I’ll drink to that, my friend.

Exactly what they’re doing right now. What cable companies did. What every dominant business does when something better starts to eat their lunch.

Become increasingly abusive and scummy towards the customers who are left, because they’re either too deeply ingrained, spineless or lazy to change and they’ve already self-selected.

I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on this premise.

There are lots of things you can get by in life without knowledge of. If you don’t know how vaccines work, you can go right on through your life and argue that you have better things to do… until we reach a critical mass of people who are willfully ignorant and the next thing you know we have a head of health and human services who thinks eating random dead animals is a safe way to boost your immune system making decisions.

Large-scale, pervasive ignorance of things that are actually critical and consequential to the functioning of society is not without consequence. It’s a free world and people are free to take the view that they don’t care. They’re also free to completely forgo and not use technology. But both using it in your daily life AND deciding it isn’t important to know any basic knowledge about how it works? I’m not concerning myself with those people - I don’t understand OR respect their decision.

I am very understanding of “it’s too difficult, make it easier”. I am NOT understanding or accommodating of “I don’t think I should have to do it at all.”

Edit: Furthermore, we wouldn’t even be HAVING this conversation if those people really believed that produced good enough results. Most operating systems are ALREADY built with that philosophy. If Windows and other operating systems that are built based around the philosophy that you don’t need to understand anything and the OS should do everything for you was working so well, why are people looking at Linux in the first place? It’s pretty clear that that philosophy is not producing satisfactory results anymore. I would argue it CAN’T produce satisfactory results. You either want control and freedom, and the responsibility and extra work that comes along with that, or you don’t. There’s no free ride that gets you both.

The premise of the question is that it’s somehow supposed to be a flawless experience.

Nothing is flawless. Linux has a learning curve. Everything does.

The advantage to Linux is, if you learned Linux 15 years ago, then got stranded on a desert island, got rescued, and installed a new distro today, you can still count on more or less everything working exactly as you expect it to - maybe a bit smoother.

With Windows, who knows? It’s death from a thousand tiny cuts every other day to avoid a deeper, persistent, and meaningful understanding of your system. The time you spend learning how to do things in Linux isn’t WASTED. That knowledge will never STOP being useful. It’s best not to look at it as an annoyance so much as an INVESTMENT.

Curses!

Does my code have to not suck?

I mean, I would argue it’s better than standard tech support because I don’t get disconnected and it sometimes actually solves a problem

Not without someone getting a ban.

H.P. Lovecraft entered the chat