Honestly, as a newbie to Linux I think the ratio of well documented processes vs. ādraw the rest of the fucking owlā is too damn high.
The rule seems to be that CLI familiarity is treated as though its self-evident. The exception is a ground-up documented process with no assumptions of end user knowledge.
If that could be resolved I think it would make the Linux desktop much more appealing to wider demographics.
That said, Iām proud to say that Iāve migrated my entire home studio over to linux and have not nuked my system yet. Yetā¦ Fortunately I have backups set up.
Linux on the desktop almost never needs CLI interaction though. Maybe youāll need to copy/paste a command from the internet to fix some sketchy hardware, but almost everything works OOTB these days.
However, self-hosting isnāt a desktop Linux thing, itās a server Linux thing. You can host it on your desktop, but as soon as you do anything remotely server-related, CLI familiarity is pretty much essential.
That depends on your use case for desktop linux of course. For me, yabridge is the tool I needed to run VSTs on Linux. Its CLI only as far as I know.
Donāt get me wrong; Iām not afraid of the CLI. Its just some tools are assuming the end user is a server admin or someone with deeper than the upper crust knowledge of how Linux works.
Donāt forget the situations where you find a good blog post or article that you can actually follow along until halfway through you get an error that the documentation doesnāt address. So you do some research and find out that they updated the commands for one of the dependency apps, so you try to piece together the updated documents with the original post, until something else breaks and you just end up giving up out of frustration.
CLI familiarity is fine. CD, Nano, mkdir, rm. I am proficient with that. But I am not necessarily proficient with Docker (went with it because it worked nicely for another thing which was well documented and very straight forward). Itās just Iām trying to self host stuff. Some things like Wordpress and Immich are straightforward. Some things arenāt like Matrix and Mastodon. Lemmy is also notoriously bad.
I think if youāre talking wider demographics your model OSs are (obviously) Windows and macOS. People buy into that because CLI familiarity isnāt required. Especially with Apple products everything revolves around simplicity.
I do dream of a day when Linux can (at least somewhat) rival that. I love Linux because I am (or consider myself) intricately familiar with it and I can (theoretically) change every aspect about it. But mutability and limitless possibilities are not what makes an OS lovable to the average user. I think the advent of immutable Linux distros is a step in the right direction for mass adoption. Stuff just needs to work. Googling for StackOverflow or AskUbuntu postings shouldnāt ever be necessary when people just want to do whatever they were doing on Windows with limited technical knowledge.
However on another note, if youāre talking a home studio migration, not sure what that entails, but it sounds rather technical. I donāt want to be the guy to tell you that CLI familiarity is simply par for the course. Maybe your work shouldnāt require terminal interaction. Maybe there is a certain gap between absolutely basic linux tutorials and the more advanced ones like you suggest. Yet what I do want to say is that if you want to do repairwork on your own car itās not exactly like that is supposed to be an accessible skill to acquire. Even if there are videos explaining step by step what you need to do, eventually you still need to get your own practice in. Stuff will break. We make mistakes and we learn from them. That is the point Iām trying to get at. Not all knowledge can be bestowed from without. Some of it just needs to grow organically from within.
