this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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In my opinion, the biggest problem with Linux is it requires tinkering in terminal which nearly every non-tech savvy person finds intimidating. Even if it's a simple command. Until Linux has a shiny dumbed-down GUI for everything you need to do, it won't catch on for the average PC user.
Linux has made incredible progress in this area though. But, everytime I use a new Linux install, I encounter errors or something that requires troubleshooting and terminal use.
I'm comfortable using a terminal, but with my Linux machines s common pattern is:
Need to get some software working. Find how to fix it, edit some config files.
Months later I run a system update and it's starts asking me about merging the changes I made to various files. What were they for again? Are they still even necessary with the update or are the values I changed no longer used?
Then sometimes, something I installed is no longer supported, or needs a manual update because of how I installed it.
You can set up something like Timeshift to automatically take a snapshot of your system before updating (and/or before installing new software) every time. The one time my system got a little fucked up after removing the wrong dependencies or whatever, loading up that snapshot worked like a charm.
Just having that as backup has made me far more comfortable with trying new things on my laptop.
Some of those that don't find it intimidating do find it tiring. I grew up using MSDOS and later Windows 3.1 when it came out. Most of what we did was in command line and having everything in a GUI is just a QOL upgrade you don't really want to come back from.
I've been using mint on my laptop for a few months now and it's great, but like you said there's still some things that require command line tinkering and I just don't have the energy for it.
It's the same reason I like console games, they just work. Don't get me wrong, the console modding scene is non-existent and any kind of customization is generally out of the question, but it just works, and it works the first time every time.
Full agree on tiring. I work as an SRE, my job is administrating Linux machines (containers these days). When I need to use a computer, I just want it to work out of the box and Linux doesn't offer that yet. I don't want to spend time getting it to work
Tbh for some people there's no going back once you learn it. Navigating a GUI and clicking through several buttons vs having a nice shell with completions and whatnot like Fish and learning piping at some point just becomes faster, same thing as using modal editors.
Thank you! Glad Iβm not the only one to mention this or agree with it. Had some twit bitching at me last night to prove it, as if I kept screenshots or something. I just fixed things and moved on.
Agreed. This should be the #1 priority for at least one Linux distribution to make it accessible. The issue is that Linux fanatics will cry blasphemy for it and thatβs counter intuitive.
There's still no way to log into Nautilus as root user from Nautilus.
So you can't just double click on an icon to decompress it below the home folder.
And then people will give out this long series of terminal commands....hello, I said FROM NAUTILUS.
I'm actually quite okay with using the terminal, the problem is almost nothing invoked from the CLI actually works properly. If the programmer can't be arsed making a skin, they generally can't be arsed with proper playtesting either.
Yeah. It's come a long way, and if nothing else, Linux is a fertile playground for the philosophy of software design for those who handle the UX/UI stuff.
Windows 7 was beat to the punch by gnome/Ubuntu on the paradigm of representing apps in the taskbar as icons that then expand to become textual lists. Some people hate that idea, and that's ok too, so long as they're given alternatives that are easy to switch between.
Windows 7 was the best OS. I miss it.
Meeehhh.... Kinda. It was great, for windows, don't get me wrong.
But personally I think windows 2000 was the most rock steady and speedy of all of em. But it also had less legacy stuff to support, didn't have XP's compatibility layer etc etc etc.
So it's easy for me to love win2k, it was less complex, thus less likely to have serious bugs (after the 4th service pack lol).
Nkt with GNOME. I only needed to use the Terminal in GNOME to do complex things an ordinary user wouldn't do anyway.
Tinkering in terminal is the thing I like most about Linux. What's holding me back is most of the tools and games I want to use is not yet available on Linux but I think it's getting there soon
Most of the games? Or just a few? Because my experience recently with Proton has been pretty amazing, and I've yet to run into a game (that my laptop meets the requirements for) that hasn't worked. Even some games that Steam marked as "unsupported" worked just fine for me.
I'll definitely give that a go. Thanks.