Installing Linux Doesn't Need to Change. The Experience Does.
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If you mean unrootable Googled Android then I don't consider that Linux. If you mean something else please clarify.
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And that attitude is why adoption will remain low
ROFL. Kiddo, I've been contributing to OSS for over two decades. The day I start caring about what non-contributors think is the day I stop writing code. Either show up with patches or STFU.
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ROFL. Kiddo, I've been contributing to OSS for over two decades. The day I start caring about what non-contributors think is the day I stop writing code. Either show up with patches or STFU.
Okie dokie boomer
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TBH do you actually think that there's some chance that nobody is testing these releases and this is happening to a massive number of people?
I've installed linux countless times on a SHITLOAD of computers and never faced any of these problems, realistically, you're very unlucky, and these sorts of things happen with windows all the time too.
I'm not saying your issues don't matter, but unless you have statistics that back you up, you can't say "it just works" to either OS.
I've had more of an "It just works" experience with linux literally hundreds of times.
I actually think there's some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don't always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it's not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don't have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that's not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.
Don't get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it's just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than 'lol buy an AMD GPU', so the odds are pretty good that I'm not the only person in history that that has happened for. I've never had problems like this on windows, I've never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don't have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.
I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it's not just 'press button, receive OS' like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it's not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.
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Oh look. Yet another post demanding things from a volunteer-based community without actually volunteering their own time to work on solving the problem they're insisting needs solving.
I'm sure these demands will totally make a difference in ways that putting their time into actually writing code wouldn't.
By that logic I should demand to get payed for testing your "free" software in real environment
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So... Linux the kernel but without the freedom?
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I actually think there's some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don't always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it's not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don't have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that's not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.
Don't get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it's just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than 'lol buy an AMD GPU', so the odds are pretty good that I'm not the only person in history that that has happened for. I've never had problems like this on windows, I've never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don't have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.
I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it's not just 'press button, receive OS' like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it's not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.
I'm curious what OSs and what issues you had. If you want, make a post in a Linux community and reply with the link here. I'd be keen to see where I'm at in helping others with Linux drivers since I just had some issues I resolved. I want to move my grandpa's computer to Linux when Win10 runs out so it could be a practice opportunity.
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Oh look. Yet another post demanding things from a volunteer-based community without actually volunteering their own time to work on solving the problem they're insisting needs solving.
I'm sure these demands will totally make a difference in ways that putting their time into actually writing code wouldn't.
I think it should be encouraged for non technical users to share their insights regarding UI/UX. People who are skilled in building applications often don’t have great skills in that area anyway. Actual UI/UX specialists are even harder to come by it seems.
The issue with this video is that it doesn’t bring in a ton of new insight. Issues regarding the variety of package management solutions are well know for example, and some distros are already solving this by having system packages and flatpaks managed by the same installer.
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Okie dokie boomer
You're both being silly. Ones a gatekeeper, ones a name caller
Want to know what's wrong with Linux? The community.
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Yeah I love linux, but it's user experience , while light years ahead of what I used in the late nineties and early aughts, is still clunky compared to others.
That being said, honestly most of linux's issues are GUI related, when it comes to going mainstream. The capabilities and efficiency are far ahead of windows and mac os but most users don't care.
Directions, examples and mundane work should all be seamless for mainstream consumers.
A good rule of thumb is, " if a user has to look for it to fix it, or open a terminal window to install software, then it won't be accepted fully.
Mainstream users don't want to type commands in a prompt. Why does everyone think windows blew DOS out of the water in sales? It wasn't because DOS wasn't working. It was, hell early windows ( I started on 3.11 so that's my limit of knowledge ) still used DOS.
So bottom line. Start putting the non tech consumer first or we'll forever be stuck in this "almost mainstream" category forever.
I don’t see them as mutually exclusive - can’t Linux be user friendly for the non-techie while also offering a techie lots of flexibility and command-line joy?
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Or users could maybe learn how to do things without having their hands held and treated like babies every step of the way; or at least how to search for information to find what they need...
️Or, maybe yo will understand when you grow up that people are good at different things.
Garuntee there's some pretty easy things for me to do that you would get left behind trying to do, and not just on PC
Same for you. You know some things you'd blow me away doing.
Just because you don't know what I know , and vice versa, doesn't mean people are dumb.
Means they've learned different things.
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I don’t see them as mutually exclusive - can’t Linux be user friendly for the non-techie while also offering a techie lots of flexibility and command-line joy?
️They can and should. But they don't. They really only cater to the techie, because that's who uses it
Then they got pissed when their "marketing" efforts fall shorts.
Stop acting like non Linux users are dumb. They aren't. they've used the time others spent learning other thing, while others spent their time on techie things . Their priorities were different. Or maybe their poor and don't care about that as they need a PC but have to work 80 hours to feed their family.
But no. Instead of making life better through foss for those who need it, you're making Linux some unattainable nerd toy.
We can tell ourselves we don't care. But we do. Or the thread wouldn't be here
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They could. But you and I both know they won't because most people don't care about anything beyond 'make the magic box work so I can do my job / play my game / etc.'
Because we keep feeding them stupid pills and encouraging them not to think. Microsoft was a pioneer of the whole "water down software and call it user-frienfly'" thing.
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You're both being silly. Ones a gatekeeper, ones a name caller
Want to know what's wrong with Linux? The community.
We really gonna pretend the name caller is as bad as the guy with the opinion that "critics are useless and should just learn how to do the thing the critique"? Cuz that's a classic shitty opinion
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Because we keep feeding them stupid pills and encouraging them not to think. Microsoft was a pioneer of the whole "water down software and call it user-frienfly'" thing.
wrote last edited by [email protected]That's not it at all. You don't think accountants who juggle numbers and Excel formulas all day couldn't learn? Lawyers whose entire job involves absorbing and filtering vast amounts of information? Doctors who diagnose machines that are far more complex than computers (people)? Of course they could; I worked around these people in IT for 20 years, I can tell you that despite how stupid these folks seem around computers they feel the same way about your capabilities in their field of expertise, only they don't have the arrogance to assume that everyone should learn to be a mechanical engineer or dentist in order to understand their job.
What they are is too busy doing other shit that they care more about. They don't have the time or interest to be farting around with a computer to do anything more than the absolute minimum requirements needed to do the shit they actually care about. Human society functions because people specialize, and people who don't specialize in making computers go just don't care enough about them as anything other than as a tool and maybe an occasional source of entertainment to waste their time learning. Just like you don't waste your time learning about how to run a nuclear power plant.
And I say this as someone who used to love tinkering with computers, turned it into a career, and slowly grew to hate it. I too no longer care about optimizing or fiddling or tweaking, I just want the magic box to work so I can do the stuff I care about (writing, gaming, etc.)
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I'm curious what OSs and what issues you had. If you want, make a post in a Linux community and reply with the link here. I'd be keen to see where I'm at in helping others with Linux drivers since I just had some issues I resolved. I want to move my grandpa's computer to Linux when Win10 runs out so it could be a practice opportunity.
I've tried PopOS 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and 25.04.
PopOS mostly worked but almost none of my games worked, they acted like they weren't being hardware accelerated by my GPU when they launched at all, and every time I tried to update the driver the install process hard-locked my system and when I rebooted it it came back up with no video driver at all. I was finally able to get one driver version to work, after doing about 10-15 install/reboot/unfuck cycles (the 555-server closed source driver.) I tried a couple versions of the open source drivers and they didn't work either. I also had this weird issue with (I think it was) pipewire where my sound would cut out at random and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle between speakers and headset repeatedly. I noticed this especially when joining a voice channel in discord, but it would just happen out of the blue too.
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS installed fine but whenever it boots the monitor goes into standby with a no-signal notice. The system seems to be running, ctrl+alt+del reboots it, but I can't even us ctrl+F2-6 to get a curses terminal where theoretically the video drivers shouldn't matter at all? When I tried to install 25.04 (on the assumption that it would have a newer video driver) I booted on the USB key and even the installer didn't work, same issue: monitor goes no-signal.
In case it matters, my specs are:
Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core
Gigabyte Vision OC 12 RTX3060 w/12GB VRAM
32GB DDR4-3200 RAM
Multiple SSDs, some SATA, some NVMe in M.2 slots, but I've only ever installed linux on my BPX Pro 1TB NVMe drive that's ~4-5 years old. -
We really gonna pretend the name caller is as bad as the guy with the opinion that "critics are useless and should just learn how to do the thing the critique"? Cuz that's a classic shitty opinion
Not pretending anything. Saying they're both acting silly. Eos.
Have a nice day
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Just saying, not my experience. I have used linux for over 25 years and nontechnical users in my family have also for almost 20 years. By in large it has worked just fine.
The big issue is Linux is not the OS that is supplied when people go to the store and buy something (well except for Android and Chromebooks which are Linux and are popular). It is also not the system or have the apps their friends use. It also does not have the huge supply, support, and word of mouth ecosystem. Buying hardware especially addons is confusing. Getting support is hard unless you have friends that use. Buying Linux preinstalled often costs more. Change too is hard and there has to be some driver and for most people there is not.
I've been a "heavy" user(/admin) of Linux in the server space for about 12 years now, but only recently through a new employment opportunity have I become a daily Linux desktop user. Last weekend - slowly coming to the realization that Linux can really satisfy all my personal needs (including gaming that supports DLL injection) - I thought I'd like to see how feasible this would now be for the kind of end-user that I encounter as customers and friends, family members etc.
Having chosen CachyOS for myself a lot of my needs are now met brilliantly by the AUR, but of course I don't see this being a realistic proposal for an end-user. Flatpaks on the other hand I am now (and previously through my Steam Deck) encountering as a super straightforward way of covering a lot of ground in terms of the kinds of apps people may need, and having them remain usable across system upgrades and such. I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but with Flathub I feel that there's not just everything there that probably covers 95% of non-tech-savvy people's needs, there's even stuff in there that you can't get anywhere else with a simple install button. Like a youtube-dl UI for example.
Anyways this isn't even the story I'm trying to tell, sorry for the tangent. So I thought if I'm ever going to recommend any distro to someone it's gonna have to be an immutable one, but based on what I just said I'd say any distribution (immutable or not) is going to be dead in the water if it doesn't come with Flatpak support out of the box. And so the choices in terms of popular ones (according to ChatGPT) were VanillaOS and Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. (Personally I use KDE now but I think the most approachable DE is always going to be Gnome hands down unless you're talking outdated hardware.)
So I set up VanillaOS in a VM, latest ISO from their website, went through the installer, all went fine until the reboot where I was basically just met by a lengthy splash screen and then some GTK error saying it failed to launch or whatever and then the screen just remains black indefinitely. Obviously this isn't supposed to happen, it's probably something to do with my virtualized setup, but if there's any chance of this happening on the physical machine of a person in need of a digital revolution in their life then this is certainly not what I'm going to recommend to them.
Next up, Fedora Silverblue. Went through the installer, the Fedora one is already a great starting point in terms of simplicity. Rebooted into a working Desktop Environment, so already winning on that front. I had one minor problem there where the last step of the Initial Setup process would just hang if I wanted it to enable Third party sources straightaway. If I left that off I could finish and finally get to my Desktop. Then I would open the Gnome "Software" app and it would basically ask the same thing in a more convoluted manner but basically that means there's a second "chance" to enable third party sources without having to find something in a settings menu. It's a little more fussy than if the checkbox had just worked on the Initial Setup but I guess I could see many people work through this if I told them "don't check that last checkbox and then check it in the Software app".
It's weird that both avenues I tried came up with problems that seem way too on the nose to be overlooked. Or who knows what factored into those problems, but really they shouldn't even be within the realm of possibility. For a setup process to yield a black screen or hang itself if the wrong checkbox is clicked are the kind of things that (imho) are going to define when the "Year of the Linux Desktop" meme will stop being a meme. If you can give me an immutable Linux with Flatpak support out of the box which can be booted on a SecureBoot enabled computer and which will reliably install to a working Desktop then we're talking. For now, my recommendation is Fedora Silverblue. Slap that onto a USB-Stick and you have a somewhat attainable Linux installer that mere mortals can make use of.
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You're both being silly. Ones a gatekeeper, ones a name caller
Want to know what's wrong with Linux? The community.
Nobody is gatekeeping. One of us is asserting that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
The features being requested do not come for free. Someone has to sink the time into doing the work.
So, in an argument between people doing the work and people insisting someone else do the work for them, but it must be to the specifications of the armchair quarterbacks... well... I've got bad news about the things the non-paying non-coders want.
You can either pay money or pay time, but nobody cares about the freeloaders demanding things without offering any kind of compensation.
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Nobody is gatekeeping. One of us is asserting that there's no such thing as a free lunch.
The features being requested do not come for free. Someone has to sink the time into doing the work.
So, in an argument between people doing the work and people insisting someone else do the work for them, but it must be to the specifications of the armchair quarterbacks... well... I've got bad news about the things the non-paying non-coders want.
You can either pay money or pay time, but nobody cares about the freeloaders demanding things without offering any kind of compensation.
" the day I start caring about what non-contributers think .."
Be sure not to wear your actual gate keeping opinion on Your sleeve if you want to deny them .
