Comment on Microsoft is not done yet: more ads spotted in latest Windows 11 build - gHacks Tech News

• M500@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I think about this sometimes. What stuff can’t you do in a Linux GUI that an average person would be able to do in Windows? For the sake the simplicity, lets limit the GUI to Cinnamon, Plasma, or Gnome.

  Obviously, there are obscure GUIs out there, but in the main ones, I think just about everything can be done without CLI.

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  • jj4211@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’d amend that to say I wouldn’t count “regedit” or group policy muck to be “easy” by virtue of having “a gui”. Those are areas where technically there’s GUI that might be CLI-only under Linux, but hardly friendly enough to make a difference.

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    • asexualchangeling@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Regedit is about 10,000 times more complicated than Windows users think the Linux terminal is

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      • sturmblast@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Amen, I consider myself pretty savvy with Windows under the hood. Most of the time when my users see me ripping around in the registry to fix something they think I’m some crazy skilled hacker\programmer lol. It’s funny.

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    • sturmblast@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Good point

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  • sturmblast@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Until you have problems with hardware or something, generally I’d agree.

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    • M500@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That’s pretty rare these days. If you running reading edge then maybe there are a few months or using a wifi- usb adapter.

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• Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I know the filesystem is simple to Linux users, but the semantic form of physical drives getting a letter always made more sense to me.

  I have three drives in my computer. So they’re labeled C:, D:, and E:. You can’t place a file on “The Computer” - it’s stored on some particular drive. If I install a game on the E drive, and then later somehow remove that drive and bring it somewhere else, that game remains on that drive, even if it’s no longer E.

  On Linux, as best I understand it, if I have three drives, two of them are at /dev/hdd0 and hdd1. But they’re not actually there, they’re accessed at /media/hdd0 after mounting them (or at least, that’s the convention, and if it’s someone else’s computer, good luck). Then you either begin every game installation path with that annoying prefix, or you start configuring a dozen symlinks. If you place an item in /home/documents/notporn, then who knows which drive it’s on because you don’t know what symlinks someone set up to make that folder.

  Windows does have symlinks too now, which has been nice for hacking a few installation directories, but I appreciate that it’s an exception, and everything else follows relatively logical division of space, rather than this hybrid system where the filesystem isn’t just stored files but also devices, programming concepts, and more.

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  • SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I know the filesystem is simple to Linux users, but the semantic form of physical drives getting a letter always made more sense to me.

    That’s one of the things that semi-experienced Windows users need to wrap their head around, but I strongly disagree that drive letters are somehow inferior to a hierarchical file system structure. I mean, the A:, B:, C: … convention was originally just intended for the first IBM PC with 1 or 2 floppy drives. It was never intended to support complex storage configurations, whereas hierarchical storage was designed for Unix systems that had to handle multiple magnetic drives from the start. It is a much more flexible system to organize your file storage.

    On Linux, as best I understand it, if I have three drives, two of them are at /dev/hdd0 and hdd1. But they’re not actually there.

    That’s because there is a difference between a block device and a mounted file system. Windows just obscures that difference from you with its archaic drive mapping system.

    All your block devices and partitions on your block devices will be in /dev with a meaningful name. You can list them with the lsblk command. If a partition contains a file system that Linux knows how to use, you can mount it anywhere you like.

    they’re accessed at /media/hdd0 after mounting them

    No that’s not “convention” at all. Some desktop environments may decide to mount undefined drives there, but there really is no convention, ultimately you mount it where you want it to be mounted.

    If you place an item in /home/documents/notporn, then who knows which drive it’s on because you don’t know what symlinks someone set up to make that folder.

    If your unsure, df /home/documents/notporn should tell you exactly what drive it’s on, but ultimately it’s up to you to know how you’ve organized your storage.

    BTW I’ve said this before, but Linux is probably harder for users who know Windows just well enough to be dangerous than it is for relative beginners, because there are so many concepts and things they take for granted that they have to unlearn.

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    • Katana314@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      While it might be suitable for server environments with 400+drives, all home setups will have fewer volumes than there are alphabet letters, so it’s a suitable setup there.

      Someone else identified how you can run an extra command to identify actual location of a file, and while that’s useful, it’s an extra step that’s unnecessary when the design of the location string itself also identifies that. Unless you can tell me which drive /home/supra-app/preconfiguration/media is on - without running something different. (Vs windows: C:/Users/Someone/AppData/supra-app/preconfiguration/media) That’s what the design of WWW URLs was for - you never have to ask which domain a website is on, and it can even inform you about whether a site is trustworthy.

      I don’t think you’re helping your case by showing there’s no drive location convention at all. A friend plugs a USB device in your computer while you’re busy in the kitchen. He’s fine if he just uses a UI autopopup, but if he needs the full path, he has to ask you where you’ve set up auto-mounting, if you have at all.

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      • SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        The thing is, you are absolutely free to use a /c/,/d,/e mounting scheme, but you are not shackled to it like you are in Windows.

        BTW, I notice all your complaints revolve around “OMG it’s different” and “OMG the user can choose to do things differently… so complicated”. That is kind of the point of Linux you know?

        At some point you just have to accept that it’s different and move on, or decide that it’s too complicated for you and use something else.

        BTW, I wonder why people never make this complaint about Apple devices? It also has a hierarchical file structure without drive letters, after all it is also a Unix variant.

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    • morbidcactus@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      As an interesting fact, windows totally supports mounting positions to folders and as far as I recall it’s been able to for a very long time, remember doing it as a teenager and thinking it was cool AF.

      …microsoft.com/…/assign-a-mount-point-folder-path… And learn.microsoft.com/en-us/…/cc772671(v=ws.10)

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      • SpaceCadet@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Yeah, I believe that was introduced as far back as Windows 2000. It never really caught on though.

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  • cman6@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    So just to help a little bit without getting too technical…

    df -h is your friend to find out which physical drive or partition relates to which directory (called the “mount point”)

    If you want, you can set up each drive/partition to be mounted a bit Windows-esque.

    For example:

    • Drive 1, partition 1 will almost certainly be root /
    • But drive 1, partition 2 can be mounted to: /mnt/d/
    • And then drive 1, partition 3 can be mounted to: /mnt/e/

    And so on.

    You’ll need to look up fstab to understand how to do that.

    I understand it’s tricky to get your head around initially as I felt exactly the same coming from Windows to Linux.

    Once you get your head around partitions being able to be mounted anywhere, it actually becomes really handy

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  • Asifall@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I have three drives in my computer. So they’re labeled C:, D:, and E:

    That’s the default configuration but there’s actually no guarantee that those drives map bijectively to physical devices.

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• rozodru@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  and even the challenging part doesn’t really have to be that hard and can quickly be figured out. either via a package installer or it can be as simple as git clone <insert git repo> then makepkg -si

  I mean with Arch and AUR it’s that easy. worse comes to worse if it’s not in Octopi or AUR then download the exe, wrap it in wine, and that should do it. I’ve been using Linux for almost a month now and I think the only thing I just couldn’t get working was some Mod package for a game and that’s only cause I’m lazy and gave up on it but it would work if I was dedicated to get it working.

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