this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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Linux

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Let's say just like for example like MacOS. It's awesome we have so many tools but at the same time lack of some kind of standardization can seem like nothing works and you get overwhelmed. I'm asking for people that want to support Linux or not so tech-savy people.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

More appealing? Linux runs basically all server infrastructure where even Microsoft bent the knee for Azure & Windows Subsystem for Linux. If we are talking about Desktop Linux, it will remain popular with those building software for easier/better dev tooling & wanting to better understand the systems their production code is run on. As software becomes more intergral to our lives & knowing how to write/debug it rises, folks will slowly keep trickling in as the have for decades where more & more software is treating Linux (& the web, & since BSDs, et al. are running similar software such as GTK they are also included) as a primary target. The other desktop OSs continue to shoot themselves in the foot injecting ads into the OS or denying system-level access to the machine you own.

A would say a better focus is mobile Linux… as casual users have migrated away from desktop OSs, where Android & iOS’s walls are holding them captive.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 months ago

Thank you thank you thank you for posing this question.

This is the biggest issue by far with open source stuff in general, and as a non-programmer who wants to use more and more of it, user unfriendliness hamstrings so much.

I don't know the answers but I can tell you for a fact that if open source in general is serious about broader adoption, this needs to be occupying 50% of everybody's open source discussion time, at least.

What I know is the standard "fuck you read my 19 pages of 1s and 0s" is the wrong answer.

Maybe good design is just really hard. I don't know, I've never tried to do it. Seems like the sort of thing that might take three thousands iterations.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The issue starts at the fact that it's difficult to find a computer sold by a common major distributor with Linux already installed, nor does Linux have any marketing aside from word of mouth to compete with the aggressive Microsoft/Apple duopoly.

The threshold to entry begins at simply having the technical prowess to install an alternative operating system on one's computer, which I don't believe a good majority of people are even capable of. Before that, people also need an incentive to transition in the first place. They've probably been using their current OS for a good portion of their life and are more than comfortable with it without putting themselves through another learning curve.

The average person isn't considering an alternative to what they're already using, and if they are, it usually isn't Linux. The biggest problem isn't appeal or ease of use; it's exposure and immediate accessibility.

That said, performance and simplicity would be an excellent selling point for Linux. It would be absolutely worth banking on the open-source nature of it to appeal to a growing demographic of people interested in privacy-oriented tech as well.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (2 children)

BazziteOS is really straightforward. Newbies can just jump on there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

If I haven't heard of it, then the average Windows user definitely hasn't heard of it.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

This. I've tried around 10 distros. Bazzite is exacly that.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (4 children)

I will be checking this thread out later for potential idiot proof distros

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

As others have said, macOS does not “just work” anymore.

I am primary tech support for a few “normy” users including my mother and wife. My wife, the more technical and capable of the two, uses macOS. My mother uses Windows. My wife requires substantially more tech support. Worse, the issues are often complete mysteries to me like “why is everything so slow” and it turning out that some OS level process is consuming huge amounts of memory and / or CPU. Web searches reveal lots of people with similar issues but no real insight into what to do about it or why it is happening. I have moved OS versions just to solve this kind of crap on Mac. Another problem is software not working on older versions of the OS.

I am no Windows lover but, once I show my mother how to do something, I never hear from her. Every once in a while I stop by to marvel at how many updates need to be applied but that is about it. She is in the Windows 10 that I installed for her many years ago now. It just works.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Fedora Kinote just works.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

It is very hard, time consuming and boring to iron out those finishing issues in any software product. You need team of people being paid for that.

When doing it for fun, I just go until it works and until it is fun. As soon as I come to those last 20% I never touch it anymore.

So ai doubt it will happen until more companies start paying decelopera to do it. But I don't see the business model in that, so I doubt it will get better fast.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

After getting used to KDE I still need to use windows for work. People think big companies iron out all the bugs but they really don't. We're just so used to our default OS that we don't notice the bugs we deal with every single session.

Windows has tons of buggy base functionality but users just work around it. KDE's base functionality is actually quite solid by comparison. You only run into issues with more technical compositor stuff that an average user would probably not interact with.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think it should be: "Software that is yours"

Overall, I think more focus should be put on consolidating similar projects.

Do we really need 6 different window managers that follow the same design logic?

Do we really need each major distro to have its own package manager?

How many image and PDF viewers do we need? How many music players?

Can we convince Ubuntu that no one wants snaps and they are wasting developer resources.

The freed up capacity should be focused on better windows app compatibility. Something akin to Valve's push in gaming.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

While I understand the sentiment, we have to understand that Open Source developers work on projects that motivate them.

So, we can have a single example of each of these but they do necessarily get any more devs. In fact, if you take economic theory ( competition for example ), it is likely they attract less attention individually than they do competing as part of an ecosystem.

It would certainly help on the user acceptance and commercial software side where choice is an impediment. But, if we are just talking resources, limiting the number of projects only works if you pay people to work on them.

Why was each of these projects started ( eg. window managers )? The answer is simple. It is because the founding developer did not like any of the existing options.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It does just work for normal users.

Normies use the installed os. Just install a browser and office suite, thats all the need and care about.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Mac OS is not a "just works" experience. It is heavily tied to icloud and Apple services and everything is janky.

Maybe if Mac OS matured a bit I would consider using it but for now it is in a broken unusable state.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

I was going to refute your comment but to be honest I use it largely because of those features. I’ve used MacOS for over 30 years and recently bought an AMD workstation for development work when my MacBook didn’t cut it anymore. It would be a good experiment to try an all local MacOS experience to see how it stacks up and I think it would probably be ok. You can install a lot of desktop apps using Brew to keep your system up to date. The main advantage that Mac has over Linux is that a lot of corporate software is available that otherwise can only be obtained on Windows. When I realized that windows in a VM on Linux wasn’t for me I more or less converted my Linux machine to a server for most use cases.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

If you appreciate autonomy, avoid MacOS. Their whole business model is to suck you into their technological ecosystem. The fact that their stuff works in any way outside of their expensive, walled garden is unintentional.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

By telling users to change their mindset, by showing em how control is important and how the "just werks" mentality imposed by Microsoft is more detrimental than anything.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

"Just works" is not a mentality imposed by Microsoft, and has nothing to do with loss of control. It's simply (a consequence of) the idea that things which can be automated, should be. It is about good defaults, not lack of options.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

It was literally the tag line for Windows 98 I think!

The gag was that it just (barely) works.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago

I have been forced to use mac now for like a year, and I don't get the whole "just works" opinion of it. Like I have had so many issues with just basic stuff. Turning off mouse acceleration and the mouse still feels all slimy. Highest mouse speed is so slow and setting it higher requires some crazy tricks, which also does not work consistently through boots. It can't wake up a lot of monitors, I have to turn them off and on manually. If it cannot connect to a monitor properly but tries, it like disables your keyboard for a few seconds while trying. Some items in the settings menu take a long time to load, as in if I reboot, log in, open settings, there is no mouse settings.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago

Kinda don't think you can its one of the beauties of Linux, there's so many different flavors of it. Best thing that would've helped me as a beginner would've been like a collection of all the wiki's and basic knowledge in a single space instead of searching through different sites for a problem or terminal commands, which I bet exists but I just never looked too hard. Also documentation of common problems would've been big for me (especially for older devices) like drivers no longer being supported by kernels and solutions like using the open source version instead.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

MacOS being a bad example here since Apple only needs to make its OS work on a very small set of hardware that they control wheras Linux (and Windows, yes) need to work on probably hundreds of thousand if not millions of devices (including Macs 👌) with at least the same amount of peripherals combined in almost any imaginable way. That's a completely different task.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Most people have had great answers coming from the company side of things. I'll take it from the standpoint of individuals like us helping someone linux curious see the light, while still having the "just works" experience.

Do not give them any choices. None. Put them on your stable distro of choice for a new user, call whatever that is "Linux", and be on your way.

But why? Isn't that antithetical to everything we value? Yes and no. We value choice almost above anything else, but that doesn't "just work" for most people. Which of those do you value more?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

No-one who buys a PC with windows preinstalled gets any choice at all... and had the preinstalled malware cme with it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

That's true. Most are perfectly fine provided they have a computer ready to use. Straight out of the box. Immediately. The lack of choice itself is comforting. Everything moves forward. No lateral motion.

We must provide them that type of "thing that just works". Constantly move forward. What is comfortable. What is familiar.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Simple, start teaching it in elementary school all the way up through high school. Apple did it long ago and got apple users out of those kids. Microsoft does it now, and now you have Windows users. Just need the computer education to be Linux centric from the start. It's not that it's different, it's that it's not what they grew up with and were taught.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Windows hasn't been in schools for a while. It is all Chrome OS

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think it depends. If a school has a laptop for each student, it is most certainly a Chromebook. However, a lot of schools also have a mix of systems. In elementary school, I was taught to use Microsoft Office on Windows, for instance. At my high school, all the students had Chromebooks, but there were also some labs with Windows machines; graphic design, photography, and film classes had labs full of 5K iMacs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Chromebooks are low cost and easy to manage. Unless it is for a highly specific use I wouldn't be surprised if a school was all Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.

Also there is a public high school full of expensive macs? That's wild

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Not exactly “full of” - it was more like 3 classrooms with 30 each. Still a lot of Macs, but keep in mind this was a high school of 2000 students. Also, I’m pretty sure the Macs were paid for with grants for the visual arts programs rather than standard public funding.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Linux is a tool that big corporate entities have profited greatly from for many years, and will continue to. Same with BSD, Apache, Docker, MySQL, Postgres, SSH...

Valve, Sys76, Framework, etc. Are proving that using Linux to serve an end user market is also profitable, and are capable of supporting enterprise use-cases.

I understand that there may be specific problems to solve wrt improving adoptability, usability, compatibility, etc., but Linux is doing more than ok within the context of the FOSS ecosystem (and increasingly without).

Your thinking is slightly skewed, IMHO. Linux doesn't have an inherent incentive to compete with MacOS or MS, and if it did, it would be subject to the same pressures that encourage bad behavior like spying on users, creating walled gardens, and so forth.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

But Linux is open source? So if hypothetically so distro adopted spying al la windows couldn’t people just change distros? tbh I also think the question is slightly confusing as I don’t understand why OP thinks Mac OS is not standardized but I digress.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah sure, a distro could start spying on users. How easy it would be would depend on their distribution model, and how willing they are to violate the GPL.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 months ago (2 children)

The way to get Linux more appealing is to get proprietary software makers, like Adobe, Microsoft (Office), you know the actual things people need to do their job, to make software for Linux. Steam Deck is a good example of this, it works because Steam ported the games to Linux...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

In some ways this is true. However, I feel like in the case of Adobe, someone needs to take another shot at a good FOSS image editor. Adobe is really starting to mess itself with generative AI; knowing many artists, they hate generative AI image tech as a threat to their job, so I find it weird that Adobe is alienating one of their largest user bases. I find it weird how Inkscape is really good and has evolved (I actually switched to it from Adobe Illustrator and don´t regret it), while GIMP has barely changed in 10 years.

I get that some parts of an image editor are complex, but at some point, it's just a chain of mathematical operations. Maybe I'm wrong, but when I get the time, it's almost tempting to take a stab at the issue.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

While I don't disagree with you about the potential of those alternatives they won't cut it for the average graphic designer... usually not due to the lack of features but most likely because of the network effects / dominant position that Adobe holds over their field. People who need to collaborate with others and are pressured to get stuff done can't afford the slightest compatibility issue.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Looks at the current state of Microsoft and Adobe

I'm good.

Anyway you can't really do much about a company not supporting Linux. Either find an alternative or don't use Linux.

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