Linux sucks, and there’s nothing you can do about it

"The UNIX command line and most programming languages are ineffective and slow tools, because they do not make use of the brain’s ability to process visual inputs quickly in parallel and contextualize large amounts of details into a cohesive idea."

"Too much reading!"

"Linux programmers are stupid."

This reads like satire. Surely this must be satire?

Golly. Persistent live usb has been a thing for like, ever right?

It makes me feel a little bit like open source projects aren't doing documentation right when someone could have easily googled for this if they only knew the right vocabulary.

But, I'm not super worried about having lost this specific person since they're so quick to call linux as a whole "crap" and developers "stupid." Maybe after undergrad and some time in the field they will come around.

Its bizarre how often I see programmers complain about CLIs given the nature of the work. A CLI is just higher-order programming. At what threshold does the author find programming an appropriate solution? Perhaps we should do everything on paper in metal filing cabinets to maximize the stimulation we provide our visual cortex.

I'm not personally averse to GUI usage. It just seems to me that complaints of "too many options" are common in regard to CLIs. And yet to me it seems that CLIs have significantly fewer practical permutations than a Turing-complete programming language.

Could this article be summed up as “someone tries to install Linux onto hardware that wasn't designed for it and did reasonably well considering”?

IMHO if you want to use linux as a day to day operating system you are better off buying it pre-installed on supported hardware from someone like Dell or System76.

That it runs on a mac at all is a testament to a volunteer community.

The argument made that everything should be in a GUI sounds like a throwback to the 90s.

I think that Microsoft’s recent efforts to improve their CLI support on Windows are a good indicator that for a certain set of problems CLIs are just less restricted.

GUIs were there first on windows if you prefer otherwise but still Microsoft needed to add decent CLI support to stay competitive.

OMG.

1. UNIX != Linux

2. Painful to you does not mean universally qualified "SUCKS". I'm at a loss what the alternative is, maybe you can't understand a CLI, or something.

3. I figured it out. Here I fixed the headline: "Understanding what the computer does is too hard SUCKS, and the only thing that can be done is to learn stuff"

Thinking one could use Linux on Apple's proprietary hardware without non-trivial problems was the first mistake. Really should have thought twice about installing Linux to an external drive on a system with it's own internal drive & bootloader too.

Surely a better solution in this case would be to run linux inside a VM?

I ran this way for a couple of years on a black macbook, and it has a few advantages, such as the VM just suspending rather than rebooting if for some reason the host OS reboots, eg to install updates.

Now, there's docker et al too.

Personally I've always found setting up any complex dual boot configuration fraught.

And linux makes some things quite complex to configure (eg sound), requiring you to look online for solutions. Unfortunately those are often in the form of rambling and often outdated forum topics, or "educational" blog posts that start with "First, an introduction to computer sound hardware ...", when all you want is the cli command to change volume.

Wow, a computer something-ist trying to be a neuroscientist.

So maybe the visual cortex is 30% of the brain, it is also very coarse and imprecise. It sometimes ignores large part of the visual field. It is very immune to noise and that's why it is imprecise. It does much processing without you being conscious and that's why there are so many "optical illusions".

On the other hand audition (when working, not my case) is very precise (sensitivity), has very good frequency selectivity, huge dynamic.

This is precisely the sort of way in which "user friendly" installation methods fail.

I have a theory that most desktop Linux users, after a number of years, end up in one of two camps:

a) giving up and going back to $PROPRIETARY_OS

b) settle on something like Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, Debian or similar whereby the system is less 'opinionated' and just gets out of your way.

Mint seems like the worst of all worlds to me.

And the poster here is insufferable. If it's supposed to be satire, it's not funny either.

This was genuinely painful.

If you want to run an OS from a removable external hard drive, you put the bootloader on the external hard drive too.

In his case, taking the easy option when he wanted a complex solution was his error. He should have selected the 'something else' option. Yes, he needed extra knowledge to pick that selection, but that is where Google is your friend.

Linux is User-Friendly. But it is very selective in choosing its friends.

Maybe this moron could have answered "no" to the question asking if he wants to install the boot loader on all drives but clearly, he's to dumb to do so just as he's too dumb to restore the uefi boot loader in os x (system settings-> syrup m startup disk). I stopped reading after that. People this clueless should not use computers without supervision especially Linux.

Can anyone positively confirm any OS that handles the scenario described here seamlessly?

It seems like a rare use case that, while feasible, is totally unsurprising that it would require a good bit of research and manual intervention.

"other entrepreneurs"

Ryan john sucks and there's nothing he can do about it ...