this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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The average person probably should stay away from Linux. In fact most of them should stay away from PCs in general.
They should stick to an iPad or something. That way I, the family tech nerd, will never be bothered by them a week after they downloaded "hacked Spotify" or some shit, that is now emailing scams to everybody in the continental United States. Most people just need a browser.
Ah yes. Let's gatekeep Linux and keep the general public out of it. Definitely helpful to drive up adoption of desktop Linux.
As someone who recently started using it...doing anything at all is a pain in the ass in Linux vs Windows.
Installing many things requires following a guide instead of downloading an exe. And when one step of the guide yields something unexpected, well good luck.
The thing hurting Linux adoption is Linux.
No, it's fragmentation. If you know what can be applied to other distros and what's distro-specific, things become very easy.
You completely missed the point, which is standard.
Unironically yes. Let's gatekeep anything that people can fuck around with that can't be fixed by a simple factory reset button.
Learning more about technology and having more control can be really empowering. I don't think dumbing things down even more is going to make people more tech literate and it's definitely going to make them more dependent on shitty corporations.
Many years ago I advocated for using Linux on the servers we sold to customers. They didn't need to do much. Run a DB server mostly. This was accepted happily by my managers as we could save costs on Windows licences.
Over the next five years, as those machines started to go wrong, it became my job to fix all of them, alongside all my other duties. So now we use Windows again, because our low wage helpdesk monkeys can actually talk people through most faults.
Sometimes people don't want to be empowered. They just want their shit to work.
Ironically factory resettable Linux distros are coming and will be more mainstream. Fedora plans to convert all Workstation users to Silverblue/Kinoite within 5 years. Being immutable distros, a factory reset option will soon arrive at them. Other distros are now also experimenting with this.
It would be convenient in short term. But, once the vast majority of people starts to live in the walled gardens, it would be very difficult to buy a "normal" computing device.
Based, most people today would be just fine with a Chromebook. Not to say I support Google's BS, but 90% of people don't need to do more on their computer then use a web browser to access emails, view their bank account, stream some shows and maybe write a word document here and there.
It's true that Linux gives you control and freedom over your computer. But for the vast majority of people, that level of control is something they don't know how to wield and is unneeded given their day to day tasks.