this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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Yeah, we really need to stop taking about it as if it is difficult.
I think most folk's apprehension comes not from the difficulty but because a certain type of person wants people to think that it is difficult.
Most teachers (the ones educating the youth on tech!) can't figure out how to play a YouTube video. Hell they can't figure out how to take a photo on a phone or send a text. Installing Linux is difficult for the average person. The average tech savvy person, it's easy. Related xkcd as always,
It is difficult for a huge portion of the population. Hell man, my neighbor came over the other day and asked me if I know how to copy stuff to a USB drive. He's about my age, so it's not like he's ancient or anything, he just doesn't know anything about computers like most people these days.
There's "difficult" in the sense of a person's reasonable ability to follow rather straightforward prompts, even if they don't know what they mean. Linux installers are rather low difficulty here.
Then there's "difficult" in the sense of how much a typical person will tolerate being rushed through a bunch of mystifying questions just to get through to the other side, particularly when an alternative option that doesn't ask them at all is available. Linux is atrocious in that regard.
Really hot take: more choice is actively bad for people who don't care. Which is far and away most of them. The kind of personality matrix that is attracted to Linux as-is tends to be the kind that wants everything configurable, and for the system to never assume anything, and let the user roll everything themselves. Most people are not like this and they don't appreciate this "courtesy". Giving them the option at all is the deterrent.
If you want to talk Linux installers that are on-par with the UX feel experience provided by macOS or Windows from a normie's perspective, show me one that doesn't ask anything of the user that doesn't also appear in one of those installers. Not a single thing. If it does, that's a speed bump that has no reason to be there. Because the person who is using it likely doesn't have the answer, and if the correct course of action in that situation is, "It doesn't matter, just use the default", then why did it even ask? It should just do it.
I'm not suggesting we need to completely rob all installers of any choice, either. We can have a two-tier system, so people who actually know the answers to those questions can select the advanced install, and people who don't care can select the streamlined install.
The dirty little secret about the mass market aversion to Linux is that people are genuinely not interested in or remotely curious about the inner workings of their computers. Those of us who like to immerse ourselves in it for fun are outliers. Any one of us who denies it has their head extremely far up their ass.
It's similar to car mechanics. The vast majority of drivers don't know or care how the machine works, they just want it to get them where they want to go. If it breaks, take it to the nerd who gives a shit. The more fiberglass cowls and covers you slap on top to hide the inner workings of the thing and automatic features you implement to abstract it all away from the user, the better, from their perspective. The damn car should just go. How it goes is not of any concern.
Linux needs to offer a similar experience if it wants mass market appeal any time soon. The alternative, trying to actually spark that curiosity in people to enjoy understanding how the machine works, is far too slow of a process to make any measurable movement of the needle of user adoption over time. Low barrier to entry isn't good enough when zero barrier to entry exists and is already the standard.
It's not just that they may not care. They may not know what they're being asked or know what the consequences are for choosing either option. Then they sit there for 30 minutes searching the internet for what the question means.
honest question: have you ever tried to fresh install windows on a pc or laptop that didn't have an OS (or a previous windows) installed? I found it way more unintuitive than for example kubuntu installer in the past years.
Thing is, most non-Linux users didn't install their OS: It came with the machine.
Unfortunately, most have never installed an OS and so have no frame of reference of how difficult it should be. The majority just turn on the machine and the OS is already there, so for them, anything more complicated than that is already harder than what they expect.
Also, hardware compatibility. There is no easy way to know how compatible a given machine is. If the common user installs Linux and runs into compatibility problems immediately, then that will make them think Windows is better, because it doesn't have those issues.
For Linux to reach mass adoption it needs to come pre-installed on machines or else it's just too much to ask from the masses. Also, never underestimate tech illiteracy.
It is true that Windows is harder to install than Linux, but most don't install Windows: It came with the machine.
I haven't. I suppose that's a large chunk of where the advantage comes from, isn't it? New computers are expected to just come with the OS on them already. The entire process of installing an OS no matter whose you use is a completely alien concept to most people, and anyone who thinks it's "not that hard for the average person" is daft.
Are OEM Linux installs even a thing? For like, ""real"" hardware, from ""real"" (read: mainstream enough to buy on a shelf at Best Buy) manufacturers? Those are what we need to be steering people to, IMO, if we ever want Linux to be competitive with Windows and macOS for an average person.
System76 sells OEM Linux computers, but they don't sell them in Best Buy, to my knowledge.
It's a start!
I hope I'm not moving the goalposts too far here, but I do want to stress that if at any point in this process a consumer has to go out of their way to get the Linux experience, it will never compete. Every lowering of the barrier is progress, but there is a critical mass point we clearly haven't reached yet.
You can get most Dell laptops shipped with Ubuntu, but I don't think that's available at a brick and mortar retailer.
Yes but also if I told my wife to try "install Linux", she'd be lost before finding out where to start. Not that she's dumb, but because she has no practical knowledge (or any interest to learn) to do anything outside her browser or few apps there that she needs or wants. If there's something that needs to be done on the computer, she asks me because it's my area of expertise.
But on the other hand, I'm not thinking for a shit about medical questions. As a medical doctor she can answer my stupid questions on that topic.
For some tinkerer yeah sure it's easy as pie
Whoosh.
95% of people can't figure out "what percentage of the emails sent by John Smith last month were about sustainability."
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/