They are doing this from a new user take. Mac and windows don’t have easily accessible package managers nor are they out of the box.
Not to derail the thread but Hitler proved you wrong (historically speaking) about repetitions of false hoods. Just something anecdotal to think about
That said no it was rebuked by you. Not so many others. Most are in agreement there are severe issues with its ecosystem and Linus blowing it out do the water needs to happen
Also in reference to “you have the right to be cranky about it” sure and people have the right to stick your crankiness right up your arse when you are rude about it simply because you don’t want to answer that question
If you don’t want to answer it don’t answer it at all. Leave it to someone else. The whole principle of nothing nice to say don’t say anything at all doesn’t exist amongst the people Linus called bad. He said there’s a lot of good but they are hurt by these bad and I for one would like to see these “bad” get crushed. Everyone of those folk I’ve met that are condescending with newer users are people self convinced of their own grandeur and far worse devs or programmers or “power users” than they ever gave themselves credit for. They are a detriment to the Linux community and realistically we don’t need them. We could find someone else to do their tasks if it was very needed.
If they dont have the impulse control to avoid being condescending really they arent somebody who anyone wants to be around.
So?
Should we remove one of the best elements of Linux because windows and mac dont have a compairable means of downloading and installing programs?
I am all for the “users” point of view
Perfectly encapsulates my feelings about many of the issues. They keep confusing the way windows does things with being intuitive when really its just familiar.
I am not discounting or writing off everything just saying that switching any OS comes with a learning curve.
Sorry, I know I’m a complete novice, but isn’t like the entire point of those that they are completely self-contained and don’t use system libraries? I thought that’s how they got around dependences and stuff.
Yeah but its fundamentally flawed when stuff differs like certain capture cards, nvidia, etc
The concept is cool. The implementation not so much
Did I say to remove? No I said it is not what new people to Linux would use. It is something that is neat. But you were critiquing Linus for download deb files instead of using a package manager. 99% of people don’t even know what a package manager is. I use the windows package manager. But some programs are not included in the given package manager. Chill out.
I must keep the law a law
I think this might have been true in the mid 2000s, but is each distro’s software centre GUI really all that different from the App Store, Google Store or Windows Store? People are a lot more used to downloading and installing software straight from the OS than they used to be, and from what I’ve seen Microsoft are pushing this harder in Windows 11.
Of course, the caveat here is that all of these stores are (in my experience) very heavily curated and updated. The issue where an outdated and uninstallable version of Discord (for example) has not happened to me on iOS or Windows, but it has on openSUSE, and while I understand the criticism of Discord, if it’s in YaST it should work, and if it doesn’t it should be removed. It didn’t exactly delete my desktop though xD
I don’t know if it’s a Linux Community thing or a Reddit thing, but it is so tiring to just get a barrage of downvotes and insults every time I say anything about what it’s actually like to be a recent Linux convert, in the face of the picture Linus is painting. This forum is more than fine, so I’m tempted to just say it’s redditors being redditors.
I don’t understand the difference in reading a man page on the terminal than reading it on a .pdf or from a website . . .
screenshot using firefox reader
Most people on reddit. . .
you clearly dont get the basic windows or mac user transition perspective. If they have a pretty icon on the desktop that says help and they can search any docs, any of the distro wiki and any man page
that will already be a big win for them. and THESE folk are the people linus and luke are catering too like it or not
Some distros decided not to ship man pages by default, or not ship them at all, especially ones that are aimed at being very minimal and having a small footprint, in scenarios where every kb counts. So for cases like this, it’s good to be able to read manuals in a browser, if you don’t already have the same software installed on another device (and distro) that does ship / where you are able to install man pages.
That is just it though. Rarely do people use the window store. Mainly Apple and Google rely on that.
Yeah . . . You’re right. On a fresh install of Fedora you get the Help + The Pre configured Bookmarks in Firefox for Docs. Can it be better… sure. It can be better integrated.
I really like what Fedora is doing. The communities should look and do the same
https://readthedocs.org/ and devdocs.io is a good way to write these in a friendly searchable way. Not if we can make that into an offline app. That would be awesome for people
I mean you picked one of the three examples I gave, and the one that is improving as times goes on. All of these people have smartphones, they all use app stores of some description. In fact, I’d really put it the other way – all of their phones have GUIs for package managers that they’ve been using for years.
This isn’t a thing on Windows. People on Windows get help by googling issues and finding answers – which is exactly the same as Linux. In fact finding a “man page” on Windows that exhaustively states how to use a piece of software is not really a thing. Linux is already much more user friendly than Windows in this respect.
I would’ve agreed but weve moved on past MSDOS for almost 3 decades.
Man pages are an IT guy’s friend, not a noob’s tool. These days, the expectation is, you cant have documentation longer than a tweet. The GUI just has to be accesible enough to the uninitiated. That seems to be the trend for tech. You dont have to like it. It just is.
I can’t work out what it is specifically you’re criticising. If you’re saying that WIndows’s three different settings/control panel GUIs, plus its two different terminals, its registry, its three different file managers are intuitive enough to not require documentation, I strongly disagree. It’s been much easier to get any kind of power user functionality in Linux than it ever was in Windows.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: Windows isn’t intuitive, it’s just familiar.
Something I seem to be noticing is that most Linux users who are trying to care about what the experience for a newbie is are so far removed from being a newbie themselves that they’re having difficulty recognising the pitfalls for new users, so when they guess they tend to get it way off. It’s like having a Physics professor trying to teach 11 year olds. They’re going to over teach the things that the children actually understand very well, and skip things that actually warrant more explanation. Like the whole refresh button thing. That’s not something that new users generally don’t know, that is such a common shortcut. Shift+del, on the other hand, could do with highlighting. I was using rm in the terminal way before I found out I could just shift+del from the GUI – and given this shortcut also exists in Windows this is just as much a criticism of Windows.
While we’re on the subject of UI, this isn’t Linux, but it is Linux adjacent and that is that LibreOffice’s UI is genuinely terrible. It’s not really obvious what a lot of the icons are denoting, if there’s specific functionality you’re looking for finding the correct icon is a very cumbersome process (even very basic functionality: I never did manage to find the button to make a bullet point list in Impress…). I hated Office’s Ribbon Interface when it was introduced because in like 2006(?) it wasted about a quarter of my 900p screen, but actually on a modern display I do see the value of it.