• achensherd
    +1

    Apologies in advance for exuding some of the frustrations I've had with Linux in my comment below.

    As a Windows user who has tried to make Linux work both at home and at work, when it works it's a beautiful, fresh experience, but when it doesn't work is when it's a PITA that completely nullifies whatever free and open benefits it may have. And before anyone asks, the most recent experience I had was with Linux Mint 17 Qiana (hereafter referred to as LM), so it's not exactly one of those "you had a problem with Linux a long time ago; it's not like that now" situations.

    What broke it for me this most recent time? Printer support. LM detected my printer just fine, but getting it to print from it the first time was literally a nightmare. For whatever reason, asking it to tell the printer to print a one-page document caused it to spew out endless pages of hex characters. Why? Who knows. I then spent about an hour trying to make it stop doing that, which really tested my Google-fu because all I could find were user accounts of similar instances that occurred on prior versions of LM, with fixes that were no longer completely applicable or working.

    Eventually I did something with an ndiswrapper setting (after everything else had failed) and got the printer to work properly. All good now, right? Nope. It only printed, say, 90% of the time. That remaining 10%? The printer just sits there for no apparent reason and refuses to print until I power cycle it. Well, 90% is still pretty good, right? "A" for effort? Well, when Windows-anything can get it to print 100% of the time, anything less especially in an active work environment where people are waiting for documents to print is unacceptable.

    Well, that's just LM. You should've tried [insert distro name here]. Also, [insert your least favorite brand] printers are known to be dodgy with Linux in general. If you had a [insert your favorite brand] printer, you wouldn't have had to go through what you did. Lastly, ndiswrapper? Why would you do that? Newb mistake. All you had to do was open the command line and--

    http://media.giphy.com/media/lF5bH6enH9F1m/giphy.gif

    So, was that the only thing? That one printer experience? No, it did the same with the networked printer (different brand) in my boss's office, and I had a darn fun time explaining why her printer was spewing out endless pages of hex characters. Anyway, no, printer problems weren't all. Prior to trying out LM at work, I tried LM (16, I believe) at home, and there I was faced with not being able to login sometimes because all I'd get is a black screen and a blinking cursor. And yeah, there was a fix for that, but... just look at it from a Windows user's point of view. You're kicking my ass right at the door! I can't even turn the knob without using a command line!

    Damn it, Linux! I want to like you! I really do! I don't try to all-in with you at home or introduce you to my work for shits and gigs, but when I have to %a %b %e, %l : %M %p you just to make you give me the time in a format I'm familiar with, you done fucked up now!

    • BarnyardOwl (edited 8 years ago)
      +2

      I have to say that I definitely agree with the printer issues. The drivers just aren't up to scratch. I ended up having to switch to a different printer to get it to work for me.

      I don't agree with the bit about time formats, though. I really like the customizability of them and took advantage of it to make a format that looks nice (to me, at least).

      • achensherd
        +2

        About the time format thing: I'm not against customization. Being able to make the time format look however you want is awesome. However, in my case, all I wanted to do was change the default 24-hour time format to a 12-hour one. That was it. And that took Googling "how to change time format in Linux Mint" and copying and pasting %a %b %e, %l : %M %p to do. Was that hard? No. But it wasn't intuitive (or at least it wasn't to me), and in my opinion shouldn't have been necessary for something like that.

        • BarnyardOwl
          +2

          Hmm, that's odd. I guess they changed it at some point. On mine it includes a button that says "Show information on date format syntax" which takes you here. The page is actually quite nice, including presets, references, and even a "build your own" date format.

          When I made my own, I just pulled up the reference and started playing around. It really wasn't that difficult (or unintuitive).

          • achensherd
            +2

            Yeah, I think that might have came later or in an update, because when I was trying to change it at the time I don't remember the interface providing or linking to any kind of formatting reference. The site you linked would've been mucho helpful.