People here have been very helpful to me as a newbie to Webmin and Linux, and I am grateful for that.
But some of my struggles and some of the responses have just gotten me thinking about the culture of Linux as a whole.
I do technical support and QA testing for a living, specifically for a web-based software product. I talk to people from every state in the USA using our software to do their jobs in the public health field.
Sometimes it falls on deaf ears, but I am always pushing my colleagues to make our systems friendlier and explain more things on screen without forcing people to dig through documentation. Many of our users donât understand the basics of using computers, web browsers, etc.
I am reasonably tech-savvy. Certainly a power user.
But then I got into Linux just to run my own little NAS box at home for my photography hobby. I was completely lost, and âLinux peopleâ just expected me to understand all of this technical jargon and commands. Even the UI expected me to know things by osmosis.
This is why I believe Linux has remained so niche. I spoke to one of my former colleagues about this a few years ago. He was a very smart web developer, and he was complaining about nothing âjust worksâ in Linux and why he hated using it.
There are a lot of us who want things to just work out of the box or guide us through setting things up in a basic way without having to tinker so much. I didnât set up this NAS as a homelab or trying to learn new technology. I was literally just trying to store my photos and videos I have shot securely and back them up to my other Synology NAS.
Of course, there are good reasons to tinker with things in Linux and customize it to meet your needs. Itâs obviously important for people doing professional IT work to know it well and make it work the way they need it to work. Thereâs nothing wrong with that. But it should also be a lot easier for schmucks like me to just do the basics without a lot of prior knowledge.
I am a Windows guy for many years and the difference between this and Linux is large.
I completely understand that most things require you to use the command line to do things and this is where Virtualmin comes in, it gives you a GUI which then uses the command line to perform the actions for you. So this shows that being able to do everything from the command line is a positive because you can build software to sit on top of the command line. I personally try the CLI avoid this because I might type the wrong command, I am getting better.
Ubuntu does a desktop version of their OS and this is a lot more user friendly. Linux Mint takes this further to move more towards Windows. I think in the near future the desktop version of Linux will become more competitive with Windows especially with a lot of hardware that will not run Windows 11.
The documentation quality can vary in quality and I have found that people use switches that are not documented.
I think if you are not a experience Linux guy the eco system can come across as the wild west. If you find and decent resources on your travels, I would be interested as I want to improve my Linux skills.
Webmin enables you to configure a Linux box without needing to remember the commands of the Linux CLI and the parameters which are to be applied to the commands.
Virtualmin enables you to install and operate a shared hosting web server environment without needing to remember the commands of the Linux CLI, the sequence of commands to operate a web and mail server and the parameters which are to be applied to the commands.
A newbie can run a basic but viable web hosting business with the free / GPL version Virtualmin without ever needing to use the Linux CLI.
The Linux learning curve can be avoided altogether if you use Virtualmin without overselling storage on your server or offering multiple versions of PHP.
Linux has a steep learning curve and thus, is hard work. There is a reason why nobody recommends Linux to inexperienced users. They are better off with macOS and Windows that can be used right off the bat.
Iâve been working in Cybersecurity for 15 years and see the effects of misconfigured Linux hosts almost daily. Lower costs and providers who sell VPSs like hot cakes make it way too easy for hackers to access data and set up botnets.
Yes, *min helps keep terminal work to a minimum, which is also the big problem (Iâm talking about any software with a GUI, not just *min): Just because you can handle a GUI doesnât mean you understand the system.
If you arenât prepared to invest a considerable amount of learning and time in Linux (especially the use of the terminal), you shouldnât use it.
This community is tougher to deal with than the Windows people. In the Linux area, itâs automatically assumed that one has already dealt extensively with the subject matter before any questions are answered. Questions asked by newcomers in particular are often shot down with the comment that one should find out about it via the man pages or by googling.
But youâre right that Windows servers arenât easy to configure either.
But like everything in the world of computing it is all in constant change Linux is certainly no different (just sample all the different varieties and the near daily upgrades) heck it is even an issue with Windows.
Oh bring back the days of machine code programming - it is just so called progress!
Linux is not difficult to learn just different like all languages - once you get fluent the effort has its rewards.
I gave up with windows in the last melenium, when it became apparent that the gui was going the way to go, this was apparent in windows me/2000, the command line was being lost in favor of this new fangled gui ⊠this slowed my productivity down and wish to return to the the days when guiâs are not os and can be terminated leaving you with a cli, enter linux at the time. I would guess anyone less than 40 years of age has not experienced this way of computing and become âducks out of waterâ when confronted with a linux server, but I guess itâs just the same if you moved to a different country and have to learn a new language
Or maybe they expected you to put in some effort? There are plenty of people âblowing throughâ here that expect the community to do their work while they profit. They wonât even answer the questions asked of them and then complain we havenât used âreverse osmosisâ to magically fix their problems.
Personally, Iâve put in decades of mostly finding my own answers and relying on the community when I couldnât find it. Give a fish, teach fishing. Your choice in how you view it I guess.
I hear you, I really do. At work, I often find myself âteaching users to fishâ so they can do things they think only we can do for them at our access level.
But the truth is, I shouldnât have even had to ask the community for help to begin with for something so basic because the software should have a âtraining wheelsâ or âWizardâ experience built in to set up essential things. And I know this is possible with a NAS because Synology already does it so well. My Synology NAS seems to âjust workâ for me.
I just couldnât apply that experience to this hardware because itâs not a Synology box, and I wasnât sure I could keep up with updating it manually. I just wanted something I could set once and forget.
Having a GUI is necessary but not sufficient. It needs to be understandable to people with zero prior experience.
Maybe itâs just Webmin, and there are other distros that offer a better experience for beginners.
I shied away from âdesktop Linuxâ because this is a NAS, after all. But maybe that was my mistake. TrueNAS is also off the table because of the hardware requirements that my old clunker doesnât come close to meeting.
Heh, I worked on an experimental generative AI project at work this year that included ChatGPT, and Iâll just say the project was scrapped because the results my colleagues and I got from the AI were not up to snuff. Way too generic considering the highly specialized information and data we were feeding it. It wasnât just ChatGPT either.
Maybe it will be revived someday as the AI responses improve, but as of nowâŠyikes. we still have a long way to go.
Ok from your other thread it would appear that webmin wrote the data to the correct location, but your windows client did not have the correct permissions to read it, maybe this comment should be pointed to a Microsoft forum somewhere ? Idk
And probably using the same underlying technology. Can you reverse it to see what their settings are? Remember, this is a Webmin/Virtualmin centric board. Lots of general knowledge but probably few, if any, of the volunteers here use SAMBA.
But then I was told that wasnât going to work in the long run because that older version of Samba was going away soon, and I would be âright back here.â I appreciated that heads up and the subsequent troubleshooting help, but then Iâm left with the same problem I had to begin with.
Checking a box in Windows was only a Band-AidâŠand it works, for now. But, I still donât understand how to make it work properly in the long run.
Of course, my Synology NAS was just working properly the entire time regardless of my Windows settings!
It turns out my Synology NAS was using SMB 1.0. I never knew that was a problem until someone here told me it was outdated and going away in the near future.
I just changed it to SMB 3 with a minimum version of 2, and thatâs when it stopped working until I turned on SMB 1.0 support in Windows back on.
So, perhaps it really is a Microsoft issue. Regardless, it has been driving me crazy for three years while Iâve owned this Webmin NAS.
