Developers: Those are rookie numbers
I’m going for the high score!
I’m an IT engineer, 100% of my time is spent on computer problems.
I’m a home server hobbyist. I like to think of them as computer solutions.
You don’t eat, sleep or go to the bathroom?
Someone call Harrison Ford, we have a replikant!
At least 5 percent has to be doing something else.
How much time do we waste on car problems? Neighbor problems? Political problems? Grocery problems?
Right and how much time do we save by having computers? Fixing the problems is just the cost of doing business
Yeah, this seems like a pretty dumb conclusion. I expect that as far back as you look, people always took advantage of tools that save them time. But then they always also spent a fair amount of that time (that they could have been working), just maintaining/fixing/making their tools. I think the truth is that computers are very useful tools, but the maintenance and troubleshooting can be quite time consuming.
I will continue using computers though.
Using computers and also having to deal with their problems is still far more betterer than not using computers at all.
Also in the context of working, this isn’t just computers. It’s tools in general, and a computer is a type of tool. Problems with your saw? Problems with your batteries? Problems with access to electricity and your extension cords not being long enough? Problem with losing your 10mm sockets? If you’re a trucker or driver the problem could be your vehicle. Etc etc etc.
This article is stupid. Tools break, they always have and always will. The tools we have now are better than they have ever been. They will probably keep getting more and more efficient, but they will still break. Because tools break.
Not much.
Do they include “fighting with anti patterns and dark patterns” as broken? It’s pretty insane how much misalignment there is between what most people want their computers to do and what the companies want people to do, which seems to largely be “look at ads literally everywhere”.
Personal computing is badly sick today.
Even for Linux users.
Why for Linux? Its always painted as Zion for matrix-dwellers?
It’s painted like that because it is. It’s the biggest bastion of freedom.
Well, because it’s still enormously complex and growing, and because, in user applications, comparing today’s XFCE to 2010’s XFCE is sad, and because comparing today’s Gnome to Gnome 2 in its prime is sad, and because comparing today’s KDE, eh, even to KDE4 - the same.
Because it’s becoming less and less logical, wave after wave people suffering NIH syndrome and\or thinking that mimicking MacOS or Windows is very smart erode it, and because the Web is ugly and becoming uglier.
And because CWM initial configuration takes 15 minutes to write and forget, and there’s no Wayland compositor which would take the same amount of time to set up for me, with the same easiness of use.
Anyway, what I wrote in that comment was a subjective feeling and I’m trying to rationalize it retroactively now, which is the same as lying.
Of course it’s what you said for Windows and MacOS users.
My job is to fix computers so I waste 100% of my time with computer problems.
“I’m here to fuck computers and chew bubblegum…”
At the same time?
If I have to.
Keep fighting the good fight.
Linux users brings the numbers up
Once everything is set up properly it just works tbh. Meanwhile in windows updates broke something every other time.
This is so not true unless you are using some super stable old Debian release and aren’t doing complex work.
Most DEs are super buggy, especially the darling child kde, which right off the bat makes things not super stable.
Additionally some of the most loved distros are rolling release and inherently unstable.
Hell, I use multiple distros daily, fedora and slackware, I also use windows for work, windows is by and large more stable in my experience.
Slackware has kernel panics monthly, kde crashes on fedora, Wayland has too many problems to count, meaning I have to switch to x sessions all the time.
Most GUI software I use has tons of visual glitches.
Yes it’s tolerable, that’s why I still use it, but I wouldn’t exactly say it ‘just works’
I would estimate I restart my fedora computer about 4-5 times more often than than the windows computer, and usually I have to restart fedora because of serious hard crashes (e.g. kde crashes so hard that I can’t even switch to a tty, meaning I need to hard reset)
I’ve not had anything like that since… forever. But then I’m not a kde nor fedora user. Naturally raises the question - have you considered switching from kde, fedora or both?
If Linux “just worked” I would have switched years ago. I’ve used several distributions, always preferred Gnome to KDE, and even with “expert” help setting things up, I always spent way more time trying to make things work than actually having things work. Unless it’s a basic-ass workstation being used for minimal computer things or to run a server for something, there’s always something that doesn’t want to work.
I like the idea of Linux more than I actually like using Linux. :/
Fair enough. What stuff do you run on your regular week?
I use KDE on my Linux machine, which means that I cannot develop anything involving the GPU.
The moment I experiment a little with the API or give it wrong parameters, not only my program crashes, but the whole system freezes and I have to manually press the “power off” button.
It does happen in windows too, however it’s 100x less unlikely.
I also had a problem not long ago that crashing my program would not free the RAM, so every time I ran the program (and it crashed), I had 2-3GiB less of RAM. So I had to restart the computer every 10 runs or so.
Operating systems are supposed to isolate programs and manage their resources. A program crashing under no circumstances should affect any other program. I don’t understand how it can happen.
Really? Because I updated and my wine prefix just broke. That was yesterday.
Skill issue. I don’t update the wine binaries I use for my most used prefix. I use https://github.com/Kron4ek/Wine-Builds/releases I may setup a new one eventually and just migrate the data tho. Maybe once a year, so once per major release of wine.
I see, I was holding it wrong
Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Savior Fedora Silverblue?
I spend literally no time at all dealing with my OS.I’m literally dealing with an update issue with this distro lol
To he fair, it was perfect, literally perfect, until now. And even now, it’s not unbootable, since I can just use the previous image point. Just sucks I can’t update.
You affected by this by any chance?
Was a quick fix for me on Bazzite.
I installed the official silverblue, but it does seem like the same problem. Does this fix also work on the official silverblue?
Oh, sorry. I missed that part. I think this was just for uBlue images which doesn’t include Silverblue… I think.
O, well, shoot haha
Back to the search for me :)
Hey, all of those problems are entirely because of my own incompetence.
I can’t tell if you are joking. But just in case, my installation worked flawlessly for years.
I mean, that’s fine, but as a Linux user I’ve fucked around a lot and spent a lot of time fixing mistakes that I did not need to make.
I think I’m a pretty average Linux user. Who needs something that “just works” when you can break it by trying to add something you don’t need?
Yaa arch BTW guys!!
I’m joking I use fedora and its super stable And takes less time for gnome customization which can’t be achieved by windows
All 0.4% of the user base or whatever it is? Unless you mean among the population of server admins.
You mean like 50%? Or do you only mean desktop users? Which would be 4%.
It’s not a waste if I’m getting paid to do it full time
I wish I could do that
You absolutely can!
Jokes on you! My whole life is a waste of time
This is 100% due to Microsoft, google and Apple. If you dont understand, I’m not defending my position, or explaining further.
Tangent: what’s this trend all about where people will make a statement and then firmly state that they will not answer questions or explain themselves afterwards?
I’m seeing it everywhere.
Presumably it’s people who are tired of dealing with troll responses.
Right.
I just never read replies. Have people answer me and then never get back to them or even just read their well thought out comment.
Sanity.
Working server side much? Pretty sure a lot of us spend a lotta time on fixing shit unrelated to either of those 3… Not that it diminishes the merit of our IT support dude that endure due to those 3 indeed.
He uses arch btw
One thing I appreciate about Arch is that it’s quick to set up if you don’t care and still need something kinda controllable.
Since I don’t reinstall everything every week, I’m fine with Void. But I’ve used Arch for a month or so. It’s sane.
Oracle vies with MS as to who fucks me more often each working week. Cuurrently Oracle is pippng MS for biggest fucker award. If you don’t understand, you’ve never had to use Oracle (front end / web UI products - tbf the back end DB usually works ok).
Correct, but not how you meant it, fixing my Linux boxes is is my hobby now, so ita not a waste of time anymore.
Whatever. I waste probably 20 hours a week on “work”.
Them’s rookie numbers.
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It’s actually simple.
HIG, UX, ergonomics, all that - it doesn’t build up. Acceptable complexity of a pretty mechanical normal 80s’ UI\UX is the same as of a modern one. Humans don’t evolve over decades, they evolve over spans of time which are as good as eternity. They still need the same kind of complexity in tools they use.
A control panel for a loader that a factory worker should be able to use is as complex as a workflow on a computer can be. And that’s very explicitly accounting for the fact that loader’s or lift’s control panel doesn’t change every fucking day and the user remembers it, so computer UIs should be simpler than those of lifts and loaders!
You just don’t make UI\UX more complex than that. There are things humans can learn to do, and there are things they often can’t and they shouldn’t.
The issue is that this creates a bottleneck for clueless project managers, UI designers and such. They can’t throw together some shit in 30 minutes. They have to choose. They have to test. They don’t want that. And no regulation makes them do that, because if a loader has an unclear UI\UX, you might kill someone, while if an email program has that, you’ll just get very nervous.
A control panel for a loader that a factory worker should be able to use is as complex as a workflow on a computer can be. And that’s very explicitly accounting for the fact that loader’s or lift’s control panel doesn’t change every fucking day and the user remembers it, so computer UIs should be simpler than those of lifts and loaders!
I design control panels. I try to keep the workflow consistent not because I see value in it, but because some asshole decided that they didn’t want to pay for retraining. Really I don’t care, having to retool slightly every decade or so is pretty reasonable. Especially given that the tech is always changing.
Especially given that the tech is always changing.
Humans don’t. Changing things is fine, making using them more complex for the same result, because another decade has passed, is not.
It has to get more complicated, more edge cases have popped up and the process is more complicated.
Look basic example. I made an uncoiler and needed to add in a reverse override. Why? Because someone one time loaded it in wrong.
By “more complex” I meant making other operations slower (EDIT: and harder to understand) for somebody using it, so - not this example.
We are wasting up to 20% of our time with bronze problems.
– Some grumpy dude circa 3300 BCMust be the crappy copper from Ea-nāṣir
This. We used to waste time repairing the mechanical things when we could have been planting, or wasting time dealing with plant blights and livestock woes when we could have been hunting for wild game.
Some people still do. Fuck Jhon Deere.
I certainly don’t. If I can’t fix it in 5 minutes, I just ignore the problem. And I wish everyone else would too and stop complaining about the smoke coming out of the machine. It’s fine.
Using the word “we” loosely.
Sounds more like a lot of people could do with some basic computer skills training.
I don’t know how many times I’ve taught my coworkers to use the search features or ctrl+f function … at this point it feels like they are willfully forgetting. They ask me to help them do something, I go over to their computer, one of the steps is to bring up 1 specific document from the list of 100+ documents, they proceed to slowly scroll… and scroll… and scroll…
How about everyone who has zero skills with these problems, do they count is 0% spent on them as they outsource it or do they count as 100% since the smallest problem incapacitates their computer usage?
