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From the article, tips on challenges for users to show what sets Linux apart from other OSes: > 1. Learn how to use the shell. > 2. Find and install packages

From the article, tips on challenges for users to show what sets Linux apart from other OSes: > 1. Learn how to use the shell. > 2. Find and install packages from the command line. > 3. Try out a tiling window manager, especially if you consider yourself a power user. > 4. Compile a program from source. At this point, the author would have surely alienated the vast majority of users potentially interested in Linux. I would venture a guess that even most engineers who use Linux at work (i.e. on their laptop) don't know what's a tiling window manager (since it's an implementation detail).

sascha_sl 5y ago
It's a very long way to say "no, I don't want UX to get better, why don't you instead join us and become a linux nerd, from 0 to 100". It also implies these are the things that make Linux good over macOS and Windows, when I can think of a lot of other benefits, including essentially eternal support for a wide range of hardware, the best printing stack (sharing that with macOS somewhat), independence from Microsoft and Apple, extreme customizability of any component of the OS and choice in who to trust with putting together your base system (aka distro).
- sixothree 5y ago
  I would say those are all very much the things that make linux bad for new users. This article feels like it was written in 2015.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  There's a lot of companies working on the UX for Linux. There's Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, Zorin... They're not for me though, as what I care about is pretty contrary to the idea of mainstream. I don't really care whether Linux makes it to the mainstream or not, why should that be everyone's goal? The lack of a unified direction might seems like a weakness of Linux but it's also its biggest strength. It's the reason it's the most used OS in the world now, when you include servers and Android devices. It's just so easy to adapt if you want to do something different. So let the techies do their techie stuff and let the mainstream OS vendors focus on their users :)
- adrusi 5y ago
  There is a companion argument linked in the first paragraph which lays out what desktop Linux needs to focus on to be better for beginners. The article you're responding to is giving advice to beginners who want to get value out of Linux today, given that desktop Linux has not yet managed to make itself better for beginners. The current state of desktop Linux is that there's a category of Linux software that is suitable for beginners, which is built atop the set of features that make Linux excellent for the people who put the amount of time into learning the operating system that is appropriate for learning a professional tool. But this category of software (the GNOME and KDE desktop environments and 3rd party software intended to run inside one or the other) doesn't do much to ease the process of learning the deeper, more compelling aspects of Linux. It provides you with an interface that's recognizable to Mac and Windows users, but doesn't provide nearly as much power, and then expects you to learn Linux in all its depth to make up for that difference in capabilities. That makes Linux great for people who just need a web browser and maybe an email client, and it makes Linux great for people who have enough background technical knowledge to learn all its depth, but leaves it vastly inferior for everyone who needs more than a Chromebook but doesn't need a professional tool. If you fall into that category today and want to use Linux anyway, you need to learn its depths, and expect that until you do, it will be worse than the OS you're coming from. If we want to improve the situation, we need either go all the way and make GNOME just as powerful as macOS (which is a fools errand), or make GNOME better integrated into what Linux is already great at and ease the transition.
  - aulin 5y ago
    Would you mind expanding on what does MacOS provide to the user category you describe that e.g. Linux+GNOME doesn't?
    - kitsunesoba 5y ago
      A starting point would be to stop trying to eliminate menubars and awkwardly sweeping the remaining unremovable menus into “junk drawer” hamburger menus. Under macOS the menubar is a huge boon for a few reasons: - It improves discoverability for any given app’s functionality immensely, as the menubar acts as a universal searchable index of functions - It provides an easy way to see the key shortcuts for any function - It provides a hook-point for the system to allow the user to set custom key shortcuts for any menu item in any app, even if the app’s developer never provided that capability GNOME is pretty great in a lot of ways but its phobia of menus can be grating as a power user.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  I think tiling WMs in particular are somewhat overplayed. They’re amazing tools for a certain class of users with a particular workflow and set of tendencies, but they get awkward for most users outside of that set. As a multi-OS user of 20+ years and developer of 15+ years they’ve never worked well for me. A more traditional floating WM with light optional tiling functions (think Aero Snap or Moom/Magnet/etc on macOS) has been more productive for me. With tiling I always end up with some windows being oddly sized and unusable, or half my windows being in floating mode which defeats much of the point of a tiling WM.
geofft 5y ago
Yeah, this feels like a survivorship bias fallacy (cf. the famous diagram of where surviving airplanes had bullet holes and the fact you need to reinforce all the other spots, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_milit...). If you invert the causality, the argument seems correct: anyone who is inclined to learn how to use the shell, find and install packages from the command line, try out a tiling window manager, and compile a program from source will have a good time on Linux.
syshum 5y ago
Ironically, Windows is moving more and more to that, except the tiling manager with WinGet, and other things moving to windows, I likely would be recommending windows users do 1, 2 and to a lesser deg 4. Windows users should be learning powershell, windows users should be leaning WinGet and/or other nuget based package managers (i.e Chocolatey), and windows users should maybe not compile from source but learn powershell scripting .
- VTimofeenko 5y ago
  > Ironically, Windows is moving more and more to that, except the tiling manager There's powertoys that offers quasi-tiling wm experience: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
  - bsnnkv 5y ago
    Plugging my fully-fledged, batteries-included Windows tiling window manager, komorebi: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
    - VTimofeenko 5y ago
      Oh, thanks! Feature list looks very impressive, gotta check it out. I use chocolatey as the package manager for Windows, is scoop more targeted at unix-like utils? Any plans to release komorebi on choco?
avgcorrection 5y ago
I’ve been using Linux for ten years and I agree. These are not very enticing reasons. Terminals and shells are overrated. Most popular shell languages are terrible as programming languages, and if you go for a less popular interactive shell then you will “ruin your muscle memory” or whatever for when you have to SSH into a Linux “box” (as they call it). (A lot of new tech on Linux is immediately suspicious because “[I’m a sysadmin and] this won’t work on this 30 year old Unix variant”.) The terminals themselves are just 70s technology and you might have to use another layer on top of the terminal (multiplexer) in order to do simple things like copy (to the clipboard) the output of the previous command—it’s not an integrated experience at all. And Mac has terminals and shells as well. Although I guess a different (probably better) default shell compared to many Linux distros. Tiling window managers are great and a great concept. But they often come bundled with yet-another-multi-weekend configuration campaign as you have to set up basic, simple things like date-and-time and the battery level (and often in a bad/unaliased font as well… because some users might be running their window managers on potatoes). Maybe Linux is too much of a configuration-sink for people like me. But I ended up on it for whatever reason.
- VTimofeenko 5y ago
  > Most popular shell languages are terrible as programming languages, Could not agree more, and my hobby is writing those shell scripts in a DSL that is very close to bash. To me the main benefit of terminals and shells is the composability of utilities that are built to run in text-only environments. Daisy-chaining tools together on the fly is immensely powerful and just not possible with GUI based programs.
  - avgcorrection 5y ago
    Chaining together applications like that is a great concept. But we should take it further in this case day and age with more structured input/output, like what Elvish and PowerShell does.
    - VTimofeenko 5y ago
      Yeah, the ideas behind PS and Elvish are very interesting, however, I find that if I need to process more complex data, I typically reach for Python.
ksec 5y ago
The same list that people told me in the late 90s and how it is going to take over the world and Windows / Microsoft is doomed.
bluedino 5y ago
5. Build your own device driver from source Sounds like nothing has changed in 20 years.
estaseuropano 5y ago
Funny enough the most frustrating thing I currently experience is an inability to clean up Linux. No, I don't want a complete reinstall, I just want to delete the random software I downloaded in the past 6 years and never use anymore. But as a casual user I have no idea what I even installed myself directly or through dependencies. Ubuntu software centre is unusable and doesn't seem yo know anything that came through the terminal. dkmg just gives me a list of several thousand packages in which I can't even find things I know I installed and want to get rid of (eg Android Studio). Installs by terminal are also frustrating, e.g. if they give me outdated versions (e.g. nodejs is easy to install ob Ubuntu but several versions outdated) as I just don't know enough about what's going on to get it right. For non-experts like myself the lonher I run linux and the more i do stuff through the terminal with my half-knowledge, the more I seem to create an ever growing list of confusing installs and structures I dont quite grasp...

sascha_sl 5y ago

It's a very long way to say "no, I don't want UX to get better, why don't you instead join us and become a linux nerd, from 0 to 100". It also implies these are the things that make Linux good over macOS and Windows, when I can think of a lot of other benefits, including essentially eternal support for a wide range of hardware, the best printing stack (sharing that with macOS somewhat), independence from Microsoft and Apple, extreme customizability of any component of the OS and choice in who to trust with putting together your base system (aka distro).

sixothree 5y ago
I would say those are all very much the things that make linux bad for new users. This article feels like it was written in 2015.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
There's a lot of companies working on the UX for Linux. There's Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, Zorin... They're not for me though, as what I care about is pretty contrary to the idea of mainstream. I don't really care whether Linux makes it to the mainstream or not, why should that be everyone's goal? The lack of a unified direction might seems like a weakness of Linux but it's also its biggest strength. It's the reason it's the most used OS in the world now, when you include servers and Android devices. It's just so easy to adapt if you want to do something different. So let the techies do their techie stuff and let the mainstream OS vendors focus on their users :)
adrusi 5y ago
There is a companion argument linked in the first paragraph which lays out what desktop Linux needs to focus on to be better for beginners. The article you're responding to is giving advice to beginners who want to get value out of Linux today, given that desktop Linux has not yet managed to make itself better for beginners. The current state of desktop Linux is that there's a category of Linux software that is suitable for beginners, which is built atop the set of features that make Linux excellent for the people who put the amount of time into learning the operating system that is appropriate for learning a professional tool. But this category of software (the GNOME and KDE desktop environments and 3rd party software intended to run inside one or the other) doesn't do much to ease the process of learning the deeper, more compelling aspects of Linux. It provides you with an interface that's recognizable to Mac and Windows users, but doesn't provide nearly as much power, and then expects you to learn Linux in all its depth to make up for that difference in capabilities. That makes Linux great for people who just need a web browser and maybe an email client, and it makes Linux great for people who have enough background technical knowledge to learn all its depth, but leaves it vastly inferior for everyone who needs more than a Chromebook but doesn't need a professional tool. If you fall into that category today and want to use Linux anyway, you need to learn its depths, and expect that until you do, it will be worse than the OS you're coming from. If we want to improve the situation, we need either go all the way and make GNOME just as powerful as macOS (which is a fools errand), or make GNOME better integrated into what Linux is already great at and ease the transition.
- aulin 5y ago
  Would you mind expanding on what does MacOS provide to the user category you describe that e.g. Linux+GNOME doesn't?
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    A starting point would be to stop trying to eliminate menubars and awkwardly sweeping the remaining unremovable menus into “junk drawer” hamburger menus. Under macOS the menubar is a huge boon for a few reasons: - It improves discoverability for any given app’s functionality immensely, as the menubar acts as a universal searchable index of functions - It provides an easy way to see the key shortcuts for any function - It provides a hook-point for the system to allow the user to set custom key shortcuts for any menu item in any app, even if the app’s developer never provided that capability GNOME is pretty great in a lot of ways but its phobia of menus can be grating as a power user.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
I think tiling WMs in particular are somewhat overplayed. They’re amazing tools for a certain class of users with a particular workflow and set of tendencies, but they get awkward for most users outside of that set. As a multi-OS user of 20+ years and developer of 15+ years they’ve never worked well for me. A more traditional floating WM with light optional tiling functions (think Aero Snap or Moom/Magnet/etc on macOS) has been more productive for me. With tiling I always end up with some windows being oddly sized and unusable, or half my windows being in floating mode which defeats much of the point of a tiling WM.

geofft 5y ago

Yeah, this feels like a survivorship bias fallacy (cf. the famous diagram of where surviving airplanes had bullet holes and the fact you need to reinforce all the other spots, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_military https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_milit...). If you invert the causality, the argument seems correct: anyone who is inclined to learn how to use the shell, find and install packages from the command line, try out a tiling window manager, and compile a program from source will have a good time on Linux.

syshum 5y ago

Ironically, Windows is moving more and more to that, except the tiling manager with WinGet, and other things moving to windows, I likely would be recommending windows users do 1, 2 and to a lesser deg 4. Windows users should be learning powershell, windows users should be leaning WinGet and/or other nuget based package managers (i.e Chocolatey), and windows users should maybe not compile from source but learn powershell scripting .

VTimofeenko 5y ago
> Ironically, Windows is moving more and more to that, except the tiling manager There's powertoys that offers quasi-tiling wm experience: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/ https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/
- bsnnkv 5y ago
  Plugging my fully-fledged, batteries-included Windows tiling window manager, komorebi: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
  - VTimofeenko 5y ago
    Oh, thanks! Feature list looks very impressive, gotta check it out. I use chocolatey as the package manager for Windows, is scoop more targeted at unix-like utils? Any plans to release komorebi on choco?

avgcorrection 5y ago

I’ve been using Linux for ten years and I agree. These are not very enticing reasons. Terminals and shells are overrated. Most popular shell languages are terrible as programming languages, and if you go for a less popular interactive shell then you will “ruin your muscle memory” or whatever for when you have to SSH into a Linux “box” (as they call it). (A lot of new tech on Linux is immediately suspicious because “[I’m a sysadmin and] this won’t work on this 30 year old Unix variant”.) The terminals themselves are just 70s technology and you might have to use another layer on top of the terminal (multiplexer) in order to do simple things like copy (to the clipboard) the output of the previous command—it’s not an integrated experience at all. And Mac has terminals and shells as well. Although I guess a different (probably better) default shell compared to many Linux distros. Tiling window managers are great and a great concept. But they often come bundled with yet-another-multi-weekend configuration campaign as you have to set up basic, simple things like date-and-time and the battery level (and often in a bad/unaliased font as well… because some users might be running their window managers on potatoes). Maybe Linux is too much of a configuration-sink for people like me. But I ended up on it for whatever reason.

VTimofeenko 5y ago
> Most popular shell languages are terrible as programming languages, Could not agree more, and my hobby is writing those shell scripts in a DSL that is very close to bash. To me the main benefit of terminals and shells is the composability of utilities that are built to run in text-only environments. Daisy-chaining tools together on the fly is immensely powerful and just not possible with GUI based programs.
- avgcorrection 5y ago
  Chaining together applications like that is a great concept. But we should take it further in this case day and age with more structured input/output, like what Elvish and PowerShell does.
  - VTimofeenko 5y ago
    Yeah, the ideas behind PS and Elvish are very interesting, however, I find that if I need to process more complex data, I typically reach for Python.

ksec 5y ago

The same list that people told me in the late 90s and how it is going to take over the world and Windows / Microsoft is doomed.

bluedino 5y ago

5. Build your own device driver from source Sounds like nothing has changed in 20 years.

estaseuropano 5y ago

Funny enough the most frustrating thing I currently experience is an inability to clean up Linux. No, I don't want a complete reinstall, I just want to delete the random software I downloaded in the past 6 years and never use anymore. But as a casual user I have no idea what I even installed myself directly or through dependencies. Ubuntu software centre is unusable and doesn't seem yo know anything that came through the terminal. dkmg just gives me a list of several thousand packages in which I can't even find things I know I installed and want to get rid of (eg Android Studio). Installs by terminal are also frustrating, e.g. if they give me outdated versions (e.g. nodejs is easy to install ob Ubuntu but several versions outdated) as I just don't know enough about what's going on to get it right. For non-experts like myself the lonher I run linux and the more i do stuff through the terminal with my half-knowledge, the more I seem to create an ever growing list of confusing installs and structures I dont quite grasp...