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.
…
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.
Not disagreeing with your general point, but music production in Linux is not “stuck on LMMS”. Reaper runs natively, and there is plenty more.
I remember running FL Studio under Wine with no issues; Windows VSTs work under yabridge
Their general point of view is definitely not wrong.
When it comes to music, I’ve had a good time using Reaper for casual guitar recording, however a bunch of my plugins struggle horrible with Yabridge. A lot of this stuff has online per-system drm these days, namely anything from NeuralDSP, so that often puts it to a halt
Or be the same but cheaper, but yes inertia is huge at the difference in market share
But how do you get the average user, for whom the cost of licensing the OS is completely opaque, to even think about cost at all? The computer they bought comes with Windows or MacOS on it already. Neither of which currently has any additional recurring monetary cost to the user.
You’d need mass-market laptops and desktops coming with a Linux distribution tuned well enough to run Microsoft Office and Adobe products without any more work for the user than running them on Windows. It needs to come pre installed and work so well at the “prosumer” use cases that they aren’t constantly thinking about how much easier it was to run Windows. Doing that means the OEM has to do much more unit testing and compatibility checks to ensure that when the customer opens the box and goes to install Steam and Apex or whatever that it just works without any terminal work necessary. Add to that that the OEM will want support from the company that manages the OS, and suddenly the cost to license tried and true Windows vs almost any Linux distribution for end user workstations is nearly moot.
And to make a dent in gaming, there is still an ocean to cross in terms of driver readiness and ease of use. It’s coming along, no doubt, and Valve investing as heavily as they are in Linux gaming is sure to move the needle, but it will still be an area of difficulty for some time because the user experience needs to accommodate completely custom builds with unexpected hardware configurations and box-built gaming PCs that can be OE tested and configured and everything in between.
We can force it on them…
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.
Bro im literally working in IT and it was a joke.
the irony of their post is absolutely off the charts lmao
What was difficult in your experience?
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.fixedFlatpak 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.
Wonder how much of this relates to SUSE? How “normie-tolerant” is that? I’ve been printing for years without any issues for instance, and have a HP printer that used to hate my linux OS with a passion.
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.
And vim, of course
of course
They don’t even know that.
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
You only have to start wearing them once you become a programmer.
do ski socks count?
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.
What you say describes my experience 10 to 15 years ago, not my experience today. Compare the settings dialog in KDE Plasma to the windows settings dialog for instance. Or should I say myriad of Windows settings dialogues.
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.
I was reading pages about going linux only. Everyone I read warned people off about how it isn’t easy and such. That was just one example. But for work linux is easier to support, hands down. I have supported both. But for my home pc… which surfs the web, plays games, and not much else… windows is sadly easier according to the pages I read.
Windows may be easier for games, they’re exclusively written for Microsoft so that’s to be expected ( although Valve has done a lot here).
Generally speaking, modern distributions like Fedora will be no more difficult than Windows or Mac. The important distinction is that it will be different.
Microsoft has spent a lot of effort putting their operating system into every single school and business on the face of the Earth and as a result many have decades of training with that OS. That doesn’t mean their operating system is better or easier. It just means it’s familiar. If you used Android for two decades and then picked up an iPhone, I’m sure that would be just as difficult.
In the scientific space, we’ve been using *nix systems since well before Microsoft was even around so our tooling doesn’t typically support Microsoft. For us Microsoft is more difficult because that’s the training that we have.
So, it’s not that Linux has a worse user experience per se, rather it provides a different user experience. Some may consider shell scripts worse than control panel, but that’s a preference. One isn’t worse than the other. They are just different.
In my opinion:
- Web browser
- exactly the same
- slight edge to in terms of privacy and security (there’s a reason Tails isn’t written in Windows)
- exactly the same
- Media – Movies
- exactly the same
The difference is in work, If your workflow is heavily Microsoft focused, Is a truly awful experience and you’ll feel like a second-class citizen. But if you’re working on technical things, the inverse is true, eg
For document production:
- TeX
- Linux is much easier
- HTML / Markdown /
pandoc- Linux is much Easier
- Microsoft Office
- Windows is much better here
- I don’t use Microsoft Office though so YMMV
- Windows is much better here
Finally, it’s not really fair to lump all the next distributions into the same bucket, Is over 1,000 distributions and they are all quite different, Only common element is the kernel.
Gentoo is very technical but it’s also very interesting, Arch is similar. Fedora OTOH we’ll usually walk out of the box And you have your choice of desktop environment with Good support for alternative window managers like sway/Hyprland etc.
So here is one of the pages I read… https://linux-gaming.kwindu.eu/index.php?title=Should_you_switch_to_Linux_gaming%3F I saw similar sentiment in other places as well. Sounds like you are saying this isn’t the majority opinion?
Overall, I have a strong dislike for apple in general, and I won’t take a job where I have to work with windows ever again unless I am desperate. And I am also getting very tired of Microsoft’s bs. But I don’t want my main home pc to be a project either. I already use Firefox and a vpn. But every time some page doesn’t work right I have to turn off the vpn, and try chrome before I know the problem is on thier end. And it usually isn’t, well other than not supporting firefox and a vpn, but these are banks or doctors offices, I don’t have a lot of choice in most of them. There is only so much of that I am willing to do on my main home pc. But overall, I would like to be part of the solution, as long as I am a target user, which from what I have read, I am not.
- Web browser
You don’t have to compile your own kernels you know that right?
Nice. My info was from googling using Linux as a home pc. So it may be a gate keeping attitude or it may be fact. I don’t want to fight with my home pc that just browser the web and plays games. Oh… I guess it runs turbotax in april.
What do you mean?
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.
Yes but it has subpar user experience. But there is no reason you can’t have both, that’s what I’m saying.
Subpar how? That statement definitely doesn’t reflect my own experience.
I’ve previously posted a few examples:
Is there a way to keep Linux responsive when at ~100% CPU usage?
I also regularly have my window manager crash when inserting my laptop into my docking station. Happens maybe 20% of the time. Sometimes even when it works the display scaling makes things blurry until I reset the scaling from 150% back to 100% and back again, then it’s fine. Add to this a few annoyances with UI, but these are more forgivable.
There’s all kinds of these small problems that compound to just make for a much worse experience. It doesn’t just work but it needs to if it really wants to provide a viable alternative to normal people.
Keep in mind, I am not a “normal person” - I am a professional software engineer and I still find all this stuff super annoying.
I agree with your examples and it’s certainly true there are plenty of rough edges on Linux. Then again, how many examples are there for things that should “just work” and do on Linux but don’t on Windows? There’s enough that make me not use Windows at all, because it has a subpar user experience. I even used a Macbook for a few years, mainly for work, and there were too many small things that annoyed me about it, so it too had a subpar user experience.
Seems it’s mostly a matter of perspective which issues are more important to you.
There’s like a thousand Linux distros. Having one be ready and easy to use, no hassle or deeper knowledge needed, won’t stop the great many others that exist without bumper rails. Arch and Nix etc will still keep existing, so you can chill out, edgelord.
Linux scary. Some guy yelled at me in Finnish :(
perkele
This should be the splash screen on every distro.
This is a brilliant idea, and I’m going to do it on my machine.
Fair
That’s just how they say hello in Finland, I promise!
Makes sense. More polite than the default in Boston, if I’m honest
“There aren’t enough swear-words in the English language, so now I’ll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap.” - Linus Torvalds
I mean coding is difficult enough as it is, I wouldn’t choose to use an OS that makes it even harder.
I use Linux because it makes my life easier. It has better support for development. Some of the other stuff is maybe not as easy or polished, but the support for dev tools and the ease of deploying to from local machines to servers that are also running Linux makes up for it.
If I wanted more effort I’d still be using Windows. It would force me to work on cross platform development and deployment. The idea that there’s value in making things unnecessarily hard is just weird. I want Linux to be as simple as possible to use, so I can spend that effort on things that actually matter.
I use Linux in part because it makes building software easier.
I agree, it’s usually much easier to install required dependencies with Linux. I also recently noticed that some stuff, like compiling Rust, is much faster, but I haven’t timed it.
It’s definitely faster. I have seen measurements from many people showing that Windows is slower compiling Bevy on the same hardware.
I wonder what kind of support for development do you get? Honestly I’ve only had obstacles when I switched, for example the docker installation was much more complicated on linux than on windows+wsl. Even installing python was problematic because apparently ‘upgrading it yourself can brick the system’, at least if an older version comes with the OS?
And lastly it’s the simple thing that pretty much all tools work on windows natively but on linux you have to find workarounds, which is definitely a problem when it comes to productivity.
So what are the benefits, what does linux have that windows doesn’t in this context?
It really comes down to what you’re used to. If you use Windows tools then you already know many of the workarounds for Windows and you don’t know the tools that haven’t been ported there.
For example, you know not to use Python directly, but that you have to install anaconda instead, or whatever the current problems with Python development on Windows are.
The big obvious thing that you can’t get away from is that you have to do things differently if you have develop for two different OSs with a view to deploying on Linux.
In particular support for shell scripts is crap on Windows. I could learn powershell or there’s workarounds using WSL and a bunch of other stuff that I don’t need to care about, but I’d rather not bother.
I don’t think it was the point of your post necessarily, but I did want to mention a couple of things that might make the Linux switch a little easier - if not for you, anybody else reading and agreeing.
First, distrobox (https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox) is a nifty frontend for podman/docker that I think makes it a little more usable/accessible without having a PhD in devops. Basically helper scripts that create a series of simple CLI commands that let you launch a new environment, enter the new (or old) environment, do stuff in the environment, exit the environment. Keeps your core system’s python separated from your development environment(s). Sacrifices the isolation qualities of containers in favor of usability, so probably ok for dev work on a desktop and not so much for production on a server.
Also, there are GUI applications for point and click management of distrobox - I use BoxBuddy, which is available as a Flatpak on Flathub, so again no interference with the core system provided it can run podman and flatpak.
Second, I know the php dev world figured out ways to abstract some docker complexity away with stuff like ddev (https://github.com/ddev/ddev) and lando (https://github.com/lando/lando). I wonder whether other languages have or will build that dev environment in a box abstraction on Docker/Podman/whatever.
Depends on the programming language. Some are just as easy on Windows as Linux - sometimes easier. C#, Java, Rust, Go, etc. are all perfectly fine on Windows.
Some treat Windows as a weird second class citizen though, so for those I would agree: OCaml, Perl, Python, etc. However you can still use WSL for those and have the benefits of Linux without the downsides of broken hardware, terrible battery life, etc.
For 99% of Windows or MacOS users who work in their browser and within simple applications, day-to-day Linux usage is as easy or easier than Windows. Microsoft’s monopolistic practices and lack of government intervention/regulation led us to this point plain and simple.
I just a few weeks ago successfully switched my father-in-law’s mid-2011 iMac (out of support for years) to Nobara 40. It took some finagling with the SIP settings and some other macOS specific stuff before it would boot the liveUSB but once it did, it works flawlessly OOTB.
Pretty incredible how frictionless the transition was for him. He even chose to switch from chrome to the default firefox, despite me having setup chromium for him to compare (but he knows its there if a website doesn’t load right in Firefox). He’s in his 60’s and not a techy person at all. Everything is so intuitive with KDE these days he picked it up no problem.
Only downside is background sync for KDE connect doesn’t work on iOS yet, seems this is a sticking point for most FOSS apps for some reason. It was causing disconnect/pairing issues for us. But I showed him localsend for now and it works flawlessly for transferring photos from the phone to the computer.
He’s happy with all the default apps and onlyoffice (which I switched out from libreoffice as I’ve found much more consistent formatting when sending/receiving to MSoffice users)(maybe this is outdated, haven’t tried the new release). Printing and scanning was plug and play. Apple trackpad and keyboard auto-paired. I showed him how to setup widgets and he went nuts. Overall 9.95/10 would convert a normie again.
side note: https://tomstu.art/the-dhh-problem
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.
The developers I have come across mostly use Linux if they can, or another OS if they can’t (e.g. when developing specifically for Apple or Microsoft platforms). Are there many that haven’t even looked at it?
I think there’s a pretty big overlap of gamers and programmers who use Windows or WSL because they don’t want to have to dual boot.
Games. The answer is games.
The day COD, Dota2, CS2, Overwatch 2 and all that crap runs on Linux with anti-cheat and no performance issues is the day Windows dies.
a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.
Ain’t nobody got time for that. I don’t need or want to spend my time debugging my OS for it to do what I want, I already did that and I did not exactly “level up” but I did waste a lot of time.
This is just an excuse. A poor one.
It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple.
Does it?
It’s different, but I imagine they’re not fundamentally different if you exclude established knowledge/already being used to something.
Normal office use for non-techy people is launching apps, editing documents, and surfing the web. That doesn’t work much differently, not fundamentally different, and not fundamentally more difficult.
“Demanding more out of its users” is a description of an objectively inferior OS.
random fatphobia in the opening paragraph followed by programmer elitism.
Dude seems well adjusted and pleasant. Overall point isn’t wrong though.
Dude ain’t well adjusted https://tomstu.art/the-dhh-problem. That being said exercise is healthy and junk food isn’t. Saying that is not fatphobic.
What is fatphobia? I think he was just saying it’s easier to let yourself go and turn into a blob than to stay healthy. Definitely true no?
I’m quite skinny and I also think I should exercise more and eat less junk food. There isn’t any fat phobia there, it targeted me just as well.
What’s a better analogy then, sensei?
Welcome to the DHH Show! He’ll be forever, no matter how many people beg him to stop.
I used to work as a sysadmin/dev/monkey/serverwrencher and in my experience there are 3 main groups:
- queer happy people who enjoy being weird.
- serious quiet nerdy men.
- people who think Christian Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman was meant to be aspirational.
