I had a 40in 4k for about 2 years. Got rid of it for an ultrawide because I had to turn my head to see my ammo when playing an FPS. Linus is suffering from the same problem here.
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While I would normally say this is true. Linux is just different. they cant use the prior methods easily and avoid the man page. your gonna run into a man page
except that its trash. With windows often the solution is pretty solid on average I run into a hack 1/10 times
With linux you 99 problems and a solution aint one… on google
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The other thing is that man pages are not exactly normie friendly. Don’t get me wrong. They’re extremely well-written and exhaustive, but most normies don’t have the patience to look through a 250 line text document to find the one thing they need. They’d rather watch a youtube video or read an article that tells them exactly what they want to know
One of these days, I’ll write my manifesto about why Linux is not for normies.
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8 chan feels intensifies
yeah and unfortunately the reality is this is something a normie eventually has to adjust to or they dont. It depends how they use linux. In a way Linux mint probably has one of the better normie friendly GUIs and luke is right about that with PopOS, and Manjaro following behind.
Fedora is way more dev friendly than normie friendly but if someone can adjust to gnome fedora aint bad and they have more normie friendly docs as does Manjaro/Arch having its expansive wiki.
Problem is there is no “one” vision on how to provide documentation nor one method. That makes linux suck and good at the same time. My parents adjusted but they dont do anything advanced its all GUI stuff with manjaro
Uncle Ted gave manifestos a bad name. In any other country it just means outlining your position on a matter or several matters.
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I know I was just tossing it out for bantz haha
There, fixed that for ya 
No, but in all seriousness; GNU/Linux as of today is maybe 80-85% where it needs to be for normies. That’s better than 10 years ago when it was 55-60% there, still not there 100% though. But I do not see why we cannot eventually have both; sane normie-friendly defaults, and the world-is-your-oyster poweruser distros that follow the original spirit of Linux (to utilize all available hardware on the machine, not just what the manufacturer tells you you can do).
If we’re talking outside GNU/Linux, Chromebooks and Android phones are definitely for normies, OTOH those are so locked down as to be useless most of the time 
My take, Linux will be for normies the day normies start using Linux. Which might be tomorrow, next year, or never.
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There should probably be 3 tiers of choice after installing most Linux OSes
-
Basic - noob friendly option. The OS itself will manage everything for the user and keep the stuff that breaks completely off limits to the user. The “control panel” should be just be mainly for accessibilities and maybe changing some defaults. Terminal is disabled. The aim is stability and good UX and sane defaults.
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Intermediate - for Linus kind of levels (probably the level I need as well). Probably my level as well. Enable adjusting all settings in the “control panel” including things that might break but nothing catatrophic. Terminal is enabled and with guidance but none of the “yes, do as i say” kind of breakages. Maybe terminal gives some hints, like clippy (I mean it). The aim is customizability without allowing potentially catastrophic user decisions.
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Advanced - The Linux that we have today.
Of course not all Linuxes should be subjected to this: Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, LFS comes to mind.
And? They’re helpful.
That hasn’t been my experience.
That’s what, about three sides of A4? I don’t think that’s much for an exhaustive set of instructions. I don’t think it’s that bad.
To be honest even on Windows the sort of user you’re describing probably struggles with Control Panel (they probably don’t know what it is), they probably wonder why they have a constant ad sitting on their desktop and a link to hotgirls on their desktop that they’re adamant they never put there. A part of me says these people won’t even be able to download Linux, let alone install and use it, and another part of me says they’re only likely to be using it to browse Facebook anyway so won’t even run into any of the issues you describe.
You’re thinking like a Linux veteran. A normie will not read through this:
https://linux.die.net/man/8/apt-get
To find what they need. They’ll just reinstall windows 10.
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You’re god damn right. The problem is that the last 15-20% that we need is both the most critical and the stuff that we are least equipped to handle.
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Not even OSX disables the terminal outright. That said, I would not oppose that the only way to access terminal would be a key button combo like Ctrl+Alt+T or something.
Otherwise I agree with what you’ve said, except that Ubuntu is already intermediate level with a couple of warts. 
Debian and Arch are both what I would call advanced. No real basic distro though - but then again, if we have Snaps/Flatpaks for most non-distro software, and it comes preinstalled with all hardware support Out-Of-Box (peripherals not included), that’s pretty much there already.
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Well you do have a point. I guess the first time you activate the terminal from a “basic” level, you immediately upgrade yourself to the intermediate level.
I guess something like a fedora silverblue+GNOME could be a good “basic” linux distro. Ive also recently learned about CarbonOS which also an atomic/immutable distro like Silverblue. The addition of flatpaks should make it “idiot-proof” enough. But we arent there yet.
I don’t think copy-pasting commands in the terminal makes you any more skillful than a beginner.
I was looking to help someone 2 days ago with customizing GNOME Shell and while Tweaks, themes and extensions are a thing, he wanted a specific style (transparent and thicker top bar). GNOME Shell doesn’t have all the customization available in a GUI and even if it had, that was a stylesheet.css modification that was required, so even someone has to take way too much time to program a way to modify every little toggle in a CSS stylesheet, or the user has to… not open a terminal, but basically edit CSS in a text editor. So, yeah, not user friendly.
He ended up not theming it, because there could have been unexpected behavior happening. Not outright crashes, but most likely text or icon glitches or similar. So it’s better that a DE stays simple, with not much customization in order to “enforce” an expected behavior for every user.
GNOME Shell doesn’t do that. It has a lot of hidden stuff under gconf and it’s available to mod via CSS stylesheets. That makes it a likely target to get customized.
I am hoping the System76 team does their Rust DE as simple and non-customizable as possible, in order to lock the shell behavior. I know, it’s basically what Windows does, but the advantages to this is that all shells behave the same, so it’s easier to debug, and as a side bonus, not being too customizable means people can do tutorials with screenshots and other people can follow those, with the expectation that not much is going to change.
But System76 is in a weird position right now TBH. They are a hardware company and they deliver computers from the most basic notebooks, to some pretty good gaming ones, to some insane workstation-class desktops. But Pop!_OS has basically caught mostly a gamer audience, with the programmers and scientists kinda left on the side. Pop!_OS was I think the first to include some machine learning stuff right in their main repo (I believe Wendell did a video a long time ago on Pop!_OS and showed I think TensorFlow on it, and how you can set the distro by default with proprietary nvidia drivers without a hassle).
However, I would argue that there are many programmers who aren’t Linux gurus (I know more than a dozen personally, they rarely touch the terminal and pretty much never customize their desktops). So a locked-down shell that “just works,” is stable and does the job should be ok for both gamers who are mostly going to spend time in games, not on the desktop, and for programmers and scientists who spend more time in IDEs or in whatever program shows the collected data, in order to analyze it.
Yeah, it’s a 48 inch OLED from Gigabyte. (which is actually a rebranded LG TV)
Its so true, but why do I feel so attacked right now… 
I’d argue that even thought we have to freedom to modify it, GNOME wasnt meant to be modified and changed, hence my recommendation for an immutable distro + GNOME as a combo.
I think Pop_OS is looking for something like a Budgie DE 2.0 but not GTK or Qt toolkit. Both feel problematic right now philosophically - one is strays too far from the norm and the other is deadset in their old ways. We need a new middle ground.
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Change for the sake of change is rarely an improvement 
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Well, if you keep copy-pasting and reading what the commands actually do, then you might learn something and then become intermediate
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Gardiner Bryant (The Linux Gamer) also reacted to Part 3:
Towards the end around where Linus’ Dolphin complaints were, he hit the nail on the head. He also reacts to his own shoutout. End did get cut slightly short cause he was running on low battery.