The lowest end hardware you ever ran Linux on, so far!

I am not so sure that “rulers of the past” were quite as concerned about whether their subjects were happy as you are making it seem they were.

I love that Eratosthenes was able to estimate the circumference of the earth with the amount of math we had in his era.

Not only that, but he was much closer to the right answer than Columbus was, yet Columbus is the one to get a day named after him, even though Columbus would have died due to starvation as most people had predicted he would if he had not gotten lucky and run into a continent that no one knew about except for the people that lived there and the Vikings and the Chinese and other people that didn’t count! It just proves the principle that the key to success is not to be smart but to be lucky.

Confusingly, no, they are completely unrelated things, despite how similar the names look. (This confused me as well until somewhat recently.)

Agreed; I was only arguing against the proposition that increased market share would not eventually make a difference.

I think that if Linux had a 50% market share then it would be considered a very valid alternative, even though that is obviously not very realistic (at this point, at least). My comment was more about why a high market share would be desirable than about how realistic it would be to get there.

Having said that: I think that if Linux were to get to a 10% or 15% valid market share, it would be a sign that a lot of things had changed that would have made it a more valid alternative in the process.

That’s completely fair!

Just to be clear, it’s not that I think that Linux is without problems or idiosyncrasies, but rather I think that they are more like the experience you are describing than evidence that Linux is fundamentally broken compared to Windows.

Incorrect. You did not just say that some things were “suboptimal” about Linux; your thrust was that Linux offers a “frustrating experience” overall compared to Windows as a result of all of these supposed “paper cuts”:

There are so many of these paper cuts I think Linux would be quite a frustrating experience for many people even if if had Windows-level hardware support.

Think of it as being a different way of saying “anxiety scrolling”, because “doom scrolling” is primarily referring to the experience of being driven by anxiety to compulsively consume a never-ending stream of bad news.

For example, I had to cut myself off from following what is going on in Los Angeles earlier today because I recognized the signs of going past the point of merely keeping tabs on it to stay informed and compulsively anxiously reloading the page to see if there were any new updates.

No, bad for you for asserting that your experience was universal, and then getting grumpy when someone disagreed and cited their own experience as being different.

You may be lucky enough to use Linux for your fault work, but some of are forced to use Windows because it is the industry standard. If Linux were widely enough used that I could use it at work then that would be a huge benefit to me.

I don’t think that editing fstab is a necessary step in this process, going by the first set of instructions here.

Could you be more specific about exactly what about Linux makes it so difficult to use that a typical person would not be able to use their computer at all if it were installed on it?

I cannot think of a single time I have manually created a .desktop file rather than using a GUI in the decades I have used Linux, and it has been a long time since I have even needed to edit the Start Menu at all installing packages takes care of it for me. Furthermore, even if this is a “paper cuts”, I doubt that people spend a lot of their time adding Start Menu items; by contrast, in Windows I get to experience the paper cuts of advertisements every single time I want to launch a program, and if I mistype the name of the program and press enter, then every single time I get to experience another paper cuts of launching Edge (which is not my default browser) to do a search in Bing (which is not my default search engine) for my typo.

Likewise, for the last few years that I have been using WiFi with Linux, I have never once had to go outside of the GUI to adjust the settings.

I won’t say that Linux has no annoyances, but I find using it to be a significantly more pleasant experience than using Windows overall, and my wife has never had a problem with it either.

I really do not think that these “paper cuts” are representative of peoples’ general experiences with Linux.

It’s not clear that it would, because the root problem is locking a package to a particular version of the nvidia drivers, which nix would not solve. Unless I am missing something?

The problem of there being a separate runtime for each video driver version was explicitly discussed in the article:

If you are part of the huge part of the population who happens to own a Nvidia GPU, it’s a whole other can of worms. There are Flatpak runtimes that target specific Nvidia driver versions, but they must be matched with a compatible version installed on the host system, and it is not always a process as smooth and painless as one would hope.

An improvement idea that is floating around is to, basically, just take a step back and load the host drivers directly into the runtime, rather than shipping a specific version of the userspace drivers along with the application. Technically, it is possible: Valve’s Linux runtime is pretty similar to Flatpak architecturally, and they solved this problem from its inception by using a library called libcapsule to load the natively installed host drivers into the Steam Runtime. This is the reason why it’s significantly rarer that an old Steam game fails to launch on a new GPU, compared to the same scenario on Flatpak!

Duty Calls

That seems incredibly silly; why on earth should I care about whether random people on the Internet think I have superior virtue or not? I am too busy making sure that they recognize my superior sense of humor!

To be sure, my comment was absolutely a dumb cliché! If your response to it was to feel like a fool, though, then that’s on you. 😉

Ah, I see your point now; this is basically just like how the author was making the point that refrigerator stores have an annoying way of trying to sell people butthole pictures in this comic:

Your comment was the only one calling for the termination of the pursuit of deeper meaning in the comic, which is an anti-intellectual stance.

I have no desire to terminate anything. For someone going to so much trouble to express how much you care about the importance of intellectual discussion, you are working extremely hard to avoid engaging your intellect when it comes to my comments.