Why is linux still so user unfriendly?

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
81

Yes, you will not be an expert in the command line knowing just a few commands, this is a given. My point is, you need to know a few basic concepts and then the command line is discoverable. More specifically, you need to be able to discover available commands (ls), the concept of paths (cd), and how to find out what that particular command does (man). This, coupled with some basic knowledge about where commands are (/bin/) and the double-tab command, allows you to explore the command line in a (very non-recommended, painfully slow) fashion. Like any advanced program, I recommend having actual tasks to perform and/or a mentor to ask, of course - but the same thing applies to a really advanced GUI program like SolidWorks or Gimp, too.

… Are you seriously saying Linux is not user friendly because no-one has heard of it? Because if you are you are just repeating the mantra that everything unfamiliar is not user friendly. And, well, if that truly is how you feel, then there’s no use in arguing. CIrcular reasoning works because circular reasoning works because…

Suggest you read what I posted again, and pick out the core thread of it.

You are absolutely 100% correct. At the end of the day, as mentors all we can do is point towards a path to climb the mountain, it’s up to the user to actually start climbing - if they want to. Even though it is frustrating sometimes when the users don’t walk in a straight line, it’s often better to let them hang back and figure it out on their own.

And though it is irrelevant to the discussion, shockingly enough I do have quite a bit of experience teaching @ university level as well as working professionally with Linux for over a decade, so I do know these pitfalls you guys speak of - and have found workarounds for most of them. I do have the luxury of working with people motivated to learn though.

With that, I bid you a nice evening. I believe I’ve said what I wanted to, and if you do not care to hear my reasoning then stop reading and walk away, as I am doing right… Now. :slight_smile:

82

No, what I said, was:

I was referring to people not buying System76 because they’ve never heard of it. People buy what they know, they also buy what they like.

When I worked retail, years and years ago, people wouldn’t buy AMD, Asus, and even something like Lenovo (we had to call it IBM). Because they had never heard of it. They wanted Samsung, Toshiba, Dell, HP.

Not because those brands are better, not because they’re more user friendly, but because they’re familiar.

Anyway. So no, that’s not what I was seriously saying.

Serious question, have you read what you’ve written in this thread?

1 Like
83

@wertigon, you’ve been arguing the same points to no avail in this thread for days now. Using logical fallacies left and right, and failing to even acknowledge others points. Nobody else agrees with you.

I think you should take a moment to asses whether you are fighting for chaos or order in this discussion. (hint: it’s chaos)

If you’d acknowledge a few points, we could move on to having a much more productive discussion.

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84

All right, one final post.

@AnotherDev:

You are arguing why Linux isn’t popular. This is not the topic of this thread. The topic is, why is Linux not user friendly? I think you are an intelligent human being, intelligent enough to see for yourself that you are gliding off topic here. The only way I can interpret your comment in the current context, is that popularity and familiarity define user friendliness - and they clearly do not.

Now, I’m happy to discuss - in a different thread - why Linux isn’t popular. A good place to start in my opinion is reading this blogpost about the main problems. But this is a topic for another time.

@SgtAwesomesauce:

I have been arguing that the command line is, in quite a few ways, user friendly - but the switching between UI paradigms is not user friendly, and therefore, to go from one paradigm (GUI) to another (Command line) is not. So yes, using the command line in a GUI environment is not UF - unless one is okay with using both, of course. I did acknowledge this point in my long post above, second paragraph, but I re-iterate it here.

I still think that sometimes, for some tasks, popping the hood and doing some command line voodoo is the easiest way to get the task done - But I concede it is not user friendly.

I have also argued that the command line is a useful tool, this is also off topic however, so for that I am sorry - but I’m happy to see no one really disagrees on that point. :slight_smile:

@thread:

On a side note: yes, I am a brain damaged neckbeard that runs a tiled WM and have at least three terminals open all the time. English is also not my first language, which may make some sentences come out harsher than intended. Sorry for that, but I am trying to follow the code of Lunduke: “Be excellent to each other.” At the same time, I am but a human, and I failed spectacularly this time.

I’ll withdraw from further comments in this thread now. Carry on!

85

It’s not preinstalled. It’s not preinstalled, software isn’t compatible, people can’t play games on it.

“But you can hack! But CLI”

That is not user friendly.

“But System76 or Dell Obscure Role”

Calling something “For Developers by Developers” or having a really outlandish name is a turn off, contributing to popularity, but in the end is related to user friendliness.

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86

Ah, I misunderstood your non-native speaking quirks to be a lack of flexibility or understanding. Apologies.

Oh, I agree completely, I think the point people are trying to say is that there should be an option for non-technically minded people to do it through a UI.

1 Like
87

I just wanted to relay my experience here from last night, as it sheds some insight into this topic.

was going to try out fedora 29 workstation, see if that was up to my personal expectations. unfortunately it fell short .

while my reasoning is not very fair to fedora i feel it high lights the unfriendliness factor that users experience when it comes to linux.

what i was trying to do, (because of circumstances necessitating a unconventional network setup due to hurricane Michael)

I was trying to set up a bridge between the wifi and the ethernet port,

now the last time i did this was in linux mint and it was fairly intuitive with a network manager gui that made it easy.

That was not the case in the fedora, so i figured fine ill resort to the command line .

but it seems the way of doing this has changed in the last few years and apparently its either not doable or requires up to date developer knowledge of the new way to do it . Either way the time spent in trying to figure it out was not worth it.

The points are that the divide that we are experiencing between simplicity and configurability makes advanced configurations more difficult than they need to be.

The other point is that the ever changing commands to accomplish these tasks are changing so fast that the documentation and development cant even keep up with the way to properly instruct people to do it.

this is just one example of the many failings of the various distros that cause me some headache when setting one up.

and while failing is a strong word im using my criteria and expectations as the measuring stick .

im not wanting things to just work out of the box . but i do want tools that i can use to make changes with out presenting more hurdles to jump through.
This example, is one that highlights unnecessary hurdles being created by the lack of configuration for the sake of simplicity.

88

Yeah, the Gnome network manager wasn’t very intuitive IMO.

I definitely agree here. I would like there to be a global flag in the settings for “simple or advanced” that you can check. It will give you the dumbed down version if you want it, and if you need the whole enchilada, you can switch to advanced.

An Operating System should meet your expectations, if it falls short, it’s failed. I would call this a failure as well.

I agree. I think that this is definitely an edge case, but worth exploring a solution to.

For the record, I believe that KDE provides a better system configuration tool suite than Gnome, but that’s only barely relevant to the discussion at hand.

89

Some of the tutorials when I was getting started in linux would explain that it meant Super User do, and that was what sudo stood for, and su stands for Super User… I’ll never know if the people that wrote those didn’t know or if some one was screwing with them, or if they were screwing with the people reading it…

Luckily people get called out on that kinda thing nowadays…

Put the missing and in there.

90

Technically it stands for substitute user. Sudo and su default to root but you can execute command as user different than root with it or change the session owner to another user.

91

Trying to get people to understand that 10 -12 years ago in Ubuntu IRC when trying to help them was difficult.

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92

I always thought it’s “switch user”. But… i guess substitute works fine too.

@sycpuppy
What roman are you writing on? :thinking:

I get why it would be called that instead of switch. xD I still don’t care much, but sure enough common sence would agree with substitute over switch for what it does.

That’s why I would guess it’s wrong in guides, because it’s so ubiquitous that you quickly stop thinking about what it’s called. You just su and su, get’s the su job done and refer to it as su. You don’t think “Let’s substitute my user for xyz” when you su. Or at least I don’t.

Oh wow, I just got my “first mention”-badge for the @ thing. :open_mouth:

93

Yeah, I would keep getting people asking how to use the Super User command so I looked it up and people were posting that it means Super User and switch user, at the time I didn’t really know what it really stood for so a simple “man su” cleared it up for me, but people had read in a post or tutorial that it stood for Super User and Switch User and a few other things I don’t recall anymore so I would tell them to man su or sudo then they would usually just leave or go on about it obviously being the wrong su. It was about the friendliest way I could tell people to RTFM. Then the whole fun of distros that didn’t have sudo enabled or installed by default and instructions for installing would tell you to use sudo.

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@sycpuppy I wasn’t trying to start a discussion here, but yeah I noticed a lot of people getting it wrong over the years.

@maximal if you think about it it’s logical, yes? :smiley:

95

I would say for the most part Linux is user friendly. But parts of it are user unfriendly, because it’s unpopular.

For instance:
Package managers are great and all. I like them. A lot.

Only problem is Linux is not used widely enough (apart from servers). That desktop programs are sometimes hit and miss as far as package managers go. Best case they only require additional “non-free” repositories.

Worst case you go to nvidia’s site and install a weird shell script that’s unnessesarily dumb to install, not knowing there is a repo and you could have just installed it without much hassle.

And when it’s in no repo it get’s really confusing compared to .exe => clicky thing => setup wizard.

One thing that I didn’t immidiately know what to do with was Insomnia. On fedora you only get an “.appimage” and I had to google what to do with it. That was simple. But still didn’t know what it was at first.

There is just a lot of different packaging for programs on Linux.

Or when you get the option between “.rpm” and “.dep” and “.tar.gz” and “.zip”. Also fun. If you’re not very aware of what distro you’re running you’re surely gonna be pretty lost at first.

Betterdiscord is also a good example. It’s already arguably user unfriendly on Windows to get it installed. But on Linux what you get is “betterdiscordctl” and then you move that into your bin directory. And then you gotta betterdiscordctl install -s <discord_path> and then it’s gonna tell you that there is no npm installed. Normal users aren’t gonna know what to do. Not to mention what npm even is.

So it’s like installing something is one of either a walk in the park. And if it’s not, you either need to kinda know what you’re doing. Or are at the mercy of google, or a friend that knows.

So I’d say (because it’s so widely used on the server side of things). Installing programs that are inherently user unfriendly is very user friendly. While installing programs that a end user actually wants to use. It’s a hit or miss situation.

For the rest it’s “lack of programs”. Witch there isn’t even really. For the most part you list Microsoft Office and Adobe. And the list is over. If you’re heavily invested into adobe, then it’s r.i.p. right there. For Office, you have alternatives (wps & libreoffice or web version of ms office).

Games are another thing, but not everyone needs to game on their machine. It’s getting better. But better is not good enough, for when someone wants to game on their PC. Lutris and DXVK might be great technologies. But anti-cheatsoftware is where they stop working. For singleplayer games. Sure enough it works (mostly). <= That right there, “mostly”. Already crossed of the list of viable options if you’re building a gaming system. What do they care what OS they are running, if they just wanna game. Can’t blame them, really.

Yes. :slight_smile:

96

You asked, so I’ll offer my answer. I could even be wrong but my statement is correct regardless.

Here is my answer:

Thread Ripper isn’t flexible.

Please don’t blame Linux.

97

Just tried to install a log viewing software binary, too hard- then tried apt-get, was in the distro’s repo thank goodness.

Then installed Anaconda- thankfully their install documentation is actually accurate (part of the Linux unfriendliness is documentation that expects you to already be at X level of user skill and/or just not accurate enough) so that got up and running… but the standard install does not create a desktop launcher- so there is no way to start up Anaconda in the GUI, only command line. So one naturally googles how to create a launcher- and this is the typical linux yellow brick road golden example of why linux is still user unfriendly. What a mess of multiple broken ways to kinda sorta get a launcher.

For some people this is part of the fun, for others it consumes work flow time and is really frustrating.

98

I think a lot of the lack of user friendliness comes from the fact that most desktop distros are just server distros with a GUI on top. Also some packages aren’t available and/or are old and we have to use external repos, which is annoying and beginners don’t know what to do. Thankfully, Solus solves those problems and I think it’s a very user friendly distro - the only thing is that hardware support is limited, but if it’s there, it’s good quality (like up to date nvidia drivers). Software too in theory, looking at the numbers mostly, but I never had a problem, there are lots of packages that are unavailable on Ubuntu and Fedora. The funny thing is that there isn’t Chromium available (but Chrome and Brave are), which the devs have good reasons to not include, but there is a great flatpak and snap support (snaps out of the box).

99

Just so you know, here’s the output of sensors on my threadripper 1950x.

image
image.png782×889 68.6 KB

the k10temp entries there represent each die.

100

Topic starter has not posted any reaction to this topic,
for more then a month.
So i assume that his questions are answered.