fugepeWhat are the main challenges in Linux adoption for New users, and how can it be addressed?
#1 is just not being the default for 99% of devices. If someone gets a new computer, why would they go through the effort of installing a new os when the one it comes with works fine? Hell, I bet at least 50% of people in the market for a pc don’t even know what an OS is.
Agreed. Android and chrome os are used happily by 10s of millions without any idea it’s a Linux distro
I bet if small, cheap netbooks came out running mint or fedora or something people wouldn’t even or know or care that it was Linux.
u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)In middle school I had a USB drive with Linux Mint installed on it which I was using on school PCs. We only used those PCs for internet browsing and office. Not a single soul noticed it wasn’t Windows. Teacher only noticed 2 differences, “You have different version of Office installed here.” and also gave me a note for “Changing wallpaper” which was strictly prohibited for some reason.
ѕєχυαℓ ρσℓутσρєwhich was strictly prohibited
It was probably due to some goober like me changing it to Scarlett Johansson’s bikini pics.
So… the Steamdeck?
…the steamdeck isn’t a netbook.
Absolutely. In fact i think everyone is hoping steam os will be the distro to make the big push onto desktop because of the gaming and another just works kind of interface
PlutoniumAcidIndeed, many Netbooks come with a firmware dual boot. Besides the crappy Windows lite edition, there’s a tiny instant-on Linux too. Most people don’t use that, but it’s there.
Indeed, many Netbooks come with a firmware dual boot. Besides the crappy Windows lite edition, there’s a tiny instant-on Linux too. Most people don’t use that, but it’s there.
snooggumsWhich actually means Linux is being successfully adopted by the general public in a similar way to windows as a general use system that doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge.
Fully customizable distress will never be popular with the general public. They want systems that just do the general stuff and have it work automatically.
DharkStareOf course they know what an OS is. There’s only two of them: Apple and Microsoft.
OwlI bet at least 50% of people in the market for a pc don’t even know what an OS is.
70%*
my first thought actually pointed to common OS on work devices, being Windows i’d assume a majority of the time, i’d imagine a large portion of the older population were introduced to computers in a workplace setting. But your answer makes a bit more sense.
Intimidating to install and then an unfamiliar interface and applications.
It might be more accepted if it came preinstalled and simply had a browser like Chrome and an app store, where all the other ‘helpful’ but confusing apps like Libre office were kept out of the way.
I install it for my family and it would only be accepted if it looked and worked just like Windows or MacOS. All they really need is a browser to get to GSuite or Office365.
Matt
experbiaIf 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.
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.
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!
Weird! Touch scrolling actually improves for me with the Wayland backend so that’s an odd issue indeed! There’s gotta be a trick to it, but I am unsure of what that is at the moment.
I also had this pricken 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.
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.
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 :(
GNOME has amazing touchscreen gestures, and afaik comes with it’s own virtual keyboard
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...
Me too. I love the look of Adwaita, but some of their choices I can’t get past, like not having a system tray. I’m really excited for Cosmic, it looks like it will blend the styling of GNOME with much of KDE’s customization!
COSMIC is now on my radar, thank you. It looks very intriguing.
jan teliI agree with the touchscreen thing-- I have one of those foldy-aroundy 2-in-1 laptops, and the only way I’ve been able to get touch to work properly (as in not like a mouse) is gnome wayland. Kde wayland’s fine too, but like you said there’s no included keyboard whereas gnome has one built-in. Another wayland osk you could try is wvkbd.
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.
- Self updating without user interaction per default.
- Better support of codecs and drivers.
Linux does have better codecs and drivers than Windows for some stuff (Bluetooth for example), but it has worse codecs and drivers for some important proprietary hardware stuff (Nvidia for example)
Self updating without user interaction per default.
I think that this is a terrible idea, until a clear boundary is set between applications that can or cannot break the system. Updating flatpaks automatically might be fine, but updating everything is simply a recipe for disaster.
Most folks have been sold a story that every new technology they start using is supposed to be “intuitive”; and that if it is not “intuitive” then it must be defective or willfully perverse.
For example, novice programmers often stumble when learning their second or third language, because it differs from their first. Maybe it uses indentation instead of curly braces; maybe type declarations are written in a different order; maybe it doesn’t put $ on its variables; maybe capitalization of identifiers is syntactically significant.
And so they declare that Python is not “intuitive” because it doesn’t look like C; or Go is not “intuitive” because it doesn’t feel like PHP.
It should be obvious that this has nothing to do with intuition, and everything to do with familiarity and comfort-level.
Commercial, consumer-oriented technology has leaned heavily into the “intuitive” illusion. On an iPhone or Windows, Android or Mac, you’re supposed to be able to just guess how to do things without ever having to confront unfamiliarity. You might use a search engine to find a how-to document with screenshots — but you’re not supposed to have to learn new concepts or anything. That would be hard.
That’s not how to learn, though. To learn, you need to get into unfamiliar things, recognize that they are unfamiliar, and then become familiar with them.
Comfort-level is also important. It sucks to be doing experimental risky things on the computer that’s storing your only copy of your master’s thesis research. If you want to try installing a new OS, it sure helps if you can experiment with it in a way that doesn’t put any of your “real work” at risk. That can be on a spare computer, or booting from a USB drive, or just having all your “real work” backed up on Dropbox or Google Drive or somewhere that your experimentation can’t possibly break it.
netvorIt should be obvious that this has nothing to do with intuition, and everything to do with familiarity and comfort-level.
Not to be petty, but I think that intuitive is not that different to familiar.
I mean, the problem is in using the word intuitive when “selling” something in the first place. User interaction involves ton of things, large and small, and the intuitive things are rarely noticed. Such promise is likely going to lead to disappointment.
Adapting to these small differences is a skill in itself.
IMO one of the main problems is eliminating the workflow of older commercial operating systems and having to build a new habit of using a new system. There are various Linux-based distributions that manage to give the user everything they need without having to resort to using the specific terminal.
Creating a new habit after spending years developing one for an old system, for me, is the main problem that leads many users to leave it.
Follow Steam’s example and make a cohesive operating system with good default apps so the user experience streamlined.
mremuglesMakes one wonder how many use their Steam Deck and know it runs linux by default
commercial, immutable distro with professional support team.
Easy desktop env. like cinnamon, budgie or kde
Preinstalled on new devices
dontblinkYou have to use the terminal
Anything using the terminal... I once tried to do something on Linux because a friend told me it was great. I gave it another go when it came up on my Chromebook and tried to teach myself. I just don't get it.
I'm not a programmer at all, so anything that involves typing commands is going to baffle me!
One thing i had to learn when i started to understand how big techs really work, of what that would imply (see chat control) and get passionate about free software, free operative systems and freedom of customization is that freedom itself almost always requires work, the question is: is that a work you’re willing to do?
for me the answer is a strong YES.
Fair.
But I was just giving my perspective as an outsider who stumbled across this post because messing about with the terminal had the opposite affect on me as someone who appreciates the concept of Linux but doesn't really have the level of passion to learn programming for it.
For the average user all that extra works gives them very little return.
Most people don’t want everyday computer use to be work.
I’m not a programmer at all, so anything that involves typing commands is going to baffle me!
When I was in college in the 1990s, non-STEM students regularly learned enough of the Unix command-line to:
- check their email with
pine - chat with
talkor on IRC - write their home page in HTML using
picoorjoeeditors
The command line is something that millions of people have learned; and you can, too!
TheBaldFoxYES! I fucking hate it. I shouldn’t have to enter code in order to install a program. I want to go to a website and download the software, click install, and have it actually just work.
I’ve used mint for several years now but it will never be a primary OS die my household because it’s such a hassle to work with.
You don’t - you just open your distros software manager (which is like an app store) and get all your apps that way.
Been like this for several years.
russjr08Yeah I keep seeing people mention having to use the terminal to install software, and I wonder what distro they’re using and what software they’re trying to install.
Most distros use flatpak, so when opening GNOME Software/Discover you can install Discord, Spotify, Web browsers, text editors, Steam, etc all through it. And even Ubuntu which doesn’t use flatpak by default, all of those apps are in its Snap store as well. Hell, Ubuntu even has software drivers through a GUI in one central place which is very nice.
I’m on Fedora Kinoite right now which really encourages you to use Flatpaks, and the only software I’ve installed through the CLI are dev tools which would be disingenuous to say in this situation stops casual Windows users since they are very unlikely to need Rust, Neovim, various C/C++ libs, etc…
On distros like Linux Mint there are graphical apps preinstalled for that. The distribution maintainers have repositories with common packages to make it so that you can open an app store and install programs from one place rather than going to different websites and downloading installers.
HeavenAndHellHonestly, I’d rather use terminals to install software. Most of the time, it’s actually far fewer steps than just clicking through several screen on top of having to find the application installation file you downloaded.
indigojasperThe last time I tried to make a USB dual-boot Linux on a laptop I ended up breaking the laptop. It would turn on but show nothing but a black screen. Makes me really hesitant to try again on an old laptop that I would still like to be able to use if I fuck it up.
Understanding what different distros offer and being able to make a educated decision about it. I looked around for a week or so until I found a arch distro that worked, took away the manual installation process as a complete noob, and wasn't all red flags straight away (the example is that a lot of ppl advised against manjaro). I ended up with garuda (which some ppl aren't a fan of because of chaotic-aur, but we have to start somewhere, haven't we) atm which works fine until I am confident enough to do a complete base arch installation the next time.
The_Tribble_JugglerWhen's the last time the average user has had to install an operating system?
That's the biggest obstacle right there. I think plenty of non-techy people would use linux if it came preinstalled.
Also, if it came pre-installed, one would assume all the hardware was properly supported. A big pain point with Linux is that sometimes things just don’t work right, and there’s nobody to turn to for help except Google. It’s been a while since I attempted to run Linux on a laptop, but when I did I struggled a lot getting good battery life, good trackpad support, and a sleep mode that worked correctly.
Reputations live on for decades after they are earned. Perhaps all of my laptop problems are ancient history, but I have no way to know without trying, and it’s too much effort.
Cynetri (he/any)I have an example: a little whole ago I put Arch on my 2-in-1 laptop just because I prefer open-source philosophy, and although a lot of things worked out-of-the-box, my biggest problem was the actual 2-in-1 function. I know that, like Windows, I’d have to do a little digging to get it working (except Windows would involve drivers, Linux required settings) and I got a makeshift solution working: KDE has its own screen-rotating feature, and I made 2 shell commands on the desktop that, when pressed, disable/enable the keyboard/trackpad. Turns out it only works on Xorg, and Wayland requires a way more complicated setup to work, so I just gave up using Wayland on it. Something to do with udev rules or something
People need to regain dignity and self-respect until then they will be fine being somebody's else product and revenue stream lol
Or… They just want their monitor to work. Instead of refusing to display a picture after a simple minor kernel update that causes a bug that is extremely hard to track down even when you know shit about Linux… That’s also an option.
well then go back to pimp daddy satya, he will take care of you...
One word : affordance
adonisNew user: I have a problem 😊
Everyone:👍
- are you on xorg or wayland?
- pulseaudio or pipewire?
- what WM/DE are you using?
- amd or nvidia?
- what distro?
- systemd?
New user: Nevermind 😮💨