this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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The average user wants their problem gone. And will use whatever helps. Windows users were editing register and editing ini files since Windows was an addon to DOS, and continue doing it. For a literate person there is absolutely nothing more inheritly more intuitive or easy in clicking a checkbox in a fifth submenu than entering a command in a console. Stop perpetuating this weird myth.
This is correct. I work with the "average user" of technology daily as IT support, and honestly, they don't give any shits at all about why it's messed up, or what needs to be done to correct the problem. Box broken, make fix.
The argument that I think the poster is trying to make is that, if a user needs to do any self troubleshooting, which is basically inevitable with technology at the moment, having to use a CLI to get things done is undesirable for the average person. They barely want to bother opening control panel in Windows (or the new "settings" app.... Ugh.) nevermind understand any of it.
Box broken. Make fix.
It's not a weird myth, have you ever worked with average users? Some of them have trouble opening a PDF or don't know how to import a CVS file in Excel. Power users have always been tinkering in their OS that's nothing new, but I'm talking about the average Joe.
People you described don't have better or worse time with different types of user interfaces, it's all incomprehensible to them. Average Joe with zero skills can't check boxes in some weird menus, just as they can't write text in a weird black box. We're talking about people who are at least a little curious about their OS.
It's not a myth though. How do you know what to type in a CLI? You either google it or you read the man pages and god help you if you have to do that because they are not noob accessible documents. What do you do in a GUi? You either google it or you read plain words that are low in technical information on the screen in the menu labeled after what you want to change. GUIs exist for a reason. They brought in the masses for a reason. Pretending that they aren't easier is a demonstrably wrong position.
The same way you know where the setting you're after located. As my little experiment showed it's not obvious if your problem isn't trivial. And if it's trivial, you can be sure it's trivial on every modern OS.
If you spend a fraction of time you spent learning your GUI on learning the set of commands you have, it will be very easy for you. There is autocomplete and there are various helps, and there are conventions a lot of the software follows. If you're literate, it's fine.
It's funny you listing out that experiment, because that's more akin to the bullshit I run into with Linux when I need to fix some weird ass quirk. Tons if incorrect or outdated information, and forum assholes calling people idiots for not knowing and refusing to help or being autistically pedantic because you misspelled something. Support on either platform is a garbage experience. I haven't denied that at all.
It's a curse of the tech world. There are always some bullshit problems, there is always the need for tuning, tinkering, and generally fucking around with your system. No matter the OS, you will encounter some non-trivial problem at some point, that's just the price of complexity. At least Linux is made for that and is opensource.
What is that reason? To obfuscate what is really happening? To make it difficult to support a computer because it takes 20 pages of pictures and a flow chart to explain something when a person could just copy paste a single line? I don't buy that gui's are easier or intuitive, or all that useful every time.
I don't see any difference ~~googling~~ using a decent search engine for one over the other.
And lets not forget that windows is a confusing mess of self help support pages and command line entries for almost everything that goes wrong.
Windows: "PROGRAM_NAME experienced an error: DEEZ_NUTZ"
Yep that's what we're calling a useful error prompt these days. So much better than Linux lol
"I'm sowwy, something went wrong :(". No logs, no error message, no nothing.
God I hate it so much.
You can definitely have your opinion. But seeing how so many people have a hard time switching to Linux because of this particular issue, I'd say your position on the subject is quesionable. There are hordes more people on Windows and Mac because they made things easier through accessible software. A large part of that was the GUI.
Most people I know that are on Windows are there for two reasons: they either have no idea what they're doing, they bought a laptop that had Windows on it already, they have a flowchart of buttons to press to achieve results, and when interface changes, they are in panic and I need to come to them to make a new flowchart. Or they're using Windows for the last two decades, never tried anything else, and know about Linux from random comments on the internet that scare them into believing that evil Linux is completely incomprehensible.
My wife is an English teacher. When we got her a new laptop, instead of buying Windows, I installed Arch (I use Arch btw), which is wildly considered the most evil of the evil Linuxes, and believe it or not, she is completely happy with it (well, as happy as one can be using a computer). The amount of times she needs my help with some random bullshit OS throws at her decreased since she learned a bit about how stuff works. Even using terminal to input some commands turned out not to require wast amount of knowledge like some people imply.
Because it came with their computer. I have not used a command line at all on two laptops over the past year. It is the exception not the rule these days.
However I have had to use the command line many, many times with Windows. Which is fine, it is MUCH easier to do this "Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted" instead of trying to find the gui to deal with it.
That example just proves my point further. No average joe is going to alter the execution policy because they aren't running unsigned powershell scripts. They just want their applications to install and work. They don't want to debug shit. You being fine doing all that is great but other people don't want to mess with it and won't.
Half the time instead of downloading and running an executable that works with nearly all versions of their OS, they have to figure out which os flavor they have since it's not just "Linux" it's Debian, Red Hat, Arch, Kali, Suse, CentOS, Mint, Pop, Ubuntu, etc. and then does it need to be compatible with gnome or kde or something else, then is the configuration even a supported option, oh wait it only supports versions newer than 5 years where anything older will fail, or only till 5 years ago and anything newer will fail. Or the one project that solved the issue stopped developing it 10 years prior and no longer works. Or there just plain isn't a native app so now you have to try and find an alternative way to connect to a service you pay for that has an equivalent feature set and price.
Linux is a fractured mess overall. It is not user friendly. It is not out of the box ready. It's a great option for someone technical that wants to type shit in a terminal. And it's a bad option for anyone that doesn't want to figure out what the magic words are that took the place of their double click.
My example wasn't literal, I have had to do similar things for drivers, sound, USB, search etc. And windows support is just randos telling you what they think might work.
As to your second point, the sane applies as windows is a collection of who knows that the hell software and random hardware. Which hardware? What driver? What vendor?
But I can select nearly any software since Windows 7 and it will still work on windows 10/11. That is far less common on linux. It's more a rule on windows with some exceptions vs linux being the inverse.
Support is stupid for both platforms. I don't even want to touch that mess. Assholes and cunts on both sides and in different ways.
This is so demonstrably, laughably not true it's not even funny.
Granted it is becoming less true on 11. But I am not wrong about the rest. I run into abandonware that doesn't work far more with Linux.
I mean, there are a lot of projects that were supported by like one guy that stopped updating it 10 years ago, that's true. But more often than not, if the software is useful enough, there will be a modern fork of it, or someone rebuilt it from scratch, or the functionality was repeated by some later project, or at the very least it's very easy to patch some modern dependencies, and there is a very easily googlable helpful instruction on that.
Personally, I know of only two big products for which this isn't the case, and they require 20 years old kernel to run, but those are esoteric outliers, and I'm not even sure people are still using it.
It may work, but it also may fuck up something else. I run into that a lot with users and windows. How do they fix it or get rid of it? Say hello to our friend regedit!
Again though, those times are more exceptions than rules. I'm not saying Linux hasn't come a long way. A lot of the distros I've worked with are much better than they were a decade ago. They just still aren't the oobe needed to capture general end users.
No they are more the rule. I have to deal with windows every day. I do all of it remotely using Linux. Because Linux just works and I don't have time to deal with windows bullshit. Linux has been stable and reliable, particularly on my laptops where I do nothing but update or upgrade. My desktop has caused me a few issues over the years, been rolling Arch for 6 years or so, but I think that is to be expected.
Windows on the other hand, what a pain in the ass.
But I will agree that end users, in general are unlikely to use Linux over Windows in most cases. Not because Linux isnt ready, but that is what os their computer came with, that is what they are familiar with, and largely it is what they will make apologies for. I mean lets be real: most people don't want a computer at all. I can't blame them. My elderly mother vastly prefers her iPad over a computer no matter what the OS is on the computer.
We are doing a review of all of our software to prep for Windows 11 right now. It's not going nearly as well as you think because not all software is consumer-grade.
Not too long ago a bunch of our scientific devices got knocked out by Microsoft fixing an old serial bug. Turns out all the software to run these was built to workaround the bug and quite a few of these items are long since unsupported (or the vendor is gone). Some of these are tens of thousands of dollars, we can't just replace these on a whim.
I'm aware not all software is consumer grade. And many depts like sci/lad/manufacturing/medical definitely have more to worry about with upgrades. Windows 11 is a shit show even at the consumer level, I'd hate to be managing a migration to it for an office, let alone any dept relying on custom hardware. But blaming windows for something that would just as easily happen on a linux machine is a bit disingenuous. Upgrades break shit across all the OSes. I've had to rebuild linux servers because an upgrade would break them and keeping them air gapped on a closed loop wasn't an option.
I donβt know if I agree with entirely. A good UI lets you configure your system without knowing much about it. E.g. if you want to change Ubuntuβs Wi-Fi power save setting you edit a hidden text file (I donβt remember where it is off of the top of my head.) I didnβt even know that this file existed without a helpful AskUbuntu thread and that editing it would greatly speed up my connection. If a UI option existed, I would probably have found it while poking around the network settings screen.
Thatβs what a good UI does: it lets you mess with your system without need for a help forum or leafing through documentation. You can look at where settings are supposed to be, find what youβre looking for, and even explore new settings that you donβt know about.
Oh hey, let's run an experiment then. I'm not a Windows poweruser, but I have an access to it. Let's see, in almost real time, how long it will take me to find how to change Wi-Fi power save setting (I don't know what it is, so very fair this way).
Well, it's a setting, so let's go where settings are. I go to a big menu, find settings in it, assume wifi is in network settings, go there, find wifi setting. Read through all the menus. Nothing. I'm 5 menus deep, and there is "more adapter options button". It asks an admin password, so let's give it to it. Completely different window opens, one that I saw all those years ago in Windows XP. It's called wifi 3 properties. It doesn't render properly on my monitor, the text is blurry, but we're not in "googling shit" territory yet so I power through. (later I found out that it's normal, this menu was constructed when 640x480 was considered high def resolution, and it struggles with modern screens). In this menu there is 12 rows of something, I don't know what QoS Packet Scheduler means or what Client For Windows does. Let's press configure on this one. That menu closes, it asks ominous question, and new one opens. It assures me that the device is working properly, and in advanced tab there is 24 different settings I can change. Settings like "Fat Channel Intollerant" (It is disabled. I don't know if it's good or bad), or Human Presence Detection (it's auto. I assume it's something related to the upcoming robot uprising). There is no help, there is no explanation, I lost count how deep I am, it's more than 10. I'm like half an hour in, probably. I checked all the available settings. I forgot what I'm looking for and had to re-read your comment to remind myself. But at least I don't have to edit a text file, amirite?
Ok, fuck it, let's google. First link.
I cry for a minute, click the link, the list isn't there. I still don't know what to click, and the link is about Intel. Is my wifi adapter made by intel? Do I need to know it? Let's google further.
Stack overflow.
Click yours. So I do need to know it. OK, let's do that. I should've guessed that you don't find setting in settings, it's intuitive after all.
It looks like one of the menus that I saw already, but it's not, it's different one. It once again assures me that the device is working properly. There is no settings. There is no Power Management Tab. Let's google that then.
Mycrosoft forums.
Well, the answer is 4 years old. My drivers are up to date, so that doesn't help. Let's dig further. Another post on the Microsoft forums.
Damn, I am sure glad I don't have to edit any text files, that would be unintuitive as fuck. Anyway, let's open regedit and create some new DWORDs, shall we? That would not be a problem, regedit is easy and intuitive program that allows very easy way to intuitively do anything.
Anyway, it didn't help. Turns out it stopped helping at some point. Further in the Microsoft forums people offering helping powershell scripts that I need to run in Elevated Powershell to do...something, I assume? It changes some register keys, it's not obvious what.
At this point, I give up. I am easily hour in, I don't know how to change wifi power safe setting in Windows, and I am afraid I will never know. Sure glad I didn't have to edit one symbol in a text file the name of which is easily googlable.
You have so thoroughly captured the Windows experience. Bravo!
Well the comparison I'd draw is not even needing to worry about that kind of thing on Windows. I went from getting about 200 to 300 Mbps on Windows without doing anything besides connecting to a network to getting 10 to 30 Mbps on Pop!_OS and Linux Mint (Before fixing this issue.)
The strength of Windows is not easy access to more settings (especially after they split the setting between the new settings app and the old control panel), it's not needing to access most of them in the first place. That will vary between users and use cases of course. Some people moved to Linux well before the enshittificafion of Windows got really bad because it suits their needs better.
Well, that's moving the goalpost, isn't it? We started with "Linux bad because reading hard" and "Windows good because mouse click boxes easy" and now we're in "windows is just works, no need to change anything".
Well guess what, this is also not true, you do constantly need to fiddle with Windows, it's just sometimes you can't edit what you need, and you're out of luck.
Next time, try OpenSuse
No terminal required.