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I'm Not a Programmer, but Here’s Why Linux Is My Daily Driver (www.howtogeek.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/linux

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[–] etrotta 35 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I feel like this misses the point of why people say Linux is for programmers pretty hard. It is not really about writing code, just about being tech-savvy and properly knowing your way around computers, which OP may as well know better than a lot of programmers.

Cherry-picking a lot, but I cannot imagine saying this to a normal biased person would make them any more likely to consider Linux:

I am not a programmer, but I studied computer science in college

For the past eight years, I’ve been a tech writer

Sure, being tech-savvy helps—which, by the way, is equally valid for Windows and macOS—but it’s not necessary. Linux doesn’t demand technical aptitude or computer science knowledge for normal day-to-day use cases.

It is important to recognize it still demands a lot more technical aptitude to find and understand information about how it works, how to it set up and how to customize compared to Windows or Mac, which come preinstalled and hold your hand through the setup process.

It isn't anything out of this world, but does require more effort than proprietary commercial software and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. Great article besides that though, and this wouldn't really be an issue if it weren't for that being the headline.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago

To be fair, studying computer science isn't always indicative of knowing your way around tech anymore. I'm an undergrad in CS right now with some experience as a TA. The amount of people who got points off of submissions (for a 2nd year class) because they didn't know how to zip a folder correctly and submitted an empty zip file is honestly depressing.

That being said, even knowing what Linux is probably puts your tech literacy above most people so I doubt that was the case here.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

I agree, you've captured much of why I came away from the article feeling a bit 'hmmm'.

Something I read somewhere that I found super interesting is that on Windows, when a process completes, the user often gets a notification or popup alerting them to this, whereas on Linux, it's more normal for there to not be any confirmation messages when a process is finished. I hadn't consciously realised this difference until I read this and reflected on how many times I'd have to double check things when I first started using Linux.