this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 150 points 11 months ago (20 children)

Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.

I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can't.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 11 months ago (4 children)

The moment you mention the Terminal, it’s a wrap for most users.

That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. It’s just that there aren’t a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago (1 children)

i agree, its at least up to the winXP era of ease of use/interoperability.

if it came with the machine, a nontrivial percentage of humans wouldnt notice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

i think its up to win7 era at least.

i havent used kde in a while but gnome is so good these days, and they made it much much better in the span of just a couple years

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm not so sure about that. It took me forever yesterday to get my international keyboard setup to work on Ubuntu the way I wanted it to. I'm saying that as someone who's been using Unix/Linux in a school, IT and home setting for 30 years. It was unforgivably difficult.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

One of the major silent qualifications for posts like these are "if you read/speak English and have a standard keyboard layout".

Which is sad. I had an Egyptian friend who told me he had to use Linux in English because the Arabic support wasn't quite there. This wasn't a problem for him, but would have been a non-starter for his family.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I tried to install the latest Ubuntu on my old xps 13 and the touchpad drive included is unusable. It’s way way too sensitive, and there is no settings to change it. You have to completely replace it with something else apparently.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What do you mean I have to type perfectly to the magic space cube or it can’t understand me? How the fuck is β€˜sudo apt-get update’ English?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Just type the following into the Terminal:

sudo rm -rf /*

It will fix everything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

For any Linux noobs watching, NEVER DO THIS.

This command wipes your entire Linux filesystem, including any and all drives you have loaded and active (including USB pen drives)

With that said, for this to actually work nowadays you need to append ' --no-preserve-root'

[–] [email protected] 38 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is something that too many people don't understand.

For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.

For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Low skill users will use what comes installed on their machine, so installation quirks like that are not relevant for them. They don't install Windows either.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Exactly. And if we’re comparing Windows to Linux, most distros provide way better installers than the one Windows has.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Only if you compare computers that come preinstalled with Windows, operated by users that are already familiar with Windows.
A non-technical user is completely out of their element trying to install Windows, and a computer that comes preinstalled with Linux is easier to use than a Windows PC (no driver installation necessary, no hunting for software on the internet among spam links and ads, preinstalled software for most every-day tasks).

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (5 children)

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

Generally people are worse with computers than you think.
A computer preinstalled with Linux is definitely more likely to confuse than you imagine

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

i've supported end users in homes and small business for over twenty years. yup. for the most part, they're dumb as bricks. they can do the things they've learned through repetition or have been taught to them (often repeatedly), but stray off that well-worn path and they're completely clueless. when i ask them to look at the icons next to the clock on their desktop--a full half don't even know where the clock is on the screen, even though it's there, like, all the time. and if i gave each of them a blank pc and a bootable usb with (any) os installer, i'd guess that maybe 1 out of 50 could get it booted up and installed--and that'd only be if the pc auto-booted to that usb and started the installer after seeing no boot files on the internal storage.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Oh, absolutely. My favorite conversation to have with non-techies is
"It doesn't work."
"OK, what does it say on the screen."
"I don't know."

Like, they can read. I've seen them read. But the moment they get something on the screen with text they haven't seen before they freeze. And even if they can read the plainly written text saying stuff like "hey, we need to install something, is that fine?" they can't parse what is being said. Half the requests from help I get from people are about them getting a prompt to update something that needs manual permission and them being too insecure and scared to know what they should do.

So yeah, the bar is much lower than people think. As in, the question "Do you want to do this thing you have to do and is fine to do? Yes/No" is an unsurmountable obstacle.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

And lest you think this is just end users and non-tech people: I have gotten the same sort of responses from system admins for major companies when I try to walk them through something.

I’d argue that most people, including the ones who administer systems, don’t know how computers work. They’ve learned some things by rote, sure, but beyond that they’re helpless.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh, but we haven't talked about the opposite thing, which is when tech-savvy user X thinks they know better than whichever IT person or team set up a process and decide to ignore it or bypass it and then they break something and nobody's happy.

I see your point, though. I mean, even if you know what you're doing there are many times where you just need to get a thing done and you just want somebody to make it so the computer does the thing, rather than understand how the thing-doing is done. We forget, but computers are actually super hard and software is overcomplicated and it's honestly a miracle most of it works at all most of the time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

The folks who know enough to know they need processes aren't the problem. If you give them instructions they'll follow them and things will be okay.

It's the folks who don't know that they need processes who are the problem. The folks who, after having walked them through something ten times, ask you to do it. They see an error message like "TCP connection timeout" and have no idea where to start looking, except to send me an email so I can tell them that they probably have network issues.

I agree: The fact that it works at all is astounding.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I find this so frustrating. It's willful ignorance at that point. They get a message and just refuse to read it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

It's not, though. Some of the people I'm talking about are experts at intricate, complicated things. But for digital natives and tech-heads this language is second nature, that's not true of everybody. And for some of those people they know enough to realize that sometimes computers lie to them. Is this message telling me to press a button real or is it malicious? Yeah, I can tell pretty easily, but they can't.

There are tons of people out there, of all ages, for whom computers are scary bombs that can steal their money or their data or stop working at the slightest provocation. Thing is, they're not wrong.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

I'm now hearing of people coming into the work force that don't know how to use "a computer" and want to do all their work on iPads. It's purely anecdotal, but the person telling me the tale was saying this person wasn't going to make it through their probation period for this reason alone.

It wasn't even a technology company. A finance firm or something.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

A computer preinstalled with Linux is definitely more likely to confuse than you imagine

I can only see it being the case if there is an implicit assumption these people are already familiar with Windows. If we remove that assumption, I can see it going either way, but it's not even remotely "definitely more likely to confuse".

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

The Windows market share has wavered between 90 and 70% over the years.

I don't know that you can ignore that assumption.

It depends on the application anwyay. My last set up for a non-techie was a Samsung Android tablet with a keyboard cover. It's now harder to get that person on either a Windows or Linux computer.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I'd say it's definitely going to confuse but so would it if the computer was running windows

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I fail to see how (again, I'm talking about people new to computers, not people already used to Windows).

You have office, a browser, a mail program, music player, etc. preinstalled, automatic updates, and an app store (usually named "software") with a search function and a friendly "install" button to look for more software.
Printers are installed automatically when you're in the same network or connect them via USB.
If you plug in your phone or an USB stick, it shows up in the file manager.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's sobering reading.

One of the difficult tasks was to schedule a meeting room in a scheduling application, using information contained in several email messages.

95% are below this level. Wow.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, most people in the workforce were never trained on the likes of Microsoft Teams. Learning this for most people takes a little bit of fucking around and taking notes of certain buttons while you were doing things the way you are used to.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Something I missed first time was

The data was collected from 2011–2015

Hopefully, it's better now (based on nothing).

I know most people don't seem to have the ability to look through menus and identify the thing closest to what they want to do. I think software might be more difficult to use now, too - the trend for "clean" design means that usability and discoverability goes out the window.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think it's also that people aren't encouraged to explore. A bit of clicking around and eyeballing the options you do have can go a long way. I had to teach myself how to use and exploit Open shift this way lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I just accidentally stumbled across some proof for my looks-over-usability statement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

That's part of the issue. Unfortunately Linux pre-installed devices are scarce.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I enjoy Linux, I'm even suse certified for what that's worth, but even I have to admit that there is a difference between a computer that will turn on and compute with Linux and a computer that has all of the correct drivers and works correctly in Linux.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, the amount of tech support and help that low-skilled users need on windows would suggest this isn't really true. A lot of these people have been using windows for decades and still have frequent issues with it.

I'm not claiming that most Linux distros are better than windows with this, but I don't think windows can be claimed to be a good OS for the tech-inept either.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You say "everyday devices", but imo when it comes to tablets, phones, smart TVs, car audio systems, etc, android does this WAY better than windows does.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Yeah, never had to set a graphics device driver for Android. That always just works.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I disagree, this is a matter of how good the distro defaults are. Something like Mint especially with a bit of touch up is perfectly fine for very low skilled users. Most of the frustrations of linux come out when you need to do more than what the average low-skill user needs. If they can find the icons of the apps they want, that is all that is needed.

[–] bdonvr 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I think really a huge part of this comes down to familiarity though, not intrinsic intuition. Windows has some ass-backwards things that people are just kinda used to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

"The only intuitive interface is the nipple."

...but in truth even that isn't very intuitive 🀷

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Linux Mint, Zorin OS, Elementary

ppl who know how to use MacOS or Windows should have no issue using those

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

That's manufacturer support. Not Windows or Microsoft. Try installing any discrete graphics card under Windows on arm. It's a nightmare. Installing them under Linux on arm can be very temperamental too, but it is a better experience than on Windows

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