GS3 wrote: ⤴Tue Jun 30, 2020 8:07 am
MurphCID wrote: ⤴Tue Jun 30, 2020 7:21 am
It is a solution to the issue of Linux elitism. From the bad old days of yore where it was RTFM newbie! To the newer days of elitism, where if you are not an Arch fanboy, or worship at the altar of Canonical, Mint is a breath of fresh air, and a solution to both driver issues, and dependency h*ll. Those of us from the 1990's will remember this problem, and shudder at the agonies of trying to find each and every dependency to get some software to work. Or the hours of frustration, agony, and rage at drivers which refused to work no matter what, and with 56k dial up modem time being expensive you could not pop over to a forum to get help. IF they would help instead of telling you to get lost and RTFM! I have NO desire to return to that, nor to the Linux snobs of those days. The holy wars between APT and RPM, between Debian, and Red Hat, between l33t Hax0rs, and guys just trying to use a system other than Apple or Microsoft. Thank the good Lord up above that you can install Mint and it just works. It. just. works.
Well, on the whole you do have a point and things are very definitely getting better and easier and I believe the trend is they will continue to improve (which is something I do not find myself saying about almost anything else these days).
But..., it often works after initial problems and much tinkering. It often has unsolvable problems which you have to live with and just work around them. Each OS has its own set of problems and you have to choose your poison, it is all you can do.
Regarding the elitist attitude, there is still too much of it, even on these boards. There are still people around who will tell a newbie that if they do not like dealing with the command line they are not really worthy of Linux and they should go back to their room and that if they would like to configure something so that it will work they way they had it back in Windows then they are in the wrong place and should go back to MS tout suite.
Fortunately there are plenty of helpful people who will help out and I really do appreciate it when I find someone who is not only knowledgeable but also spends their time to help out some anonymouse on a screen. I feel great gratitude for such people and I even miss some who stopped posting and I wonder what became of them and why they disappeared.
The 1990s were an era of transition which people who did not have computers or who owned one but didn't scratch beneath the surface truly know nothing about. At least, that's been my own experience as someone who first touched a computer in 1984 and first owned one (a Macintosh) in 1986. I've been there and I've watched as we transitioned from a world largely driven by hobbyists and enthusiasts and tinkerers to one which is totally commercialized and commoditized, and one in which all the powers that be want as much control as they can possibly get, both technology companies and (in particular) the entertainment industry.
As for elitism, well... Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of being an a**hole towards other people, but that said, I also well remember the era of the "AOL User" and the general mentality of the new-comer non-geeks that somehow everyone else in industry owed them something (or, everything). I mean, c'mon, if you want to have a computer, at least bother to try learning about technology. I have no use for the intellectually lazy and disengaged. A friend of mine a number of years ago said "Not everyone should be allowed to have a computer." I strongly agree with that statement, even though we live in a world where technology is so embedded in the fabric of our reality that one can seemingly not function without at least
some of it.
And yes,
MurphCID, most people here on this board have ABSOLUTELY NO FREAKING IDEA what "dependency hell" is all about. It's no wonder that the supposed "Year of Linux" back in 1997/98 failed, and failed hard, and likely scared off generations of potential GNU+Linux users.