Having to leave OpenMandriva; here's why

Coffee break
85

Depends. If you had spent the last 20 years using Linux in your business and were trying to switch to Windows then you would feel the opposite way. Change isn’t cheap no matter what to or from. If I purchased a car with a manual transmission I could complain that it was costing me all of my spare time teaching my wife to drive it and therefore cars with automatic transmission are less expensive and it is the fault of the manufacturer of the manual transmission that there is a learning curve.

The most expensive computer on my desk at work is the Windows laptop. It is so full of anti-malware garbage that it bogs the system down and makes it painfully slow. If you were to calculate the time I spend twiddling my thumbs waiting for it to get a few CPU cycles to spend on my tasks it would add up to many hours per year (Renaming a file in a CAD tool that I use can take 1 minute per file when it is being fussy). I suppose that you could argue that you don’t have to run anti-malware to the levels that our IT department does, but then you run a much greater risk of getting ransomware. Ouch.

I got permission from my manager to spend $1k USD on a computer so I built my own and put Debian Trixie on it (I would use OMLx but they have balked at and then ignored my request to contribute the packages that I need). Now I no longer waste several hours per year thanks to Linux and the people that give of their time to Debian and the software.

86

submit a package request if the source is available and I’ll add it to my list.

87

https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/help-me-understand-the-omlx-toolchain-for-avr

88

You are absolutely correct that it depends on where you start. Windows is just as painful for doing advanced tasks as Linux is, but I have been using Windows since 3.1.

However, for basic tasks, Windows is easy for an employee to use without training. No config files need for SMB.

Nothing is free, in any sense. “Freedom” and “Free of cost” are both nonsensical ideological concepts.

89

Don’t get me wrong, I think Linux is a better operating system, which is why I am banging my head against a brick trying to train myself how to use it. It is worth the investment.

I am using old computers that I will not have to replace thanks to Linux, saving a lot of money to help offset my investment. Not to mention the environmental impact of upgrading everything much less often.

It just has to be acknowledged that it is a SERIOUS investment. I always get pushback when I point this out, but I will push right back because it is insane to believe otherwise. Reality is the place where I live and work.

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90

I’ve not used SMB since I purged my house of Windows, but back in the day I found Mandrake Linux hands down the easiest Linux distribution for me to get SMB shares working on. I want to say that there was some kind of GUI tool that made it dead simple to do. I’ve also made good use of Webmin in the past to configure the shares on the server side, but I can’t check right now to be use that is available in OMLx or not.

91

I am working on a promising setup involving autofs. I think it is going to work out fine. Once I get the Linux way of doing things seared into my brain then things will go much smoother (theoretically lol).

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92

I use SMB to share a couple of directories from my main PC to the little Raspberry Pi I use as a media tank on my TV.

93

I use Unraid as a home office server and it can share directories as SMB or NFS but everything is already setup as SMB so I am trying to just make it work as is for now. One less thing to reconfigure.

94

Why is this? Is it because almost all Windows users have been using Windows since forever and know exactly how/where to click to open, close, save, delete, print, and so on?

My experience with employees, 25 years ago when the tool and die shop was running mostly NT4 and some 9x, most employees were familiar with 95. You should have heard the uproar in the engineering department that I received when our engineering workstations and server had to be “upgraded” to 2000 Professional because the CAD/CAM vendor decided to now support 2000 Professional and 2000 Server, dropping NT4 support. “The screen colors changed! This is the end of the world! Where did the big HP plotter go? Why is the printer printing sideways?” I spent a year solving problems, many hardware-related, created by 2000.

Never mind the time the company switched from Lotus 1-2-3 and AmiPro to Microsoft Office 97. I spent several months explaining where things were in Office. Then a few years later with Office 2000, wash, rinse, repeat. I haven’t touched Office in years. Does every upgrade still require a learning curve?

When the company where I worked at the time started using Windows NT4 and 95, you should have heard the uproar from everyone acclimated to using MS-DOS and/or Windows 3.1. So much for Windows is easy to use without training.

Training for Windows isn’t required today because everyone is familiar with it. Unless the user went to schools that were all MacBooks, had one at home, and somehow managed to never touch Windows.

To this day, I have never touched an Android phone. Relative to my old iPhone and iPad, I can easily say that from my perspective, Android is difficult. But I won’t, because if someone tossed an Android phone at me and asked me to upgrade their operating system, I could probably figure it out. Yes, I would have to go to several websites and study the problem before doing anything. Unlike on my iPad and iPhone, where I can find the problem relatively fast because I know where to look.

I can flip this around. Anyone who has never used iOS will instantly find it difficult to use, while Android is easy.

Having never used a MacBook, I can say it is difficult, relatively speaking. The most I ever did with one was recover files from the hard drive because the owner trashed the internal battery and allowed it to destroy the keyboard and touchpad. I have a niece who swears by macOS and hates using Windows. If that is what makes her happy, who I am to judge?

Why do some people think that ignoring an expanding battery will fix itself?

Chromebook. Never owned one. Touched one only one time. I was asked to restore it back to factory specs after a friend of a friend’s teen daughter had managed to trash ChromeOS. I had to spend some time online, figuring out how to do it. For me, relatively speaking, ChromeOS is difficult to deal with, because I don’t deal with it every day.

But I am willing to learn, so I do it anyway. Or at least give it a good try. So long as I have an Internet connection to pages full of what I need to learn.

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95

There is the truism that the more powerful a tool is, the harder it is to learn to use it.

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96

Yes, partly. But not entirely.

All 3 my employees are Zoomers (“Gen Z”). 2 of them do not even own actual computers, just android phones and PlayStations instead.

It is because doing things on Windows is point and click. No config files or terminal needed to operate normally when doing basic to intermediate tasks. Advanced stuff on Windows however is nearly impossible sometimes without a massive pain in the butt.

I hate Windows so much these days. I feel like I am preparing to leave an abusive relationship.

97

I agree with this meme 100%.

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Why can’t those same tasks be point and click on Linux? Behind Windows, the same thing is happening. The difference is the corporations wrote all the fancy GUI frontends and script files and who knows what else in the backend to make it work.

I will admit that I know almost nothing when it comes to how to go about creating a GUI. Perhaps this is something Linux desktop environments need? A GUI to drive a Bash script or whatever other method is required. Does such an animal exist in a DE? I know other software does have such “features.”

The last time I attempted doing a GUI, it was on a CAM software package called Smartcam. This happened almost 30 years ago on Windows NT4. It is long gone into the dumpster of old CAM software that was bought out by a larger corporation. The other tool path programmer (I was one of two) wanted more “real estate” on the programming screen. We were working on 21-inch CRT monitors back then, running at 120 cycles. Every time a dialog box opened, it took up half the screen, regardless of resolution. 1600 x 1200 or 800 x 600, it did not matter. The Smartcam developers sent me their GUI developer’s toolkit, which was another GUI that drove an executable that compiled a new GUI for Smartcam dialog boxes. I then just had to make sure that the files for each dialog box were named properly. Then the handler could call them when required. I was not up to rewriting the handler script from scratch. I was able to reduce a half screen of dialog box down to two or three lines at the bottom of the display. Mostly by eliminating dead space and deleting “tool options” that were not required. For instance, when milling a pocket in steel, valid tools are end mills, ball mills, angle mills, and face mills. Never drills, reamers, boring bars, and taps. So why are they in the dialog box if they don’t belong? Tool and die trade school machinist thinking vs university education thinking. Amazing how I still remember this stuff.

Anyway, that is all I ever learned about doing a GUI. If someone throw the tools at me, I will use them if I can.

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99

The answer to that is outside the scope of my limited knowledge of Linux.

I am just a computer user, not a developer of any type.

100

You never attempted to handle a McCormick-Deering Super W6TA pulling a John Deere mechanical lift tricycle plow in a red clay field after it rained, as a 13-year-old teen, have you? Power steering was your arm muscles. If one wheel takes off spinning, slam forward on the brake with all you have, as there was no differential lock. But you did have 46 horsepower. Did I mention snow showers?

Then, when you get to be 17, your dad gets a new Massey Ferguson 285 pulling a John Deere semi-mounted hydraulic lift plow. The engine is now an 81 horsepower diesel so it has plenty of torque, hydrostatic power steering, hydraulic lift, differential lock, and a heated cab. Snow showers? Turn on the heater. It took all of five minutes to figure out everything. Perhaps less.

Low powered mechanical beast once removed from a horse. Versus a Cadillac.

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101

I don’t even know which driver it is. In the Mint installer it asks if you want to install support for proprietary codecs and proprietary firmware too.

I understand the importance of encouraging the use of free software, but we live in a reality where we use proprietary Bios/UEFI and proprietary hardware. Libreboot doesn’t work on most hardware.

Unfortunately, free hardware is in short supply.

102

This is precisely why people do not understand what the button they’re clicking actually does. You should try packaging the nvidia driver and then come talk to me. It has nothing to do with whether I like it or not. You are trying to measure what we are doing against larger projects. To which I will say, you should probably use something that you know works from a bigger project. If you don’t have the time to do the work or help it get better, then your entire statement is moot.

While you may be factually correct in your statement, the implication is that we should know all things about all hardware configurations ever to exist and plan for them accordingly. We don’t have the resources to do that. People coming here with those configurations should be our resources but they overwhelmingly choose not to. This has more to do with their expectations of us, than ours of them. We don’t expect people to use OMLx if it does not meet their needs, but we do expect that if you are going to use it and you have problems that you work with us to resolve them. Otherwise, just leave without saying a word and go back to something that works. We have more important things to do than spend time interacting with people that barely used our distribution (if at all), and never bothered to speak to us about the issues.

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