folkrav

Okay. But did any of these users need to read the manual to use Windows? My point was not that RTFM is a bad thing per se, but that pretending people aren’t proper Linux users if they don’t is absurd. They have Linux in their machine? They’re Linux users.

Yeah, we’ve admittedly come a very long way. My Hardy Heron setup took days to get to a usable state on my hardware, back then, and even then, my laptop couldn’t hold a charge, sleep didn’t work properly, and there were so many crashes lol. Nowadays it’s pretty much smooth sailing on most of my machines without really having to think about it. I still avoid Nvidia like the plague, but Intel/AMD stuff are usually a pretty safe bet.

Those early years were really formative, but I’m glad of all the progress that’s been done. I just wish the gatekeeping would stop. It’s one of the major hurdles to adoption, IMHO. I don’t want people to convert necessarily (I still use Windows and/or macOS for things) but to stop being afraid to try, and these people really don’t help…

I genuinely have a hard time believing you can both have been “using Linux for a very long time” and never had to fix an issue lol. If you’ve legitimately been using it for that long, you’re also probably the type to RTFM, so I probably wasn’t talking about you…

This is merely one way to view it. The other is the one I gave. An OS is a tool for most people, they don’t even understand nor learned Windows, it’s mostly the gateway between them and their actual work, i.e. the software they use. They want a computer that runs their software, that’s it.

The “we don’t need them as Linux users if they don’t want to RTFM” line of thinking you’re exhibiting was exactly my point. Why do you interpret making things better for everyone as “lowering the bar”? Unless you genuinely think it’s a good thing the technical barrier is there, I don’t know how you rationalize this opinion.

Mine was 2007 too. Almost two decades later, and we still have the people playing gatekeepers.

One time purchases are not a sustainable income source for long living and updated software products like unraid.

I’m always left scratching my head every time I hear this line. Software subscriptions are a relatively new trend. The majority of software has been single-purchase until then over the last handful of decades. Why did it suddenly stop being sustainable to do so?

It’s the same model JetBrains has for their IDEs. You pay for a year, you get a perpetual fallback license. You pay again, get another year of updates.

JetBrains (accurately) still calls it a subscription though.

Yeah, but that wasn’t my point nor the one made by the person I was answering to. My point is, those users eventually hit the (inevitable) bump in the road, ask for help, get told by people like the person I was answering to that they have to RTFM or else they aren’t real Linux users, so they go back to Windows.

I don’t have half the world’s RAM to give to ZFS on my budget NAS tho, and Unraid allows mismatched drive sizes, which is pretty attractive to budget users. TrueNAS is definitely great though.

And this, folks, is why there will be no “year of the Linux desktop”. The technical difficulties, and the surrounding gatekeeping.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a dev, I RTFM, but for most people, their computer is just a simple tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver, that lets them do the actual work they have to do. They aren’t any less “real” Linux users. Just users that will go back to other OSes cause it doesn’t work for them and they keep getting told that it’s their fault for not reading the manual.

Unraid’s “killer feature” is the ability to mix and match disparate drive sizes and only requiring the parity drive to be at least as large as your largest data disk, a la MergeFS/Snapraid. Also ZFS chugging RAM like there’s no tomorrow so not really an option for underpowered devices like some NASes. But yeah, TrueNAS is nice.

I get your point, but if it’s just about semantics, why would they be so defensive about it not being one?

You get a perpetual fallback license even if you stop payin, which is what I was referring to. It’s pretty much functionally equivalent to what Unraid is proposing here. You pay for a first year, get a license to use that version, then need to pay again to get an additional of updates.

https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What-is-a-perpetual-fallback-license