DefederateLemmyMl

  • Gen𝕏
  • Engineer ⚙
  • Techie 💻
  • Linux user 🐧
  • Ukraine supporter 🇺🇦
  • Pro science 💉
  • Dutch speaker
  • 1 Post
  • 173 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 8th, 2023

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  • If your average Windows user calls tech support, they’ll get a simple answer

    They’ll get a simple answer alright. In fact, they’ll be lucky if they get any answer at all that is not reboot, retry, reinstall or some other cargo cult nonsense from some on-paper “MCSA” in a third world country.

    And sorry for going on a rant here, but Windows tech support forums are truly the shit tier of all tech support forums, because very few people actually have the skill to properly diagnose problems in Windows when something outside of the realm of expected behavior occurs. It’s all learned behaviorisms instead of understanding: reinstall your drivers! defrag your hard drive! run ipconfig /renew! clean your cache folder! delete your cookies! Never: “look in the system eventlog for an error event coming from this source, and tell me what the error code says”




  • people not knowing shit about tech is not their fault

    I don’t agree with much else of what you are saying, but you are quite right here. We should indeed not throw people under the bus because they’re not tech savvy and only know how to use Windows. They need to be defended from all those horrible anti-human and privacy invading practices by Microsoft and other Big Tech companies as well, and we should keep fighting and pushing back on those companies pushing their anti-human features, regardless of whether an alternative exists.

    BUT, ultimately Linux is the answer, and people are not wrong for pointing that out. It’s the only viable alternative that is user respecting by design. It’s the only way to free yourself from the abusive relationship between you and Microsoft, because much like an abusive partner, Microsoft will never change. So if you’re tech savvy, and you would be able to switch to Linux but for some reason you don’t, I have little sympathy for your Windows problems.





  • It was much easier to “hide” sit back then unless you were in the know in the industry.

    It wasn’t hidden. Everybody knew back in the day what an evil piece of shit he was.

    It has just been forgotten about and many current adults weren’t old enough, or even around, in the heyday of his evil empire, so he has been able to whitewash his image. My 50 year old ass remembers though. Fuck Bill Gates.






  • I’ve always thought of dependencies as equivalent to dlls. Is that right?

    Usually, but not always. Most of the times a dependency is a software library contained within a shared object file (a .so file), and that is indeed analogous to a dll.

    A dependency can be other things as well though, like a specific program that a software package depends on being present. For example, the handbrake program to reencode videos will call ffmpeg under the hood. So naturally ffmpeg is a dependency.

    Why is Linux so fiddley with dependencies?

    I don’t think it is? I mean, software depending on external shared libraries isn’t exactly a Linux only concept, and if anything I think most Linux distros’ ways of handling dependencies are superior.

    The main difference with Windows is that third party software tends to bring their own dlls for anything that’s not a standard part of Windows, which is wasteful because of duplication, and less secure because the included libraries may be out of date and contain known security holes.

    On Linux, distributions usually have every library under the sun in their repositories, managed by the package manager and kept up to date by the maintainers. As long as you stick to software included with your distro, or software packages for your specific distro, dependencies should be resolved automatically by the package manager. For example: if you download the Google Chrome .deb file, and install it with apt-get, it will pull in all the dependencies it needs to run.

    If you go outside of that, for example compiling software yourself, or downloading non-distro specific binaries, you will have to take care of dependencies yourself. Perhaps that’s what you mean with the fiddly bit.