Here? Absolutely!
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My experience is that users who are that insistent are actually afraid of âbreaking their computerâ but donât know how to express that. But if everything is exactly the same, they feel secure that they canât break anything, because after all itâs working, right? Itâs 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 wasnât âsameâ, 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 canât navigate anymore, and pressing onward sends them into a panic, because theyâre already lost. Theyâve always had that predictable storebought computer, and it was hard enough to understand before we put a whole different foreign desktop on it.
And itâs 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, âThatâs broken, fix it.â 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.
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My turbo would confuse you. I went looking for it and canât 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 donât 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. âYour dipstick is too short! You need a new dipstick!â 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 doesnât 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 donât need 270 horsepower. My last truck had 120, and I didnât use that because I learned how to drive with only 90 horsepower.
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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. Hereâs a surprise.
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Yes, Iâve experienced this as well, even amongst so called systems admins. They want consistency, but worse, even the sighted canât or wonât 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 Iâve said previously, I want the consistency, too, even though I am able to navigate the differences. Iâm old skoolâcut my *NIX teeth on SunOS 5.1.4 and itâs early '90s Enterprise friends. Iâve always preferred hopping between SunOS/Solaris and a BSD over Linuxâbecause unlike Linux, the other two options are internally consistent. Linux feels like itâs âdifference for differenceâs sakeâ, not for any real functional improvement. Glares at systemd
But at this point itâs 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 itâs CLI-only OmniOS on the home file server.
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Awww your dad sounds like he was a really fun guy lol! I feel his pain in some ways 
I found it wasnât even that. Computing, and in particular operating systems, use their own language, which is not English (or whatever). It looks like English, but itâs not. If you donât speak the language, itâs gibberish. Just like âfirst and third, one out, 3-2 countâ uses English words, but doesnât mean anything to someone who doesnât speak baseball, Even if they do go looking, and find relevant help, thatâs what it looks like to them â a confusing foreign language. Most do not have the depth of interest to learn that new language, they just want the durn thing to work.
And that adds to their fear of breaking something.
Human nature at work. We here are largely outliers, not typical users.
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Iâm the same. My primary computer I use every day is a Mac. So youâd think that Iâd lean towards GNOME. But no, thereâs just something about GNOME that I donât like. I canât quite put my finger on it. But KDE just feels much better to me. Yes, I can mac-ify my KDE if I want, but I leave it in the default âWindowsâ-like look.
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I perpetually laugh at the article linked earlier in this thread:
The only menu with a clearly-defined purpose is the âOpenâ menu. It accomplishes this clarity using âwordsâ. Itâs so simple and understandable that Iâm surprised it was allowed in a Gnome app at all.
So exquisitely written
My computer journey started with Kaypro playing Ladder and Clone as a kid, DOS and The Incredible Machine and tons of other games we spent hours on, then years and years of Gateâs buggy Windows offerings. So when I got my first computer, it was Mac all the way. I still have one of those early Macs and the crazy thing still works works to this day.
I was constantly trying to evade Appleâs walled garden though, so maybe thatâs why I felt at home in KDE and didnât gravitate to Gnomeâs weird version of minimalism. If I was just a few years older and could have learned to fix those previous computer problems rather than fear them, my journey might have been much different idk.
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A wonderful example of Mystery Meat Navigation (MMN).
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Ha ha yes! The article is LOONNGGGG too. Holy smokes he must have spent forever writing that. He had a serious bone to pick with Gnome (and rightfully so imo) 
I have extensive experience with Macs, and also prefer KDE to Gnome. But that stems mostly from the bloat of Gnome infiltrating everythingâŚreminds me of Windows.
My current work laptop is MacOS, as is my system for editting photos. I am slowly migrating away from MacOS because of Appleâs âwe know better than the userâ attitude and decline in quality. You know QA is bad when it takes three major versions to fix a persistent NFS bug, and still havenât fixed their own backup software after 5 point releases Sequoia (current vers). And though I donât use SMB, I read that there is a race condition in that will crash your system in Sequoia as well.
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Sounds like you need to try cinnamon
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Not just macOS. Apply the same âwe know better than the userâ to iOS on the iPhone and iPad. It seems Apple is becoming Microsoft, where every âupgradeâ is a downgrade.
This is nothing new. Back in the early 1990s, in the tool and die shop, we would say the same about a certain CAD/CAM software developer who was bought out by larger and larger corporations. It got so bug-filled that we switched to MS-DOS based CAD/CAM software. Hardware went from expensive SGI Silicon Graphics to plain vanilla 80486 boxes built in house from assorted pieces-parts.
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Proof that sometimes you need a MACHINE to just be a MACHINEâŚsorry I donât need a smart fridge synced up to Alexa
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Not a lot of options in mobile device space, though. Google is equally as badâjust for different reasonsânot the least of which devices becoming e-waste because their manufacturers donât provide security updates for long enough time periods.
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While Apple renders its cell phones and tablets after X years by no longer keeping the security up to date.
Apple claims to not spy on users, unlike Google, where spying on the users is not only tolerated, but encouraged. Of course, with Apple, we can only assume Apple is being honest when it says it does not spy. I highly suspect otherwise.
At least with either platform, it is possible to use an alternative browser. Trouble is, 99.99% of users are confused by that concept and just keep on using spyware filled Chrome or Safari. I know. Every last one of my friends find installing a more secure browser to be âtoo much workâ while complaining about being bombed with ads while being spied on and fed malware.
Apple or Google. Six of one. Half dozen of the other. They are both not good options.
Cell phones and tablets are one area where we need better options. Yes, there are Linux options, but the user needs to be a technical expert to get one working and keep it that way. Definitely not for todayâs average user who gets confused by a terminal prompt.
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That should read:
While Apple renders its cell phones and tablets obsolete after X years by no longer keeping the security up to date. In addition, Apple deletes older versions of some apps that could work on older versions of iOS, contributing to obsolescence.
Other things were on my mind yesterday. Anyone who claims that he doesnât have days like that probably doesnât have a life.
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This. I once ran Slackware on a desktop rig with no DE or window manager, just framebuffer and tmux. It was a great setup!
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Good LordtâŚFirefox with uBlockOrigin takes like 3 minutes.
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