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Comment by bharathyes | Hacker News Reader

Many customisations are not possible in Windows let alone requesting any specific feature from the devs.

In cases where I had ti seek forumn help in windows three common scenario were: 1. Well known bug with a simple fix that user has to make.

2. Well known bug that has a weird work around or hacky reg edit.

3. No idea what the cause is and you just reinstall and hope it doesnt reoccur.

And the ltt video was an obsolute joke because they made little to no effort to learn anything about Linux and operated it like they do windows. of course it was such a bad experience. that's what most reaction I saw was too. if you are great at driving automatic but decided to just drive a stick without putting any effort to learn its specific details or the different, that will end horribly. Cant blame the stick car is terrible.

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> And the ltt video was an obsolute joke because they made little to no effort to learn anything about Linux and operated it like they do windows.

The point of the video was to approach desktop Linux in a way similar to how your average layman might (which when considering the dominance of Windows probably means using it like it’s Windows) to see if it’s ready for the less-technical masses.

It might sound silly but this is the exact sort of test that desktop Linux needs to pass with flying colors if it’s to have any hope of gaining traction beyond the extremes of the technically capable minority and grandparent who only needs a box with a browser capable of checking their Yahoo email.

Hopefully the layman isn't Linus enough to type "Yes, do as I say!" without reading what they're doing...

Yeah, no, he read what he was doing, but the "packages to be removed: Gnome, X.org server,..." warning doesn't mean anything to anyone who just wants to use a computer to play games instead of compiling his own kernel.

Get out of your techie bubble and go see how actual non-GNU humans use computers to get a sense of how poor some SW can be at communicating information to clueless users and how little interest clueless users have to learn the nitty gritty things about their machines. They just want to play games or whatever.

In fairness, the literal next line of text up on his screen read "You are about to do something potentially harmful", verbatim. That's why people memed on him, not because he doesn't know what Xorg or GNOME is.

The non-techie folks are fun but they mostly just complain about their iPhones changing overnight and a bad Windows driver update. It's nice to just sorta be done with that rat race and focus on free software, if it's all the same to you.

>"You are about to do something potentially harmful"

That doesn't mean anything anymore. Such omenous warnings pop up everywhere, even when installing legitimate drivers and applications or updating your software, that at one point you desanitize yourself and just click Yes, Next and Accept to everything to finish the installation and start pwning some n00bs in your vidja games.

Blaming the user here is stupid, especially since Linus was following the instructions he found online, which is exactly what most users would do, even if one of the steps throws an omenous warning.

As a clueless user coming from Windows you don't expect that a Steam installation should lead to the uninstalling of your desktop environment and display server, since on Windows these are part of the core OS and no amount of fuckery can remove them. This is a massive barrier to entry for new users on Linux.

That's why Valve threw in the towel on convincing people to install Linux on their PCs and instead sold them a PC based console with Linux preinstalled and already configured to run games. Linux on the mainstream home PC is a dream that even Linus Torvalds said won't happen.

I'm not strongmanning the idea that everyone should abandon MacOS and Windows. It would be nice for those companies to lose their control over computing, but I can't move the needle either way. I use Linux on the server though, and it works fine for my desktop too. It's a better enthusiast platform than either MacOS or Windows, and it lets me avoid messy workarounds at work like Colima and WSL.

I'll happily blame Linus and his vidya-addled brain if that's what you want to blame it on. I suppose that's why kids ate the Tide pods, after all.

> Such omenous warnings pop up everywhere, even when installing legitimate drivers and applications or updating your software

Case in point, Microsoft Excel throws a big scary warning every time you open a file and enable editing mode. For completely basic usage, Microsoft throws in the towel and claims that anything bad happens is on you. Why should anyone expect users to take these messages seriously?

>the ltt video was an obsolute joke because they made little to no effort to learn anything about Linux and operated it like they do windows. of course it was such a bad experience.

If you need to grow a neckbeard to operate the computer, that is a terrible operating system.

It's not about growing a neckbeard. Sometimes you have to unlearn the habits you picked on one side of the fence.

If you took the same attitude towards other platforms, the result would be same.

I can use one coffee maker like any other coffee maker, one toaster like any other toaster.

Even Windows and MacOS are largely interchangable at the appliance level.

Linux and its desire to neckbeardify its users is its undoing.

Go ahead and try running setup.exe on a mac. Let us know the results, whether you have seen the nice wizard interface.

Yes, sometime you have to adjust.

>Go ahead and try running setup.exe on a mac

Except Linus wasn't trying to run steam.exe on Linux, but instead trying to install the official (borked) Linux Steam package shipped with his Pop_OS ISO, which happened to completely nuke the desktop environment and display server, landing him in a tty.

And of course the Pop_OS team was quick to blame Linus for being an idiot and not knowing he should first open a terminal and go `sudo apt-update && sudo apt-upgrade` before installing anything, instead of expecting packages shipped with the OS to just work(TM) and not nuke your system.

Bugs happen, Linux distros aren't exception.

Linus was warned, that something wrong is going to happen and whether he really, really wants to proceed. He did. Without even reading what apt is complaining about.

The bug in Windows updater that wiped out users profile dirs with all documents inside didn't warn in a similar way. Yet, we are not harping about it all the time. We all understand that it was a bug, just like that borked steam package.

>Without even reading what apt is complaining about.

How many users switching from Windows do you think will read about apt when they've been sold the idea that Linux is now great for gaming?

>its desire to neckbeardify its users is its undoing.

Uh, no, because Linux isn't currently, nor was it ever in the past, successful or appealing because of how much it caters to normal users.

It's been successful and appealing based on how much it caters to techies (my earlier post).

That Steam decided to support gaming on Linux is why its market share among Steam users has fluctuated around 1% and why Linus Tech Tips did an exploration video about it, but if you're already measuring Linux's success based on how many "non-neckbeards" use it, it's already undone, and it was always undone (and, if anything, arguably getting slightly less undone, as its ease of use for and popularity among normal people has grown significantly over the last 10 years). :p

The number of new OSX users with OSes that had slowed down to a crawl, because the users came from Windows and thought closing the Window closed the app, I have seen…

Correction: it's a terrible OS for normal people.

Linux is, and perhaps always will be, an engineering OS. It's much better for development and IT than Windows, and Windows is worse than Linux for development or IT, precisely because the trade off of designing for normal people vs. designing for techies.

The funny part comes out in the rare instances that Linux beats Windows in normal person terms: KDE is way better than Windows's DE, and Dolphin (the file manager made for free by like five Dutch guys) makes Explorer look like a joke. (That's because Microsoft doesn't prioritize those normal end user facets, ironically.)

But, in general, as a techie (neckbeard haver?) who prioritizes techie things more than non-techie consumer things, you'll be way happier by learning Linux (especially truly learning it -- we're talkin' Arch). Then, as frosting, you have the abstract, philosophical stuff like "I'm not slaved to a callous all-devouring corporation", "I'm using free software wow" etc.

No one makes this distinction because the conversation is de facto shifted over into the reductive premise that "Linux is worse than Windows" vs. the somewhat fantastical premise that you can dump enough GUIs on Linux to make it as good as Windows for normal end users. But we're in a thread titled "GNOME 44", so I guess that tracks. :D

It will come the day that GNU/Linux is better than Windows for any kind of graphical development activities.

In my teens all I wanted was customization. Now that I want to have a social life and I actually have things I want to get done other than staying up until 4am customizing my Gentoo install, I’m starting to believe that customizations are overrated. Not saying we shouldn’t have them, but we should stop bringing that up to as an excuse of why things are ok being left alone with all the wiring exposed. Just a personal view that I feel I can support with Apple’s sale numbers.

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