Imo this is just a result of the chaotic, unreproducible install processes typical for proprietary software and a hesitancy to do root cause analysis on a workstation when you have time pressures to focus on other things.
The deep mystery of 'no one knows why' when it comes to issues is something I've never experienced on a personal Linux machine as an adult. But most of us work on machines where software installers can do whatever they want, we don't control the software update cadence, and our computers are bogged down with all kinds of instrumentation (AV, privilege management, data exfiltration monitoring, etc.) that affects performance and compatibility in complex ways and whose configuration we may have limited capacity to inspect or modify.
The hopeless sense of mystification here is not a fact of computing. It's a function of being alienated from our computing environments. We don't have to work this way, and I wish we didn't. But we largely do.
Which applies to nearly 100% of modern software. (Including Linux distros and a lot of their required software, other than the source bit...)
Of course, someone would debate that with me, but before the Windows NT kernel took over, I had to format to solve problems sometimes. I haven’t had to do that a single time since Windows 7. I ran eight or nine years on one Windows 7 install.
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I can tell you from experience that issues stay well in known boundaries. I can tell which users will have issues and with what, by just looking at their installed applications.
Where things begin to fall off, users that want to be admins, developers that deploy random stuff. Power users in general are the cause of their own problems.
Developers sharp or not don’t always know how to run their own laptop. More often than not they are the cause of their problems.
There are some terrible applications out in the world. Creative cloud I’m looking at you.
Or I found this great application called Figma let me paste raw 500mb pictures & pdfs into it and watch it eat my machine alive.
Laptop & desktop hardware, Apple included, still has a huge randomness factor.
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Q/quantum-bogodynamics.html
In all seriousness, it probably has to do in large part with gestures broadly global state. Registry, configuration, what else is running on the system, how up to date it is. There are so many possible different settings, parameters, processes doing weird api calls, that it's a combinatoric explosion.
Nevermind the fact I have cross- platform issues (win/OSX/linux/android) with audio and bluetooth devices with teams...
There is also an admirable type of person who has lots of tech problems because they’re genuinely pushing limits, but they’re rare.
People have different annoyances and preferences. Perhaps you are lucky enough to be close to the default where you don't need to change so many things.
While the defaults for other is death by a thousand papercuts...
So it depends on which direction you push the customizations.
Forcing the square peg into the round hole often results in extra challenges. Sometimes its just easier to use the round peg, even if its not perfectly what you'd like.
I tend to just roll with the defaults and only change settings when I really need to. I tend to experience a good bit less friction than a lot of my coworkers who flip every switch into something other than the default.
Odd. I feel that people are sympathetic because everyone knows Teams is weird and cheap.
But I've noticed something else about computers and software. You can have two people with similar jobs, similar computers, similar software, etc. One person will have crashes and problems all the time, and the other person, smooth sailing. Nobody knows why. It doesn't matter whether they're IT experts or homemakers. In the words of a former office-mate: "I got a new computer, and spent two days setting it up exactly the way I want it, and yet it still crashes all the time." That person was a very sharp and productive programmer, yet he was swearing at his computer almost continually.