this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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Guy says this as if it's a good thing lol. That's the real reason people don't use Linux, nobody making Linux seems to care about user experience for normal people.
Yea I agree. Good UX is a lot of work, and I think FOSS projects rarely prioritize it. Even good documentation is hard to come by. When you write software for your own use case, it's easy to cut UX corners, because you don't need your hand held.
And good UX for a programmer might be completely different from good UX for someone that only knows how to use GUIs. E.g. NixOS has amazing UX for programmers, but the code-illiterate would be completely lost.
I believe that the solution is "progressive disclosure", and it requires a lot of effort. You basically need every interface to have both the "handholding GUI" and the underlying "poweruser config," and there needs to be a seamless transition between the two.
I actually think we could have an amazing Linux distro for both "normies" and powerusers if this type of UX were the primary focus of developers.
What you say describes my experience 10 to 15 years ago, not my experience today. Compare the settings dialog in KDE Plasma to the windows settings dialog for instance. Or should I say myriad of Windows settings dialogues.
Perhaps another perspective is where to draw the line in terms of expected expertise.
Sure, and where the line is drawn now is why more people don't use Linux. I even use it for work, but still don't want to deal with the hassle at home. I am getting a new home pc soon, and I thought maybe linux is ready. So I started reading up. No, I do not want to have to reinstall the os several times before I get it right. I don't want another chore.
Perhaps you're simply more familiar with Microsoft / Apple, maybe it's not more difficult?
I too use Linux for work, but I have limited experience on Microsoft systems and have been on Linux based systems for over a decade. For me windows is a chore.
In my opinion, it's a matter of perspective and experience. Yours is aligned with something different, that's all.
I was reading pages about going linux only. Everyone I read warned people off about how it isn't easy and such. That was just one example. But for work linux is easier to support, hands down. I have supported both. But for my home pc... which surfs the web, plays games, and not much else... windows is sadly easier according to the pages I read.
Windows may be easier for games, they're exclusively written for Microsoft so that's to be expected ( although Valve has done a lot here).
Generally speaking, modern distributions like Fedora will be no more difficult than Windows or Mac. The important distinction is that it will be different.
Microsoft has spent a lot of effort putting their operating system into every single school and business on the face of the Earth and as a result many have decades of training with that OS. That doesn't mean their operating system is better or easier. It just means it's familiar. If you used Android for two decades and then picked up an iPhone, I'm sure that would be just as difficult.
In the scientific space, we've been using *nix systems since well before Microsoft was even around so our tooling doesn't typically support Microsoft. For us Microsoft is more difficult because that's the training that we have.
So, it's not that Linux has a worse user experience per se, rather it provides a different user experience. Some may consider shell scripts worse than control panel, but that's a preference. One isn't worse than the other. They are just different.
In my opinion:
The difference is in work, If your workflow is heavily Microsoft focused, Is a truly awful experience and you'll feel like a second-class citizen. But if you're working on technical things, the inverse is true, eg
For document production:
pandocFinally, it's not really fair to lump all the next distributions into the same bucket, Is over 1,000 distributions and they are all quite different, Only common element is the kernel.
Gentoo is very technical but it's also very interesting, Arch is similar. Fedora OTOH we'll usually walk out of the box And you have your choice of desktop environment with Good support for alternative window managers like sway/Hyprland etc.
So here is one of the pages I read... https://linux-gaming.kwindu.eu/index.php?title=Should_you_switch_to_Linux_gaming%3F I saw similar sentiment in other places as well. Sounds like you are saying this isn't the majority opinion?
Overall, I have a strong dislike for apple in general, and I won't take a job where I have to work with windows ever again unless I am desperate. And I am also getting very tired of Microsoft's bs. But I don't want my main home pc to be a project either. I already use Firefox and a vpn. But every time some page doesn't work right I have to turn off the vpn, and try chrome before I know the problem is on thier end. And it usually isn't, well other than not supporting firefox and a vpn, but these are banks or doctors offices, I don't have a lot of choice in most of them. There is only so much of that I am willing to do on my main home pc. But overall, I would like to be part of the solution, as long as I am a target user, which from what I have read, I am not.
You don't have to compile your own kernels you know that right?
Nice. My info was from googling using Linux as a home pc. So it may be a gate keeping attitude or it may be fact. I don't want to fight with my home pc that just browser the web and plays games. Oh... I guess it runs turbotax in april.
What do you mean?
It is a good thing for those of us who don't want bumper rails on our OS.
No it's not. Good user experience should also allow for extensive customization. There is nothing mutually exclusive about these things.
Linux does allow for extensive customization, way more than Wondows or Mac. They just don't hold your hand to show you how.
Yes but it has subpar user experience. But there is no reason you can't have both, that's what I'm saying.
Subpar how? That statement definitely doesn't reflect my own experience.
I've previously posted a few examples:
Two 4k external monitors through a docking station - Why is this seemingly effortless for Windows but basically impossible for Linux?
Is there a way to keep Linux responsive when at ~100% CPU usage?
I also regularly have my window manager crash when inserting my laptop into my docking station. Happens maybe 20% of the time. Sometimes even when it works the display scaling makes things blurry until I reset the scaling from 150% back to 100% and back again, then it's fine. Add to this a few annoyances with UI, but these are more forgivable.
There's all kinds of these small problems that compound to just make for a much worse experience. It doesn't just work but it needs to if it really wants to provide a viable alternative to normal people.
Keep in mind, I am not a "normal person" - I am a professional software engineer and I still find all this stuff super annoying.
I agree with your examples and it’s certainly true there are plenty of rough edges on Linux. Then again, how many examples are there for things that should “just work” and do on Linux but don’t on Windows? There’s enough that make me not use Windows at all, because it has a subpar user experience. I even used a Macbook for a few years, mainly for work, and there were too many small things that annoyed me about it, so it too had a subpar user experience.
Seems it’s mostly a matter of perspective which issues are more important to you.
Maybe some but much, much fewer. It shouldn't be surprising - Microsoft has hundreds if not thousands of people hired specifically for creating working UX and design. Linux just can't compete with that since it's mostly developers working on it and, again, developers unfortunately make for awful UX designers.
I don't think external monitors or a responsive UI is a matter of "perspective". These are things that should just work, always, for everyone.
What are the examples you are thinking of btw?
First example that came to mind was actually Mac users who struggle with external monitors/projectors and things like screen sharing too. I agree they’re things that are so basic they should just work. Reality is often different even on other OSes.
Of course if you have a Windows home and everything works and then you try Linux and it struggles with a piece of equipment, it’s easy to blame Linux. You wouldn’t even be wrong. But you are oblivious to someone else’s experience who uses Linux exclusively and everything works for them, how many of those things wouldn’t work or work well with Windows.
Personally I’m a developer, so I care a lot about integrating parts of my development stack. A lot of those things don’t “just work” on Windows, or even Mac, so I’m happy to stick with Linux instead.
I'm also a developer, but I'm also a user, depending on what I'm doing. And this is a very poor excuse for Linux having bad UX.
Linux shouldn't only be for developers, it should be for everyone.
Of course, I’m a user too, but I don’t think Linux’s UX is that bad. It may be bad in some areas, but it’s not bad across the board.
I also don’t think Linux is only for developers. It’s great for developers, but it’s also great for people with only basic needs of their computer, those that don’t need much more than a browser, an email client and maybe an office suite. The UX is totally adequate for them, as evidenced by ChromeOS.
I think where Linux lacks is mainly for the users in between, those who are not full developers or tinkerers, but do want to mess around and do so from a perspective of expectations of how things worked in the Windows world. And I won’t deny there’s a plethora of legitimate enterprise use cases for which there is no equivalent in Linux today. But those are not UX issues, those are mainly matters market support. Linux is not great there, maybe it never will be. Or if it does, it’ll take a long time.
There's like a thousand Linux distros. Having one be ready and easy to use, no hassle or deeper knowledge needed, won't stop the great many others that exist without bumper rails. Arch and Nix etc will still keep existing, so you can chill out, edgelord.