Well that’s … descriptive.

I mean, I wouldn’t call riding a motorcycle “safe”.

I’m not even arguing against them, it just feels like calling it “safe” makes it easy to dismiss all the safety precautions you should take and safety gear you should use whenever you do ride one.

Lately I’ve been seriously thinking about resurrecting my FidoNet node. It looks like FidoNet still exists!

I’m a CPA and my PC runs Linux, but also has a Windows VM for when I need Excel (unfortunately the open source alternatives just don’t cut it, and I’m guessing it’s similar for someone who relies on Word the way accountants rely on Excel), and my work laptop runs Windows.

If you ever edit PDFs with Acrobat Pro, there’s no good Linux equivalent that I’ve found for that either. It can be done, but you’ll need a couple of different programs depending on what you need to edit in the PDF.

In general I’d say that you can run your business in Linux, but it is probably not the best choice.

I tend to think of it like a garbage disposal. If you can’t dispose of your garbage, you gotta keep it somewhere. Except most things probably don’t check if it exists or have a backup plan, so they’ll just crash.

I haven’t tried that, but my guess is generally no based on other things I’ve tried chatGPT for and things I’ve read. It would probably have some lucky hits and those would seem like magic, but it would mostly produce correct-sounding answers that don’t fix the problems.

Imagine making a typo and it continually being shared and highlighted for over 30 years.

Kinda makes me glad I’ll never be famous for anything.

I use Ubuntu on my desktop and when I had an NVIDIA video card I did have fairly frequent issues when the proprietary drivers would update and then not play nice with something. That card died and I replaced it with an AMD video card and I don’t think I’ve had a “dive into the annals of gnu/Linux architecture” session since.

I also had some bad RAM at one point and spent a couple of hours trying in vain to boot into either Linux or Windows.

I do think it’s fair to say that there are some things that Windows handles a little more gracefully, but the situation is not nearly as bad as it used to be / people still tend to think it is.

I also have a Windows laptop, and from time to time I’ll have an issue that I’m trying to fix and I’ll end up on the Microsoft forum where someone asked my question and the answers are either answers to questions that weren’t asked or a set of steps that must have been based on a different build of Windows or something because there’s no way to follow them on my installation of Windows 11. So maybe that’s not hostile like the old school Linux forums, but it’s still unhelpful.

I think both are fine, both have their pros and cons, and those pros and cons aren’t as different as people make them out to be.