💾 Archived View for splint.rs › gen › vet_show.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 18:11:57. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-04-19)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Linux veterans occasionally find their way from IRC to other channels, and like to take a 'realistic' attitude about how normal users couldn't possibly live outside of a telemetry-ridden environment, where they manually download random executables from the web.
These veterans once installed a wifi-driver fifteen years ago, booted up Arch Linux shortly after, and remain convinced that nobody else in the world could possibly handle the kind of emacs shortcuts they currently use to watch Youtube.
And I'm really sick of it.
What your average user - whether in an office, at home, in a school, or coming across a random computer in a hostel - actually needs, is a browser and an app store.
Give an old person a Windows computer, and it'll take a team of 15 engineers writing Active Directory policies, and signing up for a 6-month contract with some antivirus company to keep half the filth off their laptop. This is by design - the engineers in question have to justify their job, and this setup of 'virus on/ virus off', promotes a constant stream of work which can be sold to anyone with the cash to spare.
And the fun doesn't end there - someone has to talk about contracts in order to have an antivirus, then install the thing, then renew those contracts, update the licences, and install a special remote-agent so it can be mismanaged from a web-panel.
The diligent antivirus then pops up once in a while to make sure it's appreciated, and the engineer can wander over to see if he feels like working more. Failing that it's a 'false alarm' (declared after taking a sweeping look at the desktop, as if he had eyes so sharp he could see viruses wiggling between the pixels).
Ask 50 helpdesk engineers to do a full virus check and you'll be lucky to find a single one who even knows how to decompile a binary, and guess at which embedded commands might be malicious. Hashsum checks aren't available for any of the odd software companies get sold until you manage to blast your way through the sales team, who seem physically incapable of saying anything but 'yes', to any and all questions.
Viruses aren't the enemy - they're part of the show.
The alternative might be a money-saver, but it's also a wage-drain. A full office of computers running Linux Mint lands you with a boat-load of serious problems:
Old Linux veterans aren't bad people, but they are an important part of this show, and their problem is that they think they have 'experience', but they don't.
The real people who have experience are the random people who boot up a laptop, hit the 'Firefox' icon, and couldn't tell you which operating system they were using. You won't hear from them, but these people have the most valuable possible experience - specifically they experienced getting things done without seeing the computer.