#1 is just not being the default for 99% of devices. If someone gets a new computer, why would they go through the effort of installing a new os when the one it comes with works fine? Hell, I bet at least 50% of people in the market for a pc don’t even know what an OS is.
Agreed. Android and chrome os are used happily by 10s of millions without any idea it’s a Linux distro
I bet if small, cheap netbooks came out running mint or fedora or something people wouldn’t even or know or care that it was Linux.
In middle school I had a USB drive with Linux Mint installed on it which I was using on school PCs. We only used those PCs for internet browsing and office. Not a single soul noticed it wasn’t Windows. Teacher only noticed 2 differences, “You have different version of Office installed here.” and also gave me a note for “Changing wallpaper” which was strictly prohibited for some reason.
Which actually means Linux is being successfully adopted by the general public in a similar way to windows as a general use system that doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge.
Fully customizable distress will never be popular with the general public. They want systems that just do the general stuff and have it work automatically.
New user: I have a problem 😊
Everyone:👍
- are you on xorg or wayland?
- pulseaudio or pipewire?
- what WM/DE are you using?
- amd or nvidia?
- what distro?
- systemd?
New user: Nevermind 😮💨
if a new user is using a distro that doesn’t use systemd they fell for a meme
if a new user is using a distro that doesn’t use systemd they fell for a meme
Or they hate fridge art like systemd and are on something like PCLinuxOS or Alpine.
That’s what I mean though, why would a new user be running alpine as a desktop os?
At this point, my biggest dream is that these ‘new user’ distros used only Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd and Flatpaks simply to simplify things. Hopefully we’re less than 2024 away from NoVideo Wayland support.
Also as soon as XFCE releases their Wayland support, that soon it’ll become the most famous DE choice of Mint.
What I am really happy is to see how well supported Pipewire already is. Pipewire has never showed any problem in the new installs for me.
So … basically Pop!_OS.
That’s what I’m using now, and it’s what I’d recommend for most desktop users. I’ve been using Linux systems on-and-off since before kernel version 1.0: Slackware, then Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, then Pop.
(Admittedly, my use cases are pretty simple: a terminal, a browser, Signal, VLC, and Steam.)
Pretty much. Pop is my go-to recommendation for pretty much anyone these days. It’s so well polished and just easy.
The problem with that is most major distros market themselves as “new user” distros to some extent though. Noob-friendly, out-of-the-box, easy, etc are all distro-marketing buzz-words that mean nothing.
You can’t expect them to only use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks because that dream requires every distro to use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks, which will never be reality.
Most distros will probably eventually adopt these tools, but there won’t be a sudden shift. It will be gradual.
pipewire seems ready for primetime but I’m more dubious about Wayland. For instance KDE appears to still be a bit flaky and sway still works poorly under Nvidia and will never have proper mixed DPI for xwayland apps. Still seems like a tradeoff vs X which doesn’t require a compromise. XFCE is roughly 10% of Mint users. Mint users are unlikely to switch because of wayland support
Systemd
Fridge art. Fuck, they MAYBE have nfsroot working. MAYBE. After a decade of fucking around, when it was available for ages. The number of bags on the side of lennart’s piece of crap, just to reinvent the wheels we had before, is absolutely ridiculous.
and Flatpaks
… break single source of truth for as-built information and current software manifest. This kills validation, which dissolves certainty on consistency, then repeatability. And given the state of the software load exported to management tools is NOT the flatpak source of truth, you now have a false negative on the ‘installation’ of a flatpak resource when checking it via management.
Oh. That needs to be on the interview questions.
Gonna be honest with you I’m an intermediate user and understood jack shit of what you just said. A beginner and average user would have probably been scared off by Linux by this point rewding this.
Doing tech support, I encountered this attitude. People like that are nearly impossible to help. “Why can’t you just fix it!” The true answer never given is that your problem is probably something stupid you are doing, like trying to make a phone call by physically shoving the phone entirely up your asshole, and until I run through some common problems and ask some questions, I won’t be able to tell you to have your significant other get the salad tongs and pull it out of your rear and then go over “dialing.”
People mostly need to be willing to gather detailed system info with Inxi and share it.
No. That’s the support job to figure out the problem of the user. It is not the user’s job to figure out the support problems.
I work in support, so I know what I’m talking about. Unfortunately most computer guys are elitist assholes who can’t understand a user doesn’t have their knowledge or even the will to understand why this shitty tech is not working.
Free open source software projects you don’t pay for don’t have paid support. If you talk to a fellow user it IS your job to figure out your problem. if you don’t have the will to understand anything you ought to buy a support contract.
So you want them to provide answers by using magic? If you seek support for any software, open source or otherwise, you’ll need to tell them version, build number etc. Why do you think Linux will be any different?
Because people can already barely provide this level of information for a Windows device. Most of these words look like technobabble to non-tech-enthusiasts
Of course the words will be different. They aren’t hard words. And they can be answered very easily. In fact, most forums ask to include an output of something like inxi -Fazy with every question, thus eliminating the need for all of these things.
For more niche problems, people might ask for more specific information. But most of the time, they’ll tell you exactly what to run to get that information.
You know what’s the Windows alternative for this? Most of the time, nothing. You need to reinstall Windows. Mac is similar, except you need to have it replaced. You actually CAN repair Linux. That’s the difference.
- Isn’t pre-installed on well known machines by well known brands.
- Popular applications (whether productivity, creativity, or games) do not work out of the box that people want. It doesn’t matter that alternatives exist, or that you can use things like Wine. If it’s more than just click the icon, it’s too much.
- If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.
If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.
100%. Even as a power-user (understatement) who overwhelmingly prefers keyboard input to control things when I’m “gettin’ stuff done”, I will sometimes miss the general consideration level of Windows’ input handling when it comes to mouse and especially touch. Mouse is pretty damn good these days on Linux, but touch…
Touch is abysmal. A ton of modern laptops have touchscreens, or are actually 2-in-1s that fold into tablets, etc, and the support is just barely there, if at all. I’m not talking about driver support - this is often fairly acceptable. My laptop’s touch and pen interface worked right out of the box… technically. But KDE Plasma 5 with Wayland- an allegedly very modern desktop stack- is not pleasant when I fold into tablet mode.
The sole (seriously, I’ve looked) Wayland on-screen-keyboard, Maliit, is just terrible. No settings of any kind (there is a settings button! it is not wired to anything, it does nothing), no language options, no layout options (the default layout is abysmal and lacks any ‘functional’ keys like arrows, pgup/dn, home/end, delete, F keys, tab, etc), and most egregiously, it resists being manually summoned which is terrible because it does not summon itself at appropriate times. Firefox is invisible to it. KRunner is invisible to it. The application search bar is invisible to it. It will happily pop up when I tap into Konsole, but it’s totally useless as it is completely devoid of vital keys. Touch on Wayland is absolutely pointless.
Of course, there is a diverse ecosystem of virtual keyboards and such on Xorg! However, Xorg performance across all applications is typically abysmal (below 1FPS) if the screen is rotated at all. This is evidently a well known issue that I doubt will ever be fixed.
In the spirit of Open Source Software, and knowing that simply complaining loudly has little benefit for anyone, I have at several times channeled my frustration towards developing a reasonable Wayland virtual keyboard, but it’s a daunting project fraught with serious problems and I have little free-time, so it’s barely left its infancy in my dev folder, and in the meanwhile I reluctantly just flip my keyboard back around on the couch with a sigh, briefly envious of my friend’s extremely-touch-capable Windows 2-in-1.
I echo your frustrations with Maalit. I am running Arch on my Surface Pro 7 and very frequently I have to snap in the keyboard just to get myself out of a situation where touch doesn’t work. Maalit also has this bug where it will push and resize windows as if it was visible even though it is hidden.
Regarding the Firefox issue, it helps if you enable it’s Wayland backend by passing MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 to it. Maalit should properly pop whenever you tap on a text box.
MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
Thank you - I was already aware of this, actually, but I choose to leave it disabled because when this is set, touchscreen drag-scrolling of webpages breaks and it selects text as though it were a mouse click-drag instead. As it turns out, I barely use Maliit anyway because of its other deficiencies, but I definitely touch-scroll my browser a lot, even in laptop mode. A generally disappointing dilemma!
GNOME has amazing touchscreen gestures, and afaik comes with it’s own virtual keyboard
I have been tempted by GNOME several times, but I disagree with some of their design choices and find them a bit frustrating. I feel that it’s fairly strongly-opinionated software. The benefits, of course, are obvious: internal consistency that leads to a higher quality experience. But, only if you buy-in to some overarching design philosophy. That’s one of the reasons I left Windows! I also have a suite of Kwin scripts that make my life a lot easier, so it’s pretty hard to leave Plasma at this point.
Still, that keyboard has tempted me a lot nonetheless…
At this point I’m just glad I migrated to GNU/Linux way before touch input was a common thing. I never experienced it on Windows and the only way I experienced it on GNU/Linux is with it behaving like simple mouse clicks. I literally have no idea what else to expect, so I expect nothing and I don’t get disappointed.
Using touch on Windows has definitely set my expectations much higher than the reality on Linux right now, so this is a good call! You won’t know what you’re missing, so it’s not going to bug you. I kind of wish I could return to this blissful ignorance. I have another 2-in-1 with Windows 11 on it in the house and anytime I look at it to keep it patched up and fix issues for its user, it reminds me very effectively of how far behind my 2-in-1 is with touchscreen interactions :(
I agree with the touchscreen thing-- I have one of those foldy-aroundy 2-in-1 laptops, and the only way I’ve been able to get touch to work properly (as in not like a mouse) is gnome wayland. Kde wayland’s fine too, but like you said there’s no included keyboard whereas gnome has one built-in. Also another wayland osk you could try is wvkbd (tho I’ve never used it beyond “hey what’s this”).
Preinstalled.
Like, were nerds and we fuck with our computers n stuff. But most people are lucky to know what a power cord is.
Honestly if Linux with a good DE like KDE or Cinnamon was already on their PC at boot they would figure it out. Most people just use a web browser anyways.
I have put my dad on Kubuntu. Don’t like anything *buntu, personally, but I have to admit it’s quite stable and with sane defaults. He hasn’t complained ever since and support calls dropped considerably. He spends most of the time in Firefox anyways, where I’ve added ublock.
The problem with Windows was, he’d occasionally browse the web with Edge by mistake (or because MS forces it down your throat), and as soon as an 80+ y.o. browses the web without ad blocking, getting a virus is just a matter of time.
All this is to say that I agree with the fact that preinstalled is key. I wish that more effort was focused on fewer distros and I feel that so much talent and energies are being lost in marginal projects.
But many people do this for passion and it’s of course their choice to decide where to contribute, or whether to spin up a brand new distro entirely, can’t judge them for that. I’m just observing that those energies could be better used to smoothen some rough edges on more popular distros to make them even more appealing to OEMs and convince them to ship those on their hardware.
This is definitely how I feel as well. None of the other shit matters unless it comes already on the machine. Even then, it absolutely has to be rock solid stable long term for it to be comparative. Of course that’s asking a lot, considering people still take their PCs into geek squad or wherever else when something goes wrong (or their printer won’t connect).
This always reminds me of the Dell XPS option of having Ubuntu installed but of course that’s far away from “Microsoft literally pays us to sell their shit”. So, until that - or some type of adoption occurs on a B&M level/online-storefront - it’s going to be pretty “voluntary” in terms of adoption. It’s just comparatively so much more work in the layman’s sense.
It’s in a weird way the same with cars. It’s been statistically proven that most people specifically won’t go out of their way to get a simple utility pickup truck. They buy the big fuck you truck because that’s what the dealerships have. It’s the same thing with kids going to college and the parents taking them to buy a laptop for class. My point is that it’s far more easier to just use what you get than try to rehash it. Maybe you don’t even know that’s a possibility so you just settle. Of course this isn’t the only issue, but imo the largest determining factor. IBM had businesses sucking from the teet since computers dropped, and we still deal with the ramifications.
I have my dad on Mint for years. Setup browser and email program and told him to click on that little shield and do updates when it’s there. You can set the shield icon to only appear in case of updates. I sometimes have to update between versions. I think he is still on 21.0 and now 21.2 is out already.
Most people buy computers with the OS already installed and would get just as lost trying to install MacOS or Windows.
