4 ms·

Or it makes tinkering easier and simpler than ever. Linux is many things. User friendly is not one of them.

DSMan195276 12y ago
> User friendly is not one of them. That highly depends on what you're doing though. The Raspberry Pi in general isn't a user-friendly piece of hardware, the OS is only a piece of that. The fact that at least past iterations of the Pi aren't extremely fast means that it also had to run fairly unfriendly stripped-down setups so you could squeeze power out of it (IE. Even if you could run Windows on the Raspberry Pi 1, it wouldn't have been very pretty. The advantage of Linux was that it could run with a lighter setup.). With the new processor in the Raspberry Pi 2 I'd expect you could run much a much nicer setup on the Pi, comparable to the Windows setup. I'm interested to see how well Windows 10 actually runs on it though, I'm not convinced it's really fast enough to handle a full Windows stack, so it's possible we might see some type of stripped-down Windows setup for it. In which case, it will probably be less user-friendly.
chez17 12y ago
Linux is beyond user friendly these days. It just depends on what you want. I gave my wife's parents, two old hippies who live in the middle of nowhere and have literally no computer skills, an old laptop with Ubuntu on it. It's been totally fine. If they can use it, anyone can. Long gone are the days of needing editing configuration files in a terminal editor. Of course power users still can, but for novice users it's just as friendly as Windows and more friendly than OSX I would argue.
- 72deluxe 12y ago
  Good point. I forget that Linux on this new Pi will be more like Ubuntu on a laptop than a CLI with a stuttery slow X interface or Wayland with much tinkering. I wouldn't trust my parents to configure any of my machines securely (Windows, OSX or Linux). In fact, I advised my mum to use an iPad as it stops her fretting all the time. Sadly, she still struggles with using iOS since they removed all text and replaced it with obscure 1px line hieroglyphs that are apparently meant to communicate an idea (obviously, a box with a tiny arrow coming out of it means share, right??) Let's hope that they make the SD card reader on this new Pi respect the RW/RO switch on SD cards!
- forrestthewoods 12y ago
  A co-worker completely corrupted his install of Mint and had to start fresh because he changed his background. So, uh, no, I politely disagree. It's not user friendly.
- sorenjan 12y ago
  I wanted to use my Raspberry Pi to share an external NTFS formatted hard drive on the network. This required installing support for NTFS, making changes in fstab to mount it with read and write privileges, installing Samba, making changes in Samba's configuration file, making a new Samba user, restarting services, and probably more that I've since forgotten about. Every step needed to be researched through a mixture of blog posts, Wikis and other online resources. I also wanted to run a Python 3 script I'd written on a different computer. Python 3 wouldn't install through apt-get, so I downloaded and installed it myself. Various dependencies wouldn't install using pip, instead giving error messages mixed in the regular output from the install process. I don't remember the actual errors now, I gave up and ran it on a Windows desktop instead. Sometimes Linux gets in the way of what you want to do. Sure, keep at it and you've learned something, but sometimes you want to get stuff done and don't really care about how hard drive mounting works. I'm still a big fan of Linux and open source, but I think Windows is a fine option for Raspberry Pi 2.
  - riskable 12y ago
    OK so let's take your example from the perspective of a Linux user trying to use Windows 10... So I want to share out my external ext4 filesystem from Windows 10. There are no options. I'm done. Sure, an ext4 tool exists for Windows on x86 but it will not work on ARM. Probably won't work on Windows 10 in general anyway. Even if I could get Windows to mount the drive I still have the hurdle of NFS (or sshfs or other options) to overcome. Windows Server 2012 ships with old school NFSv3 support but regular desktop Windows does not. That means finding and downloading a 3rd party tool. In the past I've solved the problem by using openssh under cygwin but let me tell you: getting openssh server setup and configured in Windows, starting on boot is much harder and more complicated than getting Python 3 running on Raspbian (the latest version of which actually has Python 3 in the repos). There's another thing I want to point out: The Python 3 problem you experienced has already been solved but I don't see the ext4 (or any other common Linux filesystem) being supported by Windows any tine soon. It won't be solved because Microsoft has no interest in interoperability and the closed nature of Windows means it is difficult for 3rd parties to solve for the rest of us.
  - yellowapple 12y ago
zxcvcxz 12y ago
I don't understand what you're saying? What is something one might want to "tinker" with in windows that is more complicated than "tinkering" with it in Linux? I assume you mean install drivers or possibly configure an internet connection? This can be a head ache on windows just as much as Linux... and believe it or not there are ubuntu certified PCs that literally work out of the box. I'd argue learning to "tinker" through a whole bunch of GUIs specific to one OS isn't a good starting point for anyone. If you plan on using complicated UIs and powershell then the learning curve is already really steep, so Windows doesn't really offer any advantage here. Knowing Windows != Knowing computer science
yellowapple 12y ago
TIL it's still 2005. Seriously. This whole "Linux is not user friendly" myth has been a myth for almost a decade now. I've seen 70-year-olds with zero understanding of technology whatsoever use GNU/Linux (openSUSE, specifically) without problem. Let that sink in for a second.

DSMan195276 12y ago

> User friendly is not one of them. That highly depends on what you're doing though. The Raspberry Pi in general isn't a user-friendly piece of hardware, the OS is only a piece of that. The fact that at least past iterations of the Pi aren't extremely fast means that it also had to run fairly unfriendly stripped-down setups so you could squeeze power out of it (IE. Even if you could run Windows on the Raspberry Pi 1, it wouldn't have been very pretty. The advantage of Linux was that it could run with a lighter setup.). With the new processor in the Raspberry Pi 2 I'd expect you could run much a much nicer setup on the Pi, comparable to the Windows setup. I'm interested to see how well Windows 10 actually runs on it though, I'm not convinced it's really fast enough to handle a full Windows stack, so it's possible we might see some type of stripped-down Windows setup for it. In which case, it will probably be less user-friendly.

chez17 12y ago

Linux is beyond user friendly these days. It just depends on what you want. I gave my wife's parents, two old hippies who live in the middle of nowhere and have literally no computer skills, an old laptop with Ubuntu on it. It's been totally fine. If they can use it, anyone can. Long gone are the days of needing editing configuration files in a terminal editor. Of course power users still can, but for novice users it's just as friendly as Windows and more friendly than OSX I would argue.

72deluxe 12y ago
Good point. I forget that Linux on this new Pi will be more like Ubuntu on a laptop than a CLI with a stuttery slow X interface or Wayland with much tinkering. I wouldn't trust my parents to configure any of my machines securely (Windows, OSX or Linux). In fact, I advised my mum to use an iPad as it stops her fretting all the time. Sadly, she still struggles with using iOS since they removed all text and replaced it with obscure 1px line hieroglyphs that are apparently meant to communicate an idea (obviously, a box with a tiny arrow coming out of it means share, right??) Let's hope that they make the SD card reader on this new Pi respect the RW/RO switch on SD cards!
forrestthewoods 12y ago
A co-worker completely corrupted his install of Mint and had to start fresh because he changed his background. So, uh, no, I politely disagree. It's not user friendly.
sorenjan 12y ago
I wanted to use my Raspberry Pi to share an external NTFS formatted hard drive on the network. This required installing support for NTFS, making changes in fstab to mount it with read and write privileges, installing Samba, making changes in Samba's configuration file, making a new Samba user, restarting services, and probably more that I've since forgotten about. Every step needed to be researched through a mixture of blog posts, Wikis and other online resources. I also wanted to run a Python 3 script I'd written on a different computer. Python 3 wouldn't install through apt-get, so I downloaded and installed it myself. Various dependencies wouldn't install using pip, instead giving error messages mixed in the regular output from the install process. I don't remember the actual errors now, I gave up and ran it on a Windows desktop instead. Sometimes Linux gets in the way of what you want to do. Sure, keep at it and you've learned something, but sometimes you want to get stuff done and don't really care about how hard drive mounting works. I'm still a big fan of Linux and open source, but I think Windows is a fine option for Raspberry Pi 2.
- riskable 12y ago
  OK so let's take your example from the perspective of a Linux user trying to use Windows 10... So I want to share out my external ext4 filesystem from Windows 10. There are no options. I'm done. Sure, an ext4 tool exists for Windows on x86 but it will not work on ARM. Probably won't work on Windows 10 in general anyway. Even if I could get Windows to mount the drive I still have the hurdle of NFS (or sshfs or other options) to overcome. Windows Server 2012 ships with old school NFSv3 support but regular desktop Windows does not. That means finding and downloading a 3rd party tool. In the past I've solved the problem by using openssh under cygwin but let me tell you: getting openssh server setup and configured in Windows, starting on boot is much harder and more complicated than getting Python 3 running on Raspbian (the latest version of which actually has Python 3 in the repos). There's another thing I want to point out: The Python 3 problem you experienced has already been solved but I don't see the ext4 (or any other common Linux filesystem) being supported by Windows any tine soon. It won't be solved because Microsoft has no interest in interoperability and the closed nature of Windows means it is difficult for 3rd parties to solve for the rest of us.
- yellowapple 12y ago

zxcvcxz 12y ago

I don't understand what you're saying? What is something one might want to "tinker" with in windows that is more complicated than "tinkering" with it in Linux? I assume you mean install drivers or possibly configure an internet connection? This can be a head ache on windows just as much as Linux... and believe it or not there are ubuntu certified PCs that literally work out of the box. I'd argue learning to "tinker" through a whole bunch of GUIs specific to one OS isn't a good starting point for anyone. If you plan on using complicated UIs and powershell then the learning curve is already really steep, so Windows doesn't really offer any advantage here. Knowing Windows != Knowing computer science

yellowapple 12y ago

TIL it's still 2005. Seriously. This whole "Linux is not user friendly" myth has been a myth for almost a decade now. I've seen 70-year-olds with zero understanding of technology whatsoever use GNU/Linux (openSUSE, specifically) without problem. Let that sink in for a second.