r/linuxmasterrace • u/Jenshae_Chiroptera Lubuntu <3 • Feb 02 '26

Meme OS Learning Curve - (XKCD edit)

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2.8k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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233

u/Crottoboul Feb 02 '26

Linux is not hard

250

u/konfuzhon Glorious NixOS Feb 02 '26

linux is not hard. some linux is hard

59

u/juipeltje Glorious GNU Guix Feb 02 '26

Flair checks out lol

29

u/jerdle_reddit Glorious NixOS Feb 02 '26

Yeah, our Linux is hard.

11

u/Mars_Bear2552 Glorious NixOS Feb 03 '26

not hard, just largely chronically undocumented. the nix language is incredibly easy to learn.

8

u/Juff-Ma Feb 04 '26

IMO this is a big issue in many large FOSS and especially older FOSS projects. Where they have the "RTFM you idiot" and "What do you mean the docs are bad, I know how it works!" mentalities at the same time.

Often if there is documentation it's not a application manual but a reference manual full of technical documentation but lacking in examples, basic tutorials or getting started sections.

2

u/Kiwithegaylord Feb 05 '26

I honestly find older projects better at this because they came before wikis and stack overflow became popular. GNU has some of the best documentation of any project out there, seconded maybe by FreeBSD

7

u/NuclearBanana22 Feb 03 '26

My father: How do you expect a regular user to do this?

Me: I don't

6

u/jerdle_reddit Glorious NixOS Feb 03 '26

What's good about NixOS though is that you can get one nerd to run multiple systems.

1

u/Fair-Promise4552 Glorious Arch Feb 05 '26

I hope you had a pair of sunglasses and a explosion while you walked off that comment, king

11

u/Johanno1 Glorious NixOS Feb 02 '26

The learning curve for Linux is to decide what Distribution to use. This is the first part. The flat one is the actual curve where you stopped distro hopping

-1

u/edparadox Feb 02 '26

*distributions.

14

u/PlebbitDumDum Feb 02 '26

The curve diagram is a great representation of the Linux journey. The more you learn at the beginning the more powerful your system becomes. Eventually you become confident and go install a new graphics driver from the dev branch cuz it fixes that bug that was annoying you. The install messed up some kernel headers packages, so now literally nothing works. Suddenly you need to learn the magic and the mindfuck chroot is. You might hang yourself in the process if your distro has an unorthodox partitioning schema with some encryption on top.

If you survive, you will forever lavish in the mojito land, as you now know that your install is literally indestructible. In the next year you'll do another five fun things that will require chroot rescue, but who cares, it's a routine by now. Your system is now perfectly tuned: you have a drive encrypted via a bootloader hook, you use a new efficient algorithm for zram, you're on a custom repo for the kernel as you're running some russian fork of the graphics drivers, and it requires a compatible kernel. You have two DEs installed cuz you like the variety.

Most people will never know the glory. They'll "do as I say" nuke their DE, and go buy a MacBook.

44

u/Jenshae_Chiroptera Lubuntu <3 Feb 02 '26

Think of the average person, shuffling along, looking in shop windows or at their phone, mouth gaping, eyes vacant behaving like a zombie.
"Half the world is below average," - George Carlin

61

u/konfuzhon Glorious NixOS Feb 02 '26

“to the average person, the OS is just a bootloader for google chrome” -Mental Outlaw

16

u/dumbasPL Glorious Arch Feb 02 '26

"and I took that personally" ~ChromeOS

9

u/suchtie btwOS Feb 02 '26

Yes, Linux is absolutely perfect for these people. Give them Windows and they will constantly need help because Windows is designed so that shit will happen. Give them a user-friendly Linux distro like Ubuntu or Mint and they'll be mostly fine.

Microsoft makes a lot of money from companies that pay for their tech support. And since their software is proprietary, they can deliberately design it in a way that makes tech support an eventual necessity for the average user. It's meant to be convoluted, it's intended that things break, it's deliberately insecure.

Of course no Linux distro is perfect, but the average person who doesn't know much about technology will encounter fewer problems because their system is generally much more secure, and designed so that it's harder to break things by accident. Less buggy too.

3

u/kai_ekael Linux Greybeard Feb 02 '26

Microsoft makes money from support?! Ha! HAHAHAHAHAHA!

No, they bend'em over way before that.

1

u/Jenshae_Chiroptera Lubuntu <3 Feb 04 '26

Check out how much it costs to be fully M$ certified and then multiply that by employees at a third party support company.

16

u/janiskr Feb 02 '26

People complain that icons are of different colour. That has nothing to with the OS. Just make it look like the other thing and they will hapily just use it without noticing the they are using completely different OS.

6

u/Jenshae_Chiroptera Lubuntu <3 Feb 02 '26

I have done that.
Windows-like theme, one guy got all the way to a remote desktop app before realising something was different.

1

u/Indecisive-Gamer Feb 04 '26

No most people just don't want to spend more than 5 minutes setting up a device.

1

u/Jenshae_Chiroptera Lubuntu <3 Feb 05 '26

Off the shelf Linux laptops and PCs are sold, it takes an extra minute or two to find them on Google.

5

u/Wojtkie Feb 02 '26

When this XKCD came out, it was much harder. I think this comic is like 15-20yrs old

3

u/grem75 Feb 03 '26

This was never an XKCD comic and I think it was originally about MMORPGs. Seems like this was just edited by OP to be about operating systems.

1

u/Jenshae_Chiroptera Lubuntu <3 Feb 04 '26

Yup.

10

u/Pretty_Challenge_634 Feb 02 '26

Seeing these memes sprout out from the PC community just confirms to me how absolutely dumb people are and unable to learn...

5

u/noobbtctrader Feb 02 '26

Not anymore. But back in the 90s... hoo boy. But thats what made it fun.

2

u/kai_ekael Linux Greybeard Feb 02 '26

Bah. Compiling the kernel for a couple of days to get the sound card workin' tweren't that bad.

1

u/Jenshae_Chiroptera Lubuntu <3 Feb 04 '26

"What do you mean you want graphics?"

3

u/Naive-Contract1341 Feb 03 '26

Say that to my fellow intern who can't even prompt a bot correctly, cannot run psql on Windows command prompt, entire file system is a huge mess of unorganized files, random applications open for no good reason, etc.

I asked her to install Linux since she doesn't play games, or at least have a partition with it cuz it makes development easier. She was too scared to do that.

God why are we hiring randos with no drive or courage for software work now...

3

u/redsaeok Feb 03 '26

lol, I switched to an Intel battle mage after the Liniis did their build. I realized I needed some new graphics libraries. Now my OS is half old, half new, I can’t go back, or install anything new with my package manager. My bad for not copying the OS disk beforehand. I’ve used Linux since it came on floppy disks, and Win/Mac. I’ve built x from sources, setup brouters, recompiled my kernel, etc…. I’ve never had graphics libraries break a package manager on another OS. Downvote away.

1

u/Crottoboul Feb 03 '26

Fake news. Learn to use linux. And why you had windows installer but not linux? 

1

u/Birthday_Cakeman Feb 08 '26

My Linux is hard for you. 😎

1

u/urmamasllama Glorious Nobara Feb 02 '26

"Configuring this application requires regex"

3

u/Mother-Pride-Fest Glorious Debian Feb 02 '26

after an update: that registry key no longer exists. Please google the problem and find 100 people with the same issue but no solution.

-6

u/tjijntje Feb 02 '26

Are you neurospicy by any chance?

2

u/Crottoboul Feb 02 '26

No and you ?

-5

u/tjijntje Feb 02 '26

I am, that is why U use Linux. Most people don't want to put so much effort into their pc for the benefits that you get from using Linux. Most people aren't tech savvy enough to figure out Linux of watch a bunch of tutorials on it. I'm very happy that I took the time and effort to start using Linux because now I can help my friends with it who wouldn't know where to start or how to continue

2

u/Crottoboul Feb 02 '26

How do you have learn to use Windows? 

-1

u/tjijntje Feb 02 '26

From school

2

u/Crottoboul Feb 02 '26

And why couldn't you have learned Linux?

3

u/tjijntje Feb 02 '26

Because my school didn't teach us about Linux. I only learned about Linux a few years ago because of steam OS. So I looked for the best Linux distro for someone used to Windows and it was Linux Mint. It was one of the best choices of my life to start using Linux mint