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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • All I’m saying is that people shouldn’t be immediate turned away from Linux whenever they bring up a failing of the platform by the people who live and breathe CLI.

    It would be good for Linux flavors intended for desktop OS use to have some kind of style guide. Developers who are donating their valuable time don’t have to follow it, but it would at least give them all a sort of unified target so they don’t have to constantly reinvent the settings wheel.


  • There are a non-insignificant number of people who want it to be, and frankly it would be good to have the competition in the market space if only to keep the other players honest.

    Almost any discussion about another popular OS has a few token “switch to Linux” comments. I see people often using the phrase “The Year of Linux” after that other OS does something unfavorable in hopes to see a massive migration.

    So there’s a desire for it to become popular. Maybe it will never replace that other OS, but that doesn’t mean it can’t compete for the desktop OS space.


  • The disregard for simplicity and/or outright hostility towards ease of use and centralizing settings I see in the comments here is the primary reason Linux will never replace that other OS as the home computer OS. This culture of elitism, and yes it is elitism, is harmful to that cause. I see this attitude almost every time someone expresses frustration towards Linux for an issue that other OSs have overcome (or significantly lessened) literally decades ago.

    There is, arguably, a sense of entitlement for wanting free software developers to ‘do the thing’, but that’s not a Linux problem. Free software exists on all platforms, and those developers still manage to follow the OS’s design philosophy.

    The standard user should never, ever, ever have to use a CLI for anything ever, nor should they need to have a Linux Guy on speed dial to be able to solve a basic general issue. You might argue that an issue on those other OSs might need someone to open a CLI or dig into a settings file to fix, but those times are so few and far between that the average user may never have to do it in their lifetime. Meanwhile it seems like every solution to a Linux issue begins first thing with opening terminal.

    User friendly flavors of Linux have made great strides towards making things much closer to those other OS design philosophies, and that’s great, but they’re not quite there yet. I’m also not saying every flavor of Linux needs to follow this pattern, as not every problem calls for a hammer. The problem is that Linux is still very much a Wild West OS where anything goes, hidden behind a roughly painted GUI facade.