Probably because you associate more with lemmy, I think most lemmy users use linux

And recent fumbling of msft with recall

It’s not, I’ve been using Linux for 20 years and it’s been gradually getting more and more exposure on the main media. I think there was a huge push with Steam Machines and then another one with Proton, then every Windows screw up bumps it a little more. We’re probably going to get another bump in popularity in a short while when Windows 11 enables the new feature that will take screenshots of everything you do (credit cards, passwords, etc) and use an AI to search through them.

Meanwhile I’m here still stuck in vim

It’s such an old laptop to feature in an article. I even opened the image URL to see if it’s one How to Geek just had on file they used. The photo was uploaded last year

That’s a logical fallacy, all dogs are animals does not imply that all animals are dogs. Even if all programmers you know use Windows that could still mean that all Linux users are programmers.

That being said several relatives use Linux because I refused to help with IT unless they had Linux, and since then they mostly hadn’t needed IT support. So it’s not true that all Linux users are programmers, but a good percentage of us are.

There’s some hardcore conflation going on that assumes that people with technical skills will tend to be good at everything, or that they’ll gravitate towards the uber-geeky stuff.

In my experience it’s a very wide spectrum. Lots of programmers are strictly focused on the language they use and don’t care to know anything about the OS, or networking, even computers. They are definitely not jacks of all trades.

There are people who can do programming as well as system administration and build a PC and build some book shelves and so on. But that’s a very specific type of person who’s a tinkerer and happens to be into programming, it’s not because they’re a programmer.

In addition to the perception that you have to be “good at computers” (aka a programmer) to use Linux, in my experience a lot of Linux media outlets (websites, YT channels, podcasts, etc) tend to be heavy on advanced features and tools without much explanation in layman’s terms and tend to be geared towards an IT professional/hobbyist audience, which can reinforce that stereotype among those (like me) who are not.

Most of the programmers I know (including myself) use Linux or BSD, but that all depends on who you associate with. A lot of companies are purely Windows shops and others just throw their programmers mac books and call it a day. At my last company I was only briefly allowed to use Linux until they decided it was no good as I couldn’t use whatever resource intensive corporate garbage security software of the year they bought.

Linux use among devs is much higher than gen pop.

survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/#section-most-popula…

Keep in mind, this adds up to more than 100% because it wasn’t an exclusive choice question, it was multiple.

Maybe with zRAM and a bit of swap it could run quite ok 🤷

I have 3GB of RAM on my PC running Linux Mint, using LibreWolf, it works pretty great for me, I mean I can’t open 100 tabs, but 10-15 is possible

I’ve tried to use Fedora Workstation in VM (GNOME Boxes) with only 1GiB RAM. And it is even usable and UI is responsible for GNOME and Firefox, but applications start more slowly. All those at cost of higher CPU usage. Probably it performs well because Fedora uses swap on ZRam, and it makes the system more reliable.

I’ve tried Firefox limited to 1 GB for a laugh. It’s usable. It won’t do many tabs at the same time but it’s usable.

You can actually go lower than that but you’ll start to run into limitations with YouTube videos etc.

There are also other browsers out there that are more light-weight but perhaps not as feature-full as Firefox. Giving up extensions alone reduces a lot of complexity. If you fire up the package installer on any Linux distro and search for “browser” you’ll find a ton. There aren’t many engines but there are a lot of browsers.

Im using a 4gb laptop with Xfce, and its definitely struggling sometimes. Even though it’s usable, I doubt 2gb would be enough

There’s Linux dists that can only requires less than 200 MB of RAM. Absolute Linux for an example, has a minimum system requirement of 64 MB RAM. Plenty of space left for memory hungry softwares like a browser.

Lynx 4 Life!

That’s what palemoon is for. It wouldn’t be my first choice, but if you don’t have the RAM to run crysis librewolf on high it’ll work.

And to use the computer without being bombarded by ads

Helped my SO fix Sims 4 on her W11 laptop recently; lock screen ads, start menu ads, pre-installed bloatware begging for money

I even asked how she deals with all of that and she basically said “I dunno it just does that, if you can make it stop that’d be nice ig but just get Sims to worl for now”

Needless to say I got Sims 4 to work (removing cachedir did the trick) AND uninstalled the bloatware and turned off ad-related settings

I find it amazing that so many distros with volunteers manage to curate a vast software ecosystem, reasonably successfully and yet some of the largest companies on the planet, worth more than $1T each cannot manage to find the resources to do it efficiently.

Imagine firing up a cmd or ps prompt in Windows and tying in: msiexec install adobe-hipster-app and it just works.

what does she use for money management?

As if I needed more reasons to love Stephen Fry!

invidious.materialio.us/watch?v=cT7Vl4UpCEM

I am so, so close to doing the same. Still have a small partition carved out for CoD and Windows. I just find myself booting in to it less and less.

Thank goodness MicroVision seems to be keen on continuing to flog that dead horse with a Warzone focus, means I can finally be free.

Only thing keeping my windows partition alive is the pain it seems to be to set up sim racing gear and games and servers on Linux.

This goes hard

Same here, I work in the arts and can’t code a thing, but I use Arch (btw) as my daily driver.

If I recall correctly Arch has … ssh into wifey’s laptop … python installed out of the box.

Run up a console and type python, and hit enter. Type in print (“Hello World”) and hit enter. There you go!

If you lack a python: $ yay -S python.

It was my first Linux distro after using Microsoft stuff for ages and let me tell you: it was a big mistake. It was absolutely confusing, had to use terminal for so many things with even msdos commands that I forgot that existed, broke it 3 times by just trying to automount the other drivers and a host of other things.

End up switching to Linux mint and the transition went much smoother after that. I’m going back to it eventually though. I actually like it a lot.

How do you do that in python…

print("Hello World")

# Load sys library for exiting with status code
import sys

def sayHelloWorld(outPhrase: str="Hello World"):
    # Main function, print a phrase and return NoneType
    print(outPhrase)
    return None

if __name__=="__main__":
    # Provide output and exit cleanly when run from shell
    sayHelloWorld()
    sys.exit(0)
else:
    # Exit with rc!=0 when not run from shell
    sys.exit(1)

Gnome is so much more cozy than windows

I have no formal tech background, but I’m pretty damn good with it. And I like Arch and Debian with XFCE.

Ooh, does Linux have good open source video editing? I remember back in the day that was tricky. (Or I am misremembering.)

Really? I have migrated to Fedora Linux and have had 0 issues playing games. Literally just installed steam then heroic launcher for my games on GOG and Epic. I did have a little issue get ea games to load but that was as my as blocker blocked ea games from fetching the librsry. Which in fair EA faorness EA sucks and should be vlocked.

Because they live with old news and don’t update tech news knowledge as often as tech savy people do.

Because installing a different operating system than the one that came pre installed is a non zero amount of effort.

Terminal inputs seems like coding. Back in the day you can mess with everything by coding. Having to spend time on forums and searching Google to fix problems that are Terminal inputs only is not something people want to do and what people are passionate about a thing or it is their hobby do.

Most people use what is in front of them, works, and what they are use too. I don’t have time to fix the wifi issue on my 10 year old linux laptop I just plugged it in. Other option is to reinstall windows every 6 months

The problem solving though?

I have my Boomer dad using Linux Mint on his laptop, but he was still using Windows on his desktop PC.

Then it updated to Windows 11 and he HATES it and asked me for help to put Linux Mint on his desktop as well.

This is a real estate agent in his 70s who needs help making scans and downloading email attachments.

Defintiely! I recently bought a used Thinkpad and slapped Pop!_OS on it for my father-in-law. He’s 73 and he’s loving it! He proudly tells his friends that he is now “a part of a computer revolution”.

I don’t know any programming languages but can navigate around Linux, both TUI and GUI.