when was your last "what the hell am I doing with linux" moment

[barbedsaber]

I have had my fair share, I am in the process of getting a new printer at the moment, and linux compatiblity has been a pain, but with the open printing database and this forum, I finnaly found one that will do all that I want it to do. However, this took around 10 times as long as it would have if OS compatibility hadn't been an issue.

I was trying to set up a data projector, and I couldn't get it to work! I was wondering if I needed to change a file, or download a package, or somthing else, and then I decided, before giving up all hope, to try using windows, and it worked straight out of the box. GRRR

I was trying to play a game, made by microsoft (please forgive me) and I gave up with wine REALLY quickly, and just used windows for a few hours, and a few seconds after the VERY long boot, I realised why I had changed to linux, I got 6 popups (no ads) a few seconds after bootup. admitidly a few were from lenovo care thingy that came with vista, but come on, 6!

There is no way I am going back to windows, but I think you would be lying if you said that you had never asked yourself "what the hell am I doing?"


(right now I am asking my self "what is the point of this thread?" :)

[tgm4883]

I have had my fair share, I am in the process of getting a new printer at the moment, and linux compatiblity has been a pain, but with the open printing database and this forum, I finnaly found one that will do all that I want it to do. However, this took around 10 times as long as it would have if OS compatibility hadn't been an issue.

I was trying to set up a data projector, and I couldn't get it to work! I was wondering if I needed to change a file, or download a package, or somthing else, and then I decided, before giving up all hope, to try using windows, and it worked straight out of the box. GRRR

I was trying to play a game, made by microsoft (please forgive me) and I gave up with wine REALLY quickly, and just used windows for a few hours, and a few seconds after the VERY long boot, I realised why I had changed to linux, I got 6 popups (no ads) a few seconds after bootup. admitidly a few were from lenovo care thingy that came with vista, but come on, 6!

There is no way I am going back to windows, but I think you would be lying if you said that you had never asked yourself "what the hell am I doing?"


(right now I am asking my self "what is the point of this thread?" :)

I myself haven't asked that question in years about Windows. On the other hand, I have asked myself what the hell I was doing running Hardy on my Laptop. I came to the conclusion that I get bored and like to try new things ;)

[MONODA]

when i first found out about linux I tried to install ubuntu feisty fawn but I really did not know what I was doing in the partition menu and halfway through the install I canceled like a retard. then when I rebooted I got grub error 7 (or 22 i dont remember) and my computer would not longer boot into either ubuntu or windows. I really dont rememeber how i fixed it...

[jrusso2]

Every time I go onto to Windows I get some bug crash, irritation or worry. I just feel a lot more relaxed when using Linux.

[BigSilly]

Having one right now!

I dunno, sometimes I just feel like I'm out of my depth with it really. My latest project was trying to get an emulator (sdlmame 0.123) running on PCLOS by compiling from source, but it just won't work and I'm spending an age searching about the net and posting on forums to get some help.

I don't know if it's my fault for being stupidly ignorant in the ways of compiling, PCLOS's fault for not having a more up to date and comprehensive repository, or Linux's fault for being so bloody technical! I guess it's a bit of everything really, but it's making me feel a bit out of my depth as I say. When I use Ubuntu it works so well and is so easy because everything's in the repo, and if it isn't there's often a keen enthusiast looking to make things easy for fellow users by making .debs and suchlike. Step outside of that though and things get very difficult very quickly....

I don't think I'm having a crisis of faith because I'm still looking forward to Hardy, and don't see myself going back to Windows anytime soon. But it's clear that Ubuntu has done more work than any other distro at making things easy for everyone.

I suppose I'm spoiled! :D

[-random]

Sometimes i get a bit tired of the constant workarounds to things that run smooth otherwise in ******* (e.g. youtube vids on 64bit ubuntu, *.exe games etc...)

But when you take all those commulative startup times of windows, you'd save days/weeks of hour's w8ing for your machine to start up. I'm SO curious what ******* does while starting up / changing a theme.... :mad::lolflag:

speedy linux ftw <3

[Lord DarkPat]

when kubuntu started crashing on my comp.
Oh well, Xubuntu's heaven, so what the heck:popcorn:

[Martje_001]

When I want to watch a DVD, wich is encoded :'(. Just horrible..

I can cry my eyes out then.. (but I've found a solution:
1. Install wine
2. Install DVDShrink
3. 'Backup' the DVD
4. Watch with VLC)

[tcpip4lyfe]

I was following a how to at work on setting up nagios with a perl script that send an instant message to my AIM account when a server goes down and I had download a module from CPAN ( I guiess CPAN is like a perl repo. I have no idea). It took forever and I had no idea was was going on and it didn't work after 4 hours of messing with it. Perl scares me.

[samwyse]

When I want to watch a DVD, wich is encoded :'(. Just horrible..

I can cry my eyes out then.. (but I've found a solution:
1. Install wine
2. Install DVDShrink
3. 'Backup' the DVD
4. Watch with VLC)

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu#head-57a5050d451985de1b87ea87a3ccc1a4895e57d3

If you mean "encrypted" you can just go and install one package from Medibuntu.

[lswest]

hmm...the last time i had that "what the hell?" moment was about a day ago where i was trying to get my cups server pushing windows drivers, eventually i just gave up and hosted the Adobe Postscript drivers on the SAMBA share on the same server :P not elegant, but it works^^ Other than that...i get moments where i'm sitting in front of a terminal and then ask myself..."what was i going to do?" but all-in-all i don't have those moments very often anymore (been a linux junkie for pushing on about 4 years now^^)

[penguinv]

It's happening right now.

I cant seem to install anything that does not install itself.
Eg of things that install themselves: flash in Firefox, LostIRC, Opera.
They are "Well Behaved" and how I expect a GUIsystem to be.

Eg of things I cant install: flash in Opera, anther IRC client (forget which now), azurus, kbittorrent, deluge.

Eg of something I strugged with, finally installed and forgot how (almost): Java [The crux was, in a terminal window, to chose Yes, the only one choice, I had to push an arrow key, normally used to move _between_ choices, to highlight the choice so that the <enter> key could choose it. Now the fault there was clearly with the Java Folks who did not want to leave a chance of a No answer.- and yet, they set it up so that I had to act as-if the No answer was there. Baffles me.]

OK now let me settle down and talk about deluge, my latest attecpt to install a bittorrent client. We have words like
download, archive, package manager, dependencies.
I have figured out that synaptic, apt-get, etc are frontends for some other package manager that is prolly run in a terminal shell. Maybe I should just learn to use that one. (Learned this in http://monkeyblog.org/ubuntu/installing/)

(dependent para) quoting
This system is called the package manager and on Ubuntu you'll meet it in the form of apt-get, aptitude, Add/Remove..., Update Manager and Synaptic. All these programs are frontends to the same package manager[2] built right into Ubuntu.
(2) Advanced Packaging Tool or APT is what empowers many popular Linux distributions. It was first seen in Debian (that's where the name of the packaging format, deb, came from) but is now also used by other popular distributions such as Ubuntu, Knoppix, Linspire and Mepis. Another popular package manager is RPM (RPM Package manager, a recursive acronym) which is used by Fedora Core, SUSE Linux and Mandriva.

But nothing tells what it is. How it works. What a package is.

Is a package the archive I haev a choice of? What is extracted from the archive?

I started Symantic. I saw a long list of strange names. Are these packages? Are they already on my hard drive? If so what's the point of saying -- but just that Windows programs typically include parts of libraries in their installers, taking up lots of space after they've been installed because the same libraries have duplicates many places on your harddisk; Linux programs usually don't do this. -- if Linux puts all these things on my hard drive.

And in another place it suggests that Synaptic must look on the net in repositories for "packages" If so, then why do all these pages have download sites for programs, and not tell me to go start Synaptic first.

Guys, when I understand this I am going to write a beginners guide that doesn't stop people from using the system. This is like a highschool clique. Except the rhetoric READ THIS CANONICAL is that it's for everyone.

Does Synaptic access the web? Have I been looking in repositiories? Are repositories something else? Debian looks easy or does it, oh then it says it only works if you already know how to install something or other and have installed it. Jolly well circular.

Its a cruel game you play and I want to open the field.
Ay masters, we slaves shall be freed.

PS look for this post again starting its own thread. This looks like a rant-thread not an answer-thread.

PPS I just noticed that my Ubuntu can't partition my drive right thread, has been echoed by another sufferer, who also got no useful answers.

Let the struggle continue.:popcorn:

[rabid9797]

im having one of those moments, right now(although it has been awhile since i had another one)

atm i am trying to get permissions on my remote hardrive working so i can mount it over the network and have full read/write access.

fstab, sambfs, and cifs, can be terribley confusing sometimes :(

[Methuselah]

No, but a few minutes ago, I had a 'why am I in windows' moment and rebooted into my other operating system. I had rebooted windows becuase it was behaving funny only to log in and still end up waiting several minutes for any of the programs I clicked on to launch.

Just got fed up and got out.
I'm a lot less irritated now.

[FuturePilot]

Every time I go onto to Windows I get some bug crash, irritation or worry. I just feel a lot more relaxed when using Linux.

Haha, same here. It seems that anytime I boot up Windows I get some dumb error, something crashes, an update fails to install or something else.

[Martje_001]

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu#head-57a5050d451985de1b87ea87a3ccc1a4895e57d3

If you mean "encrypted" you can just go and install one package from Medibuntu.
Thank you! I thought it was already in ubuntu-restricted-extras..

[regomodo]

about everytime i try to get my hardware to work correctly. Scanners, acpi, and tv-card remotes.

I don't do it often but only when i build up the motivation, because i know it'll fail and get stressed out and go back to windows for a few days. I do not have bugs or crashes there like people keep proclaiming i should.

Last time was probably last week, used XP a lot. For me, Linux is fairly useless. nvm

[regomodo]

Ha, having one now. can not get the Arduino IDE to work in Debian Lenny amd64.

It would be so easy to just use windows (the install was easy there) but i feel somebody needs to figure out how as their is no documentation on it yet (as ever).

[edit] i submitted defeat. Wiped my Debian Lenny install

[justin whitaker]

I was having that moment since Gutsy....I went back to XP for a while, then came back to Linux with Mandriva, then went back to XP...

I had a WTH am I doing on XP when I realized I was running a firewall, AVG, a spyware protector, and a bunch of bloated apps in RAM so they wouldn't take so long to load (iTunes, Open Office Quickstart, etc.).

When I realized I was mostly using Open Source apps on XP, that's when I made the switch.

I'm not going distrohopping anymore, either. One Linux is just as good as the next, might as well help Ubuntu take over the world. :)

[sp0nge]

I am asking this of myself today! I built myself a computer for Christmas:

Asus P-965 Neo Mobo, 2 GB XDDR Ram, Intel Core 2 Duo, Lite-on Cd/DVD

When I built the machine, I loaded the live CD and it fired right up. Everything worked perfectly. Then I tried to install and things started going down hill. The install process seemed to work well to completion. Once I reboot, I get:



GRUB loading, please wait.....
Error 21


Upon investigating, I find that JMicron, a 3rd party software maker, made the IDE controller and it is not compatible with Linux- How stupid! So that machine is doomed to use windows until I can find a work around. I have considered installing a PCI IDE card but am skiddish about doing so. I just stick to banging my head against the wall to understand how a hardware manufacturer can justify limiting the capabilities of their products. And even worse, they don't care about the inconvenience to the user.

I still love Linux, ubuntu is my flavor of choice and of the 5 machines in my house, only one is bound to windows! For now.