Stumbled across this quick post recently and thought it was a really good tale and worth sharing.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking: “If Linux is so good, why aren’t more people using it?” And it’s a fair question! It intuitively rings true until you give it a moment’s consideration. Linux is even free, so what’s stopping mass adoption, if it’s actually better? My response:
- If exercising is so healthy, why don’t more people do it?
- If reading is so educational, why don’t more people do it?
- If junk food is so bad for you, why do so many people eat it?
The world is full of free invitations to self-improvement that are ignored by most people most of the time. Putting it crudely, it’s easier to be fat and ignorant in a world of cheap, empty calories than it is to be fit and informed. It’s hard to resist the temptation of minimal effort.
And Linux isn’t minimal effort. It’s an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.
Now I totally understand why most computer users aren’t interested in an intellectual workout when all they want to do is browse the web or use an app. They’re not looking to become a black belt in computing fundamentals.
But programmers are different. Or ought to be different. They’re like firefighters. Fitness isn’t the purpose of firefighting, but a prerequisite. You’re a better firefighter when you have the stamina and strength to carry people out of a burning building on your shoulders than if you do not. So most firefighters work to be fit in order to serve that mission.
That’s why I’d love to see more developers take another look at Linux. Such that they may develop better proficiency in the basic katas of the internet. Such that they aren’t scared to connect a computer to the internet without the cover of a cloud.
Besides, if you’re able to figure out how to setup a modern build pipeline for JavaScript or even correctly configure IAM for AWS, you already have all the stamina you need for the Linux journey. Think about giving it another try. Not because it is easy, but because it is worth it.
Counterpoint: most people don’t use Linux because the people that evangelize Linux talk about it like this.
I don’t want to “level up,” I want to accomplish my tasks. I’m trying to get shit done, not train for a fucking tournament.
I think people that talk like this overstate the difficulty of Linux. There are easy distros that won’t trouble the average user.
I’m the laziest man on earth and I use Mint, way less hassle than windows for example. So if you have never used either, you can safely go with Mint IMO.
If you gave spent 20 years on windows, then it’s another story.
I’ve spent 30 years on Windows and I let it go almost 2 years ago for Mint.
The only real pain point I’ve found is on a hard power-off (loss of power, OS hangs) I often have to do some CLI drive maintenance using a bunch of commands I can’t fucking remember to save my life. ChatGPT always helps me out (so nice to just take a pictures of logs and error messages on my screen and have ChatGPT tell me what if anything is relevant), but I’m a power user of both computers and ChatGPT so I’m able to push back on ChatGPT when it’s wrong about something, getting side-tracked, or tells me to use tools that non-standard for my distribution. I’m not sure casual users would find AI as helpful, which means they have to call a professional (or relative) for help which can cost money.
Printing isn’t quite the same. Certain PDFs have to be printed to TIFF files before they will print. Some applications don’t offer my printer as an option, so for example I have to download a PDF that is open in Firefox and then print it from whatever the default PDF application is. I haven’t even attempted to set up the scanning functionality of my printer on this computer.
Games for the most part just work. I tend to buy everything off of Steam and I haven’t really had to mess with anything to get them to work on my computer. I did buy one game that isn’t on Steam and it took an hour or two of effort to get Wine working with it
90+% of what low-tech computer users use a computer for is just a browser. I spend probably 1% or less of my time in CLI, maybe 10-20% of my time in specific apps (VSCode, IntelliJ, Joplin, LibreOffice, Discord, Steam games) and almost everything else I do is in a browser.
Moral of my story, I suppose, is if Mint would auto-heal on hard power-off and you can browser and print just as easily as on Windows, I could recommend it to my non-technical folks.
Things have also gotten easier since I started 15 years ago
Waaaay easier on a longer timeline too! I first used Linux in the late 90s when the things the author of this piece talks about were true. You really did need to understand more than an average computer user just to get Linux installed.
That hasn’t been the case in along, long time now, at least not with the easier distros.
What articles like this often fail to discuss is that Windows took effort for everyone to learn at some point too. Same with macOS. Same with your smart phone.
Learning anything requires effort, and not everyone wants to invest that effort - which is totally okay if they already get what they need from whatever they’re already using. But I wish that people would stop exaggerating how hard Linux is to learn simply because it will require effort.
Exactly this.
I’m a software dev and also a Linux user, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend my precious time messing around with the OS trying to solve problems.
I see the operating system as a tool I use to accomplish the things I actually want to do, which is writing my code for my projects, just the same as I see a car as a tool to get me from point A to point B.
If Linux was complicated to set up, or always broken, or requiring constant work then I wouldn’t use it, no more than I’d tolerate a car which is broken down and in the shop every other week. But fortunately, Linux is none of those things.
Modern Linux mostly “just works”, and it’s really counterproductive to talk about Linux like it’s hard or you need to be a deeply invested techie to use it.
See, you have people like you all over saying “Linux just works” and then you have other users here saying “I have to spend an hour fixing my computer running one of the most user friendly distros every single time the power goes out”. I don’t know who to believe but both cannot be true simultaneously so which is it?
If you just want to get shit done, allow me to introduce you to Debian…