My dad who retires today and who has been a Windows user since roughly 1993 has set up multiple Pi-Holes and OpenVPN in the last few years and recently even installed Ubuntu in WSL so he can run bash scripts locally too. He’s not in a tech job, he’s a doctor.
A year ago my friend who has been using Windows for his gaming for the last 22 years asked my to help him set up a Fedora dual boot. Just to play around with, even though he doesn’t have a tech background. He didn’t really use it much. But today his work had him blocked by their own fuck-up and he decided to use the time to try it out again.
This evening he told me about how he upgraded his Fedora back to a current version using GUI tools. Then he saw that Windows wasn’t the default boot in his grub boot order anymore. He tried to find an app for editing grub, realised this was the kind of thing people do with CLI. So in the next two hours he learned enough CLI using a free beginners lesson he found online somewhere, until he found the
historycommand, where he found the grub command we used during the original setup. He was so excited about this success!I think the CLI criticisms are way overblown, and non-programmers can use CLIs perfectly well if they want to.
I think the CLI criticisms are way overblown, and non-programmers can use CLIs perfectly well if they want to.
it’s not even criticism, it’s just people being lazy and not wanting to learn things, which is fine, be lazy all you want. But at least be honest with yourself about it.
I think people have trama from Windows CMD and DOS
It is much nicer these days
I think a good portion of the people complaining have never touched DOS, maybe CMD once or twice with a tutorial online (which sounds a whole lot like some stackexchange user teaching me about bluez, but this is scarier because they were told linux hard.)
I’m a pretty advanced user on Windows and I sometimes use the command prompts but it’s pretty darn rare, and I certainly don’t have any commands memorized. I have a couple basic commands memorized for the run tool but even that rarely comes up. I don’t tinker with my machine for the sake of it though, ideally I want it to “just work” and I’d want the same thing from Linux. And I do want that but unfortunately there’s a few programs I need for my work that don’t run on it (namely lightroom and Photoshop). Spending time on Lemmy did make me want to install a dual boot mint though, I have a separate drive for it I need to move from my old machine, doing that soon^tm.
You need the CLI more on average using linux, but many people can still get by without it. Tbh I thought I’d need it more so I learned the absolute basics it, and then it turned out I only “need” it rarely when I’m trying to do something weird or something that should be working isn’t, but I end up using it all the time because it’s just so convenient! And I learned more as I went along. Then I learned how to write basic scripts to automate stuff I wanted it to do by just chaining some of those commands together in a file, which was even more convenient. Honestly now Windows GUI is more difficult to me, I can’t just type “yo do this shit” I have to click 4000 different things.
But yeah, adobe locks you in to windows anyway, dualboot ftw! Good luck on your journey!
I was thinking that a lot of them are too young to even know what those are… My thought was that they’ve been raised on GUI for everything, without being able to tinker even if they wanted to, that the entire concept of CLI is alien to them.
ITT: Nerds that want mass Linux adoption but don’t want to deal with people who don’t share their interests and opinions
There’s quite some hypocrisy in learning to use windows, its obscure registry and the shady softwares that will tune it while refusing to copy commands in a terminal.
Yeah, but regedit is a GUI. So it’s all cool and dandy.
Actually, yes. Because it’s just data. It might change system behaviors in annoying ways when programs read that data, but it’s just data.
Executing curl | sudo bash because docker said so, or some flavor of the week python packages manager says so, or because you want to run tailscale and your distro doesn’t have a package…any of those scenarios relies much much much much much more on trust and is a major security flaw in how applications are distributed on Linux.
gatekeeping always helps with conversion rates, keep it up 👍
Yes because we’re not a religion, conversion rates as a measurement of Linux success is silly
- who said anything about success, that sounds needlessly defensive
- are you pretending that more people using linux wouldn’t be beneficial for linux
Because objectively mass adoption for Linux isnt a good thing. We have no reason to lie or decive people, Linux simply is not for eveyone. Every single time someone asks me “I love Windows/MacOS, if I switch to Linux will it basically be the same thing?” I say absolutely not. If someone wants Windows/MacOS (as most people do) then they should just use Windows/MacOS. Mass adoption would also require fundamentally changing the character of Linux, however even that would not be enough. The question then becomes do we wish to appeal to people who are happy not using Linux and when they do install Linux they generally become unhappy. When nontechnical people install Linux they generally complain however they do not, contribute, they do not donate, and they do not offer anything beyond complaints. When something isnt exactly like Windows/MacOS they call it “not user friendly”, when 0.0001% of apps arent compatible they say “Linux isn’t ready”, and when any advanced power features are baked in they demand it be dumbed down for them.
Once again how would more (specifically nontechnical) people using Linux beneficial in any way?
Yeah. Gatekeeping by selling your product for free. Guess how much an Apple/Microsoft engineer makes vs a Linux one. Lmao.
the post is literally about gatekeeping what the fuck are you even taking about
Have you ever thought how GUI is made? It doesn’t just spawn in there. It requires work and I’m not saying there isn’t anti gui community among us. But it sure is a way of coping. The real issue is funding and management. The big foss projects that have funding most of the time have proper ux except a few(gimp, management issue again).
tldr: The post is taking about gatekeeping and I’m talking about why gatekeeping became normal.
so first there was no gatekeeping but now gatekeeping is good, actually. brilliant
Yeah you might just be dumb
Most of the people I’ve introduced to Linux don’t even use the shell. Beginner-friendly Linux distros are perfectly usable without ever touching a terminal, just as most people use Windows without ever touching PowerShell (or worse, the Registry Editor).
GUIs are an awesome tool. Humans as a species have 5 senses, and instead of limiting computers to the narrow portion of sight needed for typing, they make full use of both our visual and aural senses.
That being said, they add another layer of abstraction away from the hardware on top of the already very abstract userspace utilities that abstract away the kernel that abstracts away the machine code that abstracts away the hardware.
All of which is to say that “Just Works” is shorthand for “I don’t want to actually learn how this complex tool that I’m using works, I just want it to do everything I think it should be able to based on my lack of understanding, and do so in the way that makes sense to my ignorance. And I want it to do all that without learning why we do some steps (and then I’m going to complain about how little sense it all makes).”
That mentality is what allows predatory software companies to not only take advantage of their customers—by hiding shady practices outside of the GUI, and drawing attention to and manufacturing outrage about inconsequential “features” (like ads on the start menu)—but also exist in the first place. Pushing back against that “I shouldn’t have to learn the tool to use it” mentality is one of the ways we keep scam artists and spyware dealers out of Linux spaces.
Have to ask, do you gdb everything you run ? You think of big sofwares like office or things like that. There are GUI tool who replace the command line better. I am thinking about the configure display GUI specifically. X config was a pain… We are better of with the GUI and drag and dropping screen to place them.
We got to approach this nuanced though. Yes, a strong stance against all the enshittification (incl. dark patterns and all that) is absolutely necessary to preserve the good things most Linux distros have in common. For example once KDE e.V. and the Gnome Foundation have finished their work at the payment backend for Flatpak repos we absolutely need to bolster Flathub + a handful of others (to avoid centralization) so they become a default, and through that are able to enforce a strong “no bullshit” moderation as companies are trying to “capture the market”. This will be an inevitable shitshow as Linux-based OS’ become more popular.
Meanwhile we have to admit that not providing comprehensible and well integrated GUIs for everything - and that includes stuff like Bootloader settings, Systemd Services Management, sysctl configuration etc. - is a shortcoming that should be remedied in the future. On rare occasions even average users will have to open these things, and it’s way better if they do so through an environment they can understand and navigate. Anything else is just gatekeeping.
Linux should be accessible to everyone - that includes normies as well as those who may not be mentally able to understand or memorize CLI. This fear of enshittification is understandable in our current landscape, but it absolutely doesn’t help if it stifles development towards more user-friendliness. After all nobody argues to take away the CLI in any capacity, just to add another abstraction layer for those who either need or want it. Which, assumably, are most people.
Anything else is just gatekeeping.
I’m not programmed to balk at that word. I’ve watched some of my favorite subcultures go to shit because of their unwillingness to seem like Evil Exclusionaries™, and I honestly don’t think defending your community from infestation by fascists or consumer mindset or whatever is a terrible stance.
By definition anything that seeks to limit who is welcome is gatekeeping, even if it’s trying to keep the evil-nazi-pedophile-personifications-of-pure-evil-that-you-hate-on-moral-grounds out. I just don’t want thoughtless users who gleefully trade in security and privacy and ownership for simplicity and ease. And I will gleefully gatekeep them all the way to obscurity and irrelevance.
Meanwhile we have to admit that not providing comprehensible and well integrated GUIs for everything - and that includes stuff like Bootloader settings, Systemd Services Management, sysctl configuration etc. - is a shortcoming that should be remedied in the future
I don’t have to admit anything. I’m not one of the devs on any of those projects, and I have no clue what challenges such integration introduces. Adding complexity (such as a making GUI) rarely comes without bugs and security risks, at the very least. Sometimes some projects are a lost cause by their very nature. And then you get people clamoring for the option that is more conducive to GUI than the ones that privilege other criteria, like performance, or security.
Linux should be accessible to everyone - that includes normies as well as those who may not be mentally able to understand or memorize CLI
Okay! They are free to create their own distro if they are unhappy with the current offerings. Or use Mac or Windows if they really just prefer the handholding. You get what you pay for.
We got to approach this nuanced though.
Nuance is for people who think more than the average end user; they can have GUIs. The rest should live and die by the CLI.
Holy shit, your reply is so phenomenally unhinged and disrespectful to other people in so many aspects it’s honestly impressive. Hope you get well soon.
Thanks! I’m not ill though, just fed up with “be extra nice to my ignorance and I might consider not making your forum/hobby/government shittier” mentality that’s worked so stellarly at curning enshittification so far.
Hope your bruised ego gets better tho! No need to shallowly disguise it as being a champion of the people, expertly defending them from someone who might push back on their self-centered worldview.
Linux Mint vs Windows is already enough to learn for a day 1 linux user.
I run 2 systems. One is HTPC with LM, the other is dual boot Windows / bazzite. I like LM and bazzite. I like it very much. But maaaaan, I had problems setting up.
LM was totally fine except for when I was trying to set up pihole, screwed some steps and tried to remove it by terminal. It somehow corrupted OS so every time I’d try to login it would crash and prompt to login again. So far it is running fine but I had issues with pihole again when I tried to update it to v6. This time it corrupted pihole itself but I have managed to restore and update it. I guess reason is that pihole doesn’t support LM put of the box and requires some tinkering to install.
Bazzite, on the other hand, is totally fine now. I guess that was something related to a recent update. But before that it wouldn’t load. Like screen would be black but terminal would be still accessible. I have figured out that it would crash loading gaming mode and stuck there (but I didn’t tell it to boot to gaming mode) so I had to manually make it boot to desktop mode (kde) in terminal every time. If you think that I have screwed something up again - nope. Fresh install on a separate ssd. It installs and then would reuse to boot or boot after like half an hour into kde. All the rpm ostree -update or -upgrade did nothing.
I love these both systems but maaaaan if a basic user has to experience what I had, they’d stick to mac/windows for the rest of their life.
literally just learn CLI, you’re actively wasting time by not learning it. It’s so hard to describe how utterly beneficial the CLI is to someone who hasn’t used it.
Why do people need to learn CLI to watch youtube and write emails? That’s all the average computer user does.
Stop being the person the meme is about
im correct though.
You should just learn CLI, if you’re already using linux, clearly you desire more than the “it works” approach of windows or macos. Why not improve your life by learning how to better utilize it?
This is like arguing that you shouldnt have to learn self finance because it’s a choice. Sure, but it’s an objectively stupid choice.
I think it’s fine to have some less commonly used actions be only accessible through a terminal, even on more user-friendly distros. That is basically what Minecraft does, and yet no one’s scared of that.
A sensible opinion on my porn app?
I’ve been using Linux for almost 20 years, but I still remember the fear of the terminal. The truth is that there is not much that you need to learn for daily use. Unless I’m working on an actual project (like configuring servers/networking) I don’t spend much time in a CLI. Start with a beginner friendly distro (Linux Mint Debian Edition is my pick). You shouldn’t need terminal at all for basic usage. Next, find some tutorials on basic Linux terminal usage and practice. The goal isn’t to “learn every command” but to just familiarize yourself with how it works. Learn how to navigate your files and folders (ls, cp, mv, touch, etc). Learn how to edit text files (use nano). After that, anything you need to learn will be because you want to do something beyond basic use.
gasp how dare you suggest nano over vim! /s
The year of linux will never come because a lot of people wanna boot up their pc and have it work. Just fire up a program and have work, without looking up workarounds and clis and other stuff.
I made the jump just this month but i can totally understand if someone doesnt wanna do this.
There’s a lot of work being poured into Flatpak, which is the way to go forward (most likely coupled with immutable file systems in the future). If this work is done as well as more people contributing to the big desktop environments as Linux becomes gradually more popular there’s a good chance we’ll see steady success.
But even then this whole culture has to change, and people need to stop lying to themselves how “CLI commands are universal” and such stuff (there are way too many differences between distros). Anyone who, instead of pointing to the corresponding disk utility, by default starts to describe parted or /etc/fstab to people who didn’t asked for the harder CLI way is actively alienating people. Not to mention who, in utter unhelpfulness, respond with “why would you want to do that” or “RTFM”. As if that’ll help anyone (also the manuals are utter garbage as they’re almost always written using high-level terminology expecting knowledge no newcomer will understand).
It’s indeed “alles extrem belastend”.
So what do those people do when their Windows machine doesn’t just work and applications require a workaround?
Get angry, frustrated and ask someone who knows. And because more people are using Windows, chances are, they will find the answer way quicker. Also, most programs already run on windows.
Like when i wanted to set up my Proton Drive on Windows, i just downloaded it and started it.
On Ubuntu, i had to write a systemd.service to get the program to autostart on starting my machine. Which was fun, but it isnt for a lot of people.
If people can do that for Windows, they can also do it for Linux
idk what is wrong with Ubuntu but autostarting applications is extremely simple. If looking online for help isn’t for a lot of people, then computers aren’t for a lot of people.
I learned the command line on Sun Solaris Unix in the 90s, after messing with DOS first. At work I have a terminal open all the time, though I’ll use GUI versions of some things too.
I use mint btw.
Same here. I always have a terminal open if i need it. I probably split my time 50/50 between GUI and CLI.
not sure why people think it’s one or the other when using linux
I use debian, btw
Remember to build everything from source
