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Comment by sascha_sl | Hacker News Reader

It's a very long way to say "no, I don't want UX to get better, why don't you instead join us and become a linux nerd, from 0 to 100". It also implies these are the things that make Linux good over macOS and Windows, when I can think of a lot of other benefits, including essentially eternal support for a wide range of hardware, the best printing stack (sharing that with macOS somewhat), independence from Microsoft and Apple, extreme customizability of any component of the OS and choice in who to trust with putting together your base system (aka distro).

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I think tiling WMs in particular are somewhat overplayed. They’re amazing tools for a certain class of users with a particular workflow and set of tendencies, but they get awkward for most users outside of that set.

As a multi-OS user of 20+ years and developer of 15+ years they’ve never worked well for me. A more traditional floating WM with light optional tiling functions (think Aero Snap or Moom/Magnet/etc on macOS) has been more productive for me. With tiling I always end up with some windows being oddly sized and unusable, or half my windows being in floating mode which defeats much of the point of a tiling WM.

There's a lot of companies working on the UX for Linux.

There's Ubuntu, ElementaryOS, Zorin...

They're not for me though, as what I care about is pretty contrary to the idea of mainstream. I don't really care whether Linux makes it to the mainstream or not, why should that be everyone's goal?

The lack of a unified direction might seems like a weakness of Linux but it's also its biggest strength. It's the reason it's the most used OS in the world now, when you include servers and Android devices. It's just so easy to adapt if you want to do something different.

So let the techies do their techie stuff and let the mainstream OS vendors focus on their users :)

There is a companion argument linked in the first paragraph which lays out what desktop Linux needs to focus on to be better for beginners. The article you're responding to is giving advice to beginners who want to get value out of Linux today, given that desktop Linux has not yet managed to make itself better for beginners.

The current state of desktop Linux is that there's a category of Linux software that is suitable for beginners, which is built atop the set of features that make Linux excellent for the people who put the amount of time into learning the operating system that is appropriate for learning a professional tool. But this category of software (the GNOME and KDE desktop environments and 3rd party software intended to run inside one or the other) doesn't do much to ease the process of learning the deeper, more compelling aspects of Linux. It provides you with an interface that's recognizable to Mac and Windows users, but doesn't provide nearly as much power, and then expects you to learn Linux in all its depth to make up for that difference in capabilities.

That makes Linux great for people who just need a web browser and maybe an email client, and it makes Linux great for people who have enough background technical knowledge to learn all its depth, but leaves it vastly inferior for everyone who needs more than a Chromebook but doesn't need a professional tool. If you fall into that category today and want to use Linux anyway, you need to learn its depths, and expect that until you do, it will be worse than the OS you're coming from.

If we want to improve the situation, we need either go all the way and make GNOME just as powerful as macOS (which is a fools errand), or make GNOME better integrated into what Linux is already great at and ease the transition.

Would you mind expanding on what does MacOS provide to the user category you describe that e.g. Linux+GNOME doesn't?

A starting point would be to stop trying to eliminate menubars and awkwardly sweeping the remaining unremovable menus into “junk drawer” hamburger menus. Under macOS the menubar is a huge boon for a few reasons:

- It improves discoverability for any given app’s functionality immensely, as the menubar acts as a universal searchable index of functions

- It provides an easy way to see the key shortcuts for any function

- It provides a hook-point for the system to allow the user to set custom key shortcuts for any menu item in any app, even if the app’s developer never provided that capability

GNOME is pretty great in a lot of ways but its phobia of menus can be grating as a power user.

I mostly agree. But that's only true for the very small subset of GNOME's own applications for which the little set of actions provided by the hamburger menu is enough.

I doubt they ever had the strength to push for a osx-style global menubar (or this hamburger menu thing) for the whole desktop. Too much fragmentation, too many toolkits, too many partners pushing their own user experience.

It’s so sad that none of these complaints used to be applicable to Gnome and GTK.

I would say those are all very much the things that make linux bad for new users.

This article feels like it was written in 2015.

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