Sounds pretty rad actually if one is packing a halfway decent processor! :) Thanks for enlightening us!

You're right, I've learned to love flatpaks for certain things. The sandboxing can be a little reassuring and I'll definitely reach for it if I'm getting dependency-hell from a core package and just "Need it to work without spending a weekend on it." :p

But it CAN do it, it just needs a bit of work, be it by yourself oor by someone on the devs' side

The people who reference Dunning-Kruger often vastly overestimate how competent they are at statistics.

It depends. You also have to decide if you want to use LTO or PGO or similar techniques to further boost performance (but massively impacting compile time).

Generally Gentoo 'feels' smoother than other distributions. And I had an old netbook that used to be unable to play HD content on Ubuntu and the like, but HD content worked smoothly on Gentoo.

Plot with green points is Dunning Kruger data. It's hardly correlated.

It tends to explain why entry level programmers act the way they do. Like when I graduated I was definitely on the peak of mount stupid but as I learned more I realized how little I knew. I did not externalize this as I was just trying to make iy through my days, however I have seen some entry levels absolutely fuck things up because they thought they were geniuses. It was exactly like that bell curve where idiots and experts do the same simple thing but mediocre people do the most complicated thing possible with 5 layers of abstraction.

"What's a file anyways, more than a bunch of bytes in a specific order?"

So are you immediately trying to pull the conversation away from ethics, because you know Microsoft has no leg to stand on in this regard? Who cares that the founder of MS is heavily implicated in the Epstein files if you (supposedly) save a little time, right? Or I guess it doesn't matter that that same company is actively providing surveillance tech support to Israel in their genocide of Palestine? That they censor their employees emails from speaking about the very atrocity they're complicit in? Or that the same surveillance infrastructure is being used at home in service of an authoritarian regime?

That's not even getting into all the gritty details of all the little annoyances and rights abuses - which have been accurately predicted by free software advocates for decades now - that inevitably stem from proprietary tech companies like Microslop, which collectively we are now calling enshittification.

But even ignoring the massive pile of shits about Microsoft and Windows to address your argument in a vacuum, does Windows respect your time? Really? Does Windows respect your time when it forces you to go online and sign up for an online account, and login to that account to enable their at-home spyware, just to install their operating system? Does it respect your time when you have to go through a potentially hours-long painful update procedure on a fresh install? How about when the OS runs awfully sluggish even on great hardware? Does MS respect your time when you have to go out of your way to research and install multiple tools and scripts to try in vain to gut all the spyware, AI garbage, adware, and bloat, and run 3rd party system tools to suppress other elements of the OS just to make the damn thing halfway usable and have the illusion of being something that can be trusted?

Even on your own little point, where is this superior documentation you speak of? Because every time I've run into a problem on Windows, their support pages have only ever given me the most generic troubleshooting answers that have been completely unhelpful. Please show me documentation that comes even close to the thoroughness and quality of the Arch Wiki.

Assuming any of what you said is even in good faith, and that you're not just a shill or simp, here's what you need to consider: Windows is something that most people have been using all their lives. When you've been operating something that long, it feels easier. You're more able to ignore the pain points because habits are already deeply settled, and you know your way around. That's the biggest reason Linux feels like such a hassle at first - learning new things takes time, and is always frustrating. I know this experientially because at one time I struggled to use Linux systems too, but now I have the reverse problem. I've been using Linux long enough, and Windows has devolved and changed enough, that on the rare occasion I try to use that piece of shitware, it is the most frustrating thing in the world. Windows 7 was something I was used to. But Windows 10 and 11 are new and unfamiliar to me, and consequently feel damn near unusably bad.

Does Linux have things it needs to improve? Of course, but at least it's something worth improving. You're trying to compare imperfect, yet a remarkable collection of software, to something that is literally just malware at this point. If anything, virus scanners should be adding Windows to their definitions lists.

If it doesn't work for you, it doesn't work for you. Plenty of other distros are fine too, and some more appropriate for certain use cases than others.

It’s a series of files (tubes)!

Just because it explains an experience, doesn't mean it's statistically true in a deep way. I would tend to agree that the Dunning Kruger effect is a nice logical story, a shorthand if you will. I would really be careful about placing undue confidence in neat little explanations of a stupefyingly complex word, especially when it concerns yet incomprehensible structures like the brain.

I'm having my own issues with an old laptop with an nvidia card, but on Fedora. Upgraded from 43 to 44 recently. I love how relatively pain-free Fedora updates and upgrades are, especially for being a somewhat bleeding edge distro.

But after the last upgrade I'm having an issue now where closing the lid to put it into sleep mode causes it to wake to a black screen. I've just been having to shut down every time I step away.

Never getting Nvidia again.

And files that can be deleted while even in use just because.

Who cares, be loud and proud about it.

Personally I'm just going to ramp up being annoying to my friends until they switch because they'll thank me in a couple years and also because they deserve it

By the way, I watched a video about OpenBSD and kinda intrigued to put it on my old Thinkpad. Well, at least I'll consider if I can make it without a headache. I have a plan to make a really minimal (and maybe secure) writing machine. :)

udev? WATCH -N 1 CHMOD A+RWX /DEV

except that thing. ...and the other thing. that thing used to be a file but it's not anymore. that's only a file if you use this specific shell. that one is a file system, but there's no files in it. oh don't touch that file, that's deprecated. oh that's only a partial file, you need to open this one too otherwise it breaks.

Good for you, stay where you are

Why would a file not be deletable while in use?

"It's called a shovel," said the Senior Wrangler. "I've seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical."
—Terry Pratchett: Reaper Man

Counter argument. What is the goal of owning a computer in the first place? Needing to do "a bit of work" with the OS or actual work.

I don't want to be a Linux developer. I want to do work. Sometimes I feel like I'm too much developer.

My PC just programmed all the units in my mesh in around 5 minutes. It would have likely taken longer trying to fix the USB connector. I should figure out how to fix this edge case so I don't have to take my old PC out again.

Whoa man. You ok?

Being explained in experience is the worst proof, it's all bias. I should have been more clear, I want it to be true because it makes sense, but it is incorrect.

If you get Microsoft office to install and function, let me know how you did

Ahh, that clears it up. I misunderstood you.

Using this plot as a statistical argument against the idea of Dunning Kruger is pretty Dunning Kruger.

It’s a scatter plot with hella dense overlap and no density indicator, and a best-fit line that doesn’t match the visual skew. Different ranges and scales on the axes are wonky as hell and make it hard to follow a 1:1 reference line. Try tracing a mental line from (75,75) to (150,150) and it looks much cleaner.

It seems to show subjective vs. evaluated IQ results, which mostly shows people generally think they’re far above average. There’s clearly a statistically significant positive correlation in the trend of modest magnitude.

More importantly though, it’s a bit of a weird thing to tie to Dunning Kruger: The plot tells us something about how well people can guess how “cognitively gifted” they are relative to peers, but that’s not a reasonable proxy for how people might self-evaluate on a skill-based or knowledge-based domain.

E: and I went looking for the source and that’s fake, simulated data you’re presenting as real there lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect#Statistical_and_better-than-average_effect

I'll correct myself, the data is simulated and I skipped the word. You are completely right to remind me of this. But there are a few important considerations here.

1. The original DK study used a IQ like score based on general cognitive faculties for its argument, subjective vs. measured.

Wiki quote: "The initial study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger examined the performance and self-assessment of undergraduate students in inductive, deductive, and abductive logical reasoning; English grammar; and appreciation of humor."

1. Second of all, for this I have consulted the study itself, according to my cursory read the sample size of the study seems to be below 100. I'll let that speak for itself.

2. A new study working with more data, that doesn't just present generalised skill shows that, just like in the simulated data, it is still a blob following a normal distribution in terms of density. The simulated data was meant to show how misleading inferences can be made with noisy results.

from https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000644

Well. ACTUALLY, it's very simple you see every time you spin up a new linux box a little piece of Linus Torvold's soul get's imprinted in the CPU registers and then that fragment handles everything from there.

not for linux users!

source: I use linux.

I don't understand the dbus.

I've tried.

But I just don't get it.

Rtfm?

Understand on what level?

The basic idea is that dbus is a type of communication layer and api.
Services can register there and programs see their registrations.
dbus can in theory then launch a service too, so things don't have to run all the time.
The idea is similar to having some known config file, that programs write to and that a service listens on or uses later. But dbus has more granularity.

It also often runs the other way, with system components presenting info in dbus and programs using it, to adapt to user configuration.

And let's not even get into udev.

Point here is that dbus could be implemented via a command and an sqlite database for example. The command checks the database and constructs the dbus state from it.
But for likely performance reasons it isn't, so this info is simply hidden in dbus, in ram, instead of being a file.

You can access dbus via a socket file ofc, but it's not like you can mount it.

Even more confusingly, the internal ephemeral dbus structure with its apis and endpoints resembles a filesystem. In that way it is similar to the w!ndows registry, though not nearly as bad.

so yeah dbus is most definitely not files

edit: also there's multiple dbusses, usually one per user and one for the system. Those two hold different apis and info. It's just the same thing twice tho.

All those levels.

I mean what do you wanna know?
What's your concrete question, or how did you get confused by dbus?

I'm being facetious

Your comment was actually very thorough and helpful.