this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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I have tried to switch my daily driver to linux for more than 15 years now, Linux desktop just isn't ready.
Full disclosure: I am an IT admin with near 3 decades of experience, including administrating linux servers, so this isn't a skill gap.
Weird, I switched my daily driver in December 2022 over to Mint (likewise I've been using Linux for various things since '08, so not a noob) and it's been pretty damn solid since then, including upgrades from Mint 20 to 21 and all of the Mint 21 point releases.
I admit that Mint is the distro I got the furthest with, several weeks in I just stopped being able to do full screen 3d. I spent a month and a half on forums trying to figure it out including 2 clean installs and couldn't get anywhere.
I even did board level diagnostics on my video card.
Just gave up and went back to windows, never had an issue there and still don't.
I'll use linux for remote servers or fun little house gadgets, but as much as I hate windows, (and I hate windows with the seething glowing magma aged bitterness of someone who has had to support it since WIndows 3.11.
I would LOVE to ditch it, especially now, but until I can get a clean install to doing what I need to do in under a day, I can't advocate linux.
the discourse between you two in this thread is not productive; please chill out a bit and stop antagonizing each other.
We really should be allowed to block admins.
i've already rendered my verdict here—which was i banned the other person for a bit and not you (even though you both said things which run afoul of our rules) because you're a member of our instance and we can afford to be more patient and understanding with you accordingly. but to be clear: if you respond in this manner even to very light moderator feedback then for moderation purposes you'll be held to outsider standards going forward. which is to say, you're not going to get anywhere near the benefit of the doubt or the lenience when you break rules.
Well I appreciate that but it doesn't really do anything to reduce my general anti-authoritarian streak.
That being said you have already proven yourself saner than 99.5% of reddit admins and is a bit of a relief considering the treatment I got at lemmy.world.
One thing though: Criticism of admins should never be considered a rule breaking event provided it is not derogative or endangering, and if my reply to you is considered a reason for admin action then I need to reconsider my participation in beehaw as well.
just to be clear the issue here is/was not you critiquing me--i don't care about that particularly, comes with the job--it's the tone which seemed like it implied being held to any moderation standard was problematic. because they tend to cause a scene about how they're being censored we're not super interested in having people in that category on here, and so whenever someone responds in that way it's a red flag
I think that's more of your interpretation than my intention.
In nearly 3 and a half decades of heavy internet use, admin and mod messages in general are more annoyance than value and I find that my experience is better just filtering them all out. I know that probably applies less here than in most other forums I've participated and probably sounds like I'm being personally hostile.
I'm sincerely not, you seem like a pleasant and well written person and we probably align in a lot of our ideals.
But I'd still block you if I had the opportunity, again because of your role, not your person. Keep in mind Lemmy's blocking doesn't prevent you replying like reddit's did so there really should be no implications in me wanting to block admin replies. You can still illustrate to the community what my rules failure is and I can be mercifully free of arbitrary justifications.
Even though I do not have experience at such a large scope, I understand being a mod/admin isn't easy, I co-modded /r/talesfromtamriel for a few years and even as a niche sub with a positive community, it was still a task to handle all the spam and harassment.
So I want you to know I value your effort and have been very much doing my best to be a contributive member of this instance as I was on early reddit, but I want to make this very clear: I would still block you, and every admin and mod on the instance if I could. And I have that sentiment for every single forum I have been on since AOL chatroom days.
To be clear, the only site I have ever been banned from in my entire time on the internet has been reddit for saying 'Punching nazis is a moral good'. I am not a rabble rouser or deliberate antagonist (with the exception of auto antagonism towards white nationalists and I will gladly take any ban you want to give me for shouting down nazis) and truly value the good online communities I participate in.
And I like beehaw, and most of the people I've spoken to here are quality posters. This feels a lot like old reddit for the most part. I want to be a longtime member and contributed tens of thousands of words a week.
But I don't really want to see anything from any mod or admin because if it's positive, fine I don't need to be aware of it. If it's negative, then I will find out the results organically. Again I know this will feel like a personal attack but it really isn't: I am better off not knowing what those roles type because in nearly every circumstance there is an implicit or explicit misuse of authority that will piss me off to no end and cause me to reply in ways that seem to only antagonize the situation.
And you will say 'But here, we are different. We moderate with a light touch and only when necessary'.
And I have heard that so many, many times before and I can count the number of times that has been true on one hand of a clumsy woodshop teacher.
And you may be correct, and frankly this place has the BEST chance I've seen of being true to that maxim, and I am thankful that this place exists because of it.
And I know moderation is necessary, there are truly rancid and destructive people out there that need to have their posts removed, and accounts banned for the betterment of the community.
And I know it is a thankless, no-pay job that exposes you to the worst the internet has to offer (and that is saying something).
That said. I'd still block you if I could. I don't mean that personally, it just works out better in the long run.
Wanting to block an admin isn't criticism. You're free to criticize us, and in fact, encouraged to do so if we are warranting criticism. If you were able to block us, we wouldn't be able to tell you when you are breaking the rules or provide feedback based on reports of your comments. We can't run a space like this without giving this kind of feedback to members, and just like what happened in this case, we try to give this feedback before jumping to moderator actions like banning.
Summarizing my other post below:
I have been online since the late eighties and participated actively in hundreds of forums.
And in all that time, the number of meaningful mod/admin replies as compared to just blatant abuses of power, arbitrary justifications, and self-gratifying pontifications has been so vanishingly low that I find in all circumstances it is better to be unaware of their posts.
Same goes for appeals or feedback. Vanishingly small numbers of actual circumstance changing interactions as compared to countless arbitrary justifications, concern trolling, and outright propaganda.
I know you are thinking 'But here at Beehaw we are different'. And you may indeed be.
But in my experiences, in the long run, the chance of this being true approaches zero. This universal for nearly every online forum. The only place I have seen avoid that in the long term is somethingawful and that's because they charge for accounts. For free account forums the tendency will always be towards enshittification.
If my natural communication method, which I have taken decades to refine and improve, breaks the rules of a forum in such a way as I am to be banned, then I really have no business being in that forum to begin with and whatever justification the mod picked out of a hat for my banning is kind of meaningless to me.
I am not needlessly acerbic, I do not pick fights, but I do respond harshly to hostile replies as noted above.
And of course most mods will just remove of ban both participants, ignoring who the aggressor is because that is the nature of hierarchy to be radically out of touch with those they have been privileged to administer over. I am fully aware of how protected bullies are in this world and really don't want to waste any energy reading about an authoritarian's opinion on my method of discourse.
Let me be clear: The ONLY site I have ever been banned from was reddit for posting 'Punching nazis is a moral good', and please tell me now if this is a violation here and I will just delete my account and leave.
Me blocking an admin does nothing to degrade the experience of others, and serves to greatly enhance my own.
Punching nazis is most definitely a moral good. We've outlined this (intolerance towards the intolerant) in our docs.
Well that's a relief. I got kicked from lemmy.world for a similar sentiment.
Was worried the infection was inescapable.
Do you game often?
That's the main use of my main rig, so yes.
Steam with Proton-GE works great. For everything else I use Heroic Games Launcher and the Linux native itch.io launcher.
Mint was the last one I tried and it was awful, really buggy and poor UX
Something isn't adding up here. I switched to mostly Linux around 2003. By 2005 it was all Linux unless I got paid for it. My wife has been only Linux since then and she doesn't really know how to use a computer and doesn't want to. Linux just works for her.
I do all my work from a Linux desktop and two Linux laptops. Well and a Steamdeck I use as a desktop when traveling. I remote into windows machines when I am using windows for jobs. Sometimes desktops, sometimes Azure virtual desktops, but my local client is always Linux.
I have an MSDN, I admin Azure instances, SQL servers, Windows Servers, and work on Windows desktops. Over the last two to three years it has been the windows machines that are the most annoying and troublesome. Linux is just easy and just works.
The Linux desktop is ready. Has been ready. Something is going on with your situation. Could be breaking old habits, could be hardware. I don't know. But saying Linux is to blame here is ridiculous.
You think it's impossible that Windows, an operating system with whole teams of people paid well to work on design and UX could be easier to use than Linux desktop which is primarily people working in their spare time?
Did I say that? I said windows has caused me more issues lately. I was replying that Linux desktop is fine. It works. Has worked for a very long time.
But since you brought it up..... No. I do not think Windows is an easier desktop to use. Depends on familiarity and what you want to do with it. They can't get single click right. They can't get multiple desktops right. They certainly do not have activities. If you are using a Gnome workflow, windows seems almost insane in comparison. Don't get me started on the ads and what this whole discussion started about with Edge trying to push itself into your way. And how about that registry system? So intuitive and useful right?
Nearly identical story here, and I agree.
Habits and hardware are definitely the big ones to overcome. I still remember how absolutely lost I felt the first couple times I tried installing slackware in the 90s. I could install/set up windows in my sleep. But then slackware dropped to an unfamiliar command prompt, I can't dir, there isn't even a C drive, and now I'm expected to configure something called xfree86. Luckily I wasn't told to use vi or I'd be stuck there to this day.
New users aren't thrown into the deep end quite like that anymore, but it's still a big change for a windows power user. So much of what you learned is not applicable or just the wrong way to do things. Mac users and Windows non-power-users seem to have a much easier time accepting the changes.
It's definitely not for everyone (is any OS?) but it's been 'ready' as a desktop OS for me since Mandrake 8 in ~2001. That's about when I ditched windows 2000 and haven't looked back.
That's hilarious. I was a full time IT admin earlier in my career and still have run Linux full time for well over a decade now. For anything proprietary, i have a qemu image.
Of course, now I'm a DevOps admin so I get play with linux all day, for $$$! Hundreds of servers of all distros! Ubuntu, Cent, RHEL, Alpine containers... My big task this year is to get off Docker/Mesos and into OCI/Kubernettes. It's going to be an incredible project.