Maintaining a Tank

Something recently reminded me of something from "In the Beginning was the Command Line", where the author, by way of allegory, compares Windows to a horrifically leaky and inefficient SUV and Linux to a tank.  The buyer complains that he doesn't know how to maintain a tank, and the Linux vendor points out that he doesn't know how to maintain an SUV either.

So, here's the backstory: My kids are playing Minecraft.  We were doing multiplayer, hosted by me, on my Linux laptop.  (Which required no special setup to work.)  They are playing on Windows 10.  They decided they wanted to play together in a world of their own, so now they are trying to connect to each other.  It's not working.  The connection attempts just timeout.  Sadly, this is pretty much par for the course for Windows.  The problem is usually some obscure thing going on with Windows Firewall, that it just shouldn't be doing on a private network.  I've fixed it before, but Windows has a way of magically breaking itself again periodically, and sometimes I just can't figure it out (and I'm what many people would call a "tech wizard", so that's saying a lot).  So, I Googled a bit to see if I could find something that might help, and I came across this:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/minecraft-windows-10-edition-unable-to-connect-to/a6d1103a-885a-45f7-a292-7ed5e47f5379

If anyone ever whines to me about having to drop down to the command line in Linux, or complains about how hard it is to use Linux because you "have to" use the command line, I'm going to have to tape my butt back on, because I'm going to laugh it clean off.

There may have been a time when Windows was easier to use out-of-the-box than Linux.  That's no longer true.  In fact, in my experience, it hasn't been true since the mid-2000s (when I was using Kubuntu and Lubuntu, which "just worked").  And now, even Windows own tech support people are giving many lines of cryptic command line commands and expecting casual users to be able to be able to use them to fix problems that Linux never had in the first place.  Welcome to MS, suckers!

Here's the first line from the MS rep: "Online gaming requires periodic resetting of your network configurations."  What the crap MS?  I've never found myself having to "periodically" reset my network configurations to keep my online gaming working, even in Windows!  And I've played my share and then some!  This has nothing to do with needing to reset stuff periodically (and let's be clear, only crappy software ever needs regular resets to work properly).  Windows is a stinking pile of crap, that can't do even the simplest things Linux does out of the box without having to do arcane magic at the command line.  That's the problem.  Online gaming doesn't "require" periodic resetting.  A complete trash network stack does.  Software that is completely incapable of detecting its own failure and handling errors gracefully does.

To be fair, Windows 10 is better than every previous Windows back through Vista, and it's about on par with XP, though the final iteration of XP was less buggy and the networking wasn't as crappy.  But better isn't the same as good.

My laptop has Windows 10 on it.  I haven't booted into it in months.  The last time I clearly recall booting into it was more than 6 months ago, though I might have booted into it once since then to get a URL from a browser tab.  Steam's Proton allows me to play my Steam Windows games on Linux flawlessly (thus far, anyhow; addendum: I had to boot into Windows since writing this to play Age of Empires 2 (2013), however note that AoE2: Definitive Edition works fine in Linux through Steam).  I also have PlayOnLinux, which allows me to play Blizzard games (which is the rest of the Windows games I have), pretty much flawlessly as well (though I've only actually tested Heroes of the Storm on this computer).  I'm going to have to resize partitions to install more Blizzard games, but since I'm not even using Windows 10 anymore, I should be fine just taking 90% of its free space without any issues.  (Maybe I should boot into Windows 10 one last time, to uninstall all of my Blizzard games there, to free up even more space to install them on Linux...)

Anyhow, it turns out maintaining a Linux tank is now substantially easier than maintaining a Windows SUV, whether you are a noob or a wizard.  I find it a bit funny how MS keeps making their OS more and more obsolete.