this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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not until Linux bros find a way to appeal to newcomers. being curious about Linux is the worst user experience anyone will ever have about any tech related issue.
You aren't trying to suggest that experienced Linux users are a bunch of arrogant fart-sniffing a-holes who expressly enjoy gate-keeping inexperienced users by being as condescending and unhelpful as possible?
I tried talking about how absolutely horrendous their behaviour was recently, pointing out how completely unhinged and self-defeating it is, and someone actually literally said that this was a good thing because Linux is hard work and they should keep away people that aren't experts.
And first of all, if that's right it's an admission that linux will never succeed, and secondly I agree that's the effect but I think that's bad actually.
I honestly think there must be at least some amount of psyops in the community poisoning the discourse for everyone.
Microsoft running psyops to keep the Linux community as toxic as possible
Omg it really feels like that sometimes.
The youtubers who paint Linux as extremely unstable/not appropriate for gaming almost come across as sponsored by Microsoft. (Not to mention the overemphasis of the ubiquity of adobe suite users i.e. confirmation bias)
Mostly first Linux users will download Ubuntu, latest release, and I've not used a more bug ridden OS in my life. Everyday there was a new bug that made me have to hard reset my computer (mind you this is 24.0.4 noble). Display was grey after login, didn't want to login, laptop screen doesn't wake up, Wayland crashes and doesn't start backup. And that is the bugs that forced me to hard reset my laptop, then we have a whole slew of other bugs.
I mean some new getting recommend Ubuntu will have a horrible experience, and most of them do
It almost seems like Linux Mint is the default recommend now which is better. I had a kind of buggy time with Pop OS, due to the amount of unsupported extensions you need to run to have some customisability.
OpenSUSE TW with KDE has been the best experience for me in the end.
I don't think Linux caters to the casual crowd, maybe in the distant future, because it takes a lot of effort to create a good user experience, those resources are not available to distro makers.
In the PC world you have some different setups of devices, apple has it a bit easier they explicitly choose the hardware that they want to Support.
Also casual people have a hard time connecting a printer to their computer or fixing the wireless wifi.
I can't imagine them fixing anything via the terminal. My SOs runs Manjaro and she is like that, but I usually fix her laptop when she has issued.
I love Linux for what it is, this toy for a developer that can automate and customize stuff relatively simple, with a large opinionated community.
I would instead rather focus on those thing, than seeing Linux trying to compete with windows/Mac.
I never experienced any of those problems with Linux Mint (except hardware incompatibility with Mint debian, which they explicit state it's experimental and for enthusiasts). The user experience was sweet from the start, lots of preinstalled useful stuff, an AppStore that already is miles better than Microsoft Store, and my printer was recognized by the pc and printer program better than on my smartphone. Everything has a useful GUI knob to push or click, and i never use the terminal unless i want.
Agree with Manjaro being unstable, that's why no one recommends it as beginner distro, and Pop OS is the distro of System 76 computers, so they also mainly aim for hard and soft wares integration inside they ecosystem (the apple of linux) and people should stop recommending it to beginners.
Linux Mint is the Magnum Opus of desktop linux for me, and we should recommend ONLY it for the time being, as default choice.
Oh for sure, I'm not a "This is the year of the Linux desktop" kind of person. The average person probably doesn't care about privacy/software freedom enough, but I don't think think it is at all insurmountable for a normal person to transition to the simpler distros if they begin to care about those things.
Unironically I think it must happen to some extent, and that doesn't mean every toxic person is an op. It wouldn't take a lot of manpower to create a toxic environment. Just hassle the devs with annoying questions, suggestions and bad "contributions" until they're sick of everyone's shit and start to become toxic themselves. If they're dealing with all the noise of bad actors, they get overzealous in moderating it, and it's hard to tell the difference between a troll who's trying to waste your time, and an honest newbie who doesn't know what questions to ask or what information to share, so they all get blasted to some extent, and the devs lose any interest in catering to the newbies.
Edit: actually I remember asking a question on stackoverflow about PuTTY one time, it was answered and I moved on with my life. Then five fucking years later some dickhead shows up in the comments and says, "aw... putty... windows..." So I'm like, "Listen, I don't care if you think I'm sad for using windows, I don't use linux because it's too much work" Then they start lecturing me about how linux is for experts and if I don't know what I'm doing it's not for me, and I'm like "Ok? Then leave me alone. This question is five years old, why are you here? Just to hassle a rando because they use windows?" Then a mod bumped the comments into a private chat and off the question page, then this person starts offering to "help" me learn Linux. I told them if I wanted help they'd be the last person I would ask, then blocked them, but the bad taste of that interaction has stayed with me for a long time and I think about it a lot whenever I want to put effort into switching myself over. Was that an op? Being a troll is easy, and it would've been maybe 20 minutes of work for whoever was doing it. Like, maybe that was just some kid who thought they were helping further the linux cause by going around windows-shaming people, but maybe not.
I'll counter your anectdote with my own. Every single Linux community member I have encountered on my journey to use this as a daily driver (arch BTW) has been incredibly helpful.
Where? Is this paradise oasis of helpfulness on the internet? Or is it offline somewhere?
I just came from another post where the user said they would love to switch from Windows and just needed someone to explain how to do it with a list of features and programs they always use and asking what the Linux equivalent would be.
They made the mistake of saying they needed Outlook for work and there was a commenter that basically said that that person was never going to like Linux and they needed to stay far away from it because the user “painted themselves into a corner.” The commenter even took the time to call it “Micro$oft” lol
I dislike Microsoft and basically everything they've done with Windows post-7. Every machine I own that isn't expressly for gaming is running Linux, and one of the two that are for gaming is also running Linux. When I build a new gaming tower to replace my current Windows one it will also run Linux, I just can't be bothered to switch OSes mid-way.
And yet people using childish denigrating nicknames like this immediately makes me disinclined to engage with the conversation. I don't understand how anyone expects to be taken seriously while throwing around schoolyard-grade name-calling like this.
Yeah, I love Linux and would use it on everything if I could, but the bottom line is, it’s cheaper to pay Microsoft for something that “just works” with the literal decades old software businesses have used without major issue than it would be to help fund development for a Linux based version.
It’s not fair, it’s not right, and you could probably make an argument that it’s not ethical, but the fact of the matter is, Windows does work. It’s got a whole boatload of quirks and every day I wonder why I hate myself so much that I chose a career that involves working on Windows so much, but it does do its job.
Plus, I know Canonical isn’t the most popular company either, but do people think them, Redhat, SUSE, and whatever other company isn’t out to make money?
Need to pair it with a stable, easy to use distribution and some good marketing and hardware too. At the end of the day, most people don’t want to spend their weekends scouring forums to understand how to fix some OS issue with a series of terminal commands.
This is my life right now.
I put Linux on my HP laptop...
Speakers give weird sound Media keys don't work Worst of all: ever since I updated the laptop somehow crashes my router? Like, I don't even know how this is possible, but it's happening.
I'm not an idiot but all the solutions to getting these seemingly basic things to work as intended are extremely contrived.
The problem is that HP writes drivers and software for those things for Windows, but not for Linux, so Linux depends on random people to write software for those things for free (which often involves complex reverse-engineering). With Linux you need to make sure you use widely-used hardware that someone has already written support for (this is mostly applicable to laptops and peripherals, which often use custom non-standard hardware). There may be a way to fix your problems, but you'll have to search forums or issue trackers for the solutions, and they're probably pretty involved to get working correctly. The router crashing thing is probably just a coincidence though, or the laptop is using a feature that's broken on your router.
Yes I completely understand that. But it also undermines the "give your older laptop a new life with Linux" narrative that's out there at times. It's actually not that easy. I'm happy running Linux but I wouldn't put it on my moms old laptop..
Everything depends on hardware.
I had the completely opposite experience of installing Ubuntu on HP laptop and giving it to my father. It connected without any problems to his work wifi while his friends brand new windows laptop couldn't.
Tbf, this is more HP failing to support their hardware than a failure in Linux to be more flexible and performant.
Yeah as others have said, HP does not have a great reputation for laptops and stuff.
Grab a cheap ThinkPad, they usually work very well.
I agree. However there are some gems. Got one good piece of advice from https://lemmy.world/u/BombOmOm and now I'm on the Linux train (at least on one laptop anyway).
Please don't lump us all together.
I started on Linux as a kid and let me tell you, being curious about windows, welp that's been horrific.
Curious in this case is a strong term, quite a few of my students are on Windows and that OS is a mess. I don't care much for apple but at least MacBooks work.
people who grew up before tv use windows and Mac computers now. i doubt they could operate a Linux, since i find it daunting even as somewhat of a power user. idk what kind of comparison you're trying to make here but you're absolutely wrong. also i don't remember the last time my windows computer crashed, was infected or anything like that. i keep hearing this from Linux users and it feels like the last time they interacted with a windows computer was in the last millennium.
Well, I can only offer my experience.
I teach programming and Mathematics full-time and I've been doing so for the last few years. I must use 20 different machines every semester.
Every single time, windows users cannot install python, they cannot install latex, SQL etc. And of course every single time the machine is riddled with garbage and just opening the start menu takes seconds. It's probably more correlation than causation, but students on Linux always perform better In the course.
Mac Users certainly have it better but installing basic software (git, fish, ripgrep, neovim etc. ) is still quite challenging.
Much of the teaching staff have been using Linux for the past 5 to 20 years and probably have not relied on Windows since maybe 95/xp/2000 (my old supervisor started on Solaris apparently 🤷)
We sit there amazed that anybody would use this. It runs like shit, It's riddled with ads, installing software is painful, most software isn't packaged for it (exceptions being subscription-based software like Adobe), it's a privacy nightmare and of course you have to pay for the bloody thing.
I guess my point is, maybe you find Linux more difficult than Windows because you've been using Windows for the past 20 years and so you're approaching it from a different perspective.
From our perspective, we could go back to Windows and wouldn't struggle with the technical side of things too much, but there is no doubt that it's an inferior experience.
I don't think Linux Bros will ever find a way to appeal to ~~women~~ newcomers. I think it will take a company that can afford to hire UI/UX designers, marketing people, etc.
But, that's hard because there's a chicken / egg situation. Selling a Linux-based computer to the general public is going to be very difficult because of the network effects around Mac and Windows machines. Everyone else uses them and so there are people you can ask for help, there are software vendors who make stuff for the platform (also with nice UIs meant for normal people). I can only see someone spending money to make a mass-market friendly Linux in some limited circumstances.
One situation where a company might make a truly user-friendly Linux distribution is if a company like Valve decided to make a game console. They already have the Steam Deck which is doing really well, but nobody's going to be doing their taxes on a Steam Deck (although they could). But, if they made a desktop-replacement game console that could both play games and also act as a normal home PC, they could afford to spend the money needed to sand the rough edges off the experience.
Another situation might be if a big country mandated Linux for something, either for government computers or for kids in schools. They'd probably have to have a support contract for that, and whoever was supporting those systems would want them to be as user-friendly as possible so they didn't have to deal with as many support issues. So, if say Brazil mandated that all government employees switch to Linux, that could result in some company making a Linux desktop experience that was comparable to Windows.
Agree with you that gov and education should really be using open source software and hardware. Having said that, a normie friendly UI is what killed android and windows for me. Gnome does a good job being easy to use but I prefer KDE because I want configurability more than out of the box simplicity. I do agree with you though that having hardware paired with Linux software like System76 does would increase adoption. Just don't take away my ability to configure things how I like them.
Most of the time the fact there's a beginner-friendly option doesn't mean that there aren't also options for more advanced users. This is especially true with Linux.
On phones both Apple and Google lock things down so much that your options are limited. That's mostly an issue with monopolies not with phones. Macs have a bit more freedom than phones by default, Windows has a bit more than that, then you can go back to Mac if you're willing to hack around and run QT apps and so on. But, I can't imagine a Linux distro that didn't let you ditch a beginner-friendly UI for something more powerful.
I'm still hoping that the success of the Steam Deck will get the ball rolling. Steam Deck success might lead to more games that work really well under Linux. That means less of a reason to keep using Windows. More people using Linux might lead to more software being fully available for Linux, which might get more people to use it. I still think eventually you're going to need non-hobbyists to come in and smooth a lot of the rough edges. But, stage 1 in that whole process is getting more people using Linux, and maybe that's actually happening now.
(It also doesn't hurt that Microsoft keeps shooting themselves in the foot with things like the Cloudstrike bug, and the Windows Recall snoopware failure. Long may that continue.)
From the sound of it, we're well along the road to better Linux gaming. You have to pay attention to a few things like distro choice, setting up software like wine, and certain tweaks and adjustments, but my understanding is that you can play a lot of good games on GNU/Linux now! If Windows Recall can't be disabled, I may be diving into Steam, Proton, etc. all over again as I ditch Windows for the last thing I use it for.
You save it for last, but I think your last point should not be overlooked. Linux's recent successes have been augmented by Windows recent missteps and failures. Considering how bad those are, I think we should credit at least a portion of Linux's use to Microsoft's inadequacy in customization and/overreach in privacy.