[−]javascriptmick · 2026-08-30 Sun 09:20 UTC ·
link
I once asked my brother in law (a mechanic) to help me look over and buy a new secondhand car. The car we ended up buying had good fundamentals, low cost, good brand, big trunk, high top speed.
After owning it for a while, I came to learn that it was not a great car. Things constantly broke and the repairs cost me more overall than the cost of the car. A complete disaster.
I came to realise that to a mechanic, little problems like an old fuel pump or poorly maintained engine were "easy" problems to fix. To my brother in law, what mattered was the low price and the fundamentals. Repairs, to him, were easy. To me (not a mechanic) they were expensive and inconvenient.
I think, for a developer, problems with software are a bit like this. Little things that are easy to fix can be overlooked because the grand design of the system is very clever or it has some advantage over other software like handling a particular file format, or processing a high volume of transactions.
Personally, I find it very difficult to sit down and expend the attention and effort to really look at and test my own software. I think because every little issue that I see becomes another job, another hassle, another delay in releasing. Maybe thats my "Bug Blindness", not sure if it's the same.
That is the reason why too many nerds recommended Linux as a "easy" windows alternative. What for us is easy to fix and often not even worth thinking about it, is impossible for a normal person.
Maybe? I think you may be underestimating how many papercuts of the same kind are there on Windows and on Macs. They're just harder to see when you're used to them.
Having giving support with windows and linux - I don't think so.
Recently things got way better with hardware support - but just making a printer work, used to be a unsolvable problem for my dad for example, who has a electro engineering background (but doesn't speak english, and error messages in linux are very seldom localized). In windows he put in the CD that came with the printer and it worked.
As a contra-anecdote, my wife is not very interested in tech and has a Linux laptop for home use and a Windows laptop for work use. For both of them any attempt to use the printer is cursed. I think that's just printers for you :)
For the longest time, I had far more trouble getting printers to work in Windows (where I had to download a driver and hope that it worked right, and sometimes the only drivers offered were the ones for a different version of Windows than I had) than on Linux (where I just plugged in the USB cable and voila, the printer was autodetected). And I mean over a decade.
Since Windows 7 or so, I have seen the ease of installing a new printer driver in Windows rise to the level that Linux had always been at in my experience (I realize other people's experiences have differed). But it was shocking to me how easy Linux printing was for so long, vs how much I struggled when I had to install a Windows printer driver.
Yeah well, I don't usually print anymore, but just recently I did try to connect a printer that worked flawlessly on windows did not worked on my linux devices out of the box - and then I decided I rather do other things than printer troubleshooting.
[−]mystifyingpoi · 2026-08-30 Sun 13:20 UTC ·
link
No, when they hit a problem with Windows, they blame Microsoft and/or their hardware. When they hit a problem with Linux, they blame the person that recommended it to them.
After owning it for a while, I came to learn that it was not a great car. Things constantly broke and the repairs cost me more overall than the cost of the car. A complete disaster.
I came to realise that to a mechanic, little problems like an old fuel pump or poorly maintained engine were "easy" problems to fix. To my brother in law, what mattered was the low price and the fundamentals. Repairs, to him, were easy. To me (not a mechanic) they were expensive and inconvenient.
I think, for a developer, problems with software are a bit like this. Little things that are easy to fix can be overlooked because the grand design of the system is very clever or it has some advantage over other software like handling a particular file format, or processing a high volume of transactions.
Personally, I find it very difficult to sit down and expend the attention and effort to really look at and test my own software. I think because every little issue that I see becomes another job, another hassle, another delay in releasing. Maybe thats my "Bug Blindness", not sure if it's the same.
Recently things got way better with hardware support - but just making a printer work, used to be a unsolvable problem for my dad for example, who has a electro engineering background (but doesn't speak english, and error messages in linux are very seldom localized). In windows he put in the CD that came with the printer and it worked.
Since Windows 7 or so, I have seen the ease of installing a new printer driver in Windows rise to the level that Linux had always been at in my experience (I realize other people's experiences have differed). But it was shocking to me how easy Linux printing was for so long, vs how much I struggled when I had to install a Windows printer driver.