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What are the main challenges in Linux adoption for New users, and how can it be addressed?
(lemmy.ml)
this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Make it just run and pre install it on most computers.
With "just run" I mean things like:
You know, things like that that might cost you an evening or two or three to figure and make you feel like you're the rarest edge case alive. On Windows, these work just fine out of the box.
I know this ain't easy to get to, but I can't recommend people to use Linux when even a phones does perfectly fine out of the box results in at least an evening of troubleshooting.
man you must be using some fucked up distro because never had those problems in the last 4 years.
My pop_os install wont recognize my logitech 720p USB camera thats like. Its a brand new install of 22.04.
Teams, even in the PWA, and other apps often dont respect the system defaults for sound/mic inputs. Especially if you have a few, which all laptops do since theres always shitty onboard speakers and mics.
There are all experiences of mine from this calendar year. I can work around them mostly. But my wife or others....no way. They would just chuck the PC at me and say "fix it". These are all also things that work OOB on windows or MacOS.
A fellow laptop user :-) For the monitor setups I use batch files with xrandr settings. I could imagine there being a way to get them to run via hotkeys...
But yes, the whole thing summs up with "I may use it for myself, but I just can't recommend the whole package without providing tech support for it".
Yeah I use Debian. (At least once a while when I decide to give it yet another shot...)
Edit: in case you are interested, I can give some extra details on that list, and how I fixed them or not. But all these fixes ain't a thing I'd expect the median user to be able to figure.
Out of curiosity, how long ago did these problems happen? I've been using Mint and Xubuntu for a while now, but had to use a few different troubleshooting distros to fix a Windows boot issue, and none of these came up. As these are Debian based distros, I'd expect the same problems to filter down.
The only thing I've had issues with lately is setting up a USB wifi adapter on a Raspberry Pi, but I'd expect some problems with that.
Around a year ago I fixed the bigger issues, but I started with Linux around 5 years ago. The WiFi issue has been around a month ago, but didn't do a lot of troubleshooting outside of rebooting and browsing all wicd settings because well I was offline because of it. Didn't visit that place again and at home there's wifi on all bands as well as ethernet almost everywhere, so the issue doesn't hurt me that much.
Booted into it today to see if things are better, ran the update/upgrade/reboot after and:
Why would you expect issues with an external WiFi adapter for the RasPi?
I wonder if it was an edge case that the Linux driver didn't account for, like a minor incompatibility between the two devices.
You've just reminded me that I had a Bluetooth problem with my laptop a few years ago. My headset would connect and work properly, but wouldn't be recognised after the laptop had either been to sleep or shut down. I had to go through the bluetooth device folder, something like /dev/bluetooth/, find the folder that corresponded with the headset's address, and delete the cache folder inside. It would then work until the next sleep / shut down.
I expected problems with the Pi because USB wifi has always seemed to be a bit dodgy, even on Windows, and wifi is apparently still a problem area with Linux. Add to that the Pi's limited distro, and I thought it was bound to go wrong.