pixelscript

I guess by "Windows installer" I actually meant the setup wizard that runs the first time you boot an OEM machine from the factory. The thing 99% of Windows users actually see. Not sure if that's significantly different.

And if you want to claim even that is terrible, I really have to question by what metric you're measuring. Is it because it doesn't give you the options you want, like creating an offline user account, or because it's full of bloat screens for products like OneDrive? Sure, I guess. But I'd say having these criticisms are very specifically the kind of things that make you an outlier compared to the average person I'm talking about. These are things normal people don't bat an eye at. Giving them more control just intimidates them.

And yeah, I'm sure you agree, "provided [they] can create a USB" is a huge ask for a lot of people. Child's play for us, but weird and scary black magic to most. Guides can and do make it crystal clear what to do, but as long as it feels spooky to download and run the magic programs, no one will feel comfortable doing it.

Theoretically, when it's up and running. How do you intend to get to that state, though? One has to install it first. And I think that alone is a massive filter.

inb4 someone says:

I did it, and I found it extremely straightforward.

I'm sure you did, Mr. "I hate how much Reddit is pandering to the braindead to the point that I joined an experimental social media platform", I'm sure you did. Clearly, you are a qualitative sample of people who use Windows computers.

Sarcasm aside, look at how railroaded and coddling the Windows 10 installer is. I am certain a large plurality of Windows users' initiative would completely evaporate having to navigate that. And now we want to throw a Linux installation at them?

Factor on top how the vast majority of computer users in all forms that computers take simply take for granted that the OS the computer comes with is a part of the computer. Normal people don't upgrade OSes unless the OS itself railroads them into it (which Win10 already does aggressively whenable), or they buy a new PC that happens to come with it pre-installed. The knowledge required to negotiate an OS wipe and reinstall is not something most people possess, and I expect presenting that knowledge to them on a silver platter is something they'd hastily recoil from.

We're in a catch-22 here. Even if all the pieces for the fabled Linux Desktop are arguably here, actually getting it into the hands of those who would benefit from it most remains prohibitive.

This is also ignoring the elephant in the room: A massive swath of these Windows PCs (Maybe even most of them? I have no backing figures, just a hunch.) are not personal computers, but office PCs that belong to a company fleet. There's a reason Windows utterly dominates the office--Windows rules the IT sphere, at least where personal devices given to employees are concerned. Active Directory? Group Policy? Come on, guys. None of the companies who depend on these management tools are pivoting to Linux anytime soon, and you know it. And if their cheap, bulk order desk PCs don't support Windows 11, they are absolutely getting landfilled.

The only effective mitigation I could think of would be to start a charity that takes obselesced office PCs, refurbishes them to Linux, and provides them at low or no cost to those who need a low cost or free PC. It would get Linux into more hands, but it would also strengthen a stigma that Linux is nothing more than the poor man's OS. The Dr Thunder to Window's Mountain Dew.

It only just hit me a month or two ago just what a timezone, as described by IANA, actually is.

I'm from the eastern half of the US state of North Dakota. We run on what we'd collloquially call "central time", often abbreviated CST. That's UTC-6:00 in winter and UTC-5:00 in summer (technically CDT, but whatever).

Long ago I had it passed down to me from on high that the IANA timezone indicator I should use for my local time is America/Chicago. Ok. Easy enough. Why Chicago, though? I long guessed because it happens to be one of the largest localities in the CST block? That is in fact the answer if you read the rationale of the tz database, but I did not know this at the time.

What threw me off, though, is that there are other localities that seemingly map to the same time zone block. Like America/Mexico_City, or America/Indianapolis. What's up with those? When I set my computer system clock to them, they behave just like America/Chicago does. Why are these here? And why these cities, specifically?

Then, imagine the loop I was thrown for when I discovered three timezone definitions exclusive to North Dakota. Those being America/North_Dakota/Beulah, ../../Center, and ../../New_Salem. What the fuck..?? These are literal nowhere towns. Midwest America is the middle of nowhere. North Dakota is the middle of nowhere within the Midwest. And these three towns are the middle of nowhere to the rest of us in North Dakota. What is going on? Why are there three tiny timezones in the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere? And they're all right next to each other!

Then, it clicked. What do these three places have in common? These towns all used to be in the next timezone over ("Mountain Time", MST), but later decided to jump over to CST.

There's a humorous story for why this happened. Supposedly, drinkers in the capital city, Bismarck, would stay to bar close. Then, they'd all hop in their cars and drunk drive to the sister city across the river, Mandan, for an extra hour of fun, causing untold chaos in the process. The jump was allegedly to curb this. Sadly, that story apocryphal. In reality, it was just because it was economically favorable to be time-aligned with the state capital city. But I digress...

If you were, say, looking over historic records of events recorded in both Bismarck and Beulah, where records are always taken simultaneously, and your data happened to span back before this switchover, there would be an inexplicable point in time where after it the timestamps would match, but before it, they'd be offset. So, to encode that, Beulah gets its own unique timezone all to itself that indicates this historical switchover exists.

It also explains why there are three tiny timezones all right next to one another. Three counties participated in this switchover, and to make it happen, each one had to individually pass laws to enact it. These laws all took effect on slightly different dates. Thus, if we wish to capture the nuanced time shifts in all three counties, each county needs its own bespoke timezone.

IANA timezones aren't just representations of all the time zones that currently exist. They are representations of every unique permutation of historic clock changes for every place on Earth. That's fucking nuts! Knowing that, I went from being shocked that there are so many timezones to being shocked that the list of timezones is as short as it is!

There's a new RFC in the pipeline that will address this.

It's already been approved, just needs to slooowly crawl its way theough the final publication queue.

I originally had mine mounted on /, to make them easy to type. But that set one of my highly opinionated friends wretching, so I re-mounted them to /media/<user>/ to placate him and symlinked them to my home directory instead.

It's frustrating how often Linux systems, when approached with a "where is the canonical location for ?" question, have an answer ancient use cases practically no one has anymore, but no satisfying answer for extremely common use cases like permanently mounted backup drives, where to put web server hosted files, or even where to install applications that don't come from package managers (/opt/? /usr/bin/? /home/<USER>/.local/?).

1000 is the default ID given to the first-created user on Debian-based systems.

May or may not be the case with other distros. Haven't checked.

I put my home directory on another partition, because I heard very early on that it can better facilitate distro hopping. That is not the stupid part, that's actually good advice.

The stupid part was assuming that Linux users are identified by name, and that as long as I create a user with the same name as the one on my previous install, things would Just Work.

Im reality, Linux users are integer IDs under the hood. And in my original system, my current user at the time was not the first user I had created on that system. Thus, when I set up my new OS, mounted the home partition, and set the first user to have the same name, I was immediately unable to log in. The name match meant I was trying to read my home dir, but the UID mismatch was telling me I had no permission to read it. I was feeling ballsy with the install and elected to not enable the root user, so I had an effectively bricked OS right out of the box.

I'm sure there was some voodoo I could have done to recover it on that attempt, but I just said screw it and reinstalled.