah time for horror stories with sparky:
I know of people who work in IT and use onedrive as a shitty version of github for sharing and version controlling code… If I was them, I’d alteast use syncthing
+1 for syncthing
I use it for synching my Obsidian notes folder between my phone and PC
(and git for versioning and backups)
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So I’m a total Linux noob are there issues with drivers? I have a laptop I would consider doing this on if I wasn’t worried about it breaking.
You can get Mint on a “Live” USB flash drive, so you can boot it up and see if it handles all your hardware before you install anything.
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I solidly refuse to believe you’ve had no issues with WiFi drivers on a laptop. Otherwise, yeah it’s fine.
I’ve used various Linux distress on a half dozen laptops over rhe last 10 years and I’ve never had Wi-Fi driver issues
Why can’t you complain about a company being shit when there are other options?
I don’t use a lot of products, I still complain about them being shit because they deserve the bad press.
My stupid ass phone keeps demanding me to be connected to the internet in order to view photos that I TOOK ON MY PHONE.
Do you by any chance take a lot of photos on a phone that doesn’t have the capacity to store them all locally?
maybe change your gallery app to something else?
Do you have any recommendations? I’m tired of Google begging me to turn on cloud storage for my photos every time I open the photos app.
I’ve been using Aves for a while now, it’s pretty alright.
I use glimpse, which ships by default with lineage os. nit sure if it’s available anywhere. but this one semed pretty neat on a quick try:
https://github.com/IacobIonut01/Gallery
it’s free on fdroid, 2€ on google play which the developer asks to think as a donation
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This. Straight up this. Just fucking use Linux, it’s ready for casual everyday use.
No, it isn’t.
Linux on a laptop can’t even reliably wake the system when you close then open a laptop lid. There are some basic things that need to work 100% of the time before Linux can be considered ready for casual everyday use.
Can you provide an example of this? Only time I’ve encountered that behaviour was with a laptop that had a defective lid-switch.
Honestly, just google it. Tons of people have that problem and if you search for it you get pages and pages of results.
Yawn. Yelling at people to just use Linux is ineffective and it comes across as really condescending. It also does nothing to address the issue if how disruptive it is to switch operating systems, especially for less technical users.
LOL it absolutely is not. Not even close.
Tell me you haven’t used Linux recently without telling me you haven’t used Linux recently.
I use it every day across many machines. Still continue to have serious hardware compatibility problems with a wide range of devices. It’s extremely frustrating.
I realize not everyone’s experience is the same, but it can still be a really bad time for some people. Maybe the same can be said about Windows too but I still think it’s not as bad.
Remember, hardware incompatibilities is very often the issue because we don’t have many users so many don’t care about Linux
The more people use Linux the more drivers will come. The better hardware will work
In what way is it not? It has a desktop, a browser, free app for a word processor. For the CASUAL user it’s fine. Just don’t go into the terminal, like you wouldn’t for the command prompt.
Hell, even if you do go into the command prompt it’s pretty easy if you’re on something Debian based, apt is really easy to get a hang of.
“Why does my .docx document look all mess up on my computer?”
I can open .docx just fine with LibreOffice.
Hardware compatibility. I have one machine that won’t boot any Linux installer at all. Another with constant gpu driver problems. Another where Bluetooth doesn’t work at all. Another where wifi firmware crashes all the time. It never ends.
Bro I actively challenge you to install Mint and have problems with it. It’s nearly impossible. Worst case you’ll need to wineskin some niche Windows-only game or program, but honestly even that isn’t necessary all that often in my experience. You’re going to have a no-stress install finished in a quarter the time that a windows install would be, and a robust OS that apes the windows environment to such a degree that average non-technical users won’t have any idea they’re even using Linux.
Barring some sort of hardware incompatibility that I haven’t experienced personally, I’ve installed Mint on around a half dozen machines in the past several years and have yet to recieve a complaint from the end users. It just works.
the problem is always hardware incompatibility.
Mint installer does not boot on any machine I have.
I acquired an ewaste laptop with a 5+ year old Celeron, 4GM of RAM and a spinning rust drive. I tossed mint on there after fighting with Windows update to try to apply 3 years worth of updates and while the installer took 2 hours to complete, it actually is a bit more usable and once it’s booted it’s amusingly chirpy with random slowdowns whenever it has to hit the disc for data.
I might set it up as my daughter’s first computer. She’s getting to that age already so it’s about time to do it
Seriously. I’m pretty sure my housemate hasn’t noticed the difference between Mint and Windows. At least they haven’t asked me to help them with anything in over a month, and they would have, if they needed help.
I’ve been daily driving Mint at work for a few months and I love it. It was painless to install, and I like all the GUI/DE stuff better than windows. It also has better multi-monitor support than when I boot into windows.
But it’s still Linux so all the techy development shit works great too. I’m always in the terminal, etc.
Had some windows users loving the Cinnamon DE on Mint. They managed to get right into it straight away. Plus, on most Linux distros they come with easy to use package managers. And you can still get deb or rpm packages that can be used to install applications just like a windows installer exe.
My mother and aunt picked up on it just fine, they’re actually enjoying it more because there aren’t full screen ads that confuse them and it made their computers faster.
if you think FOSS makes anything better for the average user, especially UX, I have a bridge to sell you.
Whenever I get to use windows and I face their byzantine directory structure, I wonder how people put up with that shit.
The average windows user is tech illiterate. They don’t know what a directory is. I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function. She does not comprehend how or where files are stored.
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Well going to .local/share/… Isn’t very Intuitive either. Try asking someone who’s new to find their Steam Directory.
People don’t know what files and folders are anymore.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to… they can’t tell you.
Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, “Downloads” is a pretty obvious place to look.
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On
my Android phonethe Android phone I have, I find it hard to tell where the stuff I downloaded is.
Until I connect it to the computer and see the directory structure easily.The Files app seems to be trying to do some kind of Abstraction over here.
Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to “Program Files” doesn’t seem too unusual, although adding “x86” bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.
The directory structure for system files is bad, but that’s true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.
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At least with Linux the distro-specific packages install software where it should go.
I keep explaining this to my grandmother but she just stares at me and says “When I was your age, we wrote things down in our Trapper Keepers”
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unwillingness to learn
If you try to get a professional Photoshop or After Effects or Resolve or Solidworks or Quickbooks etc etc. user to use a FOSS equivalent you will be laughed out of the building.
It’s not that they won’t learn, it’s that the alternatives literally can’t do so much of what people need it to do. And at the same time they most often look worse, are harder to use, and are sometimes less stable.
A prime example myself, I have tried to use kdenlive for YEARS to do simple subtitling. Every few years I try the latest version. Without fail it ALWAYS crashes within 20 minutes.
Same for Audacity. 5 minutes into clipping some audio… crash. 3 times in a row. And it looks dog ugly enough to turn me off to even wanting to try it in the first place.
Or GIMP, it can’t do non-destructive editing, this makes it completely unusable for many professionals.
It’s not just one or two things here or there in these apps, it’s huge sweeping problems across the entire FOSS landscape, almost none of the options are comparable for professional users.
This is one reason I’m still paying my monthly Microsoft dues. I’m an advanced [I guess] Excel user and none of the other spreadsheet programs out there can do everything Excel can do. At least not easily.
So I’ll counter an anecdote with an anecdote, my dad is a draftsman by trade and was an engineering technologist for decades, he’s looked at Freecad back and forth and is now seriously looking at it over solidworks for his personal projects now that he’s retired, I also flipped from solidworks which I used professionally for about 5 years before changing roles. Does it have quirks, yeah it does, but so do other cad packages, and lets not pretend that solidworks is a beacon og stability, there’s a reason it was drilled into us in uni to save frequently and why it has autosaving. The UI is relatively simple, there’s plugins to customise it and it has substantially improved over the last decade when I first gave it a try, way better than my memories of using solid edge (and I personally disliked fusion, just didn’t click with me, at least freecad has a near identical workflow to SW). Am I more accepting of jankiness with Foss solutions, straightup yes, it’s provided for free without restrictions on its usage vs solidworks where if you have a maker license for example, only other maker licenses can open the sldprt file.
Another example, I’d wager it’s why you see a lot more r and python usage in statistical spaces where SPSS and SAS were used because those tools are extremely expensive for licenses (I recall a colleague talking about it costing 10s of thousanda at leaat, maybe more, company was always looking into ways they can get off of it) cost alone makes the Foss solutions more accessible.
I’ll be also fair that both of my anecdotal examples we’re using for personal projects but the point is that professional users aren’t a monolith.
I fundamental thing that makes FOSS better is not the product that exists, but that, when you see a problem, you have the option to think, “let’s see how to fix it”.
Now I have used MS Excel for most of my life, up until University end, and only recently started using LibreOffice Calc instead.
And despite me telling all my colleagues how much better the new versions of LibreOffice fresh are, I know very well that there are still some glaring problems in these programs even in general use.
However, I had experienced some problems in MS Office too and back then all I could do was feel powerless for a few seconds and then either find some workarounds or ignore the problem, depending upon what it was.
In case of LibreOffice, I can make a note of the problem and plan to report a bug and maybe even help fix it, which leaves me on a +ive note at the end of the day.
Digression: Problems with LibreOffice:
- Calc: Using click+drag on the vertical scrollbar in case of even as low as 800 records, causes lags during the scrolling.
- Writer: Images cause slowdown. This has been a major issue for a long time and you can probably find some discussions related to this, floating around.
I had to run an alias every time I wanted to change the brightness on my laptop, and it defaulted to max brightness every time it was restarted.
I get that if I was a better person I could just pull myself by my bootstraps and teach myself to sync the brightness buttons on the keyboard to work again but I’m not. On windows it just worked.
A lot of people are also just dumb. FOSS won’t fix dumb.
I want to save to the share drive that looks like a regular folder path.
Is that not how it works? I could have sworn I had it working that way the last time I used it in 2017. Had it rigged up as the location for Da Vinci Resolve database saves and also as a backup location for an Avid project that automatically copied to that folder every day. Wasn’t a fan of OneDrive as I had dropbox personally and didn’t want another cloud service where I stored all my data as one was probably bad enough, however the production I was working on had no IT infrastructure and no money and the computer we rented for the production for some reason seemed to offer oneDrive for free with the machine. (Maybe it was something to do with the 365 subscription it had?). On that basis since it was already there I used it and it actually ended up saving our asses later on after some other backup procedures didn’t end up being followed as they should have and the piece of shit rental machine totally and catastrophically broke. Still haven’t used it since, but I was pretty happy with it at the time and was only able to do all that because it was indeed a regular folder location on the machine that happened to sync with the cloud.
OneDrive decided to kick on after an overnight update and uploaded some projects and vst plugins to the cloud. Apparently, the files weren’t accessible except via the cloud, so I lost a few hours re-downloading my folders before I could do anything. I don’t know if I’ve ever been more furious over technology that I theoretically owned.
I got a PC in order to eventually go back to Linux, where at least I know that when something goes wrong, it’s generally my own fault and somewhat easy to troubleshoot. Unfortunately, the plugins I’ve been using only have Windows and Mac versions. If I had done a bit more research, I probably would have just gone with an apple device.
But, cyborg Bill Gates needs your data to survive. You do want him to survive, don’t you?
Bill Gates doesn’t really do anything at Microsoft anymore
Nah man I’m pretty mecha-cyborg Bill Gates is running things there.
Damn you’re dense.
Oh man, the memories… it wasn’t so long after “Best of Both Worlds” aired for the first time, that the Bill Gates of Borg meme was going viral on BBSs and Usenet. Oh how we laughed… and cried, for it was funny but true.
the documents folder on the computer that Microsoft has in your house
How much longer till Microsoft uses Windows computers across the world as a botnet. For working on it’s AI. Or some other bullshit.
And how long before the come into your house, steal your stuff, and kick your dog?
lmao its a matter of time before MS decides they need to DDoS someone so hard their data center explodes and they’ll be ready to do it
Not sure if it’s still a thing but I remember they also used windows to distribute updates to other windows PCs in a bittorrent-like fashion.
It still does it. The only thing is that the awareness of this feature was spread in a way to make it sound like it was just stealing your internet for nothing (which looking at it one way, it was) so most people just turned it off.
Blizzard used to do that as well with world of Warcraft updates IIRC ( during vanilla )
They did, and we’re really up front about it being an opt-in thing, if I remember correctly. Might have started that easy with Microsoft, too. But they can’t resist enshitifying.
So does War Thunder. Makes sense from a CDN perspective.
Honestly that can be a good thing, especially if you have more than one windows PC in your household, it’s only downloading them once then sharing the updates about over the LAN
Ya in the business world that’s what WSUS is/was for
And you’ll have to pay them a subscription fee to do it. If you don’t pay, your computer is bricked.
Do I look like I know what a OneDrive is?
All hail the Blessed Virgin!
I just need a picture of a god danged hot dog
In 2003 I could have made a living selling subscriptions to 5-GB cloud storage that was tightly integrated into Windows.
I understand why Windows is trying to capture you into it’s cloud ecosystem. Just saying that between M$, Apple, and Google you can do some robust backups, basically for free. And if you’re worried about privacy, just encrypt.
I actually don’t hate onedrive that much. I’ve used it for a while now and it’s one of the best ways to just share a folder with some people very easily. And they can even use the desktop app and you can all have a cloud synced folder, it’s really convenient for collaborating on projects. I know other things can do this, but few do it as seamlessly.
That said I’m trying pretty hard to ditch it because I hate how Microsoft are just making it the default behaviour without really making it apparent that all your documents just get uploaded to their servers. I hope proton drive gets the features I need soon,.
It’s not about whether the product is good or bad. It’s about the way they maliciously and deceptively try to push it on people.
For the agencys to break it as they have been doing? no thx
Then don’t use MS Office?
Have to for school. But you can also just press F12 to open the normal save dialog. (I put my school stuff in one drive anyway, I just want them in folders so I need the normal saving system.)
Or uninstall one drive. It’s not rocket surgery and when done correctly I’ve never seen it re-enable itself after an update.
Even with it removed the save menu on office is a pain.
Then don’t use MS
Office?Yep
My fetish is sending a document as a copy and then seeing someone edit it in realtime while I’m in it.
Yall do know we can just disable it right?
But we want autosafe, like libreoffice on my desktop.
Ok, but like i can just click a button.
Until they push some kind of update that requires you to find where they hid the button* (and it also defaults back to cloud)
I don’t think they do, most of the MS doomerism I see implies they probably never tried to turn any of it off. I uninstalled one drive years ago along with turning off the ads and telemetry and its all stayed that way ever since, but I keep getting told all of it will be back with the next update. I update when it prompts me to and it never undoes my settings.
IMO, this kind of meme post is from/for those that are scared and confused by settings dialogs.
OneDrive is a default, which can be changed.
They’d rather complain about it than spend 10 minutes fixing it.
I’d be really surprised if it took as long as ten minutes.
This is a setting in Excel. But Cloud is the default option.
When are we getting an antitrust for trying to cram down our throats the cloud?
The cloud doesn’t exist. It’s just some other computer that you don’t own.
People don’t get sued for shoving other fictitious concepts down our throats… Religion comes to mind.
When there’s some semblance of a government that works in the public interest.
Be like the EU, at least in that regard :)
Weeeeell… While it’s not anywhere as bad as the US here, EU governments are also very much beholden to the owner class.
The cloud doesn’t exist. It’s just some other computer that you don’t own.
People don’t get sued for shoving other fictitious concepts down our throats… Religion comes to mind.
Thing is M$ is showing you the cloud as the first option to make you use it and buy more space when you need it.
Google got sued for making the google the default chrome search engine without asking the user. I think M$ is doing the same with the cloud storage but asking you with a pen about to mark their option. And the programs don’t even remember you didn’t choose the cloud the last time.
The cloud is a shitload of computers connected in such a way that it’s far more reliable than any single computer, and so you don’t need to care about which computer is doing what.
Yes, those computers physically exist somewhere and are owned by someone, but saying the cloud doesn’t exist is just ridiculous. May as well say clouds in the sky don’t exist either because they’re just water.
That’s just it, the “cloud” is just a fancy name for a cluster that’s owned by someone else. Everything you’ve described as what a “cloud” is, has already been defined.
The term “cloud” is a marketing vapor term that loosely refers to a cluster of hypervisors. That’s how hypervisors at large scale are pretty much always organized.
The hypervisors in use are not something most people have ever heard of. The most commonly known contenders are hyper-v (which is the basic technology that Azure is built on), and VMware. But most major “cloud” providers, with the exception of Azure, are using something else entirely.
The same description you’ve provided can also be applied to modern super computers, mainframes, and pretty much anything that lives inside a datacenter.
A personal computer has a multitude of single points of failure. A single power supply on a single circuit, a single processor, with all memory controllers in that same processor, a single OS drive, a single network interface. Servers generally have multiple power supplies, multiple CPUs, multiple disk drive controllers, connected to multiple disks in some kind of raid or equivalent. Basically all single points of failure, with few exceptions (such as power management/distribution, and the motherboard) have been removed.
Then you take the servers and scale up to a whole cluster of servers and you get so much more redundancies. A cluster, when done properly is basically bullet proof for failures. Making it larger both increases capacity and redundancy. Without increasing latency. Again, when done right.
In all, “cloud” is a marketing buzzword. I don’t know of anyone in tech that calls a “cloud” by that name unless they’re talking to someone who doesn’t know that a “cloud” is fictitious.
The term “cloud” is a marketing vapor term
I’ma stop you right there. I’m a software engineer who’s implemented a lot of cloud-based stuff. It’s a term of art, not just a marketing word.
Always hated how MS forces you to use their shit … I mean I get it, most wouldn’t chose to use them as they are indeed shit
I have OneDrive limited to a single swap meat folder aptly called “dumpster” and it still fucks it up weekly
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That’s just an NTLite build, if you want to uninstall those things do it yourself (either with NTLite and an ISO or through command prompt like any other software)
You can disable it in the registry. H key local machine, software, policy, microsoft, windows, OneDrive, disable sync value change from 0 to 1 and it will turn it off. I may be a little off this was just from memory.
