I voted yes but also no. Yes linux should be more available for the average user, and honestly compared to where it was 10 years ago it’s much more available to the average user. But, for it to be universally available would mean it wouldn’t be the linux that we all love to toy with, or at least what the average person uses wouldn’t be the linux we all love.
That would be fine because it would mean more funding for the Linux kernel, more options in terms of apps, DEs/WMs, etc. and mergers of simplicity and complexity, more privacy-consciousness on a global scale, etc.
2 Likes
Maybe more would like to toy with, but real world difficulties don’t let them any spare time for that.
I bet a surprise is waiting, if we start a poll on
Do you play/tinker with Linux in your spare time, or do you leave other tasks in favor of self educating on Linux?
Even Gaming to some people sounds like a job, which is not exactly right. Or is it?
Admitted “toy with” was probably the poor choice of words, but certainly customize is probably more appropriate.
thoughts:
if Linux went mainstream, and a single desktop/distro rallied behind, endorsed, supported, funded, and competitive, easy to use OOTB. and the accepted face of the linux desktop and community.
…then these uncomfortable things will have to be decided and committed to:
stateless/not stateless
immutable or rolling
init or systemd
wayland or X11
foss or much more accepting of proprietary
maybe even Linux/Windows architecture partnership or remain GNU/Linux
unfied, sanctioned repo with a single package manager or not.
@dalto I think you are right and that day will never come 
Yeah, this right here:
The devs who created runit, openRC, etc. generally hate systemd, but they also don’t agree with each other 
So, yeah, it would be a case where one is chosen as the standard and gets way more development than the others, but which one is the question.
As far as immutable vs rolling is concerned, I think Rhino Linux has a good idea. They just need to build a track record of working efficiently and as expected for a good number of years.
I actually wish I had a separate device to test out Rhino on bare metal for an extended period of time. It’s the only immutable (semi-immutable, but also, not really?) distro that I actually like.
1 Like
i mean yeah, there’s a lot of htings on linux that are just ass.
A lot of it could be fixed with proper gui frontends for system configuration, but that kind of thing seems to be mostly up to distro developers to make and distro devs generally don’t seem to bevery interseted in doing that (because it’d be a ridiculous amount of work.
A lot of it could also be fixed with better defaults, or just smart ones (e.g. auto-configuring certain settings at installation based on the hardware).
It’s ridiculous that we still use fstab and can only as far as i can tell configure it through a config file, why can’t we have something similar to the windows disk manager?
You need to use the terminal a lot on linux,there’s really no avoiding it, everyone who has said that you don’t on some distros like ubuntu is basically just full of shit, i mean yeah you can technically get away with not doing it but you’d be very thoroughly hamstringed; and the average user doesn’t want to do that for a reason.
Configuring things through config files sucks! It does! I think everyone can universally agree that while config files are good because of the flexibiilty they often create compared to gui configuration, if you just need to change a setting, or even a few settings, having to dig through config files to do it is not very nice. Windows control panel by comparison is quite nice.
How ironic is it that Xorg, you know, the main software for displaying GUIs at all on linux for a few decades does not have a gui configuration? You must edit or create config files in /etc/xorg.conf.d/… So users who don’t know the format or options available for these config files are pretty much screwed, have to copy other peoples configs and hope they work, or spend a few hours reading documentation. All of this would be solved, with a good gui configuration app… And not just for Xorg, there is so much stuff on linux in this exact same situation, but Xorg is one of the worst offenders for sure, and that’s why i’m using it as an example (fstab is another one though…).
If this dependence on modifying config files could be replaced with proper GUI configuratoins (i think with systemd that might actually be becoming feasible too), everyone would benefit from veteran to novice users of linux, and the more ‘super’ of the windows users would perhaps be a bit more inclined to actually use it.
The reality is you don’t have to use terminal on android, windows, macos or ios, and you very rarely have to mess with any config files at all even as a superuser. And that’d be a nice thing to have on linux too, just for the amount of time it would save.
So yeah it should be nicer and more convenient for everyone…
But it shouldn’t be so universally, we could have distros, like ubuntu and fedora that do this properly, maybe even endeavour could be one such distro, but i wouldn’t want things like arch and gentoo to change much.
The curse of being bound to clis and config files is also a boon sometimes, there’s a lot of stuff you can simply do faster from a terminal, and there’s sometimes a much higher flexibility when configuring things through config files than guis (and depending on how much deeper you go down certain rabbit holes it’s like a whole another universe, like certain window managers such as i3 or compostiors like hyprland) and for those cases where it is beneficial, i wouldn’t trade it for the world, i always use pacman and yay from terminal, i hate package management guis because it’s just faster to do package management from a terminal for me.
But linux has always been about options.
And right now i’d say there’s a bit of a dearth of user friendly options on linux. Be that distro or just individual pieces of software, it seems that a lot of the devs within the open source communtiy aren’t really all that concerned with making things user friendly, sometimes they seem like they might even be going out of their way to make it less so.
1 Like
^^
The other main thing Linux needs is a good marketing campaign. When I mention Linux to an average person their question is “Isn’t that all typing in commands in dos?”
The notion Linux used to be completely terminal even with a GUI in older days has stuck through the generations. I’ll take a real-world example from my country. Before AMD became so defacto in PC’s Intel was ruling it. In my country, AMD was there and was a cheaper option for anyone who needed a PC. And the cheaper price tag was making AMD a favorite. So, what Intel did was to blanket the market with only Intel branding. Intel branded all the dealer outlets on their own expenditure, dealer didn’t have to spend a dime. And they started marketing this “AMD CPU heats up and it’s not good.” AMD didn’t ship their cooler as Intel did and yes the Athlone chip did heat up a bit. But now the tables have turned Intel has dropped off and struggling. But still, to this day, 99% of the market believes AMD is not good and Intel is the best. It’s really hard to convince them otherwise.
Anyway, for this to happen a big tech company needs to spearhead the campaign from the FOSS side which might not happen ever.
Also, @rabcor said about not having GUI’s. It’s mainly because Linux Distros were never complete OSs they are still to this day wrappers around a kick-ass kernel. Windows and Mac have their own thing and they don’t want people who don’t know what they’re doing to break things by accident so they made it easy by giving them a GUI. And yes most of the time a normal user does need to adjust everything in an OS.
Another reason developing CLI-based applications is not that complicated. A dev can keep the settings in a JSON or .conf and run the application or service or demon. I do this at my work I write middleware interfaces. Even though it needs a UI I’m yet to create one because it complicates things on the development side but it’ll get one soon.
Most of the applications used in Linux distros are from FOSS devs who have started a project as a learning test bed or just as a hobby. And then it has kicked off. But they don’t create a UI because they don’t want to or they don’t have the time. And many other contributors stay away from major changes like this as well. So, it’s not easy unless people who develop get together and agree to make UIs for their software systems.
Anyways, Linux is about choice. But too much choice just not good that is whats happening to Linux. Too many projects with too many directions. Ex:
The day these backend people come to a one-slate will be a day we can start heading towards one goal. Which will never happen and Linux will remain just a hobbyist software system. It breaks my heart.
2 Likes
Naw linux doesn’t need marketing, apple and microsoft are already taking care of it. By being so bad everyone sane wants an alternative that is.
The problem is that those people who are asking “Isn’t that all typing in commands in dos?”
Are kinda on the right track, because that is actually how linux is sometimes… Hence that is exactly the problem that needs to be solved first. No amount of marketing will fix that people installing linux and not being able to use it because they aren’t comfortable with CLIs will just uninstall it within hours.
Of course i suppose there are also the people who do everything on their pc from a browser, so for them it wouldn’t be a problem… But most of those types have moved over to phones.
Sane is relative, the same way normal is relative. As such, only insane people choose not to follow the norm.
In other words, being sane means sticking to what everyone else is doing. Remember that brainwashing through mass media and systemic implementation is a thing.
i don’t think sane is relative, it’s just the basic capability of making decisions that are good for you instead of ones that are bad for you. Anyone with passably decent logic is sane.
I suppose most people just do not have that though, so maybe being sane isn’t actually normal in the first place 
I think this is obligatory here
1 Like
The government is too smart to go about it this way. They went with the 100-year plan instead. Slowly but surely. 
1 Like
Oh sane and people don’t go together. I work with them 24x7. People are mostly ignorant and marketing tells them what they want.
4 Likes
gnome-disk-utility (Disks) does that. I’m actually occasionally using it to automount partitions with my preferred options even on KDE. It’s also great for partitioning, resizing, or simply viewing and identifying partitions (this is my use-case mostly). Very much like disk manager in Windows: Help getting extra hard-drives automatically mounted on login - #4 by nate
2 Likes
People want computers like the ones in “STAR TREK”, where you can talk to them, they are always friendly, know everything and can solve any of your problems just in time.
No it’s apt, cause tinkering is toying with it.
What they want is something like this movie.
1 Like
Interesting. I always hated directly editing fstab, and I always like my disks to be mounted by name, something like /mnt/T4… so I always install gnome-disks on a fresh install, then set up disk mounts, then I can start work.
In this case, it’s definitely more convenient FOR ME to do it that way. And so we have issues now with the idea of what is convenient…
For navigation/file browsing, I open Dolphin but always hit F4 and use zoxide to jump to directories (as I don’t want them all in bookmarks, or Places).
This gets around the hugely inconvenient issue of not running GUI apps as root. You can use Dolphin and terminal together - it’s a beautiful fusion.
Again, some config files are easier to manage through a nice GUI… but other times, it’s just not worth that hassle.
The first example I can think of for this was an issue some folks were having with Latte dock, the Meta key opening the menu. BY FAR, the ‘most convenient’ way to fix this was to hit ctrlAltT and paste a one liner which would fix the text file.
Nobody’s forcing you - ignore my solution if you don’t like it, go find it in the GUI if you prefer.
Having said this, I don’t remember the last time I had to use a terminal and/or edit a config file (except recently playing with fastfetch - which you wouldn’t use anyway if you didn’t want to handle a .config in a text editor).
If you want to make EOs work that way, you have to also include a GUI to manage your MPV configs - how can that be managed?
Linux gives rise to different approaches, and different options. There is no rule applied to all… unless you will simply eliminate all applications which don’t have the GUI set up to manage preferences.
What I find MOST inconvenient is when applications come out which assume you’ll never do that - and then you’re forced out of manually editing a .config file, and in some cases there IS no visible config file.
I also dislike the way different packaging methods mess with folder names - if you install ‘foliate’ e-reader, good luck finding your /.config/foliate config folder.
Yup, you guessed it. Good luck if you want to simply reset a config for a GUI you can’t launch - it’s now disguised with the name com.github.johnfactotum.Foliate because you’re supposed to only install this stuff in Flatpak or other ‘official’ channels (thankfully not Snap).
Let’s not blunder too far in the quest for a ‘convenient GUI’. That’s what Windows has been doing for years.
Test my theory - Fire up Excel in Windows, mess with settings, and then find a way to reset them to the default.