The indoctrination of windows is extreme. Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.
And yet… linux is hard, and users decry RTFM as “not growing the userbase”
People don’t have the time/will to research alternatives, that’s why most of us follow trends. It’s the old mantra “if is good enough for him…”, and honestly, i don’t feel to blame anyone. Computers by now are a necessary tool and people want an easy “switch an play” solution to use it.
I mean, people are gonna bite my head off for this, but most non technical folks are turned off by someone calling them stupid… That’s what “RTFM” sounds like. I think there needs to be a culture change to drive adoption, but stuff like the Steam Deck is helping a lot.
Even technical folks aren’t huge fans of RTFM.
If I’m doing something incredibly interesting, and I’m asking for help, I should RTFM.
If I’m doing something routine, we can (and usually do, now), make it simple enough not to need a manual.
Make Local LUGs Great Again.
My brain had to work hard to pull that acronym from the depths lol.
These days, they could even just ATFAI (like Ask The Fucking AI) and would arrive at desired destination.
The thing that prevents adoption is the human fear of change.
Hot take among what often seems to be an “AI is the devil!” crowd.
😄yes, but to be honest, I, for example, learned practically all coding I can by reading code together with AI
And as it is code, I see what happens when I compile/execute it and can uncover hallucinations like this.
Of course, my code is at first vibe programming with many small commits, but as soon as it is working, I clean up by rebasing and double checking all commits to be consistent.
And it generally helps me well with my Linux issues, as it is pretty good parsing the arch wiki
I think the troll users are getting old and grey at this point. People people are willing to help.
I understand the impetus behind RTFM - It happens when the user failed to do basic troubleshooting and expects others to do their thinking. Being blown off doesn’t feel great, but other people’s time is valuable, and in the end your system is your own responsibility.
Don’t go onto forums that are specifically to help people if you don’t have the time then. Or at the very least don’t link the whole 10000 word manual and give me a specific place to look because I promise if I have overcome my anxiety of looking stupid enough to post on the forum I have checked the manual multiple times.
RTFM is not a working formula. Because most people skip reading the manual for one simple reason, the manual is hard to read.
I remember my early arch days when asking a question about an issue I’m having was always met with a wikipage I already read but did not understand.
Rather than pushing for a magic manual, the best is to provide sane default or point to tutorials.
The best is when people tell you to RTFM and the information you need just straight up isn’t there.
just google it and the google is just a reddit post that says [deleted]
Or “if you’re having trouble there is no manual, FAQ, or wiki, just join our discord troubleshooting channel” vomit
And after hours of troubleshooting, you give in and join the Discord where you’re promptly ignored.
Or if you’re really lucky, people are willing to help, so you spend hours more troubleshooting, often repeating many of the same steps, only for all of them to give up too. (As was my experience when I tried to switch to Linux Mint.)
What were you doing on mint that had that many issues? I am genuinely asking because I have always seen it basically be bullet proof.
Play audio through my mobo’s built-in 3.5mm jack (without a significant delay). For whatever reason, Mint just really didn’t like my mobo, and no one was able to figure it out.
Oh, I know this one! Make sure you’re using pipewire and use HDAJackRetask. You can reassign the ports to whatever, you can even swap mic and headphone if you want.
Thats really unfortunate. Hardware support on linux is really hit or miss and until it is seen as a worth while investment to make sure that products work well on linux by the manufacturers it will remain that way but I can not fault anyone for going back to windows when things on their system just will not work.
Or isn’t deleted but either has no replies or replies that didn’t help them either
Those cases where the users didn’t WTFM
It’s the same way you gotta ask if they turned it off and on again. Too many don’t even look up the manual, now yes. Some hostility is just plain hostility, but the phrase is there for a good reason.
Maybe if the people giving advice would RTFM, they’d know what isn’t in it.
That shit is the reason that I will never run vanilla arch again. So many people that are so sure that something that is not in the manual is in there for so many different questions.
Git gud
/s
man 1 git-gud
Aaaand why is that? It’s hard to read because…?
We need individuals like you to help it out. It’s like wikipedia
It’s hard to read because people lack background knowledge. Man pages were horrible for my first 15 years or so.
Once you have the skills that you hardly need to read them they’re fine.
That’s why everyone wants to look it up on stack exchange, they want the answer, not an unending series of lessons
Man pages are still not great on Linux. Very few examples with common use-cases and explanations. I shouldn’t need to visit the Arch wiki.
OpenBSD man pages are a delight in comparison, and really all you need to learn how to manage the system.
tldris the application you need.This is a great project. Should replace man for noob distros.
They are hard to read because they are written to explain concepts to people who already understand them. Handy if you just need them for reference. Useless if you are trying to learn. Which is why RTFM is often bad advice
I’m currently trying to migrate my stack on my VPS from docker to podman. Bonus points if I get it running rootless.
Somehow, podman compose just wouldn’t work with my existing docker compose file. I quickly found out that podman has many options, but quadlets are preferred. It took me a while to understand what they even are and their concept. I did get the idea and the concept from the docs, but everything else was demonstrating how to set up a very simple one (think a hello world container). Or I found some blog posts with ready made complex examples for some random stacks that were way over my head. But a simple tutorial on how to map the fields/parts of a docker compose to a
.container,.networkor.volumefile for my stack consisting of several containers in a few networks with a reverse proxy in front of it? Nope.I’m the end I found podlet and used that to convert a docker-compose. While the result wasn’t completely working (e.g. a problem with some environment vars that got passed and switched in a few “layers” that podlet understandably messed up), it was enough to understand all of it with the docs and complete the quadlet. Now I just need to experiment with the rootless part.
Currently, my first and foremost pet peeve is, that different distros use different approaches and utilities, but many blog posts or guides don’t tell you what distro they’re for. If you google the problem and find the fourth guide on how to solve it and realize halfway through, that it’s again e.g. for Debian based systems, while you’re running on SUSE or RedHat or Arch or… can be very frustrating.
Is there no tutorial for mapping docker compose into .container, .network, .volume file at all? That’s unbelievable, one would expect there surely is one.
Maybe I didn’t search right, but since I found podlet first, while looking for a tutorial, I was lazy and gave it a try. It’s result was enough to get me there. Maybe, had I completely read the podlet docs and checked all optional arguments, o could have gotten a perfect result. But that way, I learned better about quadlets.
It’s hard to read because it’s a manual made for technical users.
On Linux most of the software is made by freelance developers who often forget that all users are not technical and even if they are they don’t want to be forced to interact with technical stuff. For the same reason I don’t want to daily-drive gentoo, sometimes I don’t want to read the manual.
I happen to be a contributor on multiple FOSS project and most didn’t have a docs directory in their repo or website, let alone an user guide. That’s fine for a CLI program to rely on wiki/manuals but graphical apps should have a user guide on their website. Working on documentation is a thankless job in FOSS spaces.
Then people need to be taught how to read better. Not Linux’s fault the education system was dismantled over the years.
What an arrogant comment 😂
Plus I don’t want to spend 30 minutes to wade through pages of documentation for a 5-word command that makes my speakers work.
I’m probably gonna get hated on for this but here’s my story:
About 3 weeks ago I bought a new gaming laptop with no OS with the intention of installing Linux myself and ditching Windows.
I’d read a lot online about how Linux was now competitive with Windows as Linux emulators could run Windows games with a 10-15% boost in performance. I read that it was all a case of finding the right distro and that Linux is much more user friendly and compatible now. So I did a little research, made myself a ventoy boot USB with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Pop, Garuda and Fedora to see which one I liked best.
None of them worked properly. All of them had weird little quirks. Some I could live with, some were completely infuriating. So l did a little tinkering as I was determined not to give in. None of the distros detected my hardware properly, and so I went away found forums with similar issues and I fixed most of them. However, no matter what I tried I could not get the laptop speakers to work. No problem, I thought, I’ll be either using headphones or BT to my soundbar (as that worked fine). So having given up on the speaker issue, I downloaded some games. In all of the distros they ran like shit. Sound bugs, laggy game play, some wouldn’t play at all. Again, I tried tinkering with the settings, using a different version of proton, different sound drivers, different graphics settings, different commands and programs which might solve the issues. No. Each different distro threw up different issues which I spent hours and researching and experimenting. I tried a few more distros and found new issues which needed more research and more experimenting.
Over the three weeks or so I was trying I became irritable and depressed. I’d spent a lot of money on the laptop and I was unable to use it because no matter what I tried, even with relatively low resource hungry games, they did not run well at all, and even linux itself seemed slow and unresponsive in comparison to what I was used to.
So after hours and hours of climbing the walls and snapping at my wife and neglecting my kid, I downloaded Windows. And everything just works. There are bespoke programs for my graphics card and everything in my steam library runs beautifully with very minimal tinkering. So now I have a dual boot system, windows for games only and Linux for everything else.
I hate that I’m still enthralled to Windows, but seriously, Linux is just not ready for mass adoption. If something doesn’t work on Windows , it’s usually a case of just downloading the correct driver and Windows normally knows which one you need. If something doesn’t work on Linux it’s a slog through paragraphs of text which all assume some basic knowledge of coding or Linux’s file system or some other jargon, or watching endless YouTube videos and then still getting nowhere. As a working husband and father I just do not have the time to put into it.
Tl;Dr - Windows is much easier than Linux. That’s why everyone uses Windows.
Oof. Sorry you had such a bad experience.
Pro tip for others: It takes time for volunteers to reverse engineer new proprietary laptop hardware.
If the laptop manufacturers aren’t advertising Linux support, it’s up to the community to play guess and check, to figure out what the proprietary drivers do.
You might get lucky and pick the same exact model as a passionate reverse engineer. Or you might not.
With old stuff, your odds are much better that someone has figured it out for you.
For new hardware, it’s still essential to pick a vendor that chooses to write and release Linux drivers.
This will get better when truly open hardware platforms gain popularity.
Yeh, I’d come to that conclusion myself. The laptop I bought was a 2023 lenovo legion 9i which is have discovered is not a particularly popular model but shares a lot of it’s DNA with the far more popular 7i. So I figured most of the software and fixes would be cross-compatible. Turns out that I was wrong. I’m not giving up hope yet, and I’m not gonna get rid of the laptop anytime soon. Maybe they’ll be a new kernal that come out which fix the issues I’ve been having.
Wait, what brand/model laptop did you get?
A lenovo legion 9i
To be fair, you most likely have nvidia in your PC.
As I see it, the distos you tried ether have a gui to install those proprietary drivers, but are on old kernel or no GUI to install them, but a recent kernel.
Installing nvidia drivers on endeavourOS is very simple and you always get the newest fixes after writing “yay” into console.
Installing apps is as easy as “yay [desired app]” and then choose out of the list. (Just don’t take the “-git” versions but the “-bin” versions 🤭)
After that, install steam out of multilib and make sure to pick the right vulkan package (based on GPU driver in use)
All this nvidia stuff is so complicated on Linux, because nvidia is not caring enough about Linux yet.
Only way to fix that is adoption.
All this nvidia stuff is so complicated on Linux,
I installed mint, opened the driver manager, picked the latest NVIDIA driver and it just worked. No idea what everybody is talking about …
Granted I’m on an old 1080ti, so maybe that’s it …
It is just to get newer versions of the proprietary drivers faster, and to have a more similar environment as developers. (Like if a feature of the driver is dependent on a new API just added to nearly most recent kernel)
Kernel updates can bring better support for different hardware which as well can influence how well the GPU drivers work, like, improving them.
😇but nice to hear that it works on your machine well 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻
Even Nvidia drivers have come a long way recently. I used to always have a windows setup and used it more than Linux whenever I was off work, but this year I was finally confident enough on Linux to ditch it. I have Nvidia gpus on all my PCs, with both Intel and AMD cpus, and they are all working perfectly fine with multiple 4k screens.
So far there were only two games I was unable to play on Linux - Demoncrawl and Inzoi. And the second is filled with reports saying it works ootb for other Linux users, so if I had tried to tinker I could probably get it to work. (I haven’t had to tinker with anything else tho).
Thanks this is very helpful. I was steering clear of the more terminal heavy distros as tbh I find the terminal a bit daunting as a noob. I’ll give it a go tho.
Don’t know about your hardware. I don’t own a notebook anymore. I read good things about the AUR package optimus-manager-qt for hybrid GPUs (iGPU+dedicated GPUs) but also that it can be a bit tricky.
I exlusively used dedicated Nvidia cards in desktop rigs with Arch & EndeavourOS since 2017 when I switched from Win 10. Additionally exclusively KDE.
Though I had a bit of experience with other distros and desktop environments before my switch I’d wager to say you should give one last try to EndeavourOS, even if you have barely any Linux experience. I mean you had so many failed attempts. One more won’t hurt.
Use EndeavourOS not arch. First, it uses the standard initial graphical system-setup (Calamares), then it comes with some good default settings & tools and finally a welcome screen which features links to additional tools like mirror selection (for faster updates), update shortcuts, package search, docs/wikis/forums or logs.
I’d select KDE in Calamares and I’d install the graphical package manager octopi via “yay octopi” after system installation and activate yay for the AUR in the octopi settings as e.g. optimus-manager-qt (which you should only use with hybrid GPUs) is only available in the AUR. You need to click the alien symbol in octopi to install from the AUR.
The AUR (Arch User Repository) is the repository for packages not available in the main repositories. AUR packages are user contributed where the maintainers write a so called PKGBUILD file which contains the steps to build and install a package from foreign sources (e.g. from a debian DPKG or from github sources). With octopi you can quickly open the PKGBUILD file and look from where the maintainer pulls the parts of the package.
The amount of software available in the AUR is gigantic but it can potentially contain malware (which happened a very few times). But you’ll have a hard time finding users who actually had that happen to them. A good indicator that the package is ok are its number of votes. But if you really want to know you have to check the sources in the PKGBUILD. If they come from github, you could check the github-repo and only it’s stars (votes) if you won’t read the sourcecode.
That all sounds mighty complicated but it isn’t. Just try to install packages from the main repo. Click the alien symbol only when you don’t find something official.
So with octopi and the welcome screen you don’t need to enter any terminal commands for package installation or the system update. I had only a few updates where problems occurred in like 7 years and they were always fixable. The Arch Wiki and the Endeavour forums could always help.
I can’t guarantee you’ll have a better experience than with the other distros and you will meet some bumps or roadblocks for sure. I’m not playing the the most current games and a lot of retro games via Lutris and Heroic. For some of them I had to tinker a bit and try different starters than Steam. Arma, Path of Exile, Sekiro (fitgirl repack), Diablo Immortal were tricky but all the steam games or e.g. Witcher 3 via Heroic run very nice.
On the screen where you login (usually SDDM) you can switch between Wayland and X11. Which are two very different Display managers. Wayland is the replacement for the very old X11. It works way(land) better with AMD GPUs than with Nvidia which are usable though but work much better on X11. Games can be faster on wayland for Nvidia than on X11. But things like missing color management in nvidia-settings make me stay with X11.
Thanks of taking the time to write all this. I’ll certainly give it a go once I’ve worked up the will power to go back down the rabbit hole!
Oh yeah as mentioned in a comment below Nobara based on Fedora could also be a very good distro if you’re out for gaming.
Well, that sounds like issues with your specific hardware, because that’s definitely not the usual Linux experience.
Tip for next time: find some distro that has up to date kernel. Ubuntu, Mint and Debian are definitely not good if you have very recent hardware, they stay on old kernels for quite a long time. And drivers are in the kernel.
I have to disagree about Windows being easier, but that’s fairly subjective. What’s 100% objective is that it’s definitely not the reason everyone uses Windows, the reason is much simpler: it came with their machine.
Anyway, I recommend Nobara for gaming - it’s basically Fedora, but preconfigured for gaming and general normal use.
Thanks, I’ll give it a whirl and see how I get on.
This is much less a Linux problem and much more a communuty one. We really need a semi-centralized place to get recent linux info and a nice guide on linux specific knowlage for beginners, but then people will cry needing to learn what wayland/x11 and such are will turn people away. Whoever was telling you windows games 10-15% faster were fucking dumbasses, I have zero problem running any game I want on my machine but the preformace has been exactly the same as windows (which I still consider a win for linux)
The next big problem is people going “We don’t need gaming distros” when those gaming distros are made to solve this exact problem. If you haven’t already try out Bazzite or Nobara and it might “just work” (no promises tho). But a distro like Mint/Pop/Debian are going to have a lot of missing drivers/package updates for the latest hardware, Fedora needs relatively a lot of post-install tinkering to get things working since they only ship opensource packages by default, Garuda is not ment for beginners and uses a more unstable kernal for preformance, but you still need to tinker with drivers. Bazzite and Nobara are the two big distros that aim to “just work” out of the box and even re-package some software with the latest fixes. And incase you don’t like the look of them, you can install whatever theme over KDE Plasma you want
Ofc I get if your tired of hearing “just install this distro instead” but a lot of advice is coming from others who also don’t actually know whats going on under the surface, and sometimes your hardware just isn’t supportes (not a linux issue but a manufacturer one). And if your at the point where using windows for gaming works and thats enough for you, nothin wrong with just using windows
I have similar experiences. I converted my surface laptop to linux and overall I’m happy that I did, but games that ran fine on windows now are unplayable because I can’t get it to work properly, neither with wine, unbottled nor proton.
I still have a W10 gaming pc and I planned on converting it to linux with pop os being the frontrunner, but I will keep it on dual boot with the fallback scenario of just going with W11. Linux is not and might never be ready for mass adoption because it is simply too reliant on volunteers, forums and self-troubleshooting for that.
Microsoft and Apple provide OS’es that are thoroughly tested and validated with firmware and drivers that are specifically written for them by people whose job it is to do that. It might not always be perfect, but it usually does what it needs to do right away.
Oh interesting! What model surface do you have? I have a surface pro which I was considering converting (before the above nightmare) but have read that MS have made it super difficult for anything later than a 7 and I have an 8.
It’s quite easy actually. Just google linux surface and you will find the project website where they list all surface models and potential issues with installation guidelines. I have a pro 8. The only thing not working are the cameras as nobody has figured out the drivers yet.
Edit: Project GitHub page https://github.com/linux-surface/
You sound like a Windows power user and of course linux will be harder because you are not used to it.
I had a simmilar first months until I was used to linux. Now I find many things much more convinient in Linux.
And yes there is hardware that works in windows but not in linux like there is hardware that wont work in macos. But over time you will only buy stuff that is compatible and you wont think about it anymore.
Thats why I recommend dual booting at the start because sometimes you need to get shit done without trying to learn the new way and so you don’t get burnt out. But if you keep at it you will start to use windows less and less.
Windows is to Linux what McDonald’s is to cooking your own food.
More like a restaurant that has Korean BBQ / hot pot on the menu. Most meals are completely prepared, but for some you need to do a small part yourself.
You know what, I like this one. And just like KBBQ/hot pot, there’s gonna be people who ask “what’s the point of going to a restaurant if they make you cook it yourself?” And you know what I say to those people?
You’re entitled to your opinion and I respect that - also, more hot pot for me!
Linux is going to cook your own food, then realising that you don’t have half the ingredients, so you either have the choice of going to the shop where all the food is labelled in Swahili, and there’s no pictures of what’s in the packages, and a lot of the people who shop there are kinda stuck up and look down at you for not speaking Swahili, and by the time you’ve gone round the shop three times and asked for help and you’re still not sure what you’ve got in the trolley but you buy it anyway and then you get home and you’ve got some of the stuff for dinner but you’re still missing some essential ingredients OR going to McDonald’s and getting everything on the menu but Ronald follows you home.
So that’s what cooking feels like for people who never cooked before.
10/10 analogy
Honestly that’s a pretty good comparison
I recently switched to Linux after a lifetime with Windows. Last night I went to install a backup program on my media server but it couldn’t see the destination drive. I downloaded a partition manager and it crashed trying to load the external drive. DDG’d the issue, but I couldn’t find a clear cause/effect that applied to me. So I downloaded a different partition manager and backup program, and they worked right out of the box. Turns out the non-working apps were written for Gnome and the working apps were written for KDE, (which is my desktop environment). It was a very frustrating half hour, but it pales in comparison to the time I’ve spent troubleshooting (storage) driver issues in Windows. The point I’m making is, Linux isn’t really that hard to learn, it’s just unfamiliar and therefore scary. Getting past your fear unlocks a whole new world of wonder and possibilities! 🐧
Ummm… Both gnome and kde apps should work on any desktop environment
My guess is that they are using a KDE distro that doesn’t properly package gnome stuff
That’s just a guess though
Oh yeah, Windows storage driver issues are great if you need to kill time. Nothing better than your Windows installer claiming there’s no disk. Great in combination with missing touchpad drivers. But hey, at least I found out it can indeed be installed without a working mouse and that includes installing the storage driver!
🧐never had an linux app not working because it was “not designed for my desktop environment” I am confused, I was sure all Linux app run on all window manager / desktop environment 🤔
Are you sure?
Most KDE apps will run on Gnome and vice-versa, but they might not run particularly well under those conditions.
I used to run into issues with this all the time. Recently, I find, for poplar apps, there’s always a version built for my chosen desktop environment.
Of course, I’m not very picky, anymore: Libre-this, Open-that, Free-Whatever. I usually find the one that comes up in the app search is good enough for what I’m doing.
Literally had a former co-worker who has taught computer science classes at universities, ran his own PC repair business, and avoids the command line like the plague. Says it feels ancient.
If you’re under 30 and read this and have been on the fence about getting good with computers… Just setup a Linux VM and play around with the terminal. You’ll be leagues beyond so many active professionals it’s scary.
It’s okay to have a preference. In my. 20+ years with Linux, I’ve coded with and for it, did low level embedded development with it, used it at home for school and entertainment, used for amateur photography, even managed a small server for a startup.
I still would rather use a GUI, because I have not specialized in most of the tasks. It’s less powerful, but it’s just more intuitive. It’s less portable between DEs, but it’s easier. And if your only doing that once in a blue moon, it’s more than enough.
It’s absolutely fine to prefer a GUI. At a professional level it is not fine to not understand what is happening beneath the hood.
Full stop.
If you don’t know how to use TCP dump, I don’t want you using wireshark on my dime.
I don’t agree with the full stop. Eliminating nuance is rarely good. Most tasks an IT professional will execute will be done several times a month, so memorizing the tar command options might be useful if that’s something they do all the time. But demanding that a person is proficient with the CLI as a way to prove familiarity with how things work under the hood is just fallacious.
I coded in vim and we built our own makefiles to deploy our code into our proprietary microcontroller. We also used JTAG to connect gdb with the microcontroller, and not even the guy that coded the JTAG interface would be able to write JTAG commands by hand.
I disagree entirely.
Abstraction away from what is happening never adds value in the long run.
Full stop.
Vibe coders be damned.
There’s no relationship between UI and vibe coding.
Full stop
Okay good luck debugging difficult to describe edge cases.
I’m not gonna continue to argue with you. Suffice to say, I wouldn’t hire you.
Cheers.
You come across as somebody that would be hell to work for.
Full stop.
Yeah, I always use GIMP from the command line, it’s just faster.
Lol if you’re in graphic design you’re beyond cooked. Good luck out there.
The command line is also the ideal way to play Helldivers
So you write out all your commands as machine code I assume? wait no, obviously you set the transistor state manually with an electron gun?
You need people who can read and debug machine code and dig through hex and binary in cybersecurity.
I use ghidra and IDA pro literally every week. And if you don’t know how to use hexdump, you shouldnt be using those tools in the job.
Binary exploitation is common.
So no, but you literally should be able to read machine code, and parse hex/binary in my field.
100%.
Windows is just as hard as linux, harder even with all the layers of obscurity.
Windows used to be easy. Now, it’s so obscure and locked down that only Microsoft can maintain your computer. And they maintain it for their own benefit, at your expense, with mandatory ads and lockouts.
I disagree about how it used to be easy. And agree with everything else.
Ive used Windows since the 3.1 days (MSDOS as well?). Its never been “easy”. You just learn the magic spells on how to fix a printer, get the right drivers installed in JUST the right way, or which hardware magically doesn’t work for some reason and avoid it.
With Linux, at least we get good logs most of the time.
i remember my first family pc was a tandy sensation which had it’s own built in ui - winmate - because windows 3.1 program manager was so frustrating.
As a kid using XP, never had a single issue.
As a kid helping his family’s XP and 7 computers, I had faced plenty of issues.
My favorites:
- One computer (I think XP) didn’t use the correct resolution on Intel’s driver, and needed Windows’s fallback driver
- One computer (I think 7) required Windows’s fallback driver for audio, and Windows Update was installing VIA’s or Realtek’s drivers
One thing I have noticed a lot of lately is that people just don’t want to have to fucking read at all anymore and it kind of is wrecking my faith in humanity. Asking people to read isn’t a big ask.
“I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves.”
- Hayao Miyazaki
It’s not just reading, people don’t want to mentally engage with things. There are people who would rather read movie reviews than go watch a movie and form their own opinion on it.
Engaging with material will always require something of the audience. We can try to make things as accessible and easy to understand as possible, but that doesn’t “solve” the problem, it just lowers the bar. Lowering the bar isn’t bad, but it seems like the wrong strategy for the current era. I think a better strategy is attempting to foster and enthusiastic community at a local level. Get together with friends on the weekends and mess around with stuff in person, talk about it.
Every moment of our lives is filled with stimulation.
Every moment we aren’t forced to focus we disassociate to recover from the constant never ending focus.
We are Great Apes, huge fucking mammals, how do other huge apes spend their time? Literally napping and eating for most of the day. If you forced a fucking gorilla to work a 9-5 they would get zoochosis and all their hair would fall out and they would get depressed and die.
Our bodies and minds aren’t evolved enough to handle this rapidly complicating society, it’s stressing us out to the point where we lash out at each other and burn out.
Our society is to blame for all of the malbehavors.
We can try to make things as accessible and easy to understand as possible
That’s where we’re at now with social media. Things are super accessible, but shallow and often based on pure emotional appeal.
Asking people to read isn’t a big ask.
Yes, but asking them to read a large, technical manual that’s gonna put them several hours and multiple pages in for a single concept is.
People really do refuse to understand that telling someone to read x section of a manual is not that same as here is a manual that I haven’t checked to make sure actually contains the information you are looking for, good luck come back if you’ve read it three times and its actually not in there.
Make the manual super short, pretty, interactive, unobtrusive and spread it around the system contextually. Then users might “read” it.
Sounds like a great plan! The arch wiki is waiting for your help ❤️❤️❤️ looking forward to seeing a new take on the manuals 🥰
They’re basically describing a good GUI.
Sorry, I love Linux and wish everybody was on it but no way is Windows “just as hard”. Maybe if you want to look behind the curtain and start tinkering Linux is easier but on the face of it I’d say Linux is somewhere around early Windows XP when it comes to usability for a normal person.
If you had to install Windows every time you bought a PC you’d think that Linux and Windows are comparable. That is the issue, tbh. It’s not the RTFM; its because the average PC user had NEVER NEEDED to install an OS. Windows just comes preinstalled on 99% of consumer PCs! For the “year of Linux” to be a reality, there needs to be an easy way to get a retail PC with Linux preinstalled. When I show my Windows-only users my Linux laptop, how quickly it boots up, how many apps I have installed, how easy it is to install and update apps, etc., most say: “Oh wow! I can use this”. But when I demonstrate having to choose the boot loader, partition setup, etc., they say, “Nah! I’ll just go buy a laptop with Windows!”
Tech nerds have a really hard time understanding technophobia.
Yes everyone can use Linux if they just jump through the right hoops.
The average person does not ever want to jump through a single hoop EVER when it comes to learning a new tech.
Either it works or it isn’t worth the time/hassle to learn an entire world of information that is required to use different computers to the extent that linux nerds do.
Exactly!
Unfortunately, there needs to be a commercial/financial effort behind the mass adoption of Linux. The average person has no idea that an alternative to Windows or MacOS even exists because they have not seen it advertised on TV or mainstream social media.
These conversations on Linux communities on Lemmy and Mastodon are just us nerds yelling into our own echo chamber. The average person needs something that “just works” without having to read a book about how to set it up.
Well, we got Steam Deck on that front, so at least there’s something. Not a desktop, but a regular consumer device with Linux is still nice.
Steam Deck is a step in the right direction, but the manufacturer does not highlight the fact that it runs Linux.
Most people don’t realize that they are probably using Linux daily already. If they have a fire TV stick, or Android phone, or a smart speaker, etc.Android is not Linux, it only uses (modified) Linux kernel. Android experience is not transferable to any other Linux distro. While Steam Deck’s is. You’re not saying your smart bulb runs Linux just because it uses its kernel.
Windows install is way simpler than that. Thing is, so is Linux with most major distros, unless of course you’re doing something more advanced. It sounds like you’re being way more technical than you need to, and it’s scaring people off.
No, tbh it is.
The thing is that windows has “become the standard”
Where options are, how to fix any problems? You learn windows like you learn a language. German and danish isn’t too different, but if you grew up with danish it’s going to be harder to learn german.
i picked up linux mint in a weekend; it was incredibly easy to come over from windows.
I’d say Linux is somewhere around early Windows XP when it comes to usability for a normal person.
I was confused until it struck me that maybe you don’t consider Windows XP the peak of operating system user interface design.
I’ll admit, Vista really messed with my perspective.
I can’t decide if I prefer XP or 7 I never actually daily drove XP at home because I am too young but I remember it being great on the school computers.
Windows XP? So then Linux is as usable as the best version of windows.
Not even close. Most hardware issues I had were with Windows. Additionally, that thing gets slow over time, no matter what you do. If you use it often, it’ll get to an unusable state in a year or two. And you can’t do anything about it except fresh reinstall. It spies on you so much even Google could learn from them. And nowadays it even has ads. You pay for the OS and then you still have ads, classy. And as a bonus, all the spying and ads are so unoptimised that they make your computer slower.
I know some of the issue is the manuals themselves are out of date. Ive literally had to have something explained to me via the developers Discord. I hate going to a projects Discord in order to find out crucial info.
Sometimes manuals are in 5 different places so you don’t know what applies to your specific system.
I usually try and improve the manuals when I do come across this with a quick PR, when I have time.
Lol or one of an app’s dependencies gets an update, but it takes 2 weeks for the updated flatpak app to be downloadable.
Linux isn’t hard anymore because I have ChatGPT to come up with all the command lines for me. And they work 60% of the time!
Write the kernel like a worm virus so it has self-maintenance and also self-replicates, spreading Linux to every connected machine it can. 🤡
I think that spreading Windows across Linux machines is easier. Linux’s root can be remounted as tmpfs, allowing the boot drive to be re-imaged. I don’t know if Windows can do that.
You might be able to do that with Windows Update
I bet Windows Updates are signed. Uncovering the signing key would probably have serious consequences.
Third party software can also use Windows update as I’ve done it in the past
One of my main problems with Linux is the obsessive amount of text things have to learn or understand it, I have to sig around online for someone who doesn’t say rtfm because the manual is extremely long and it’s usually a pretty small easy problem. Or I find someone who has the problem and no response or a response that doesn’t work in the current version. It took me a couple of days to setup my home Linux entertainment system because of these reasons.
Accessibility matters,it’s good to have proper documentation and it also good to make it accessible to everyone and not just the hardcore Linux people.
One of the things I had problems with is with my laptop turning off my external display with the lid was closed, took me a couple of days to find it was in some text file in systemd instead of idk in the power settings?
Linux is hard and it’s not user friendly. But better then Windows for me at least, mainly because Linux has more accessibility options now then windows.
