"Linux Sucks... For the Last Time" - 2017

Started in 2009, a reverent take on Linux issues of the day...

"Linux Sucks... For the Last Time" - 2017
Published on Mar 6, 2017
"Linux Sucks". 2017 edition. The very last "Linux Sucks". Ever. Recorded live at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) on March 2nd, 2017.


"Linux Sucks" series:
https://www.youtube.com/user/BryanLunduke/search?query=linux+sucks

 

This shows though one of the big fears. That is the terminal and its ability with a simple mistake to kill a system. One of the casual users biggest FUD items.

 

Windows 10 still sucks much worse than Linux every time. Most Linuxes will give you lots of chances to not kill a working system, and tend to be much more secure. For me to accept Windows 10, Pro or higher must allow me to have control of my PC, NO AUTOMATIC FORCED UPDATES, NO TELEMETRY, and no POP-UPS of any kind. Until this happens NO WINDOWS 10 on any machine I administer, own, or maintain. NONE! NADA, ZILCH! No built in rootkits or MALWARE tolerated.

Most Linux distros have safeguards built in to not let this scenario happen. So, not an issue. Most will do everything possible to not let you do dangerous command line things to damage your system.

 

Windows is AWESOME!
Bryan Lunduke
Published on Apr 28, 2015
"Windows is AWESOME!". Recorded live at LinuxFest Northwest on April 26th, 2015.

 

Keep in mind that some Linux distros, especially those backed by commercial entities, aren't safe from that either. Recall the Ubuntu Amazon scandal, for example.

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Also: oh god pulseaudio.

 

Yes, which is also why I don't run Ubuntu. But the Amazon junk can be disabled easily, the junk in Windows 10 can not be disabled.

It would be awesome if Microsoft would get rid of the telemetry, forced updates, and pop up crap. I like the OS otherwise. NO CONTROL OVER MY OS, I refuse to RUN THAT OS! If said OS automatically pulling crap like that suddenly ruins 6 hours of work, then NOT ACCEPTABLE. My computer is MINE, NO CONTROL OF IT or the software or update processes, I WILL NOT RUN THAT OS! PERIOD! Forced automatic junk ruins workflow or my data, it damages what I am doing. Until then I treat Windows 10 as MALWARE!

 

True, and you can also disable most (all?) of Windows 10's shenanigans as well (though it requires other hardware unfortunately).

Though in either case, it's easier to use something like Mint

 

And these days Mint and Zorin OS are my favorite distros.

 

Here are a couple of other recent video's from Lunduke of interest...

An Open Source Distributed Youtube like service with free content and paid content (movies) is beginning access in April. If you have a Github account you can get in now from there, or download the daemon here:
https://lbry.io/quickstart/all

LBRY.io is also hosting the recently announced to be removed from internet access 20,000 Berkeley Lecture videos:
https://thenextweb.com/insider/2017/03/17/berkeley-university-deleted-lectures/

Decentralized, Open Source YouTube Alternative w/lbry.io
Lunduke Hour - Mar 28, 2017
In this episode of The Lunduke Hour I chat with Jeremy Kauffman, from lbry.io -- a decentralized, open source video (and other content) sharing platform. Sort of like YouTube meets BitTorent meets Bitcoin.


Linux Game Jam w/The Linux Gamer
Lunduke Hour - Mar 16, 2017
In this episode of The Lunduke Hour I chat with The Linux Gamer about The Linux Game Jam. And the state of gaming on Linux. And SteamOS. And other Game/Linux stuff. It is glorious.

 

Linux is still a good Server software the problem is all the Distro are in-fighting and not trying to become a single Linux Distro to give Windows O/S or iO/S any real headache. That is the problem - if they do some real soul searching to make it into one acceptable O/S the other two major players will have their work cut out for them. But til this happens Linux Distro will not be a alternative to Windows O/S domination.

 

The fundamental problem is that (barring commercialized versions like Red Hat), most Linux distribution teams/people couldn't care less about commercial concerns like market share or the like. People make a distribution for their needs and if other people feel like that distribution also meets their needs, great! These needs could be as trivial as a prepacked desktop environment (those which come with Unity or KDE or MATE or whatever) to specialized concernes like security pen testing (Kali Linux for example). There's nothing for anyone to lose if an individual decides not to use a particular distribution or even Linux altogether.

In contrast, Microsoft's and Apple's primary purpose is to make a profit. Therefore, they have to make a very generalized OS which has broad appeal with the mass market (read: mostly tech illiterate people) and the primary motivations for using them are usually not technical at all (Windows has mass OEM support, games, and it's what your work uses; Apple has the superiority complex thing going on).

 

Were I younger, I'd start a business marketing Linux on a stick. Not a 'live' distro, but a genuine installation. Simply download the distro's iso, burn it to DVD, run the DVD in a laptop with no hard drive, plug in the stick/external drive after the distro is running, and specify that as the target for installation. Works fine in most distros I've tried (Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, Mageia, pclinuxOS, OpenSUSE, ZorinOS, Ubuntu, I forget the rest).

The stick/external drive boots somewhat slower, esp. if you next plug it into different hardware (another laptop, desktop of diff specs), but I've tested it on my 18 Windows machines varying from Pentium II, IV, M, Xeon and Core2Duo with and without nVidia to third-gen i7 quad, without problem. Screen resos vary from Acer A0A 800x600 to full FHD with nVidia quadro.

Sound can be a problem, but is fixed by downloading the alsamixer and running that in terminal (which looks just like any DOS program you ran back in the 1980s).

That's how I've used Linux since Mint 13 five years prior, and it's a MUST if you have a lot of Windows machines to attend, as I do. Linux surfs better, does better housekeeping, runs the old DOS programs through DOSBOX and Windows programs through Wine (am especially needing Word03 and Excel03 for my actuarial work). So whenever one of my Windows machines goes bad, I just plug in a stick to clone it off or copy, etc., then can go to another Windows machine.

Windows won't run if your battery dies. Fine, so then what? Plug Linux in and clone the disk (love Plugable for this), stick the clone into another machine (which is easy to do with Dell Latitude laptops 6530, 6510, 6410, all of which share the same hard drive).

So you see, the 'market' for Linux can be much bigger, were its value properly presented. And there's no restriction on pricing the sticks/external drives you make, since you're not selling the software, but packaging the packages into user-friendly combinations for SALE on hardware. So true portable computing.

Trick is to do it once, fine-tune the distro colors, wallpapers, commands, menus so that you can then CLONE it. How to do mass cloning for retail sale, would be the hard thing. I'm sure some machine exists, else how can Windows be sold en masse.

To date, I've not learned Linux. Have maybe used terminal 12 times in five years? And that only as instructed?

But I'm too old to do this mass marketing. Others, won't be.

Fav distros for this are Fedora 25 KDE, Linux Mint, pclinuxOS (that one needs to be installed using the highest-resolution monitor you have, as its quirk is to be monitor dependent).