Ranting About Desktop Environments

[WilsonPhillips]

@DD15

I hate tech support for financial websites. Their advice seems to always be, “just turn everything off.” Can I say this without getting into trouble?

Here? Absolutely!

[Reziac]

@DD15

Getting users acclimated to Linux applications is a different matter. Especially when they insist that LibreOffice must do everything exactly as Microsoft Office or Outlook.

My experience is that users who are that insistent are actually afraid of “breaking their computer” but don’t know how to express that. But if everything is exactly the same, they feel secure that they can’t break anything, because after all it’s working, right? It’s not so much that it has to be the same, but that they need to feel like the same guardrails are in place.

Maybe my perspective is a little different, because back in the day I supported people who were legally blind, and they are really afraid of sending their computer off a cliff and not being able to climb back into a usable state (because if something is awry, they literally cannot see how to fix it). So I became aware that what they really wanted wasn’t “same”, but predictable. And a lot of users are like that because to them the computer is a foreign language that they navigate by rote, and if anything is out of place, suddenly they can’t navigate anymore, and pressing onward sends them into a panic, because they’re already lost. They’ve always had that predictable storebought computer, and it was hard enough to understand before we put a whole different foreign desktop on it.

And it’s not merely ignorance. With my old truck, I could fix a lot of stuff and the rest, I could point at and tell my mechanic, “That’s broken, fix it.” With current vehicles, I look under the hood and see a solid blob of unidentifiable components, and I have no idea which ones I can safely mess with.

[DD15]

@Reziac

With current vehicles, I look under the hood and see a solid blob of unidentifiable components, and I have no idea which ones I can safely mess with.

My turbo would confuse you. I went looking for it and can’t find it because it is buried under so many layers of other stuff. I know what a turbo is, what it looks like, and what it does. Thankfully, the filters and other regular maintenance items are accessible. Including the oil dipstick. Did you know some vehicles don’t have one of those? Instead, an idiot dash light.

That takes all the fun out of it. Back in the day, I would be at a truck stop and some woman would come in with her small car, check oil light on, engine rattling away. She would ask me for help. So pop the hood, and locate the problem. It was obvious. “Your dipstick is too short! You need a new dipstick!” Which was good for laughs when a dozen other truck drivers arrived to help. Then one of us would tell her she needs to add oil. Buy two quarts inside the store and make sure it is not for diesel truck engines. 15W40 doesn’t work in engines designed for 5W20 or lighter. Or we would send her out in back if there was a truck maintenance shop. Those mechanics always enjoyed an easy job.

Funny thing. I never use that turbo. I don’t need 270 horsepower. My last truck had 120, and I didn’t use that because I learned how to drive with only 90 horsepower.

[Sainosaur]

And the GNU Project had and still has a toolkit. But no one talks about it, and especially no one develops programs using it except its developers. Here’s a surprise.

[rrthing]

@Reziac

My experience is that users who are that insistent are actually afraid of “breaking their computer” but don’t know how to express that. But if everything is exactly the same, they feel secure that they can’t break anything, because after all it’s working, right? It’s not so much that it has to be the same, but that they need to feel like the same guardrails are in place.

Yes, I’ve experienced this as well, even amongst so called systems admins. They want consistency, but worse, even the sighted can’t or won’t think about what to search for to solve their own problems. Heck, even my auto-didactic highly skilled electronics tech father had this attitude. When he passed in '06 he was trying to gather new, modern parts to build a Windows 98 machine, because it was what he best understood. His Win XP rants were epic, though.

As I’ve said previously, I want the consistency, too, even though I am able to navigate the differences. I’m old skool–cut my *NIX teeth on SunOS 5.1.4 and it’s early '90s Enterprise friends. I’ve always preferred hopping between SunOS/Solaris and a BSD over Linux–because unlike Linux, the other two options are internally consistent. Linux feels like it’s “difference for difference’s sake”, not for any real functional improvement. Glares at systemd

But at this point it’s nearly impossible to get fully up-to-date and performant common OSS on BSD because developers are targeting Linux and everything else is an afterthought. And Solaris for the desktop has always been too much of a throwback for me so it’s CLI-only OmniOS on the home file server.

[Thomas-Cee]

@rrthing

he [father] was trying to gather new, modern parts to build a Windows 98 machine, because it was what he best understood. His Win XP rants were epic, though.

Awww your dad sounds like he was a really fun guy lol! I feel his pain in some ways