this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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To play devils advocate, I'd say that the bigger issue is that Linus ended up in the terminal to start with, when he had no idea what he was doing in there.
If Linux is to hit the masses, then a beginner friendly distro should have the convention to install apps be by GUI instead of TUI, and guides should be updated to reflect this. That GUI-based installer should see that the "Yes, do as I say" prompt was triggered and in a clear and concise way, inform the user that important packages will be removed if they continue and they should not.
Effectively just having a much better interface for the user is what I'm saying.
It is a lot harder (and less helpful) in a written guide to tell someone to press a button in menu such-and-such; telling someone to open the terminal and copy paste a command is easier.
In addition (though I do not know if it applies so much to gui package managers) GUI apps also have the tendency to not have a stable interface, so a blender 2 tutorial will often not be useful for someone using blender 3, because the interface will have changed and buttons that were once in one place now are somewhere else or no longer exist. CLI programs for some reason are a lot more backwards compatible in my experience.
I think GUI apps should ideally be designed to be usable without the user knowing where something is beforehand (though that is not always possible, like in complex software handling a lot of stuff a new user may not be familiar with, when they only want to achieve a certain specific goal), making mentioning how the UI works almost superfluous in those cases.
No, it is most definitely not.
Any non-tech user would freeze at the mere sight of a command line. Let alone have to use it.
I've had people tell me I am a hacker because I open command prompt to ping something.
It amazes me the amount of grognards that despise any interface that isn't a command line terminal. "I can do everything on the terminal!" - True, but that's because the UI sucks and lacks proper buttons, widgets and whatnot. That no linux distro comes with a "builtin" icon (available after an installation) or shortcut to "update all programs" or "update only security packages", or even an easy solution to auto update everything on the background, without having to type the command, really shows how little thought is given to user experience. All solutions recquiring a terminal automatically fail in regards to bringing people to linux.
For me, it's not despising anything that is not the terminal but a simple preference for the terminal. Having started learning computers in a CLI and having worked professionally for over a decade mainly on the CLI, it's comfortable and familiar. I also like having scripting and regex capabilities built into my interface - a reason that I much prefer (neo)vim to VSCode and others.
Could I do nearly everything that I do in the terminal in a modern DE? Probably. I'm just not as familiar, so, it would take longer. Like writing in cursive for someone who rarely does anything but block letters.
That's not very accurate. Every modern desktop distro that I've used has this, from *buntu to SteamOS. Linux Mint probably has one of the best UI experiences for updates that I've seen and I frequently use it for managing kernels as it's much simpler to do with that tool than any other that I've used.
This is one that is somewhat tricky. Linux tends to be more geared towards more technical users. Probably a lot of us chronic Linux users came to computing when it was more of a niche thing for nerds and knowing how to use a computer meant more than writing documents, editing spreadsheets, or playing games on Newgrounds. A fault that many Linux users and devs have is an antipathy or indifference towards non-technical users. I know that I'm frequently guilty of the latter. Many of us, perhaps short-sightedly, are not concerned or interested in growing the userbase of the OS, which makes efforts like SteamOS particularly great due to their enabling of non-technical users.
What distros don't come with that? I'm running Debian and I get a notification on the desktop when I have updates available and it takes two clicks from that point to get them installed.
Several distributions do that. Opensuse for one