flamingos-cant (hopepunk arc)Laptops have soul
rumschlumpelMy current laptop survived three phones and it was already refurbished when I bought it. And my OS still gets security updates.
Buy better laptops.
I just threw Ubuntu on mine and my god it’s so much cleaner than Windows, but I have so much to learn.
Aside from the app installation process being different, what's to learn? The rest of it works like every other computer you've ever used
Installation, settings are probably something to learn. File system layout. Small things but enough of them can create a barrier to some.
If all you do is most use a web browser and bunch of electron apps, sure. But as soon as you get beyond that as a slight power user, which many are who are trying to switch
- different directory structure
- permissions / sudo
- config files instead of registry
- alternative drivers
- as you mentioned, app installs, but that’s huge. App non in snap? What’s flatpak? What’s a ppa? What’s an appimage?
- how do I encrypt my drive now? On windows I just turn on bitlocker or on Mac I just turn on filevault
- what’s gdm, I thought Ubuntu used gnome? Why is there gnome but also gnome display manager?
As someone who has helped a few people switch to Linux as their main driver, it’s usually the toughest transition for those who go beyond their web browser and tweak their OS a bit more to learn OS concepts they assumed before that they are now seeing how they can vary with a new OS.
different directory structure
For a normal user, it’s basically the same, no? When you open the file browser there are links to Documents, Desktop, etc.
- permissions / sudo
- config files instead of registry
When would the average user run into this?
alternative drivers
If you’re on Ubuntu, you click the button when it prompts you to install drivers. As long as users know to never install drivers like you would on Windows, it’s not an issue.
as you mentioned, app installs, but that’s huge. App not in snap? What’s flatpak? What’s a ppa? What’s an appimage?
Hopefully users switching to Linux know to expect software selection to be different. If you stick to your distro’s app store, you’ll be good.
how do I encrypt my drive now? On windows I just turn on bitlocker or on Mac I just turn on filevault
Don’t most distros have that in the installer?
what’s gdm, I thought Ubuntu used gnome? Why is there gnome but also gnome display manager?
What regular user is looking that deep?
Right so I started using the GUI interface for all of ten minutes, then as soon as I started looking for “how to” anything it’s all terminal commands. Especially since I switched specifically to make an environment to learn computer vision. So I spent an hour yesterday learning the difference between pip, pip3, and pipx then something with snap. Tossed all that in the "figure it out later* bucket when I realized I needed to relearn how to modify my path and what that actually means.
It’s so nice having everything accessible to me as the user instead of locked behind some windows registry I can’t look at or some oversimplified settings panel. But I’ve also got 20 years of Windows conditioning to unlearn. It can be a lot to dive into at all once.
Having said all that, I’m excited and enjoying it
If you’re playing with computer vision, you’re going way further than the typical computer user. My parents, for example, just need an office suite, a browser, and a file browser. My brother also needs a few games to work, but otherwise is the same. My SO also needs streaming stuff to work.
All of that can be handled without touching the terminal or leaving the built-in app store. Even a gamedev setup could largely be done that way as well (Godot, blender, and a 2D graphics editor). Quite a lot of people could switch today and not need any hands-holding.
Yeah, some things require more extensive knowledge, but the common things are simple enough.
mycodesucksTell me about it. My daily driver is 12 years old and the only time I even remotely feel it is on websites designed by imbeciles.
Mine is ~8yo and it’s still a solid dev machine.
A Linux laptop has, like, three souls
Inside you there are 3 GRUB entries
Buy better laptops.
More like, get rid of trash OSes
Dell Business :0
MacBook
Impressive longevity
chemical_cutthroatLmao, that’s a Major Payne reference in that last line.
🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 I only recently sent my old as fuck Windows Xp laptop that didn’t hold a charge anymore and had to be plugged in just to be turned on off to a recycler. I still worked. Probably coulda slapped a new battery in it if I could have found one. I used to use it for WarDriving back in the very early days of wifi when everything was either just open or using an easily broken encryption method. Shit made me feel like one of those heist movie hackers even though all I was doing was mapping where I could get free internet. 😎
I still have a working XP laptop from 2004. I use it to play music at parties in my man cave, though since I added a bluetooth reciever to the installation it hardly gets used anymore. It works great though, as long as you don't go on the internet.
A laptop you can take apart and put back together and it’ll be fine. You take apart a phone and put it back together and it’s like haunted now. You can get it wet anymore, and it rattles sometimes. It says it doesn’t like its new screen, so it’s not gonna let you unlock it with your face anymore. It doesn’t trust you since you took it apart. The buttons feel different now. They still work, but they feel… different.
You just don’t know how to do it right!
(I’m replying this before anyone else does.)
It was a joke, relax.
(This too.)
DaveMost laptops these days are not that far away from the glued together phones. It used for be you could swap out a hard drive or RAM in a laptop no problem, I even had a macbook way back that you could do it with like one screw. These days I won’t touch other people’s laptops anymore (I’m lucky enough to have a framework where I can, and have, upgraded it).
edgemaster72This person and I have had wildly different laptop experiences.
Yours actually have legs?
donWell duh. How else do you expect it to use chopsticks? Like cmon now.
And an intense will to live
ObiIn french the word “marcher” can be used either for “walking” or for “functioning/working”.
The classic prank was to call random numbers in the phonebooth and ask “does your fridge work/walk?” Pretending you’re trying to sell them a new one and when they’d say yes to get rid of you, you’d suggest them to buy it some shoes (damn weren’t we smart in the 90s).
All that to say, there’s a joke around that concept somewhere in there.
We have the same joke in English: ‘Is your fridge running?’
In English the joke is “is your fridge running?” followed by “well you better run after it!”
Haha! I laughed. (My language is French)
I don’t know what I read, is it a copypasta
Laptops are always so much more Fucked than phones in my experience. A laptop is like a beautiful horse that wants nothing more than to break all of its legs. A decently solid android phone will act normal. A laptop is a living creature. It has weight to it. A laptop breathes and produces body heat. And it wants to die badly. Mobile phones are not sentient like that & that’s why they don’t experience mental illness. A phone problem is like “out of storage :(” or “charging port broke”. Laptops will cough weakly as they fade in and out of consciousness. You will hold a laptop in your arms and it’s like “I can’t feel my legs”. And you tell it girl you never had any.
That motherfucker should lay off the DMT
I did have a laptop like that. Shit died on me for the last time THREE times. It would do the most spectacular graphical glitches and bluescreens, I’d say “aww fuck its over this time.” Six months later I’d get bored, fish it out of the closet, and it’d run for another year before dramatically shitting the bed again.
What kind of crap laptop did you buy?
It was a giant-screen ASUS laptop probably from 2013-ish, specs were decent for when it came out. I recieved it used from my dad around 2019.
ASUS
Say no more FAM
Lmao what have y’all devolved into?
It’s not that I don’t like it, I’m just scared
It’s not that I don’t like it, I’m just scared
“This is amazing. Hold me until I stop shaking?”
There’s definitely a ring of truth to this. Not for me personally - as others have commented, I know what I’m doing and tend to look after my tech well - but for plenty of friends and family who are seemingly incapable of taking care of a real computer with a desktop OS.
Happens all the time: they buy a new laptop, probably without asking for advice first, and within weeks they’re asking for help because it’s on its last legs. Two dozen random apps open as soon as it boots, the desktop is a landfill of icons, normal actions cause error messages, etc.
Some people just can’t be trusted with full control over their hardware.
I miss the old days when you needed to actually understand the machine to use it. Using the terminal wasn’t something reserved for “tech wizards,” it was the primary way to use the machine. Things weren’t as capable, but at least the average user understood it. Also, back in those days, devices came with schematics and whatnot so you could repair it yourself, and many did! It was a magical time when people cared enough about their stuff to learn how it works.
It’s tempting to agree but I think we should be careful about gatekeeping technology through that kind of nostalgic lens. The improvements to ease of use in computing have, broadly, benefited everyone.
You can be a good driver without knowing how to rebuild an engine.
There was a good middle ground, and we passed it like 20 years ago
Sure. My point is that if everyone understood a bit more about the tools they use, they’d have fewer problems, need to spend less money, and get more out of them, and that goes for pretty much everything.
If you know how to do basic car maintenance, you could swap a few parts now and them and save the trips to the mechanic for larger problems. It’s not hard and the tools for most jobs are minimal. If people were capable of that, they’d prioritize things like Right to Repair, which benefits everyone and can help reduce waste (i.e. prevent harm to the planet).
Likewise for laptops and phones. You shouldn’t need to replace the whole thing just because the screen got cracked or the storage is going bad. If the average person was capable of basic repairs, repair would be a much more common thing. It wasn’t that long ago that places carried computer parts (not just drives and RAM, but board level components like caps and connectors). I get that things are more complicated these days, but if people understood how their devices worked a bit better, they’d demand that tl be available at shops and repairs would be cheap.
The same goes for software. If someone knows how the system is oit together (kernel, userland, apps, etc) at a high level, they can do a much better job diagnosing problems and determine if an issue is likely hardware or software, and be able to follow guides online to diagnose further.
I’m not saying everyone should be an expert on everything, I’m saying I wish people knew a bit more than “press this button to see funny videos.” Teach it in schools to demystify things a bit, so people feel confident in digging in and learning more.
That’s fair. A little bit of a deeper understanding can indeed go a long way in terms of knowing how to take care of something properly, not to mention saving on minor repairs!
And for something like computers, it can dramatically reduce the effectiveness of scams. If the support person asks you to do something fishy, you’ll immediately recognize it’s a scam if you k ow a few things about how computers work (or hopefully you’ll never get in that situation).
Dharma Curious (he/him)I think this is more of a bloated ass windows problem than the form factor. It’s so fucking heavy that it kills the machine, crushed under the weight of an inferior OS
I have no idea what this means
Tech illiterate people create their own problems and blame the machine. Smartphones largely prevent you from messing things up too badly.
ekZepp
kehetMobile phones are so locked down from regular users that they usually just physically break before the operating system becomes unusably slow.
Laptops can be destroyed by software. Give a regular user permission to install programs, and suddenly there are a random purple monkey sitting on the desktop telling jokes and multiple crypto miners.
Oh no, I haven’t thought of BonziBuddy in a long time!
Anecdotal, but I’ve never had a phone break on me. Every phone I’ve replaced still technically worked, but was just older. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of people are the same.
In my experience it’s the opposite. It starts behaving unreasonably slow way before it physically breaks, unless I do something very stupid, and there is no way to free it from creeping bloat or even diagnose what’s actually wrong. Old laptop will behave like new again when I get it clean and install fresh OS on it. With phone there is nothing can be done, I have like 5 perfectly working old phones that just became too slow at performing the same tasks
Not really destroyed though. Do a fresh install, or rollback to a previous OS image, and everything is back to normal.
That’s just windows, install mint, breathe new life into your old companion.
And going forward, for even more resiliency, prioritize reparability, like Frameworks.
I’ve got a 23-year-old netbook that slowly perished under the weight of windows. I’ve got some lightweight Linux distro on it and its absolutely fucking fine.
I resurrected it specifically to use as a digital reference guide for electronics, and to program my new Arduino. It can even barely load Firefox (exclusive) OR play videos!
Tldr is: Buy old electronics. Use better software.
I wonder how many people glossed over “netbook” without understanding what your referring to That’s incredible 🤣
Captain AggravatedThe wild thing to me is a computer from 2005 running (a fresh install of) Windows XP feels more snappy and responsive than a computer from 2025 running Windows 11. Everything about the newer machine is somewhere between 4 and 10,000 times more powerful; processor clock speed, core count, cache capacity, RAM capacity, RAM speed, main bus speed, storage speed. I mean, that alone, in 2005 SATA hard disk drives were basically the only option, NVMe SSDs are considerably faster. But how is it that machines felt snappy back in the day but are now utterly useless?
never forget, oh poweruser, what blind enshittification has robbed from you.
Perhaps we can substitute “Abandon all optimizations, ye who enter here”?
reverse it, “abandon all bloat, ye who downgrade”