Can you evaluate the directory tree of a tar without decompressing? Not sure if gzip/bzip2 preserve that.

How tf does one do that

It’s free?

Did you respond to the right comment? I was trying to say that instructing new/novice users to disable snap updates is probably a bad idea.

Does anyone genuinely prefer Windows for a reason that makes sense? Or are they just a captive audience?

unless you completely disable [snap updates], which is hardly trivial for a new user

Tbh it probably shouldn’t be trivial for new users to disable updates. I’ve seen way too many Windows/macOS users running a years out-of-date version of Chrome.

Turns out IBM is three hot messes in a trenchcoat and always has been.

International, business, and machines?

It uninstalled a bunch of dependent packages too, including my graphics driver. I probably could have looked through the apt history and rolled them all back, but I don’t remember how to do that off the top of my head, and reinstalling took about 20 minutes.

It uninstalled a bunch of dependent packages too, including my graphics driver :(

Ah, how could I have forgotten the legion of MSFT contract employees scouring… fucking… furaffinity for that sweet, delectable anti-Linux propaganda lmao

Because Microsoft cares so much about an 18.6K-member community called “linuxmemes” on a small federated Reddit alternative known for being filled with die-hard Linux fans and furries?

Not even, man. I accidentally ran sudo apt remove python3 instead of sudo apt remove python3-pip last week.

I just copied my files to a flash drive and reinstalled Ubuntu lol

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage?time=2017..latest

I’m not extremely familiar with it, but I think X11 qualifies. I think it was determined that HDR support would be basically impossible to implement.

I said “fine”, not “flawless” haha. I don’t think your experience is invalid, just that it is verifiably atypical. If your experience were commonplace, nobody would use it.

WSL works fine. The only issue I’ve ever had with it pertains to mouse weirdness with SDL, and I had the same exact issue in a level 2 VM due to the way they handle mouse input. I still use it all the time when I’m not working in Linux for one reason or another.

More importantly, that’s not the point: bringing up WSL already means we’re talking about at most 1% of Windows users. You’re failing to consider the user experiences of

1. the person who can’t tell you the difference between an OS and a web browser (usually also the person that thinks pressing the power button on the monitor turns off the PC)
2. the prolific email answerer, who generally refuse to use anything other than Gmail (see person 1) or Outlook (bonus points if they still have an Exchange server with a custom “lastlame.com” domain they set up before the dot-com bubble burst)
3. the godmother of lost kitten posters and printed-out recipes (LibreOffice doesn’t have Comic Sans or WordArt, and my beige-plastic printer from 2001 is difficult enough to use on Windows!)
4. the Gamer™, who would be pissed to find out they can’t install Razer spyware to make their $500 in peripherals induce seizures to the beat of skibidi toilet
5. the Nvidia user, who wouldn’t have that bad of an experience these days, but has heard enough horror stories to not even consider it
6. the artist (unless the state of drawing tablet support has changed recently; I haven’t checked)
7. the hi-fi boyz (this post was brought to you by HDR gang)

THESE people represent a strong majority of PC users, and they all have reason (good or bad) to avoid Linux. The fact of the matter is, if you’re a programmer like me or yourself, your opinion is skewed strongly towards Linux because the last 20 years of development were mostly fueled by the Android kernel and enterprise/datacenter deployments, both of which disproportionately benefit our use case.

I don’t think anyone is deranged enough to call Windows “perfect”. It’s just the most supported operating system by virtue of being the most widely used operating system. And it will likely stay that way until enough people like us show up in the usage statistics for manufacturers to consider first-class Linux support.

My laptop camera still doesn’t work on Linux lol

I’ve spent 0 minutes trying to fix it, but in my defense, that’s exactly as long as I should have to spend fixing it, and it’s exactly as long as I had to think about it on Windows.

I’ve used Java 21 pretty extensively, and it’s still comically bad compared to various alternatives, even apples-to-apples alternatives like C#. The only reason to use Java is that you’ve already been using Java.

This is exactly the “popular => bad” mentality that needs to die. Good products are good—and perhaps more importantly, bad products are bad—irrespective of their popularity. Linux is a masterpiece as a result of millions of hours of thoughtful and rigorous engineering, not the absence of its wide adoption on desktop. Windows is a dumpster fire as a result of millions of hours of reckless code vomit, not its ubiquity on desktop. See also: the Android operating system you know and (if I had to guess) love.