I Have Decided to Stop Supporting My Family's Non-Linux Devices
misc-stuff.terraaeon.com
misc-stuff.terraaeon.com
> So, when my mother, sister, brother, or anyone else comes to me begging to have his or her computer fixed
Sorry to be blunt, but you sound like an terrible person with an over-dimensioned ego.
If you do not want to support your family, fine - no need to announce it to the world. You are free to do that of course, but you have to bear the consequences of people saying "what a [put your favourite expletive here]" instead of "what a wise person to battle against mighty [put your least-favourite tech here]".
I support my parents with their tech even if it is often full of things I would not have used. I roll my eyes up and fix it. And ask them not to do this anymore, and they still sometimes do.
This is not that different from them telling me, 40 years back, to not do this and that. And me still doing it. Boy, I am really, really glad they did not decide to stop supporting me until I grow up :)
Honestly, read what you wrote again and take a step back to say "ok, this sounds really bad".
PS. when you gain back a lot of time for not supporting these technical noobs, make sure to fix your site that has plenty of problems - it does not look good for an "Itinerant Engineer" who built the impressive number of 11 web sites.
Not everyone is Windows or MacOS expert. I do programming for 30 years. Las time I used Windows was 15 years ago. I never used Mac (maybe like 3 hours total).
> If you do not want to support your family, fine - no need to announce it to the world
It's the difference between being willing to give your kid a ride to sports practice vs a crack den.
You do want to support your kid, just not enable them if they're going to be doing bad things.
Why deal with that? No thanks.
Not all "bad things" are equivalent, as I hope you are aware.
However these are all life decisions, whether to be a helpless tech illiterate end-user or at least know how to navigate around a computer. If you want to learn how to use a Linux distro, then I will help you learn a valuable skillset, but if you want me to enable you to become a helpless end-user who doesn't know how to troubleshoot basic problems then I refuse to do it in my free time.
At work I'd help anybody, but that's because I'm being paid to be helpful to my team and reach its maximum efficiency and work isn't the right place to stand by your ideals.
Posting something on your own blog is hardly announcing to the world. Maybe you should have closed the tab, instead of announcing your disdain for the author to the world.
Ooh, new idiom! The dot product of "roll my eyes" and "roll up my sleeves": to privately steel oneself to repetitive, ridiculous, and preventable work.
>This is not that different from them telling me, 40 years back, to not do this and that. And me still doing it
That's exactly it. The patterns and behaviours that they yelled at and fought with us about were harder to adopt than those which they demonstrated with quiet grace.
Or "oh, non-native speaker of English"!
> The patterns and behaviours that they yelled at
I do not know how your childhood was but mine was without yells, but with extremely patient parents with two energetic boys.
Said boys now try to be alike to their own children, and understand what parents went through. So they avoid being the assholes who will say "if you do not move to linux, fuck off" (this is how I read the article, at least, with my limited understanding of English)
This is either satire or a really cringeworthy personality.
That's from the doctors article but the linked one clearly says he has an Android phone. He smells like a younger Stallman wannabe.
It's a complete waste of time to roll back updates and drivers because Windows does something stupid by itself or makes very clickable popups to fool people.
It's 2021 and Linux supports 99.999999% of software on the planet. Use it.
For the record, I use Linux since 1994 when I did some dev for the kernel (not anything fancy, just some variations of code for a NIC). I use it since on all my servers.
I also try, about once a year , to use it on the desktop for a week. It is pure torture, a system that is not even half baked for interactive usage.
You can't seriously claim that when there are lots ( millions? Tens of millions? Who knows) of people running various Linux distros as daily drivers. Hardware support can be spotty in some places depending on the specific hardware vendor ( but funnily enough old stuff works better under Linux than under Windows), and some things might not be as polished, but "pure torture" and "not even half baked" is a terrible exaggeration doing nobody any favours.
For the record, I've been running Ubuntu since 2017 on a Dell XPS 13 ( not developer edition). I have the occasional bug ( mostly with third-party stuff like Teams, or the VPN client breaking my DNS config (it also does than on macOS), but sometimes if i connect more than 4 Bluetooth devices reconnecting one of them takes ~10s instead of <3s), but overall it works, the tooling i can ise natively ( Dockers, etc.) is awesome and I'm happy with it. And anecdotally, I've had less issues than some colleagues with Windows (also Dells) or macOS.
Linux is great from a terminal. Using it as a daily OS with GUI is terrible. Every time I talk to someone who claims otherwise they end up dropping some sort of “sure, well _x_ took some work” or “well I don’t really care about _x_ anyway”.
Maybe not bamboo splinters under your nails torture, but extremely unpleasant.
There are OSes and DEs designed to be easy for newcomers ( Pop OS, Cinnamon, etc.).
Again, it isn't perfect, but no desktop OS is.
If it's a child asking for help, obviously then just help them, and teach them how to use problem solving techniques if they're old enough.
If they're adults, then you send them to a local IT support shop, or charge them normal rates for your own time. When the cost of ownership begins to exceed the technical literacy of users, the market may start to correct for some of the exploitation of consumer ignorance.
A large number of adults have no business owning anything more complex than a rotary phone.
It's immensely liberating to cut loose the users in your life when they begin to treat you as free tech support. It's also a really cool thing when people start to think for themselves and learn really basic troubleshooting by searching our watching videos.
Even more liberating, though, is to take a principled stand, whether it's over privacy, free software, or whatever aspect of tech you feel strongly about. Sorry, I won't even visit for family dinners if you've got a Facebook portal or Amazon echo in your house. You can opt out of the panopticon, and I'll gladly give my time helping you do that, but other people don't get to opt me in to unaccountable surveillance networks.
This guy's friends and family aren't entitled to his time in service of Microsoft products. Good on him for drawing a line in the sand.
>>Sorry to be blunt, etc...
Never do anything for free, and don't bend your principles or allow yourself to be used, even by family. The world would be a better place by far if fewer people got taken advantage of, and more people held to their values.
Or, y'a know, they upgraded their system but the new version of the kernel isn't compatible with the bluetooth device unless they patch the bios, but the bios patching tool from the vendor somehow destroys the grub entries due to an unrelated bug, requiring them to boot in a recovery disk, mount the encrypted volume, map the lvm volumes, chroot and ...
I've used Linux exclusively on the desktop for almost 20 years. Has it gotten much better? Yes. Are there still deal intractable problems for normal users which aren't Linux's fault but nonetheless represent deal breakers? Also yes.
Otoh my mom was on ubuntu for about 18 months and switched back to windows. She wanted to do more with it, e.g. install photoshop, scan documents (this was pre ubuntu coming out with simple scan or whatever, when xsane was still state of the art), yada yada.
For relatives who just need a stable set-it-and-forget-it computer, linux is fine. For wannabe "power users", they have to be interested in investing the time to get over the learning curve. That's a more evangelical sell. I'm kind of with the author, although am a little less strident about it - "ehh, I haven't used windows in 20 years or so, but let me google that for you and see if I find anything you can try" is my usual approach.
Plus while GNU and Linux user-level ABIs are stable, and LSB means that portability is nearly seamless (except if the GNU or Linux part is swapped itself), other APIs do break, especially when it comes to desktop elements. Snaps and Flatpaks accentuate the problem to the point that even if the system and app uses the same desktop environment (GTK on GTK / KDE-QT on KDE-QT), it looks like out of place.
More importantly, Microsoft have focused on accessibility to the point that it can be navigated by keyboard, mouse or (recently) touch alone. GNOME settings (aka control center) don't navigate well on keyboard, not even allowing selecting search results (https://www.debian.org/releases/bullseye/amd64/release-notes...).
Ever since I learned that something like 98% of printers sold in the past 5 years or so support driverless printing with IPP, my printer woes have largely gone away. Its still more of a pain than would be ideal, but at least you dont have to track down some 32-bit only driver that was only ever released for Red Hat or something in order to print.
Actually a big part of it is that its community is full of people like this.
...and a huge number of other reasons, but having a high probability of encountering a condescending asshole whenever you engage with the community certainly doesn't help.
So, Windows user. I spend 0% of my time in front of Windows computers and still wouldn’t refuse to help a non-Linux user. Also zoom is available for Linux. Hypocrite.
The last time I tried (perhaps 8 or 10 years ago) the problem turned out to be that Windows insisted on controlling DNS settings that were never going to work. Somebody else had to find this out and fix it after I'd banged on it for an hour or more and failed to figure out what was going on in Windows' rats-nest of system config. It was then that I realised that I should never try to help Windows users ever again: the likelihood is I'd do more harm than good. There've been a couple of newer releases of Windows since those days, so the situation's only got worse.
Still, I don't have much good to say about Linux either. I think on Ubuntu you can manage to get 3 different ways of network configuration all half-working and not working at same time not being visible to each other...
tl;dr: Most people won't know the difference once the basics are working.
I did teach my family about adblockers though, which goes some way to reducing one vector for malware.
This year me mother told me that after 20 years she had to use Windows 10 (instead of her usual XFCE desktop) somewhere. It was horrible, she told me. She didn't got it to do what she wanted and it bothered her with annoying ads and other nonsense.
As you can imagine, this made me feel - somewhat smugly - vindicated.
As the years when by, it became easier and easier to say I honestly didn’t have a clue how Windows worked anymore. It helps that my nearest relatives are 8 hours away by car.
Eventually they stopped calling for support. They weren’t interested in switching to something I could help with.
I could have been more pushy, but I have enough problems with the world that I don’t have the energy to go on a religious crusade to make people use an operating system that is unsupported by most consumer repair places.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170106/10163236419/fbi-i...
I’m the only person in my rather wide friend group that has any Linux experience and most of that is with servers.
Anyway, Mac are sufficently unixy that i don't have that much issues. I recommand chromebooks for non tech-savy people now and i did install linux mint on my grandmother PC shortly before she passed away (no relation hopefully), it was great and i had a remote access without installing a scam enabler. If you don't mind explaining things to your grandmother, this is a great idea. I did shortcut her three apps (and did aliases in the terminal to show her how i work usually, i don't think she ever used ctrl-alt-T after that day but still, great times). 100% would do again.
This could just as well be used as an argument why the homeless/drug addicts/etc shouldn't get help. "If we don't help them, we're encouraging them to see the light and take care of themselves". No, probably not, we're just being assholes.
It's fine to tell people (even people you know and love) that you won't play support for their computer troubles because you're busy or hate using Windows, but framing it as "I'm actually helping you by not helping you" is weird.
Most of their issues nowadays are with their routers but they know how to solve those problems: a reboot or reset. I have to help my mom with a reset. That's about all the family tech support I have to do these days.
HN can complain about Apple all they want but for non-computer savvy consumers it's a very good experience.
We tried Ubuntu and it has been a tremendous success. I even found my sister-in-law happily using LibreOffice on it one day.
People's reservations towards Linux are completely unfounded (nowadays).
No? Then why is it okay to encourage it when it's Microsoft? This is how deeply ingrained brand loyalty is, to the point that like Stockholm's syndrome people will think up any excuse to enable their oppressor.
How is it in your benefit in any way to keep cheerleading the corporate behemoth, rather than plucky newcomer who only has your freedom and best interests in mind?
I've slowly started saying the same thing with MacOS as it's getting longer and longer since I used it, but I'm still relatively competent from helping colleagues out.
I did install Linux on my partners machine ever since a forced windows update (I think it was to windows 10?) bricked her previous laptop.
For me, part of it is I'm generally unhappy having to fix windows machines. They make me somewhat frustrated and I find it relatively simple to diagnose and fix any Linux problems, even on "foreign" distros.
It painted a grim picture in my head about what kind of character he is. I honestly couldn't tell whether it was satire.
This achieves nothing except make your family think less of you. Get over yourself.
I appreciate the author’s privacy preserving preferences, but I almost always recommend to non-tech family and friends that they consider getting a Chromebook or iPad as their only non-phone device. I don’t think that most people need a general purpose device so why not just make everyone’s lives easier.
The Chromebook recommendation may seem crazy from a privacy viewpoint, but if you show people how to configure their Google account to only store YouTube history for 30 days while setting all other data retention to zero days, use Duck Duck Go, turn off location, and use the web version of Proton Mail and Calendar then people have a system that is cheap, useable, and is not so bad from a privacy perspective. I have many different computer systems (4 laptops running Linux, 3 MacBooks, iPad), but use a small Lenovo Duet Chromebook with my recommended setup for much of my casual web browsing, reading eBooks, and using streaming media. I accept any criticism for using Google services, but they do have useful services (I love GCP, and use Hetzner, AWS, and Azure as second choices) and with some care I feel like I can use Google in a reasonably privacy respecting way.
1) Get your grandmother/grandfather onto Linux. Set up their facebook and show them how to upload photos they scanned in at Walmart. (This is level 1. If you run into problems here, you're not ready for harder levels).
2) Get your parents to use it. Show them how to install programs from the app store, like Chrome, and get them set up with turbotax, youtube, banking, etc. They'll probably want mahjong or something, so show them how to install that.
3) (Final boss) Get your semi-computer-literate cousins to use Linux. They've been using Windows since childhood. They know how to install games via Steam. Show them how to use WINE/Proton, how to use LibreOffice to write book reports, how to use GIMP to tough up their photos. Show them how to upgrade Java and Minecraft.
This being on front page is just fucked up.
Here are recurrent issues:
* printing (hplip): paper might come now or tomorrow
* UI changes
* UEFI boot destroyed by an Ubuntu minor upgrade
At least running Flash is not a problem anymore.
The good side: no hardware upgrade required for years.
This, but I'd argue it's not limited to Ubuntu, or even to Linux.
For the desktop environment, I've been using Cinnamon with my family, since it's ostensibly most similar in the UI metaphor to Windows. That's luckily been a nonissue.
The problem has been Web browsers - looking specifically at Firefox. My mom and my grandmother had pretty big upsets when Firefox released Australis, and Photon knocked my grandmother off the Internet completely (she suffers from dementia and isn't able to comprehend changes in her environment anymore).
It doesn't have to be that way. My dad is still using SeaMonkey, and has almost completely avoided this problem - the UI has been largely consistent since the Netscape 4 days.
So my feeling is that if you're claiming to represent and evangelise that community, using obstinate tribalism to justify commoditising your familial love isn't the way to win hearts and minds. Seems, to me, like a way to perpetrate some pretty terrible stereotypes.
Computers aren't inherently useful, or good. They are just boxes with a number inside. If we use them to make people we love happy, only then are they useful and good.
Reliance happens because you demonstrate both the willingness and knowledge to fix something. I'm still willing, but I'm utterly lost in front of a Windows 10 PC. That is what now makes people less likely to reach out to me for help.
I once had an interesting conversation with a chap who wanted to install Windows on his tablet. He said it would be easier to configure Wifi.
I asked him if he knew how to configure Wifi on Windows. He did not.
People's connection do Windows is not really explained by familiarity or ease of use.
I don’t think it’s naive, but the way it’s being presented as, “I’m doing this for your own good” is obstinate and frustrating in a way I wouldn’t want to be towards my friends and family.
Everyone is comfortable with this arrangement.
Newbie question: In the corporate world, where for instance people need to run QuickBooks, what would be the solution? Is there a way to wrap QuickBook in a container/emulator?
Microsoft tried it with System Restore. Of course because it's Microsoft they somehow made using it worse than not using it.
Oh dear, however will they recover from this?
> I have no illusions that by writing this article I will be firing the first shot in the war of the nerds against big tech.
Really? Ego much? Plenty of shots have been fired for decades.
> I spend probably 2% or less of my computer time now in front of Windows computers. I use Zoom a little and rarely play two Windows PC games.
Good for you, but don't hold others to that. If they use Windows 100% of the time then that's their choice.
If you can't sell Linux on its benefits then I really doubt refusing to help your loved ones with Windows issues is going to change their minds. They'll just find help elsewhere and likely despise Linux users like you more.
You're reading this incorrectly. This means they don't think what they say next.
They will just Google it themselves on their Windows or MacOS machine, rather than installing whatever 'Linux' distro you want them to.
Why waste time installing a 'Linux' distro when WSL exists and they can continue to use Windows but have a Linux ecosystem sitting in a VM.
> If we wait much longer, we may lose Linux as a viable option.
Exactly. it's called Fuchsia and it is going to replace Android and ChromeOS. Better hurry up then.
> But, I can no longer help my friends and family members to get into bed with the big-tech python that is slowly unhinging its jaw in preparation for devouring them. If they choose to lie down, I can do nothing about it, but I can refuse to continue helping them into bed!
Googling will help them instead and you don't need to 'install Linux' for that. So what is your point?