People online complain that Linux is hard to install for new users. But who are these people and why do they levy these complaints? The biggest barrier for the new Linux user isn't the installer; i...
So, first off, much OSS software is at least as polished as most commercial software I’ve seen, and KDE had gotten just plain incredible. There are gaps, though; Gimp is an incredible piece of software, but jesus is it user-hostile. You use it all the time, I’m sure it’s fine, and efficient, and whatnot, but for casuals? It’s a fucking fight to figure out how to draw a square box.
Sure there’s Roblox; there are always shitty companies. I think there real issue is that Linux software is designed by developers for themselves. It works the way they think it should, they like it, and they don’t have Consumer Groups to test and complain, and they’re largely unwilling to change the interface even if a bunch of people say the UI should change. I’m the same way. I wrote it that way because that’s the way I like it to work, dammit. I’m not changing it because someone thinks it’s obscure.
I don’t think Linux is inadequate at all. I live in the CLI, and I don’t use desktops. I barely use a window manager, and only that because I found web browsing in the console to be occasionally impossible with w3m. But I do know a lot of people like my sister in law who has an iPhone calls me whenever my mostly senior mother in law has an issue with her Android phone, because she (my SIL) can’t figure out Android. There’s no way I would even consider putting her on KDE as good as it is, because she just doesn’t understand technology. Sometimes she has trouble with her Mac. And my BIL, the C-level exec at a large international, positively loses his shit when a smart device has a problem and doesn’t work the way he expects, or makes it hard to accomplish something.
Mind you, I think you think I’m saying something I’m not. The person I was replying to - could have been you, my Lemmy app doesn’t let me look at history while replying 🙄 - sounded like they were blaming users for wanting stuff to not be hard. All I was saying was that wanting software to be easy is a reasonable expectation. I don’t know that Linux isn’t easy; I think a lot of folks are just used to what they’re used to. My octogenarian, blue-collar father has been using a Linux laptop for a decade; about a year ago, he bought a newer, used laptop and installed Linux on it without every booting into Windows. With me on the phone, sure, but still: he wanted Linux because that’s what he’d gotten used to. And he didn’t want to create a Microsoft account just to use the laptop; that played a factor, too. Still, Linux has gotten good, but we need to not blame users for when they have trouble with software.
Am I? Phrasing it that way?
So, first off, much OSS software is at least as polished as most commercial software I’ve seen, and KDE had gotten just plain incredible. There are gaps, though; Gimp is an incredible piece of software, but jesus is it user-hostile. You use it all the time, I’m sure it’s fine, and efficient, and whatnot, but for casuals? It’s a fucking fight to figure out how to draw a square box.
Sure there’s Roblox; there are always shitty companies. I think there real issue is that Linux software is designed by developers for themselves. It works the way they think it should, they like it, and they don’t have Consumer Groups to test and complain, and they’re largely unwilling to change the interface even if a bunch of people say the UI should change. I’m the same way. I wrote it that way because that’s the way I like it to work, dammit. I’m not changing it because someone thinks it’s obscure.
I don’t think Linux is inadequate at all. I live in the CLI, and I don’t use desktops. I barely use a window manager, and only that because I found web browsing in the console to be occasionally impossible with w3m. But I do know a lot of people like my sister in law who has an iPhone calls me whenever my mostly senior mother in law has an issue with her Android phone, because she (my SIL) can’t figure out Android. There’s no way I would even consider putting her on KDE as good as it is, because she just doesn’t understand technology. Sometimes she has trouble with her Mac. And my BIL, the C-level exec at a large international, positively loses his shit when a smart device has a problem and doesn’t work the way he expects, or makes it hard to accomplish something.
Mind you, I think you think I’m saying something I’m not. The person I was replying to - could have been you, my Lemmy app doesn’t let me look at history while replying 🙄 - sounded like they were blaming users for wanting stuff to not be hard. All I was saying was that wanting software to be easy is a reasonable expectation. I don’t know that Linux isn’t easy; I think a lot of folks are just used to what they’re used to. My octogenarian, blue-collar father has been using a Linux laptop for a decade; about a year ago, he bought a newer, used laptop and installed Linux on it without every booting into Windows. With me on the phone, sure, but still: he wanted Linux because that’s what he’d gotten used to. And he didn’t want to create a Microsoft account just to use the laptop; that played a factor, too. Still, Linux has gotten good, but we need to not blame users for when they have trouble with software.