How broken are we talking here? Like, installation is kinda borked but technically works broken, or purge it with fire and salt the storage medium broken?

I have often busted my machine learning rig as it runs an ancient (but spacious VRAM) GPU. If I upgrade the drivers by accident, it takes an average of 1-2 days to make everything happy again.

I used to be more cavalier with my boot partitions; I am no stranger to a busy box for repairs. Best moments are when I used to try and adjust a live partition to make more room for the swap partition (or vice versa).

I have screwed up more Raspberry PI installations than I care to count. Usually by my own hand.

I have completely broken Xwindows multiple times due to drivers, trying to go between desktop environments, and most frequently trying to get video cards to work that aren’t natively supported.

“I just heart my Ubuntu, and my computer friend was right: this was easy to install!.. wait a sec. What do you mean it’s only got 3 months of support left?!? You told me to get the latest version!”

I don’t doubt you cleaned up it up well. But you are the exception rather than the rule for experiencing Windows 11.

The absolute shitfest that is the incessant integration with Bing and other online only tech is the biggest problem. If you have muscle memory like I do to start button + type keyword for a program + enter, it is unbearably slow to respond at times for the search to catch up. Or my new favorite, getting ready to hit enter, only to have it change the current selection right before.

And this is to say nothing of the critical settings you can no longer directly control or are just broken. Want to change the power profile of your laptop? Buried. Want to get an estimate on your battery time remaining? Better open the registry. Want to switch your background? Well, roll the dice on that high resolution PNG you just created; unlike 10, 11 fails on some backgrounds of certain filetypes if they’re over a certain size (try a detailed PNG over 3000x4000). Just want a plain old Documents directory that isn’t integrated with OneDrive? Happy hunting; turning it off ain’t enough anymore.

Friend, while I appreciate the time and effort on the docs, it has a rather tiny section on one of the truly worst aspects of pip (and the only one that really guts usability): package conflicts.

Due to the nature of Python as an interpreted language, there is little that you can check in advance via automation around “can package A and package B coexist peacefully with the lowest common denominator of package X”? Will it work? Will it fail? Run your tool/code and hope for the best!

Pip is a nightmare with larger, spawling package solutions (i.e. a lot of the ML work out there). But even with the freshest of venv creations, things still go remarkably wrong rather quick in my experience. My favorite is when someone, somewhere in the dependency tree forgets to lock their version, which ends up blossoming into a ticking time bomb before it abruptly stops working.

Hopefully, your experiences have been far more pleasant than mine.

More context: https://www.langton.cloud/python-pip-requirements-txt-lock-file/

Hahaha!..

Oh shit, you’re serious.

It’s all fun and games until the wheel variant you need for your hardware acceleration package conflicts with that esoteric math library you planned on using.

Windows 11 is trash. Microsoft kept boasting it was “faster” than 10, but it is (unsurprisingly?) heavy in some weird areas, including a less snappy start menu, more telemetry, invasive integration with their software, you name it. Tried one machine in my collection to try it via an upgrade (a Microsoft Surface Pro 6), and the performance was so bad I ended up going back to Windows 10. Multi-second lag just to get to the program shortcuts is a really bad sign.

Yes. So much yes.

Sure, at least half of the FAANG use Linux. But they use a homegrown Linux flavor often maintained by an entire dedicated team. Not some random ass Ubuntu or Mint ISO you downloaded; these images are custom tailored to the workflows, dev needs, security needs, and even package management needs of the corporation. They often carry a complete profile template that integrates with whatever they’ve chosen to enforce authentication, have a lavish on-board remote monitoring system, you name it.

Not safe enough. Give it another decade; I’m sure they’ll get around to ruining it by then.

This is the real answer to this question. Not just an invention to unfairly evaluate folks (and charge them originally to see it!), but nothing more than a “how much we can fleece you for” score that has become so widely embraced you can’t ignore it.

Let’s not forget HP making an “update” that effectively self-destructed the printer for use if you don’t use their cartridges. Evem after the public outcry and back pedaling by the company with a new bios update, my printer still “manifested” the same problem they intentionally introduced.

Replaced parts, tried other things, then just said “forget it” and replaced it with a more expensive color laser from a competitor. Happiness and reliable printing ensued.

Welcome to V1 of a brand new hardware platform.

You could always go with higher quality brands, like Tesla. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Tesla-car-reliability-lower-than-the-average-in-a-study-debut-as-Lexus-takes-top-spot.693018.0.html

Just kidding, let’s go with Apple’s two year average. https://www.computerworld.com/article/2752739/more-than-a-quarter-of-iphones-break-within-2-years.html