And then there are some days that suck
- You get an error message upon booting up. Something like kernel panic.
- Your friend has the webcam oh Yahoo! Messenger and you couldn’t view it.
- The cd you got from a friend could not be mounted by your cd-rom drive for some reason or another.
- You have no internet access and you couldn’t have the package you want to install then and there.
- Games don’t always run in Wine.
- Your wifi card is not supported and it takes you more than a week to figure it out.
- The files sent to you by your client cannot be opened in any application that’s supposed to be for the same purpose as the one that made the files.
The list goes on and on and on.
And yet I am still using Linux. Why? Because I am slowly learning answers as to how to deal with things. Not that Windows users don’t suffer anything of the sort. It’s just that Linux seems more fun to learn sometimes. Well, seriously though, there’s that philosophy of software freedom and open-ness that still keeps me drawn to it. At the same time, I think that Linux is still a good platform to use even by regular users as long as they’re willing to learn. I guess that once you get over the intimidation factor things will be ok. You could go on and start searching for the answers to your questions or to solve the problems you get on the days that really suck big time. Even kernel panic messages don’t have to be that frightful if you take it in calmly. And there are others before you that used Linux and had the same or similar problems and you could draw the answers from their experiences. Though I must admit that there are things I don’t bother with much because I am not terribly affected. One of those things I don’t even try to solve is viewing a friend’s webcam because I hardly have any friends who use their webcams regularly. As for the wifi card, I kept trying until these days, the default driver from Ubuntu worked well.
What are the things about Linux that make your day sucky? How do you deal with them?
Related Stories
POSTED IN: General
3 opinions for And then there are some days that suck
Paul
Aug 8, 2008 at 2:39 pm
The list doesn’t go on and on. Suckie things 1, 3 and 4 also happen to Windows users. A fried CD-ROM drive is a fried CD Rom Drive.
If files don’t open it’s probably because they sent them to you as Illustrator files or something, and you weren’t going to by Illustrator anyway. That leaves the webcam, games and the WiFi card.
Shamil
Aug 8, 2008 at 8:55 pm
Well, i can’t believe you didn’t solve the yahoo webcam thing yet. Plz check out gyachi for doing yahoo chat rooms. Gyachi can do broadcasting of your webcam and receiving of others cams. Gyachi doesn’t work with all cams though. So download kopete. Kopete is just the kde equivalent of pidgin, except it has a couple of more capabilities, such as guaranteed to work yahoo webcam sending and receiving.
As far as wireless goes. It sounds like you got cursed with a broadcom card. When going wireless in linux i highly suggest buying linux compatible wifi. For me when purchasing my laptop that was as easy as selecting intelproset wifi card instead of the broadcom based dell wifi card. Non-linux compatible wifi cards can be made to run in linux with reverse engineered drivers of ndiswrapper, but it really sucks. Luckily, the big culprit to avoid in linux wireless is broadcom…there’s some others, you should totally google this problem to find out.
Other than that you seem to have the same difficulties with linux i did several years ago. Although i had my first kernel panic 3 weeks ago when i found a computer that didn’t like the mepis 7 livecd.
Clair
Aug 10, 2008 at 10:38 am
Hi, Shamil! The reason I don’t bother with the Yahoo Messenger and webcam thing is that I hardly use it. Seriously. If I don’t use something often enough, I wouldn’t do something about it. These days, both my mom and sister haven’t used the webcam much either so I guess I have no compelling reason to fix that or look for the means. I’ve tried GyachE before but it didn’t work for the webcam we have at home. As for Kopete, thanks for letting me know about it. :) I haven’t used it in a while being happy with GNOME and Pidgin.
I agree with you. I am now more aware of the difficulties of Broadcom users because I have become one. My next laptop won’t have Broadcom on it!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: