cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1064425
And Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.
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That’s why I’d love to see more developers take another look at Linux. Such that they may develop better proficiency in the basic katas of the internet. Such that they aren’t scared to connect a computer to the internet without the cover of a cloud.
Related: Omakub
I love Linux. I’m so glad I switched both my PC and laptop to OpenSUSE and got rid of dual boot Windows. Using Linux exclusively for months has really opened my eyes to the truth:
It really just depends on what you do, and how you do it.
A formula-1 car is not for normies, but a regular car is. Same principle applies here. My tech illiterate mom has Fedora on her laptop, and she finds it considerably more intuitive to use, than her previous Windows installations
This is fair. But at that point the same could be said of a Chromebook for her needs, which I’d venture is true for most people’s computing needs given entire swaths of the world do everything on a phone or tablet.
The Linux vs Windows debate is peculiar, because it really only applies to users who are more advanced than the average, arguing about problems that only arise when you want to do more demanding things with your machine like development and gaming. Your average user doesn’t care about any of the anti-monopolistic / FOSS reasons to use Linux, which makes the argument for them essentially “you should use this operating system that takes more work to use because it’s better for you for reasons you don’t care about.”
In order for Linux to become more mainstream, it needs to be able to exceed Windows’ performance and ease of use for gaming and productivity - which is challenging since when most users think of productivity apps, they only think of Microsoft products. It’s not enough to be equal in order to compel people to switch from what they’re accustomed to.
It’s easy to forget that Windows’ success doesn’t come from people seeking it out and installing it as an OS intentionally. They’re buying machines that come preloaded with it. Linux’s success, however big or small, lies in how its methods of distribution compare to Windows OEM dominance.
Let’s be real: when it comes to the actual installation of an OS, regular users ask people like us to do it for them. I don’t think Linux is going to outpace Windows anytime soon, but the last few times I’ve been asked for that kind of help, I’ve installed Linux for them, because it is absolutely ready to be used by regular people.
I fully believe PC gaming’s future is on Linux. Valve are pushing compatibility heavily enough to the point where Proton runs virtually all my games as smoothly as Windows would and as hard as it would have been to believe a few years ago, most my library has native support anyway. Combined with the fact that Linux has a smaller runtime overhead than Windows, most of my games run better.
Ease of use is the harder metric to gauge. Most people seem to forget that Windows isn’t built for ease of use; not like MacOS anyway. Things break on Windows all the time; most people are just more familiar with the common workarounds. Even installing things are easier (once the user learns the singular command they need to do this) and flatpak installations align more with how people are used to installing apps on their phones and tablets.
1000% agree.
As a software dev, I’m using windows and I know I shouldn’t switch.
Tbh it’s even worse, I can not switch. And that’s why it’s even more ridiculous. Linux power users like to say that you can do everything you can in windows but with more control. And with “control” they are right, but with “everything” more than wrong. Everything that’s not working out of the box is a gamble on time wasted getting said thing to work. For the simplest thing you can be stuck for weeks just by sheer bad luck.
Say you are a software dev? Yeah Linux is pretty solid.
3d artist? Meh. Blender is the last thing that works, otherwise you are stuck. Octane, 3ds max, Maya, c4d, Houdini, v-ray, real flow, … You gotta be lucky to find them to be compatible even if it’s only with a workaround.
Music production? Well you are stuck on LMMS, which is basically only used by very specific experimental artists. Also plugins, especially those with copyright protection will give you one hell of a hard time.
Images? Well gimp is not Photoshop if we’re honest, and stuff like coreldraw is also hard to replace on Linux.
Video cutting? You have to carefully tip toe about everything Adobe, and that’s an awful hassle. And because everyone would love to give Adobe the middle finger, we are slowly realizing how hard it is to replace Adobe and that if you go somewhere, it is not working as well by default, you have to really make it work.
And especially in big enterprises time is money. So every time someone thinks about where to migrate to, how to migrate, or when they are migrating, and than when they have to propose new workflows, new solutions, a bunch of workarounds, maintenance pipelines, etc. it’s just not worth it. Not on a big company scale, and unfortunately also not on a me scale.
At the end of the day, an OS is a tool to me, not a lifestyle choice, a hobby or a commitment. And it shouldn’t be. As long as Linux is at least 2 of those things for everyone that’s not using it, it’s not very compelling to switch. And that goes for every distro.
Btw. this is the reason why I can understand people using apple over windows. Yeah it’s 1000 bucks to take like 20min less to do a thing. But it stacks up exponentially with every device that integrates into Apple’s universe. And if you spend even 20min less per day, that’s already more than 2h per week that you now have to dedicate to other things.
I’m not rich and this doesn’t entice me, but I get it.
So yeah, make a distro that’s not only modular and expendable,but make it also very easy to understand and make it as easy. And make it either as compatible with Windows software or add those features in a different way. And then people like me can dream about a FOSS universe for everyone.
Or be the same but cheaper, but yes inertia is huge at the difference in market share
Lol, tell me you’ve never worked IT support again.
The average user can’t remember passwords without browser autofill. They don’t want to tinker. A “just works” linux distro with a relatively limited set of default features targeted to a specific hardware set to avoid complications, like SteamOS on Steam Deck, is pretty much at the limit of the investment level the average user is willing to put in to keep things working.
One of the first issues I had problems with was figuring out what was wrong with Street Fighter 6 giving ultra low frame rates in multiplayer, but working fine in single player. It needed disabling of split lock protections in the CPU.
A recent update in OpenSUSE made the computer fail to boot half the time and made the image on the right half of the screen garbled. I rolled back to before the update and am using it without updating for a few weeks to see if the GPU driver problem gets ironed out.
I installed VMware Horizon for my job’s remote work login and it fucked up my Steam big picture mode and controller detection. I didn’t bother trying to figure that out and just uninstalled VMware remote desktop.
I managed to install my printer driver, but manually finding the correct RPM file to install would not be tolerable for normies.
I still can’t get my Dualshock 3 controller to pair via Bluetooth despite instructions on the OpenSUSE wiki. I’ve stopped trying to troubleshoot that and use my 8BitDo controller instead.
I still can’t find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.
Figuring out how to edit fstab to automount my secondary drives is not a process normies would be able to execute.
Plasma recently added monitor brightness controls to software and these seem to have disappeared for me now, and I can’t figure out why.
I can’t get CopyQ to launch minimised no matter what I do.
My KDE Plasma task bar widgets for monitoring CPU/GPU temp worked till I reinstalled OpenSUSE, and I can’t figure out why they’ve decided to not work on this fresh install. System monitor can see the temperature sensors just fine still. fixed
Flatpak Steam app wouldn’t pick up controllers for some reason. Minor issue, but unnecessary jankiness.
My laptop fingerprint reader plainly isn’t supported.
People do not tolerate this amount of jankiness. And this doesn’t include the discomfort with relearning minor design differences between OS’s when switching. Linux is a bit of a battle with relearning and troubleshooting things that would never be problematic on Windows.
Linux is second nature to us IT people, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows basic shell scripting and how to build programs from git repos.
In case you missed it, it’s an xkcd reference
I’d love to use Linux, but I just don’t have the legs for those socks
Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.
Guy says this as if it’s a good thing lol. That’s the real reason people don’t use Linux, nobody making Linux seems to care about user experience for normal people.
Yea I agree. Good UX is a lot of work, and I think FOSS projects rarely prioritize it. Even good documentation is hard to come by. When you write software for your own use case, it’s easy to cut UX corners, because you don’t need your hand held.
And good UX for a programmer might be completely different from good UX for someone that only knows how to use GUIs. E.g. NixOS has amazing UX for programmers, but the code-illiterate would be completely lost.
I believe that the solution is “progressive disclosure”, and it requires a lot of effort. You basically need every interface to have both the “handholding GUI” and the underlying “poweruser config,” and there needs to be a seamless transition between the two.
I actually think we could have an amazing Linux distro for both “normies” and powerusers if this type of UX were the primary focus of developers.
Perhaps another perspective is where to draw the line in terms of expected expertise.
Sure, and where the line is drawn now is why more people don’t use Linux. I even use it for work, but still don’t want to deal with the hassle at home. I am getting a new home pc soon, and I thought maybe linux is ready. So I started reading up. No, I do not want to have to reinstall the os several times before I get it right. I don’t want another chore.
Perhaps you’re simply more familiar with Microsoft / Apple, maybe it’s not more difficult?
I too use Linux for work, but I have limited experience on Microsoft systems and have been on Linux based systems for over a decade. For me windows is a chore.
In my opinion, it’s a matter of perspective and experience. Yours is aligned with something different, that’s all.
It is a good thing for those of us who don’t want bumper rails on our OS.
No it’s not. Good user experience should also allow for extensive customization. There is nothing mutually exclusive about these things.
Linux does allow for extensive customization, way more than Wondows or Mac. They just don’t hold your hand to show you how.
Linux scary. Some guy yelled at me in Finnish :(
