Are You Tech-Savvy Enough?

I’ve always been drawn to computers. I don’t need them, but I genuinely like them and all the things you can do on them. But it’s hard to do all of those cool things when all your brain can think about is fixing tiny imperfections.

You use what works for you, but what works for you depends on your own standards and work requirements. Not everyone dares to tinker with PCs or even ever thinks about it. Not only because a lot of people grew up with iPhones and iPads which are very locked down by design, but because most people don’t care about that stuff. They may want to draw, write, design, communicate with others or play their games. For these people, computers are tools – not toys.

I used to be a hardcore Linux guy until I realized I was spending more time perfecting things than using them. Buying a Mac freed up so much time for other, actual hobbies because it removed the mere possibility of me toying with things. There are merits to having things locked down just like there are merits to the opposite.

Granted, I learned a lot about computers during my time on Linux, but was it what I wanted to do with my time? Did I envision any future for myself in which that was an important aspect of my life? No, I didn’t.

Updates on Linux were always like Russian Roulette. I would restart and pray to every deity in human history for nothing to break. Mind you I didn’t use Arch, that was my experience on Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE. At least openSUSE had a way to rollback, but app support was lack luster and finding solutions online was like an easter egg hunt.

All I’m saying is that not everyone wants to know how a car functions to drive one. We need to get from A to B, but also sometimes from C back to A, and it feels like on Linux or really any open platform, I need to plan ahead for major fuckups by the system that would be my problem to solve. I simply didn’t and don’t have the time for any of that and I would bet that most people would just be too frustrated to even attempt fixing these things which I stupidly did, time and time again.

There is a reason why Apple’s products are so popular, especially among students, despite being so expensive. The last thing you want is your device crashing while you’re working on an important project or that a tool is unavailable or that your specific hardware requires a workaround to work with an app. There’s gotta be more to life than what computers can offer us and that’s why they should remain tools, not toys.

It’s great that Linux and Android exist, but I would never run them on my main devices that I use for actual work.

PS: I have ADHD. I don’t need anything to distract me because it all happens automatically. This is a discussion about accessibility of technology more than anything because Linux is not accessible in that sense. I’d often rather fix an issue than do what I’m supposed to do. Minimizing tech issues is what I need. It doesn’t “cure“ my ADHD, but it makes it a little less bothersome.

Edited on 2025-03-27 to add

To the people that have come here from the Tildes post, welcome! You might have noticed that I didn’t mention Windows anywhere in this post and this has a very simple reason: I fucking hate Windows with every fiber of my being and wouldn’t want to touch it with a 20 billion meter (welcome in the modern world) pole.

Linux was the alternative for me until I could afford a Mac. And now that I have that Mac and can choose between a Mac and Linux, I’ll go with the Mac since I get most of Linux’s upsides that I care about (like a functioning package manager and *nix utilities), but without the myriad of downsides.

And for the lovely people calling this post an ad, I didn’t post it myself to Tildes. This is my blog and I can say whatever the fuck I want. In any case, the last time I tried Linux which was in Springs of 2024, it still had all of the issues I talked about here.

My hardware wasn’t the issue because I had a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 14IIL05 with an Nvidia card. Linux still can’t handle fractional scaling properly (except for KDE and some window managers) and it hurt my eye sight to have to use the display at 100% instead of the preset 150% scaling it came with. I’m neither gonna mess with experimental features nor with KDE’s bugginess in addition to option overload. I’m sorry, but no. Not the target audience.

Ubuntu would routinely break, especially when going between major versions, and maybe it was my uneducated ass, but that was my reality. Linux Mint is fully and I was running away from Windows because of its shitty design decisions so having a replica running on a Linux kernel wasn’t exactly what I wanted. openSUSE Tumbleweed – a rolling release – was the most stable of them all, but it just lacked up-to-date, easy to understand documentation, so a no-go.

Updates were a hit and miss thing for me on Fedora as well – Silverblue and Workstation specifically –which was touted as stable and the new Ubuntu. They had a GRUB2 update once that just made the system unbootable and it was a disaster for everyone affected. They shipped a broken version and it took them a week to fix that. Why they upgraded versions within the release cycle is still beyond me.

It’s okay, mistakes can happen, but when those mistakes happen on Linux, I’m on my own. If my MacBook were to become unbootable one day, I can go somewhere and have it be looked at. I’m not messing with any of that anymore because my priorities lie elsewhere. Like I said, I’m not here to play with my laptop, I need it to get shit done like my current degree.

And not everything is a fan war. Grow the fuck up omfg.