What scares me is that I’ve tried to hook multiple “geekier” teenagers on Linux, and they aren’t interested. Even the math-y ones don’t know the difference between an operating system and a browser. My main computer is Arch with xmonad and it disturbs and confuses them.
We have a lost generation when it comes to computers. Lots of the little geeks that would have been playing around in the registry or learning powershell 15 years ago are so stuck in walled gardens that they don’t even know there’s a world outside of them.
A true mainstream Linux distro would need guidelines like this:
- The user is never be expected to type a command into a terminal.
- The user is never be expected to edit a configuration file.
- There is a graphical UI for every possible action the user might want to (or have to) do.
This especially includes:
- Configuring audio devices
- Installing graphics drivers
- Updating the operating system
- Managing applications and storage space
- Connecting to networked storage
- Adjusting kernel parameters (This is neccessary on certain hardware, yet, barely any distro has a graphical UI for it.)
The only distro that comes close to this is Linux Mint, but not even Mint covers everything I just mentioned.
If we want Linux to succeed, there needs to be at least one distro that confidently ships without a terminal.
Eh. I'm mostly a power user, all day at work in terminals and keyboard shortcut galore.
It doesn't prevent me from laying back and running a "filthy casual" kubuntu with little to no setup at all. At one point you reach the state where you just want to use your computer, not tinker with it all the time.
I believe Linux distros aimed at nontechnical users should strive to not need a user to ever use a terminal, but I also believe folks should be encouraged to try them anyways.
Grew up with ms-dos. Spent half my career in telnet and ssh consoles.
When I just want to play Balatro at the end of a long day fuck any system that requires more than click click to get me in.
That's why I'm switching to Linux when windows 10 is no longer supported because fuck win 11 and the amount of regedits it's gonna take to get that working.
nah fuck that noise. thats what i use.
its good to know it more deeply, but i want the practicality of a stable system that gets out of the way of my shitposting.
if anything, easy stable distros are more worthy because it allows just anyone to ditch windows. instead of being a nerd's plaything, that is.
My dad who retires today and who has been a Windows user since roughly 1993 has set up multiple Pi-Holes and OpenVPN in the last few years and recently even installed Ubuntu in WSL so he can run bash scripts locally too. He's not in a tech job, he's a doctor.
A year ago my friend who has been using Windows for his gaming for the last 22 years asked my to help him set up a Fedora dual boot. Just to play around with, even though he doesn't have a tech background. He didn't really use it much. But today his work had him blocked by their own fuck-up and he decided to use the time to try it out again.
This evening he told me about how he upgraded his Fedora back to a current version using GUI tools. Then he saw that Windows wasn't the default boot in his grub boot order anymore. He tried to find an app for editing grub, realised this was the kind of thing people do with CLI. So in the next two hours he learned enough CLI using a free beginners lesson he found online somewhere, until he found the
historycommand, where he found the grub command we used during the original setup. He was so excited about this success!I think the CLI criticisms are way overblown, and non-programmers can use CLIs perfectly well if they want to.
I'll be honest, as a macos & Linux user, even macos, the (self proclaimed) Holy Grail of accessibility and user friendliness,required me to run a few commands to fix bugs (not in weird softwares, just stuff which stopped working through reboots in the OS itself).
You can't expect to use a computer without CLI, or what you get is windows (and even then, you might get around the CLI but you gonna need to do some cursed regedit at the first attempt of slight customization, or bug).
The only exception to this is phones, and for good reason; you hardly can do shit in phones anyway, and if it bugs all you can do is wait for the devs to fix it for you
Unfortunately I use Windows at work and I constantly use the CLI. I probably use the CLI more on Linux, but I'm generally doing really awesome stuff on Linux and really dumb stuff on Windows.
If you're just a regular chud consumer, then maybe you don't need it on either OS.
GUIs are an awesome tool. Humans as a species have 5 senses, and instead of limiting computers to the narrow portion of sight needed for typing, they make full use of both our visual and aural senses.
That being said, they add another layer of abstraction away from the hardware on top of the already very abstract userspace utilities that abstract away the kernel that abstracts away the machine code that abstracts away the hardware.
All of which is to say that "Just Works" is shorthand for "I don't want to actually learn how this complex tool that I'm using works, I just want it to do everything I think it should be able to based on my lack of understanding, and do so in the way that makes sense to my ignorance. And I want it to do all that without learning why we do some steps (and then I'm going to complain about how little sense it all makes)."
That mentality is what allows predatory software companies to not only take advantage of their customers—by hiding shady practices outside of the GUI, and drawing attention to and manufacturing outrage about inconsequential "features" (like ads on the start menu)—but also exist in the first place. Pushing back against that "I shouldn't have to learn the tool to use it" mentality is one of the ways we keep scam artists and spyware dealers out of Linux spaces.
A meme is a great way to avoid their fury; Lynx doesn't show images.
those are the people not even liked by lifelong linux users. my grandparents used linux and never touched a terminal. before he was mentally gone my grandpa bet on horses online. Also every gui installer was made by someone not like this.
meanwhile windows you have no choice but to use terminal as well as customized installer image if you want to mitigate the built in spying and use an offline account
"The new Windows Terminal is so slick! And PowerShell is soooo awesome! When will Linux get cool neat powerful stuff like this?"
"Uh... About three decades ago?"
(To be honest, PowerShell is neat. But it's also cross platform, so if I really want it on Linux I guess I can get it there too? I don't really need to, I'm in middle of rewriting some PowerShell stuff in Python)
Most of the people I've introduced to Linux don't even use the shell. Beginner-friendly Linux distros are perfectly usable without ever touching a terminal, just as most people use Windows without ever touching PowerShell (or worse, the Registry Editor).
I've been using Linux for almost 20 years, but I still remember the fear of the terminal. The truth is that there is not much that you need to learn for daily use. Unless I'm working on an actual project (like configuring servers/networking) I don't spend much time in a CLI. Start with a beginner friendly distro (Linux Mint Debian Edition is my pick). You shouldn't need terminal at all for basic usage. Next, find some tutorials on basic Linux terminal usage and practice. The goal isn't to "learn every command" but to just familiarize yourself with how it works. Learn how to navigate your files and folders (ls, cp, mv, touch, etc). Learn how to edit text files (use nano). After that, anything you need to learn will be because you want to do something beyond basic use.
ITT: Nerds that want mass Linux adoption but don't want to deal with people who don't share their interests and opinions
There's an OS that doesn't require command line use to do anything slightly advanced? That hasn't been my experience.
Linux Mint vs Windows is already enough to learn for a day 1 linux user.
I'm of the opinion that if you're a newbie to Linux and want to use a more GUI-centric distro, then be my guest, telling someone to jump straight into something like Arch when they're just ditching Windows for the first time is more likely to just turn them off Linux forever.
That said, as said newbie gets more comfortable with the terminal, Arch is there if they want more of a challenge, and even then with archinstall, the main difficult part is effectively nullified, although for more advanced, long-term users, fully manual installation is still there on the Arch ISO as an option, but I'd be more likely to point them to something like Debian or OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to start with as those are generally more beginner-friendly than Arch is.
I run 2 systems. One is HTPC with LM, the other is dual boot Windows / bazzite. I like LM and bazzite. I like it very much. But maaaaan, I had problems setting up.
LM was totally fine except for when I was trying to set up pihole, screwed some steps and tried to remove it by terminal. It somehow corrupted OS so every time I'd try to login it would crash and prompt to login again. So far it is running fine but I had issues with pihole again when I tried to update it to v6. This time it corrupted pihole itself but I have managed to restore and update it. I guess reason is that pihole doesn't support LM put of the box and requires some tinkering to install.
Bazzite, on the other hand, is totally fine now. I guess that was something related to a recent update. But before that it wouldn't load. Like screen would be black but terminal would be still accessible. I have figured out that it would crash loading gaming mode and stuck there (but I didn't tell it to boot to gaming mode) so I had to manually make it boot to desktop mode (kde) in terminal every time. If you think that I have screwed something up again - nope. Fresh install on a separate ssd. It installs and then would reuse to boot or boot after like half an hour into kde. All the rpm ostree -update or -upgrade did nothing.
I love these both systems but maaaaan if a basic user has to experience what I had, they'd stick to mac/windows for the rest of their life.
I was today years old when I realized that "just works" has nothing to do with the interface kind. If it works, it works, that's it.
I just installed garuda and update via their built in update command
