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What are the main challenges in Linux adoption for New users, and how can it be addressed? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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[–] 72 points 3 years ago* (14 children)
  1. Isn't pre-installed on well known machines by well known brands.
  2. Popular applications (whether productivity, creativity, or games) do not work out of the box that people want. It doesn't matter that alternatives exist, or that you can use things like Wine. If it's more than just click the icon, it's too much.
  3. If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.
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  • [–] 26 points 3 years ago (11 children)

    If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.

    100%. Even as a power-user (understatement) who overwhelmingly prefers keyboard input to control things when I'm "gettin' stuff done", I will sometimes miss the general consideration level of Windows' input handling when it comes to mouse and especially touch. Mouse is pretty damn good these days on Linux, but touch...

    Touch is abysmal. A ton of modern laptops have touchscreens, or are actually 2-in-1s that fold into tablets, etc, and the support is just barely there, if at all. I'm not talking about driver support - this is often fairly acceptable. My laptop's touch and pen interface worked right out of the box... technically. But KDE Plasma 5 with Wayland- an allegedly very modern desktop stack- is not pleasant when I fold into tablet mode.

    The sole (seriously, I've looked) Wayland on-screen-keyboard, Maliit, is just terrible. No settings of any kind (there is a settings button! it is not wired to anything, it does nothing), no language options, no layout options (the default layout is abysmal and lacks any 'functional' keys like arrows, pgup/dn, home/end, delete, F keys, tab, etc), and most egregiously, it resists being manually summoned which is terrible because it does not summon itself at appropriate times. Firefox is invisible to it. KRunner is invisible to it. The application search bar is invisible to it. It will happily pop up when I tap into Konsole, but it's totally useless as it is completely devoid of vital keys. Touch on Wayland is absolutely pointless.

    Of course, there is a diverse ecosystem of virtual keyboards and such on Xorg! However, Xorg performance across all applications is typically abysmal (below 1FPS) if the screen is rotated at all. This is evidently a well known issue that I doubt will ever be fixed.

    In the spirit of Open Source Software, and knowing that simply complaining loudly has little benefit for anyone, I have at several times channeled my frustration towards developing a reasonable Wayland virtual keyboard, but it's a daunting project fraught with serious problems and I have little free-time, so it's barely left its infancy in my dev folder, and in the meanwhile I reluctantly just flip my keyboard back around on the couch with a sigh, briefly envious of my friend's extremely-touch-capable Windows 2-in-1.

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    I echo your frustrations with Maalit. I am running Arch on my Surface Pro 7 and very frequently I have to snap in the keyboard just to get myself out of a situation where touch doesn't work. Maalit also has this bug where it will push and resize windows as if it was visible even though it is hidden.

    Regarding the Firefox issue, it helps if you enable it's Wayland backend by passing MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 to it. Maalit should properly pop whenever you tap on a text box.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1

    Thank you - I was already aware of this, actually, but I choose to leave it disabled because when this is set, touchscreen drag-scrolling of webpages breaks and it selects text as though it were a mouse click-drag instead. As it turns out, I barely use Maliit anyway because of its other deficiencies, but I definitely touch-scroll my browser a lot, even in laptop mode. A generally disappointing dilemma!

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago*

    I also had this problem where touch scrolling on Firefox selects text instead (on ubuntu). It does however work OOTB for me on fedora, so it's the main distro on that machine.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (3 children)

    GNOME has amazing touchscreen gestures, and afaik comes with it's own virtual keyboard

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    I have been tempted by GNOME several times, but I disagree with some of their design choices and find them a bit frustrating. I feel that it's fairly strongly-opinionated software. The benefits, of course, are obvious: internal consistency that leads to a higher quality experience. But, only if you buy-in to some overarching design philosophy. That's one of the reasons I left Windows! I also have a suite of Kwin scripts that make my life a lot easier, so it's pretty hard to leave Plasma at this point.

    Still, that keyboard has tempted me a lot nonetheless...

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    At this point I'm just glad I migrated to GNU/Linux way before touch input was a common thing. I never experienced it on Windows and the only way I experienced it on GNU/Linux is with it behaving like simple mouse clicks. I literally have no idea what else to expect, so I expect nothing and I don't get disappointed.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 years ago

    Using touch on Windows has definitely set my expectations much higher than the reality on Linux right now, so this is a good call! You won't know what you're missing, so it's not going to bug you. I kind of wish I could return to this blissful ignorance. I have another 2-in-1 with Windows 11 on it in the house and anytime I look at it to keep it patched up and fix issues for its user, it reminds me very effectively of how far behind my 2-in-1 is with touchscreen interactions :(

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    Lenovo does sell Linux laptops and then there is the HP Dev One. Also according to Canonical over 160 Dell laptop, desktop, and workstation models ship with Ubuntu preinstalled.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago

    While this is true, if someone goes to a shop and buys a "PC", it will have Windows 100% of the time.

    You have to look to get Linux preinstalled on stuff, or pick the choice yourself. People buying PCs aren't picking Windows, it's just what comes with them.

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