Like when you send a .7z instead of a .zip or .rar to a friend or a teacher because that’s what your computer has installed and they’re like “Oh No, not one of those, now I have to install 7Zip” even though the same program that opens .rar also opens .7z I feel like people are way more annoyed when they receive a .7z
Yeah my mom’s 80 and her laptop runs Ubuntu. For the day to day stuff it’s dead simple, I haven’t had to do “tech support” for her in years
To be fair, someone with a more basic grasp of computers probably has fewer use cases that Linux will give you trouble with. I installed PuppyLinux on some ancient machine for someone I was renting from in like '08 and it was fine for her, but that’s because all she ever did was look at YouTube and check her email. It didn’t have any of the features of modern Ubuntu and the UI was clunky; if memory serves it didn’t even have DHCP.
It worked fine for basic browsing, but if you tried to do anything more complex, you’d better be ready to learn a thing or two.
Today it’s still pretty similar. Ubuntu and GNU at large have come a long way in the past couple of decades, but you still start running into issues when you get to more niche use cases.
I’d probably be running Ubuntu as my daily if Solaar worked properly with my MX Ergo, but it doesn’t, so I can’t. I guess I could go learn how to make contributions to patch that myself, and I may at some point, but at the moment I have stuff to get done and dealing with an unexpected hiccup in my workflow too often brings everything to a grinding halt.
What does it mean to not have DHCP? Does that mean you need to either pray the router is ok with you squatting on an IP, or you need to explicitly tell the router an IP will be reserved?
You had to manually configure your IP on the PC’s end. In practice it just meant you had to hit a button to connect to your network when you boot up. Considering that like a decade earlier we were all on dialup it didn’t feel that weird at the time.
I was also getting my internet via cantenna back then, so DHCP was the least of my worries!
Normally it means that people have to set their network IP when they connect their device since they are not automatically assigned one. If the IP is taken, the router will tell you. If you don’t set an IP, the connection will simply fail. You are basically forcing every device in your network to have a static IP.
The upside is that you don’t have changing IPs in your network. I use my phone to control Kodi on my RPi and if I didn’t force a static IP on it, I would have to search for the Kodi host probably every time I restart the RPi.
Most routers and host clients do support IP reservation while still having DHCP enabled tho, so disabling DHCP is not really necessary these days. It wasn’t so smooth 20 years ago tho.
Yeah that’s a good point, the simple stuff will surprisingly enough tend to be simple