#and also i should not be reliant on a piece of code a stranger wrote a decade ago to make an essential part of my computer FUNCTION PROPERLY

[queenofzan]

i am a linux user, and have been for years now. mostly i love linux! every time my mom or my wife has some sort of doofy security problem i’m like, ah, i don’t miss that.

if i want to use my wacom tablet’s hotkeys (which are a necessary part of a digital art workflow) i have to run a separate program some random internet user wrote in like 2011 to fix the fact that linux’s “it just works” tablet drivers do not, in fact, allow the use of this extremely necessary part of my graphics tablet. i have to run this program every time i restart my computer.

earlier this week, because of windows nonsense, my wife couldn’t get the scanner to work on her computer. ah, i thought, i will use the scanner on my computer, as with linux, it “automatically detects and installs” the drivers!

yeah, no.

to be fair, the problem seems to be epson being a dick and a: updating their scanner drivers to only come bundled with their proprietary (though free) scanning software and b: completely fucking up providing those drivers in a usable format for linux users. (they claimed to provide a .deb file for easy installation, but it came packaged in a tarball that had multiple .deb files in it? it came with a readme file that seemed to think this download was for building from source. it did not include all the things you would need to do that.)

(not to mention, in order to get the most granular control over my scanning, i use xsane, which is one of the ugliest pieces of software i have ever used. highly functional! allows me very granular control over the scanning process! it opens in multiple windows and looks like it hasn’t had its gui updated since 1996.)

and inevitably solving any of these problems means wading through forum comments filled with asshats like elvencube up there, who are like “well why WOULDN’T you want to build literally every driver and program from source” like i’m crazy for wanting things to do what every linux user assured me things would do, which is “just work”.

the worst part of using linux is other linux users. the worst part of not using linux is linux users.

i literally think it should be illegal for windows to have so much bloat that the end user doesn't have any built-in control over and that all the people responsible for the current state of windows should be exiled from society