this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2023
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I use Arch btw
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To be fair most applications don't give you shit till you launch it in a terminal. That's something I'd wish would improve on Linux. My mother would get pretty frustrated so I assume most average people would be too.
For example lutris recognizes your missing wine but it just loads indefinitely.
If you don't have all the dependencies for alacrity it just doesn't launch.
If you don't have all the dependencies for gparted on Wayland it just doesn't launch.
Most apps don't create error messages in the gui and that's hard for average users to grasp.
I just went through 3 fucking days of troubleshooting why this program wont work. Finally issued a bug report, it got closed in 30 minutes, dev responded with "ya, those features are currently disabled, terminal will show you a warning when you launch it".
Great. And nothing for the GUI users?
The biggest annoyance to me is that Linux fanboys will say how you never have to touch a terminal if you don't want to, but when you bring up how ridiculous it is to disable features, keep them enabled on the GUI, and only throw a warning in the terminal, they'll tell you to use the terminal lol.
I’ve found anyone saying “you barely need to touch the command line” is straight up lying. You can do a lot with GUIs, but they’ll always be second class citizens for Linux software developers because those developers do everything through the terminal.
As far as I'm concerned still worth it compared to the state of proprietary OSes now a days. The online language model image generation features especially worry me due to the limitless data collection and scrapping capabilities. "Justified" collection of emails, word docs, images, videos, cameras, audio recordings, etc.
Most people won't bat an eye until their most intimate details are sitting in a stack of papers on some lawyers desk awaiting a trial over some data breach or antitrust practices.
I'm not arguing against Linux. Use whatever you want. It's just stop acting like Linux is GUI friendly when it's extremely dependent on if the dev is competent or not.
Also, whatever OS you use wont save you in data breaches. Just because you use Linux doesn't mean your Ashley Madison affair data is safe.
No one's making accusations here it's just easier to avoided something like a Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal when your os doesn't require an online cloud account to set it up or use advertised features.
I am annoyed whenever I launched something from dmenu and I don’t get error output or logs anywhere.
I do wonder why you would have missing dependencies for all of these applications? Shouldn’t your package manager handle that…?
I was playing with Hyprland back when it was only in the aur. I found it weird too but on something like kde the dependencies must already be there. Also lutris never comes with wine dependencies for some reason.
I think Lutris can install its own versions of wine which is probably why it’s not included (also you don’t need to use wine at all with Lutris). I guess I’m not surprised you ran into these issues on Arch. I wouldn’t expect this on the more mainstream distros a new Linux user would be likely to use, since these distros are more likely to take a batteries included approach to packaging. I’d hope running into missing dependencies when launching a program is a fairly uncommon experience, at least for anything installed with a package manager on most systems.