New 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 😮💨
Doing tech support, I encountered this attitude. People like that are nearly impossible to help. “Why can’t you just fix it!” The true answer never given is that your problem is probably something stupid you are doing, like trying to make a phone call by physically shoving the phone entirely up your asshole, and until I run through some common problems and ask some questions, I won’t be able to tell you to have your significant other get the salad tongs and pull it out of your rear and then go over “dialing.”
People mostly need to be willing to gather detailed system info with Inxi and share it.
No. That’s the support job to figure out the problem of the user. It is not the user’s job to figure out the support problems.
I work in support, so I know what I’m talking about. Unfortunately most computer guys are elitist assholes who can’t understand a user doesn’t have their knowledge or even the will to understand why this shitty tech is not working.
Free open source software projects you don’t pay for don’t have paid support. If you talk to a fellow user it IS your job to figure out your problem. if you don’t have the will to understand anything you ought to buy a support contract.
I don’t disagree with you, but to answer OP’s question, I think this right here is the problem. I love Linux for the same reason I love building my own PCs and working on my own car. For most people that don’t want to tinker, though, they’re looking for something that “just works” and can be fixed by someone else when it breaks.
It’s such a privileged attitude, though. One CAN get paid support, but they don’t need it if they’re just a bit patient and willing to follow instructions. If you don’t want to pay, don’t expect someone else to deal with your bullshit.
(I’m not saying this to you, but to anyone who has this attitude.)
I’ll have you know I get better reception when it’s up my ass!
if a new user is using a distro that doesn’t use systemd they fell for a meme
if a new user is using a distro that doesn’t use systemd they fell for a meme
Or they hate fridge art like systemd and are on something like PCLinuxOS or Alpine.
That’s what I mean though, why would a new user be running alpine as a desktop os?
That would be me: My hardware at the time was crap so I couldn’t use the usual mint, ubuntu, etc and I was gonna use debian but I couldn’t find the x86 download button, so after a bunch of messing about with distros like puppy and #!++, I settled on alpine for a bit. I now have decent hardware and use fedora.
At this point, my biggest dream is that these ‘new user’ distros used only Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd and Flatpaks simply to simplify things. Hopefully we’re less than 2024 away from NoVideo Wayland support.
Also as soon as XFCE releases their Wayland support, that soon it’ll become the most famous DE choice of Mint.
What I am really happy is to see how well supported Pipewire already is. Pipewire has never showed any problem in the new installs for me.
The problem with that is most major distros market themselves as “new user” distros to some extent though. Noob-friendly, out-of-the-box, easy, etc are all distro-marketing buzz-words that mean nothing.
You can’t expect them to only use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks because that dream requires every distro to use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks, which will never be reality.
Most distros will probably eventually adopt these tools, but there won’t be a sudden shift. It will be gradual.
Well, for Pipewire it’s the apps which needs to adjust at this point. Only thing missing currently is the Wayland but it’s coming. Making Linux less fragmented (read: confusing), the more new users will give a try.
Why don’t you magically have a magic button that magically fixes everything with no effort of my own? That’s stupid, I think I will go on social media and repeatedly tell everyone that Linux is bad actually
- Isn’t pre-installed on well known machines by well known brands.
- 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.
- If things cannot be done purely through touch / the mouse, it is too hard for most people.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
I 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. Also another wayland osk you could try is wvkbd (tho I’ve never used it beyond “hey what’s this”).
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.
Preinstalled.
Like, were nerds and we fuck with our computers n stuff. But most people are lucky to know what a power cord is.
Honestly if Linux with a good DE like KDE or Cinnamon was already on their PC at boot they would figure it out. Most people just use a web browser anyways.
This is definitely how I feel as well. None of the other shit matters unless it comes already on the machine. Even then, it absolutely has to be rock solid stable long term for it to be comparative. Of course that’s asking a lot, considering people still take their PCs into geek squad or wherever else when something goes wrong (or their printer won’t connect).
This always reminds me of the Dell XPS option of having Ubuntu installed but of course that’s far away from “Microsoft literally pays us to sell their shit”. So, until that - or some type of adoption occurs on a B&M level/online-storefront - it’s going to be pretty “voluntary” in terms of adoption. It’s just comparatively so much more work in the layman’s sense.
It’s in a weird way the same with cars. It’s been statistically proven that most people specifically won’t go out of their way to get a simple utility pickup truck. They buy the big fuck you truck because that’s what the dealerships have. It’s the same thing with kids going to college and the parents taking them to buy a laptop for class. My point is that it’s far more easier to just use what you get than try to rehash it. Maybe you don’t even know that’s a possibility so you just settle. Of course this isn’t the only issue, but imo the largest determining factor. IBM had businesses sucking from the teet since computers dropped, and we still deal with the ramifications.
I have my dad on Mint for years. Setup browser and email program and told him to click on that little shield and do updates when it’s there. You can set the shield icon to only appear in case of updates. I sometimes have to update between versions. I think he is still on 21.0 and now 21.2 is out already.
I have put my dad on Kubuntu. Don’t like anything *buntu, personally, but I have to admit it’s quite stable and with sane defaults. He hasn’t complained ever since and support calls dropped considerably. He spends most of the time in Firefox anyways, where I’ve added ublock.
The problem with Windows was, he’d occasionally browse the web with Edge by mistake (or because MS forces it down your throat), and as soon as an 80+ y.o. browses the web without ad blocking, getting a virus is just a matter of time.
All this is to say that I agree with the fact that preinstalled is key. I wish that more effort was focused on fewer distros and I feel that so much talent and energies are being lost in marginal projects.
But many people do this for passion and it’s of course their choice to decide where to contribute, or whether to spin up a brand new distro entirely, can’t judge them for that. I’m just observing that those energies could be better used to smoothen some rough edges on more popular distros to make them even more appealing to OEMs and convince them to ship those on their hardware.
- 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)
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See, that paragraph alone is too much for the majority of non-Linux users.
I’m old. I can use stone age computers. The real barrier is the language. If you can’t explain things to me (that knows how to do shit) in terms I’ve heard before, basically nobody outside of power user, niche users, or software engineers will ever try an OS that you have to learn a new language for just to ask a question. Thank you, that is my longest run-on sentence, and I’m a scientist.
i believe fedora has this by default
Most people buy computers with the OS already installed and would get just as lost trying to install MacOS or Windows.
This is the correct answer. If Linux was pre-installed, most problems would vanish. My Linux computers are far, far more stable than windows once they run.
- All of the basics should just work well out of the box with minimal tweaking. Yes even NVIDIA stuff.
- The software center needs a massive overhaul. It feels like an afterthought by people who would rather use a command line.
Yeah, the descriptions and lack of curation is really weird … browse games and oh look here’s 27 varieties of reversi and a driving game that crashes on launch.
If it were a curated list with enthusiastic and helpful descriptions it would make it more accessible to use. Get the mature and professional looking programs front and center.
Much as I hate to say it, it could do with a makeover from someone with a sense of marketing. (Excuse me for a second, I felt a little nauseous saying that).
Im not sure the software center being half baked is even the real problem.
One of the nice things about Windows is that you dont need a central, curated, repository for software. You can google the thing you want and just download an msi/exe of the latest stable version and, 99.9% of the time, leading back to your first point, it will just work.
What? That is easiest one of the worst parts of windows. It’s just that people are used to this dumb endeavour
Why do you think its bad? From a secruity standpoint its obviously not great, but its undeniably more convenient than running a curl command to pull in a third party .repo file, yum update and yum install to get something that isnt easily available in my base repos.
Nothing more convenient then a central “app store”. apt search, apt install is all I need. But I undersntd that people don’t like it, that don’t know it.
What’s convenient about googling for software, downloading ominous files and clicking through an install wizard and most likely installing some adware and unwanted search bars? It’s crazy people see it like that.
Even the other posters in this thread are talking about flatpak and appimage. I’ll never understand that way of thought.
It needs to “just work”. It’s not more complicated than that.
This, a lot of ppl talk about the pre installed thing but Linux has a lot of friction yet. Linux is big, it’s open and made to run in almost any device with an arm or x86 processor, yet Linux is usually a pain in the ass on edge cases and we cannot ignore. Some years ago dealing with drivers on Linux was a hell, today is better but still has edge cases (this is not a Linux fault usually, vendors are shit usually but it cause friction. Audio just recently was resolved with the adoption of pipewire but pulseaudio had a lot of caveats. Now we are getting rid of X11 that is great for usual usecases but is full of workarounds if you want to to a simple thing like having two monitors with different refresh rates. There is a lot of things but linux is going forward, last year I could made my full switch since gaming on Linux became a thing but definitely was not plug and play.
Life long windows user currently dual booting and trying to fully switch.
I’ve gotten used to the terminal and I’m no stranger to editing config files but I still find myself saying ‘This could literally be a toggle or drop down menu’
I can mostly put up with it but I got friends who REALLY hate digging into files for basic stuff like global dark mode, If it’s not in a GUI it’s as good as none existent to some.
Yeah honestly same, I hate having to sudo into random system files to change something basic or having to open a terminal and remember the specific magic words to do what I need
so whenever I have the option I use GUI over CLI every time
This is heavily influenced by choice of DE. Some of them really do have all their options well laid out in the system settings, but others rely entirely on config files. I have little experience with GNOME, but with KDE I was able to customize my experience very heavily using only the system settings by just playing around in the GUI. Meanwhile, on another machine running Hyprland, I have had to read a lot of documentation in order to customize it, but the available options are relatively more powerful than the KDE setup.
Neither of these methods are more right than the other, but one is absolutely more new-user friendly, assuming they do not want to simply accept the defaults.
The actual answer, there is no reason to switch. The vast majority of users do not care about Linux or why they would want to. For us there are lots of benefits and things we enjoy about getting away from Windows but for them “why?”
I will object on this one. Even if the majority of user does not care about privacy they do care about ransomware , viruses, speed of the system and in my opinion Linux / BSD is secure, fast and speed remains after time not like Windows where I felt that after 6 months I had to reinstall to get a performant system. I guess it is all about convincing your family and friends about those benefits.
Two weeks ago my step mother asked me “Can you help my friend connect her PC to the wifi, it runs Windows XP” users are fucking weird.
Speaking from experience, from a long time ago, and from the people/family I’ve installed it for on older machines: It’s different. That’s 90% of it.
The people that had little to no windows/PC experience actually took to Linux a lot easier not having to relearn/change habits from windows.
Linux really isn’t ideal for anyone who isn’t already a tech enthusiast on some level. I recently did a fresh install of Kubuntu and after about a week, it prompted me that there were updates, so I clicked the notification and ran the updates, after which my BIOS could no longer detect the UEFI partition. I had to use a live usb to chroot into the system and repair it, as well as update grub, in order to fix it.
It’s fixable, but this is not something anyone who doesn’t already know what they’re doing can fix. I’ve had auto updates in the past put me on boot-loops thanks to nvidia drivers, etc.
This kind of thing needs to almost never happen for linux to be friendly for those who just want their computer to work without any technical understanding. This, honestly though, can’t happen because of the nature of distros, you can’t ever make guarantees that everything will work because every distro has slightly different packages.
Wine is getting better, but compatibility is still an issue, especially for people who rely really heavily on microsoft office or adobe products.It’s actually ideal for people who are actually not tech enthusiasts at all and do not need specific software for their job (Photoshop, audio stuff, actually NOT Ms office)
Everybody I 've seen making this argument is actually a tech enthusiast themselves and just as out of touch with the average user as a Linux “guru” and massively overestimates the non tech enthusiast user.
They are far more likely to fuck up their Windows PC (even with UAC because they don’t understand what it is) than successfullyinstall a new program on their own.
I 've borged my Nvidia drivers a few times, never via the distro auto updating. Custom kernels, trying to get newer cuda versions or something. Still better to fix than AMD drivers on windows and the whole DDU dance.
I’d say it can be, if they’re running something incredibly stable that you can guarantee won’t break on them… Which involves an amount of research and effort that most people simply won’t put in as long as what they are familiar with continues to work. Windows might have it’s fair share of issues, but at least a lot of people are already familiar with it, same w/ Mac os.
Nope. Install a distro like Ubuntu and it will not break with auto updates. Nvidia drivers included.
Much less maintenance than when they used windows.
You also overestimate the non tech enthusiast ability to use or fix issues with windows. They usually download the first program that promises to fix their issue, or increase their RAM.
I mean… that’s simply incorrect. If you read my original post, I talked about that, exactly. Twice in the last month I’ve had running updates via the “updates available” notification in Kubuntu break the system, and require chrooting into the system via a live usb to fix it. That’s without any changes or messing around with the system, on a very recent install.
When I used normal Ubuntu, there were rampant gnome shell crashes. Hardware compatibility is far from perfect, as well - case in point I’ve done clean installs of Linux Mint on computers for others in the past, only to find out that there simply aren’t working wifi drivers for the device.
Linux CAN be less maintenance, but it’s ultimately more work to actually make the jump and completely relearn how to use a computer. I’m fully aware of the capabilities on people who aren’t enthusiasts, I do tech support for my whole family all the time. My stepfather’s solution to the wifi being slow was to make more networks on the same router, it was hosting like 12 wifi networks at once. However, windows is already familiar to them. They could technically learn to use linux, but they have zero interest because if windows has an issue they’ll just call me and I’ll fix it (and that’s usually not needed because it rarely breaks on them).Well our experiences differ then. I never had any issues on vanilla Ubuntu systems. After all if there was I 'd have to be on the phone to fix it while also reminding the fam that any non specified click us a left click.
To be fair I rarely had issues with Windows myself, at least post xp. But windows do fail, especially on updates and in quite bizarre ways. I ve had to solve quite a few over the years.
When’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.
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.
It 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.
To be honest, one part is what everyone mentioned here. Not being preinstalled and all that.
The other part is that unfortunately at least according to my own expirence as a Linux noob a few years ago some Linux communities can be very toxic. If you’re asking questions of how to do X and someone comes along and is all “why do you even want to do X if you could also do Y? Which is something entirely different but also does something vaguely similar”
That’s one if the things.
And then other curiosities. I cannot for example for the life of me get my main monitor to work under Linux with any new Kernel version. My Laptop just refuses to output to it or the second monitor attached via Display port daisychaining. On the older version it works, on the newer it’s broken. I have tried troubleshooting this problem for over half a year and it’s still broken. And that’s out of the Box on Ubuntu LTS…
So i don’t really understand this question. There are major roadblocks. With Wayland which is default for Ubuntu now those roadblock jist became bigger. Screensharing in multiple Apps including slack is outright broken unless you use the shitty webapp. The main player Office 365 largely doesn’t work at all on Linux. All these things that should work for a Desktop operating System don’t work out of the Box as they should.
That’s why people aren’t using it and companies aren’t preinstalling it.
Make it just run and pre install it on most computers.
With “just run” I mean things like:
- Audio just working
- Bluetooth just working
- Bluetooth and audio working together
(I still can’t get this one right, after 5 evenings of trying) - WiFi supporting all the frequencies, instead of just some
- remembering monitor configurations
- Troubleshooting audio shouldn’t mean that you almost completely kill your OS with that
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.
That’s kinda the problem here. I’ve heard people say how complex and difficult Android is so they have to use iOS.
People have personal experiences and beliefs that differ and there’s no way to fix them other than to dive into it and they don’t want to dive into it. Unless they are highly motivated to change they will likely just stay where they’re comfortable.
It’s like trying to logically and reasonably explain why being vegan is morally right to someone who absolutely refuses to read the labels on the stuff they buy. They’re not going to want to go into the BIOS to fix a boot order to boot to a flash drive let alone learn a new UI. Hell, most people didn’t even want to move off Windows XP, 7, now 10 till they are absolutely forced to.
It was never about what problems you have had it is about the problems they have had. Most of the time MacOS/Windows are good enough for most users.
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.
