8 ms·

There was some Ubuntu (or Linux) forum where I had asked a question and I wanted an app or something (I can't recall now) which was easier to use and do repeate

There was some Ubuntu (or Linux) forum where I had asked a question and I wanted an app or something (I can't recall now) which was easier to use and do repeatedly. Most of the people were replying with stuff like "why can't you just do <something that involves lots of CLI and more than an hour ro so>" or on the lines of it. I, someone extremely new to Linux (hell, new to computers), was bewildered. Then a commenter replied with something that helped me and exactly what I needed. He added a note directed towards others which went something like - the battle for Linux as THE desktop OS was sabotaged by its most ardent practitioners.

CamperBob2 1y ago
What's needed is a Dropbox analogue for Linux -- something that doesn't do anything that isn't already possible, but that makes things that are possible accessible to non-specialists. It looked like SteamOS was going to be a contender, but apparently not.
- vvillena 1y ago
  This is impossible by design. Decades ago there were some distributions that had this as a goal (e.g. Mandrake, Suse), they included an application similar to the Windows Control Panel to manage everything. But such applications can never reach into all the corners, unless the distribution is severely locked down. The example of this extreme is... macOS. And still, there are some cases where dropping into the command line is the better or even the only option. Back on Linuxland, the userbase realized this about two decades ago, when Ubuntu launched. Having a nice default experience was considered better than having easy tweakability, because Ubuntu could also be configured to the fullest extent in the classic Linux way of reaching into the guts of the system and rearranging things to taste. Not that I would ever recommend tweaking Ubuntu too much, but it can be done. What about the other end? Most people who like fiddling with Linux by reaching into its internals have settled on distributions such as Arch, where this way of managing the system is expected and thus the distribution works to ensure this experience is as easy and predictable as it can be, by providing a good happy path experience for common scenarios, and providing top-notch documentation for common and uncommon customization options, or minority hardware platforms and devices.
  - alterom 1y ago
    The control panel doesn't need to reach all corners. Just enough corners to cover day-to-day usability so that new users would be able to help themselves if they get stumped. That set of corners has been pretty much covered by Windows 95 when it comes to the GUI. For tweakability, command-line interface isn't unfriendly — the commands are. People love talking to ChatGPT. This tells you how friendly typing interface is. I'm not saying that natural language processing should necessarily be a feature of the interface (although it could make a lot of things much smoother), but FFS, an interactive dialogue-based CLI is a much friendlier thing than "figure out the right incantation" paradigm.
- charcircuit 1y ago
  Does Android not fulfill that role already?
dingaling 1y ago
Yet telling someone to open regedit, find some deeply-buried branch, create a new binary key, rename it to SetFocusRefreshTimeout and set its value to 0xFFFF is... desktop usability.
- lesuorac 1y ago
  Giving them a link to a msi that does that is pretty user intuitive.
  - cardiffspaceman 1y ago
    If they have been properly introduced to PCs it’s unlikely they will use that. I myself would use it after scanning it by eye for trickiness.
    - vizzier 1y ago
      And yet we're all fine with > https://trustmeitsfinebro.com/install.sh https://trustmeitsfinebro.com/install.sh | bash :D
      - cardiffspaceman 1y ago
        Point taken. Add sudo!
- Demiurge 1y ago
  It's not, there is nothing essential a regular desktop user needs to edit in the registry directly. For better or worse, Windows has standard framework for things like GUI widgets, settings storage, installation paths. It might support decades of those standards, but I'm pretty sure you know that Linux kernel and Linux the distro are very different, and much more numerous, and logically do things differently.
  - JadeNB 1y ago
    > It's not, there is nothing essential a regular desktop user needs to edit in the registry directly. I think that this reads better "there is nothing that Microsoft wants regular users to touch that they need to edit in the registry directly." The distinction between the two doesn't really matter as long as the user's interests are reasonably aligned with Microsoft's, but the modern Microsoft-the-ad-company approach to Windows means that this is not at all true.
godelski 1y ago
> the battle for Linux as THE desktop OS was sabotaged by its most ardent practitioners. This definitely happened with Arch. For some reason they killed the noob guide (which I helped maintain). It was a great guide that helped people go from noob to kinda knowing linux. You can't have wizards without first having noobs. Why gatekeep people from enjoying the same thing you enjoy? Well, I guess all that gave us EndeavourOS and Manjaro. But still, we need more places for people to learn that nitty gritty stuff. Hell, I'd love to learn more about the hardware hacking the OP is talking about. Love to learn about those GPU hardware modifications people do. I know it's hacker news, but I'd actually love to learn about that hacker stuff. If these companies are going to continue to fight this hard to prevent us from owning the things we buy, it sounds like an important thing to learn. Or else we're soon going to have robot butlers that are just sending lidar maps and high resolution photos of our homes back to these companies. We don't need elitest pricks, we need wizards teaching noobs
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
  > Why gatekeep people from enjoying the same thing you enjoy? That's an easy one to answer: they will eventually demand that Foo changes and remove things they do not like. It has happened to all media, it has happened to all software, you can be damn sure it will happen to something as modular as a Linux distribution.
  - eastbound 1y ago
    Well Linux can be used to plot crimes against humanity, can’t it? Can’t let that happen, think of the children.
  - ang_cire 1y ago
    This seems to falsely assume that technical users are more aligned with whatever the status quo is, and non-technical users are the ones who are looking to change things. In reality, technical users become technical users because they want to make changes, and 'casual' users just use whatever app/OS/etc is given to them, as-is. Having bad or no support for your software isn't some good way to keep it 'pure', it's just keeping it less useful/relevant. Linux is OSS: fork it if you don't like something new, but don't hurt the ecosystem. Deliberately hamstringing software or documentation so that others will stay away and not make changes is literally antithetical to OSS as a philosophy.
Dylan16807 1y ago
> Most of the people were replying with stuff like "why can't you just do <something that involves lots of CLI and more than an hour ro so>" or on the lines of it. More than an hour? That's very strange, enough that I wonder if you had the right impression of things. Usually the reason to go with command line is that even though it might be bewildering to look at, slamming in the command only takes a moment and you don't need to do any button-hunting. It's a tradeoff, is what I'm saying. But you seem to be describing a situation where it's significantly worse in every way. Why would a bunch of people all be on that bad plan?
- HeWhoLurksLate 1y ago
  > More than an hour? That's usually how long it takes me to get an FFMPEG command I'm planning to use more than once right
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Well I sure hope they didn't just say "use ffmpeg" and gesture vaguely at a couple filters. If you give someone an already-done ffmpeg command it should be straightforward to use.
avgDev 1y ago
It once took me a few hours to get a printer working on Ubuntu, never again.
- lenerdenator 1y ago
  To be fair, printers suck everywhere. I hate printers.
- WWLink 1y ago
  That problem plagues every OS. Fortunately, my 14 year old canon networked printer/scanner/fax works in fedora 42 without any configuration at all. As long as it sees it on the network. Scans too! I was surprised about the scanning lol. The brother wifi laser printer I have works on everything without any installation at all. Windows, mac, linux, my phones.
cycomanic 1y ago
One reason that people often overlook is that it's much easier (and much less error prone for the user) to give an instruction that uses the cli instead of a GUI tool, e.g. if someone would ask how to add a new user who's in the usb group on Linux, I would always tell the person `adduser --ingroup usb [username] ` instead of giving the GUI instructions which are longer and depend on what desktop the person uses.
- ikiris 1y ago
  If you think a single add user command is comparable to things like use grapheneos or adb usb injection chains then you’ve missed the point here.
lenerdenator 1y ago
"... and just recompile the kernel!"
doctorpangloss 1y ago
That may be. But the CLI guys have had the last laugh, no? An LLM can work through a terminal with decades of stability much better than it can poke around constantly changing product UIs.
npteljes 1y ago
>the battle for Linux as THE desktop OS was sabotaged by its most ardent practitioners. Don't believe that for a second. Industry de-facto standards are a result of power dynamics, and the actual users of the thing wield orders of magnitude less power than they project. If a corporation like MS or Google wanted Linux desktop to happen, no amount of gatekeepers could actually hold the gates. The reason why Windows is the de-facto standard is because Microsoft put a lot of behind-the-scenes work into making it a de-facto standard. I am meaning them sabotaging everything else, treating the status quo with the famous EEE, many business deals with governments to use it, put it in school curricula, having manufacturers preinstall it to PCs, and bend every piece of connected tech to Windows' direction - hardware drivers, computer games, specialty software, even the internet. That is how Windows got its desktop users, and how Linux and others didn't really.

CamperBob2 1y ago

What's needed is a Dropbox analogue for Linux -- something that doesn't do anything that isn't already possible, but that makes things that are possible accessible to non-specialists. It looked like SteamOS was going to be a contender, but apparently not.

vvillena 1y ago
This is impossible by design. Decades ago there were some distributions that had this as a goal (e.g. Mandrake, Suse), they included an application similar to the Windows Control Panel to manage everything. But such applications can never reach into all the corners, unless the distribution is severely locked down. The example of this extreme is... macOS. And still, there are some cases where dropping into the command line is the better or even the only option. Back on Linuxland, the userbase realized this about two decades ago, when Ubuntu launched. Having a nice default experience was considered better than having easy tweakability, because Ubuntu could also be configured to the fullest extent in the classic Linux way of reaching into the guts of the system and rearranging things to taste. Not that I would ever recommend tweaking Ubuntu too much, but it can be done. What about the other end? Most people who like fiddling with Linux by reaching into its internals have settled on distributions such as Arch, where this way of managing the system is expected and thus the distribution works to ensure this experience is as easy and predictable as it can be, by providing a good happy path experience for common scenarios, and providing top-notch documentation for common and uncommon customization options, or minority hardware platforms and devices.
- alterom 1y ago
  The control panel doesn't need to reach all corners. Just enough corners to cover day-to-day usability so that new users would be able to help themselves if they get stumped. That set of corners has been pretty much covered by Windows 95 when it comes to the GUI. For tweakability, command-line interface isn't unfriendly — the commands are. People love talking to ChatGPT. This tells you how friendly typing interface is. I'm not saying that natural language processing should necessarily be a feature of the interface (although it could make a lot of things much smoother), but FFS, an interactive dialogue-based CLI is a much friendlier thing than "figure out the right incantation" paradigm.
charcircuit 1y ago
Does Android not fulfill that role already?

dingaling 1y ago

Yet telling someone to open regedit, find some deeply-buried branch, create a new binary key, rename it to SetFocusRefreshTimeout and set its value to 0xFFFF is... desktop usability.

lesuorac 1y ago
Giving them a link to a msi that does that is pretty user intuitive.
- cardiffspaceman 1y ago
  If they have been properly introduced to PCs it’s unlikely they will use that. I myself would use it after scanning it by eye for trickiness.
  - vizzier 1y ago
    And yet we're all fine with > https://trustmeitsfinebro.com/install.sh https://trustmeitsfinebro.com/install.sh | bash :D
    - cardiffspaceman 1y ago
      Point taken. Add sudo!
Demiurge 1y ago
It's not, there is nothing essential a regular desktop user needs to edit in the registry directly. For better or worse, Windows has standard framework for things like GUI widgets, settings storage, installation paths. It might support decades of those standards, but I'm pretty sure you know that Linux kernel and Linux the distro are very different, and much more numerous, and logically do things differently.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  > It's not, there is nothing essential a regular desktop user needs to edit in the registry directly. I think that this reads better "there is nothing that Microsoft wants regular users to touch that they need to edit in the registry directly." The distinction between the two doesn't really matter as long as the user's interests are reasonably aligned with Microsoft's, but the modern Microsoft-the-ad-company approach to Windows means that this is not at all true.

godelski 1y ago

> the battle for Linux as THE desktop OS was sabotaged by its most ardent practitioners. This definitely happened with Arch. For some reason they killed the noob guide (which I helped maintain). It was a great guide that helped people go from noob to kinda knowing linux. You can't have wizards without first having noobs. Why gatekeep people from enjoying the same thing you enjoy? Well, I guess all that gave us EndeavourOS and Manjaro. But still, we need more places for people to learn that nitty gritty stuff. Hell, I'd love to learn more about the hardware hacking the OP is talking about. Love to learn about those GPU hardware modifications people do. I know it's hacker news, but I'd actually love to learn about that hacker stuff. If these companies are going to continue to fight this hard to prevent us from owning the things we buy, it sounds like an important thing to learn. Or else we're soon going to have robot butlers that are just sending lidar maps and high resolution photos of our homes back to these companies. We don't need elitest pricks, we need wizards teaching noobs

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
> Why gatekeep people from enjoying the same thing you enjoy? That's an easy one to answer: they will eventually demand that Foo changes and remove things they do not like. It has happened to all media, it has happened to all software, you can be damn sure it will happen to something as modular as a Linux distribution.
- eastbound 1y ago
  Well Linux can be used to plot crimes against humanity, can’t it? Can’t let that happen, think of the children.
- ang_cire 1y ago
  This seems to falsely assume that technical users are more aligned with whatever the status quo is, and non-technical users are the ones who are looking to change things. In reality, technical users become technical users because they want to make changes, and 'casual' users just use whatever app/OS/etc is given to them, as-is. Having bad or no support for your software isn't some good way to keep it 'pure', it's just keeping it less useful/relevant. Linux is OSS: fork it if you don't like something new, but don't hurt the ecosystem. Deliberately hamstringing software or documentation so that others will stay away and not make changes is literally antithetical to OSS as a philosophy.

Dylan16807 1y ago

> Most of the people were replying with stuff like "why can't you just do <something that involves lots of CLI and more than an hour ro so>" or on the lines of it. More than an hour? That's very strange, enough that I wonder if you had the right impression of things. Usually the reason to go with command line is that even though it might be bewildering to look at, slamming in the command only takes a moment and you don't need to do any button-hunting. It's a tradeoff, is what I'm saying. But you seem to be describing a situation where it's significantly worse in every way. Why would a bunch of people all be on that bad plan?

HeWhoLurksLate 1y ago
> More than an hour? That's usually how long it takes me to get an FFMPEG command I'm planning to use more than once right
- Dylan16807 1y ago
  Well I sure hope they didn't just say "use ffmpeg" and gesture vaguely at a couple filters. If you give someone an already-done ffmpeg command it should be straightforward to use.

avgDev 1y ago

It once took me a few hours to get a printer working on Ubuntu, never again.

lenerdenator 1y ago
To be fair, printers suck everywhere. I hate printers.
WWLink 1y ago
That problem plagues every OS. Fortunately, my 14 year old canon networked printer/scanner/fax works in fedora 42 without any configuration at all. As long as it sees it on the network. Scans too! I was surprised about the scanning lol. The brother wifi laser printer I have works on everything without any installation at all. Windows, mac, linux, my phones.

cycomanic 1y ago

One reason that people often overlook is that it's much easier (and much less error prone for the user) to give an instruction that uses the cli instead of a GUI tool, e.g. if someone would ask how to add a new user who's in the usb group on Linux, I would always tell the person `adduser --ingroup usb [username] ` instead of giving the GUI instructions which are longer and depend on what desktop the person uses.

ikiris 1y ago
If you think a single add user command is comparable to things like use grapheneos or adb usb injection chains then you’ve missed the point here.

lenerdenator 1y ago

"... and just recompile the kernel!"

doctorpangloss 1y ago

That may be. But the CLI guys have had the last laugh, no? An LLM can work through a terminal with decades of stability much better than it can poke around constantly changing product UIs.

npteljes 1y ago

>the battle for Linux as THE desktop OS was sabotaged by its most ardent practitioners. Don't believe that for a second. Industry de-facto standards are a result of power dynamics, and the actual users of the thing wield orders of magnitude less power than they project. If a corporation like MS or Google wanted Linux desktop to happen, no amount of gatekeepers could actually hold the gates. The reason why Windows is the de-facto standard is because Microsoft put a lot of behind-the-scenes work into making it a de-facto standard. I am meaning them sabotaging everything else, treating the status quo with the famous EEE, many business deals with governments to use it, put it in school curricula, having manufacturers preinstall it to PCs, and bend every piece of connected tech to Windows' direction - hardware drivers, computer games, specialty software, even the internet. That is how Windows got its desktop users, and how Linux and others didn't really.