#1 is just not being the default for 99% of devices. If someone gets a new computer, why would they go through the effort of installing a new os when the one it comes with works fine? Hell, I bet at least 50% of people in the market for a pc don’t even know what an OS is.
The main issue is that easy problems that should be solved baseline by the OS crop up far too often for the average user to want to have to deal with day to day. Also, whenever you go to ask on a forum, you’re usually told to just do something entirely different or use another distro. Every time I go to fix something on this machine it sends me down a rabbit hole of shit I don’t care about because it doesn’t solve my problem since it introduces a brand new one to solve. If I want to use solution X don’t tell me to go install program Y that’s your favorite program to use but is literally not what I’m trying to accomplish.
Today I installed Manjaro onto an old laptop and for the life of me I could not figure out why it wasn’t connecting to the internet. It wasn’t a network issue, it was the fact that the time was out of sync. It took me a while to realize that was the issue and not that I had fucked up my router config or something. It just couldn’t validate any cryptography because the time was off. There were like four different solutions that all attempted the same fix and eventually I was able to connect with ethernet and restart timesync, which only worked after a restart.
How to make Linux better:
Better quality control eg. no more issues like Ubuntu shipping a broken version of systemd that wont allow the system to boot.
Prioritize performance over FOSS purity in newbie friendly distros. A graphics card driver that gets 1/30th the FPS should not be the default for a 1,000 dollar graphics card. Anyone that wants the FOSS driver can install it if they want.
Avoid homogenization of software features. i.e. better support of the feature outliers. eg. KDE does not have an option to adjust contrast of scrollbars without a theme that specifically has that contrast. This makes it harder for the vision impaired like myself to use software.
- Installation process of Linux is complicated to an average Joe (Bootable USB/ISO file/Boot priority/format <- what are these scary terms?)
- Lack of availability of pre-installed Linux PCs at physical shops
- Lack of availability of industry-standard software
- Confusion for an average Joe due to excess choice of distros/application packaging format. Average people don’t want choices, they want to be guided.
- (Minor point) Most available guides for doing something heavily requires terminal usage which can be daunting to new users
Intimidating to install and then an unfamiliar interface and applications.
It might be more accepted if it came preinstalled and simply had a browser like Chrome and an app store, where all the other ‘helpful’ but confusing apps like Libre office were kept out of the way.
I install it for my family and it would only be accepted if it looked and worked just like Windows or MacOS. All they really need is a browser to get to GSuite or Office365.
- Isn’t pre-installed on well known machines by well known brands.
- Popular applications (whether productivity, creativity, or games) do not work out of the box that people want. It doesn’t matter that alternatives exist, or that you can use things like Wine. If it’s more than just click the icon, it’s too much.
- If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.
While this is true, if someone goes to a shop and buys a “PC”, it will have Windows 100% of the time.
You have to look to get Linux preinstalled on stuff, or pick the choice yourself. People buying PCs aren’t picking Windows, it’s just what comes with them.
- Self updating without user interaction per default.
- Better support of codecs and drivers.
Linux does have better codecs and drivers than Windows for some stuff (Bluetooth for example), but it has worse codecs and drivers for some important proprietary hardware stuff (Nvidia for example)
commercial, immutable distro with professional support team. Easy desktop env. like cinnamon, budgie or kde Preinstalled on new devices
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tldr: Normies shouldn’t be allowed to use computers.
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Most folks have been sold a story that every new technology they start using is supposed to be “intuitive”; and that if it is not “intuitive” then it must be defective or willfully perverse.
For example, novice programmers often stumble when learning their second or third language, because it differs from their first. Maybe it uses indentation instead of curly braces; maybe type declarations are written in a different order; maybe it doesn’t put
$on its variables; maybe capitalization of identifiers is syntactically significant.And so they declare that Python is not “intuitive” because it doesn’t look like C; or Go is not “intuitive” because it doesn’t feel like PHP.
It should be obvious that this has nothing to do with intuition, and everything to do with familiarity and comfort-level.
Commercial, consumer-oriented technology has leaned heavily into the “intuitive” illusion. On an iPhone or Windows, Android or Mac, you’re supposed to be able to just guess how to do things without ever having to confront unfamiliarity. You might use a search engine to find a how-to document with screenshots — but you’re not supposed to have to learn new concepts or anything. That would be hard.
That’s not how to learn, though. To learn, you need to get into unfamiliar things, recognize that they are unfamiliar, and then become familiar with them.
Comfort-level is also important. It sucks to be doing experimental risky things on the computer that’s storing your only copy of your master’s thesis research. If you want to try installing a new OS, it sure helps if you can experiment with it in a way that doesn’t put any of your “real work” at risk. That can be on a spare computer, or booting from a USB drive, or just having all your “real work” backed up on Dropbox or Google Drive or somewhere that your experimentation can’t possibly break it.
It should be obvious that this has nothing to do with intuition, and everything to do with familiarity and comfort-level.
Not to be petty, but I think that intuitive is not that different to familiar.
I mean, the problem is in using the word intuitive when “selling” something in the first place. User interaction involves ton of things, large and small, and the intuitive things are rarely noticed. Such promise is likely going to lead to disappointment.
Adapting to these small differences is a skill in itself.
IMO one of the main problems is eliminating the workflow of older commercial operating systems and having to build a new habit of using a new system. There are various Linux-based distributions that manage to give the user everything they need without having to resort to using the specific terminal.
Creating a new habit after spending years developing one for an old system, for me, is the main problem that leads many users to leave it.
Off the top of my head things that Ive run into over the years that would have caused 99% of computer users to throw Linux in the bin:
*Having to edit xorg.conf to set the graphics driver
*A typo in the sources list that prevented any packages from downloading (distro upgrade)
*A bug in systemd that resulted in the OS not booting (fresh install)
*The wrong graphics card driver being selected and not being installed correctly because Ubuntu kept back 5 packages necessary for it to function (fresh install)
*A bug in how Ubuntu handles the disk platter that causes hard drives to fail far more rapidly than they should (that bug has been there for years and probably ruined a few hard drives)
*Having to recompile the wifi driver after every upgrade (broadcomm chipset) before the driver was included in the kernel and having to reinstall the OS after the driver was included in the kernel because something went wrong during the upgrade. ie recompiling didnt fix anything and the native driver wasnt working either.
*failed drive encryption
*grub being installed incorrectly (no boot)
*dealing with UEFI to maintain a dual boot for programs that cannot be emulated or virtualized effectively (lag sensitive non-native games)
*Audio output defaults being incorrect (no sound, no mic)
But the one thing that above all else, will drive newbies away is how the general linux community tends to respond to things.
I mean… Is Linux even a challenge to anyone that just needs basic stuff? (Ubuntu, fedora, etc)
I only have trouble trying to install shit that’s not in repos.
Keeping the discussion of running Windows applications through Wine/Proton aside; there are a lot of little things which happen to annoy me while I am using my PopOS install for example the most recent one is my headphones don’t play any sound from the left year, it works properly on my other devices…
I’m willing to make it work, but most general users wouldn’t be. This statement continues to be true even after the huge amounts of progress Linux community has made to make a better experience.
- Fully unmanaged and automatic updates.
- Online account: automatic e2e backups and restores. Can be a payed or a selfhosted service.
- Does not require root account. Locked root account.
- Flatpak and Android apps works out of the box
Call it Grandma Linux™ if you want. It needs to be a deploy and forget distro. I’m not recommending Linux right now unless they’re developers.
It’s the first step of installation, making a bootable usb/CD. Most non-technical people can’t be arsed to create a bootable drive, then go into the bios boot settings to run it. I haven’t used Windows in a long time so I don’t know how it’s installed these days, but the fact that it comes installed out-of-the-box when people buy a computer lets them skip the first and biggest step to running linux, which is getting it installed in the first place.
Distros have come a long way that a Windows user trying Linux Mint can hit the ground running. It’s no longer about the learning curve for USING linux, it’s INSTALLING linux that’s the problem.
Exactly. I’d argue that some supposedly mainstream distros are hard to install even for the competent. Last time I checked, Debian’s funnel for newbies consisted of a 90s-era website with “instructions” in the form of a rambling block of jargon-filled text with mentions of “CD-Roms” and a vague discussion of third-party apps for burning ISOs. I mean, on Linux flashing a USB stick is matter of a single
ddcommand with some obscure switches, but even that was nowhere to be found and I had to search forums for it. Incredible! Hard to imagine how forbidding it must all seem to the average Windows user! No Debian for them!IIRC Ubuntu’s process was much easier but still not as easy-peasy as it could have been.
The only hope for desktop Linux is a crystal-clear, bulletproof, 1-2-3-style onboarding funnel that takes the user from “this is the distro’s website” to “I have a bootable USB”. From that point on it’s plain sailing.
Yeah, it took me way too long to get Debian running on my pc, because for some reason the website assumed that everyone would have a Linux to install Debain with. I haven’t had that, and that one tool they had didn’t work.
Whats nice about gnome is the disk util. included: select USB stick, click restore image and browse for the iso file. click OK.
Yeah but here we’re interested in how easy this is for a normie on Windows.
