Why don't more people use Linux?
world.hey.com
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking: "If Linux is so good, why aren't more people using it?" And it's a fair question! It intuitively rings true until you give it a moment's consideration. Linux is even free, so what's stopping mass adoption, if it's actually better? My response: “If exercising is so healthy, why don't more peo...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1064425

And Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.

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That’s why I’d love to see more developers take another look at Linux. Such that they may develop better proficiency in the basic katas of the internet. Such that they aren’t scared to connect a computer to the internet without the cover of a cloud.

Related: Omakub

  • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
    36·
    2 months ago

    Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.

    Guy says this as if it’s a good thing lol. That’s the real reason people don’t use Linux, nobody making Linux seems to care about user experience for normal people.

    • tatterdemalion@programming.dev
      5·
      2 months ago

      Yea I agree. Good UX is a lot of work, and I think FOSS projects rarely prioritize it. Even good documentation is hard to come by. When you write software for your own use case, it’s easy to cut UX corners, because you don’t need your hand held.

      And good UX for a programmer might be completely different from good UX for someone that only knows how to use GUIs. E.g. NixOS has amazing UX for programmers, but the code-illiterate would be completely lost.

      I believe that the solution is “progressive disclosure”, and it requires a lot of effort. You basically need every interface to have both the “handholding GUI” and the underlying “poweruser config,” and there needs to be a seamless transition between the two.

      I actually think we could have an amazing Linux distro for both “normies” and powerusers if this type of UX were the primary focus of developers.

    • QuadriLiteral@programming.devEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      What you say describes my experience 10 to 15 years ago, not my experience today. Compare the settings dialog in KDE Plasma to the windows settings dialog for instance. Or should I say myriad of Windows settings dialogues.