Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by srk_hn 1376 days ago
I would cal it valuing my time. I don't want to spend an hour or two a day learning something new when I've already invested in learning something that solves my problems good enough.

Can I have gripes about the quirks and how some things could be better? Sure. Is it worth throwing the baby with the bathwater and learning something entirely new? Highly unlikely.

1 comments

> I don't want to spend an hour or two a day learning something new when I've already invested in learning something that solves my problems good enough.

This is exactly how I felt after about 20 years of using Linux since the age of 14. Windows 7? 8? 10? 11? No thanks, I don't want to learn it, I've already had 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP, I enjoyed it throughout my childhood, (and then I became a man and put away childish things.)

That's plenty of time for me to consider whether I really want to leave Windows or not, and I don't regret switching to Debian, it does basically everything I need. 20 years later, I've had lots of time to think about it, and I'm definitely still a Linux user. (And a Mac user... anything but Windows really.)

>after about 20 years of using Linux since the age of 14.

Most Average Joes that haven't had this Linux baptism through fire from an early ages definitely won't see eye to eye with you on the greatness of Linux.

They just want their known shit to work out of the box. They don't want to format USB sticks with ISOs ("I can't find any 'Linux', is Ubuntu 'a Linux'? What is an ISO?), format and portion their disks, install and learn a new OS, figure out which command line commands enable HW video acceleration in Chrome, figure out why their screen is tearing, figure out why the webcam now doesn't work, etc.

That's why Linux PC market share is still insignificant in 2022.

You're not wrong, but the experience in 2022 is much, much, much better than in 2004.

At that time, the main bragging right was at lan parties – I wasn't getting any tearing, in fact if I ran Quake 3 in Windows, there was a noticeable lag while the (whatever it was) was (doing something in the background) that was definitely not present on Linux.

Baptism through fire is a good way to put it. Back in my day, we had one-way cable modems and you still had to dial in for your upstream! It was on the ISA bus, have you ever seen an IRQ? trailing off...

I use MacOS / Linux all the time. I still use Windows for gaming because nothing comes close.
Maybe not entirely put away childish things... :) I still enjoy Minecraft, KSP, both of which can be played anywhere!

I have a feeling that's not what you mean when you say gaming though