Completely done with Linux forever

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I came from a different 'alternative os' angle and when I switched to PC the first idea was to give in completely and go windows. It lasted 2 weeks but didn't feel at home. Somewhere mid 90s. Lot of small tools required to make it remotely do what it should do. Free stuff horrible, shareware stuff crap, decent stuff expensive but often student licenses possible. Coming from the amiga world where community stuff made life better, this was... a wasteland.
Friend that helped me assemble pc also got me to stop whining and proposed infomagic (cd set of several linux distributions). You did have to do more manual tinkering to get it to work properly but at least you could. For work purposes I rolled into unix (solaris) and a mixed bunch of weird hardware on main pc made it easier to run than windows. "linux" at that time was more than an os. Still is a bit but community is gone. More users but they are 'normal people' making fun of those that made linux possible for them. I HATE what linux became but not the os. I need it for work (limited) and that is about it.
Surrounded now with more linux people than I ever was, most are ok, some know my history but will not get involved. Not happier but less angry all the time. People just don't hold up to my standards, me myself not either.

Lolzz...^^^^^. sighes

It's not hard to point out the flaws of Linux, but to my mind, it sucks the least in comparison to everything else.

I love Linux. I learnt the basics from old manuals and it simply feels like an intuitive way of thinking for me.

I love my Debian setup. The Ian Murdock story is a reminder to me - don't trust the system, don't be an a***hole.

Ethically, intellectually, it's where I feel at home. And for some processes there's no alternative: Linux or bust.

Also Linux is Emacs to me and Emacs makes me happy

On the other hand, I looked in on the Linux forums on reddit once, and boy were they an obnoxious disaster.

I gave up on Linux,after a bad experience seeking help for a problem I had. Unlike others here I'm not an expert when it comes to OS and computers in general. I knew that at some point I would need more help, and wasn't willing to take the risk of history repeating itself. It was the condescension and piss taking from people who think their self proclaimed intellectual superiority gives them the right to behave badly towards those they regard as 'inferior'.

I've had nothing but really positive experiences on the Linux Mint forum. That forum is great, IMHO

That's just crappy, firemonkey.

My background is non-technical but I'm autodidactic in most things. In many contexts it's a weakness, not a strength, but with computers at least it does make some things easier!

I've never been brave enough to ask for tech help online. I'm impressed that you did that and really sorry you didn't get a constructive response.

The Debian mailing lists are active and I like to follow the threads. In general I think they are supportive. I've seen some very nice responses to new users, and I think there's a conscious effort to be welcoming.

I'm a tech dunce. Best I ever managed was learning, without help, to use a computer for basic tasks.

I don't think you're missing much, firemonkey. I reckon you've got to really love tech for it to be worth the investment of time.

I worry a lot about disembodiment, distraction, isolation... not to mention environmental impacts.

Me, I like certain programming languages because they mirror the way my brain works (sometimes). But things that 'every home user' knows how to do, like streaming films or attending online meetings, regularly trip me up, even when I'm doing them for the nth time.

Or my latest pet peeve: the 'are you human' tests. I get them wrong all the time and I can sit there for ages just trying to get through. (What constitutes a 'square containing a bicycle'?? Is it a square with a little bit of bicycle? Does it include squares with mostly the cyclist? I believe it is more a 'can you think like our A.I.' test.)

I reckon it is about finding what works for you rather than being good or not good at the expected things. Don't sell yourself short: if your tech does what you need it to, you're winning, and if you got there by yourself fair play to you!

Maybe I like Linux because I find it easier to get rid of the stuff I'm bad at

For a while I was using something called 'R' with various ethnicity calculators . It didn't require me to be 'Brain of Britain', as I saved the commands- and pasted them into R as required.

When it comes to anything that's useful in real life I'm near, at, the back of the class. High range IQ tests on the other hand, which serve no useful purpose, I'm quite good at those. I think ,or at least I've read articles saying so, that that lack of practical intelligence is a very schizophrenia related thing.

That is a story that's familiar to me, firemonkey. And then people thought I wasn't trying because there was such a discrepancy between the test results and my actual performance. I myself didn't understand what was happening, so this view of things was distressing for me.

They just kept bumping me up grades, waiting for me to switch on in some way, I guess. Unhelpful.

Some multimodal skills I simply cannot grasp; others come easily. Some things I can do in some environments but not others. Some things I can do when cognitive energy levels are high and not at other times.

I read The Mismeasure of Man at an impressionable age and although I think the science has moved on, the key points were made well and I think they are worth remembering. The models are flawed, flawed, flawed.

I use MX Linux on one of my two main laptops. It's a Debian-based system, but it has a lot more features (some might call it 'bloated') and it's very reliable by Linux standards. I did give Debian a go quite a while ago, but found it too primitive and couldn't even get it to connect to wifi (driver issue, I think).

I've only ever been able to get along with Debian-related systems, and would probably use Mint if MX became unavailable. Funnily enough I never could get to grips with Ubuntu, though it's supposed to be essentially the same as Mint under the skin.

Not at all tempted by rpm systems or Arch and its derivatives. I suspect I'd be hopelessly out of my depth with the latter.

yeah it seems with linux you have to go on a quest to get it to do things you could do basically automatically on windows

I recommend Zorin OS Linux and Mint. I've also given up on Linux but I enjoyed it.

Linux I'm not done with but I wont use it till it gets more useable for general use because it expects you to know the whole OS, I tried it a few times first time installing anything was a nightmare as the amount of file types there was to install stuff was a lot because of all the distros and often didn't have the one you needed unlike windows where its just .EXE files for apps.

and the partitions I had issues with as well as ubuntu didn't give the software to view storage devices normally.

When I first got into Linux, I had a real-life mentor to get me off the ground with all the basics and fundamentals. Was indispensable. This has applied to any and every non-toy, serious OS I've ever learned and used - they always have a learning curve. This applied to DOS, Apple MacOS/System 7, Windows with fileshares, etc.