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Comment by rossdavidh | Hacker News Reader

The last time my wife's laptop died, I convinced her to give a Linux laptop from System76 a try. Then, when her store's Windows box died, I convinced her (and her business partner) to give Linux a try there. My daughter, 20, has a Linux laptop as well (although in order to get Adobe Creative Suite for school she still has to own a Windows desktop, thanks Adobe). None of these people were interested in software freedom, so their patience for problems during the switch was pretty minimal, and they all switched, and stayed switched. If you buy something like System76 that has Linux pre-installed, and help out with something like Spotify that is possible to install on Linux but not completely trivial, it is not so difficult to convince people anymore.

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I want to second this point, but from a different experience. I'm definitely a linux "evangelist", in that I've convinced a lot of friends to switch over. But the biggest thing that's enabled me to convince people to give linux a try is... linux has changed.

Linux is just much easier to use than it was a decade ago. Much simpler than ever 5 years ago.

A decade ago I'd have to fret over updating a nvidia driver and wonder if I'm going to spend a few hours or more recovering my display. God, there were so many pains. They helped me learn a lot and helped me gain mastery, but that's not for everyone.

But now, projects like SteamOS, System76, EndeavourOS, Manjaro, PopOS, and others have really moved the space in usability. Things have just changed. There's more effort than ever being put into linux and with that comes a lot of people willing to put effort into design. I think it is easy to lose sight of design when resources are scarce, but it is also important for drawing people into the cause.

Now the biggest problem of getting people to switch is actually with the nerdy/techy friends. They have heard too much about how linux is difficult and all that stuff. They are judging by the state of where things were than where things are now. Whereas for the most part a normal person switching to linux will have a similar experience as if they were switching from Windows to Mac or vise versa. There's pain points and a lot of "why is this here and not there" stuff, but things are very doable. But this initial learning curve can also put many people off (just like switching between Windows and Mac or Android and iPhone). But it is harder to make that transition when you have confirmation bias on your side.

> linux has changed

Windows has changed too, their bad practices are increasing and the public perception is suffering by that.

Agreed. This has also made it easier to get people to switch. This Windows 11 stuff has been great for Linux adoption

I read a comment on a forum recently that I'll just leave here:

"Windows 11 is a hate crime."

It's truly shocking to live in a world where linux is a better option in every category over windows.[0]

I really never thought I'd see this day. I can't decide if this is a great win for OSS, or an incredible loss for the common folk. Either way, the world will be a far better place without Windows 11 or Microsoft in general.

[0] I consider a lack of kernel malware 'anti-cheat' a feature, not a bug. Adobe as well.

> It's truly shocking to live in a world where linux is a better option in every category over windows.

For people who have been using Linux for decades, it is not so shocking.

Definitely frustrating it has taken so lone.

I think a little of both?

I think the problem is really down to monopoly abuse, or green. The Apple lawsuit is a good example of this. They want 30% of in app purchases but... why? An iPhone only has value because of its apps. (Just like how a computer's real value is its ability to run programs) Specifically, apps that Apple didn't also create. You could pay people for those apps and Apple would still benefit. Seems like a lot of these big companies are making categorically similar mistakes. They only can do this because users don't (meaningfully) have other choices.

I'd love to see OSS win, but not because CSS has abused their customers. I wish the fight was over the value of the product. I guess that means I wish profits were more dependent on product value. Shame we conflate market value with product value.

The Adobe Suite and those multiplayer games with kernel-level anticheat are probably the two things holding up the Windows’ crumbling empire. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Microsoft pays those companies a boatload of money to remain effectively Windows-exclusive.

There was a great write-up that resurfaced on HN yesterday on specifically why anti-cheat on linux is so difficult. It has nothing to do with companies paying a boatload of money.

Adobe, I can't comment on

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44980064

Isn't the current CoD anti cheat system also flagging Valorant as cheating software because of Valorant's anti cheat?[0]

Fundamentally the problem with any anti cheat system is that it is indistinguishable from a root kit. You're giving software full privileges to your machine with the ability to edit your kernel, inspect running processes, and inject code into running processes. I'm not saying there's no situations where you don't want a program to be able to do this but you should be extremely cautious about doing so because that program essentially owns your machine.

Put it this way. Suppose you trust those game companies and their anti cheat software. Do you trust that this software will never be hacked? I mean we're talking about an extremely high profile target with wide adoption. Sounds like you're adding a pretty valuable target that's worth far more to hackers than it is to the game studios. I mean we're talking about the same game studios that let easily solvable but game breaking bugs persist for years. Even ones where the community has provided patches for...

[0] <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/battlefield-6-and-valorant...>

> It's truly shocking to live in a world where linux is a better option in every category over windows.

I'm pretty sure it trounces Linux (for some value of whatever you think "Linux" actually is) on Accessibility. This is an area that could be vastly improved.

Hardware has changed too. Previously installing from CDs only spinning hard drives was a big investment in time. Now I'm really not scared of doing a fresh install, its often so easy I can switch distros without much trouble.

I'd add that computing has changed in the last 5 years as well. The amount of actual apps a typical user installs is minimal. You really just need a web browser for most tasks, and obviously Linux can provide that.

Besides drivers for some weird hardware, the only daily application might be an office suite, which OSS still can't quite match the MS offering. However, I've found many are willing to deal with the differences given the licensing cost of Office.

Another aspect is that Windows has gotten so terrible and distracting.

Absolutely. The year of linux on the desktop was probably somewhere around 2020.

I'd argue 2017: that was the year Chromebooks first outsold Macs in the USA.

(I know, the fanboys and penguin Taliban will rage that ChromeOS is not the True Linux, etc., but ignore them.)

Two things are non-obvious about this info.

1. The numbers are by value not by units. An average Mac is about 5x the cost of the average Chromebook.

2. This is long pre-COVID. The pandemic was very good for Chromebook sales and they've slackened off since, but the boom began well before.

Yes, I'm with you - Chromebooks are the first successful Linux Desktop.

To anyone doubting it - Google supports installing Debian apps on Chromebooks, via crostini. That's how I run Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice and a number of other things on a Chromebook. The integration is pretty good - when you install a Debian desktop app, it's ICON appears in the list of apps you can run from the Chromebooks launch button.

It's a very good setup for my wife. The Chromebook is cheap, the UI is simple, the Google ecosystem just works when you need it, and all the desktop apps are still available.

It's not perfect, and it needs at lease 8G of RAM which is a high end Chromebook. This years crostini release was a big leap in stability. It went from the occasional Debian application crash (requiring a restart of the VM) to not stopping as far as I can tell. It's a pity the upgrade destroyed the VM, losing every file in there. Not nice, Google. There are still paper cuts, but a future were I choose "Chromebook" as my window manager for a 16GB Snapdragon X looked possible.

Or it did, until Google announced they were replacing ChromeOS with Android. But now, maybe, using Android as a Windows Manager for Debian on Snapdragon X might be in my future.

Thanks for that.

Yep, I have given my wife an old (but high-spec: i7, 16GB) Dell Latitude with ChromeOS Flex as her desktop. She seems to like it more than the MacBook Pro she had before, because it's simpler.

I discovered ChromeOS Flex can't play movie files. So I installed VLC in the Debian session. Now, when she clicks on any movie file, VLC opens automatically and it just plays. I didn't have to do any configuration; ChromeOS just knows that there's an app installed that can play filetypes including .MOV, .MP4, .AVI etc and it Just Works™.

I also agree re the Android move. I wrote about it:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/16/android_replacing_chr...

I like the current ChromeOS. I am concerned by the change.

I recently took the opportunity to get my 80 yr old mother to try out Popos after her old X200 finally stated glitching (and could not update to win 11).

She has been using windows since 3.1 days (and dos before that), but recently has been having so many issues with windows changing interfaces and dark patterns. The cognitive load has gotten all too much, and with so many of her friends being scammed online, her and her group are now scared of using computers.

Anyway, Popos is a breath of fresh air for her. The interface is predictable and constant, nothing pesters for her attention, and background stuff stays in the background. She can just use it when she wants for what she wants and it doesn't need constant attention and learning.

what's wrong with the web app

In my experience web apps are almost always worse than native apps unless the native app is just a wrapper around a web app.

The native Spotify app is just a wrapper around the web app though.

This is decidedly untrue.

Even for apps where that is true, sometimes the wrapper adds some features that it doesn't have running in a browser tab. For example, the Discord electron app can get hotkeys when it's not focused (useful for push to talk/mute when playing a game), but not when you run it in a browser.

> a wrapper around the web app

All Electron apps are.

It is generally true regarding the intent of the platform owner (the app is supposed to be better, they'll put efforts into it).

The funny part being, you might still want the web version to apply extensions on it. Youtube for instance is a lot better with the auto-dub features and title translations off, but it won't be possible in the native app as Google is actively forcing those on us. I don't use Spotify, but would advise looking it it.

Spicetify offers a much better experience than web+extensions. And of course, you can use alternate, lightweight clients based on 'librespot' instead.

It locks out a bunch of features

It doesn't show up as a separate task. I have to go to Firefox and find the window. It's not as easy as an alt-tab and gets lost in all my other web apps that are in my browser.

Chrome+Firefox support pulling tabs out as individual apps, with a separate window icon + launcher

well, Firefox did, until Mozilla (of course) removed it

Chrome still supports it

Secunding blibble's comment, the wrapper mode works fine in Chrome, and links will open in the standard Chrome instance so there is little downsides UX wise.

Extensions aren't as accessible if you use them a lot, and of course you're stuck with Chrome though.

to be honest I don't know, I don't use Spotify much, but apparently for my wife it was a dealbreaker so I gritted my teeth and dived in, but then as I recall it was actually not hard to install at all. HOWEVER, IIRC, it involved typing something into a terminal¸ and for a lot of people that is also a complete dealbreaker for whatever reason.

> for a lot of people that is also a complete dealbreaker for whatever reason

Seems like a perfectly reasonable dealbreaker to me. Terminal commands are a raw UI that is neither intuitive nor discoverable -- someone must either read documentation (man pages, tutorials, blog posts, etc) to learn the behavior and syntax or they must blindly copy strings from a trusted source.

There's a reason most stories of nontechnical people using software like Linux always seem to include an expert friend, family member, or IT person in the background.

You're not wrong, but in this case I believe all I had to do was copy the line of text and paste it into a terminal (it's a while ago so I might be misremembering). But, given that is what people are doing, it does raise the question of whether requiring them to copy and paste is actually any more secure than allowing click-to-install...

> whether requiring them to copy and paste is actually any more secure than allowing click-to-install...

Agreed. If your operating system requires that you occasionally search for instructions and copy-and-paste executable strings from the internet, that seems less efficient, less learnable, and less secure than any GUI I know of.

Perhaps at some point terminals will bake in an LLM as an intermediary to convert between human-readable instructions and terminal commands, and then we just have to worry about the alignment of those LLMs...

There are 2 things here to note which explain why.

* Most distros offer multiple desktops. This is true of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Arch, etc.

Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop. Shell instructions work on all of them.

* GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted. They must be performed by the user. But most people do not know the difference between buttons and spinners and input boxes. It's very very hard to write specific instructions for people who lack the vocabulary for GUI controls.

I speak as a former docs writer.

> Point-and-click instructions are limited to only 1 desktop...

If a consumer product (computer, phone, TV, microwave, printer, radio, oven, washing machine, etc) requires reading through more than a quick start guide to access the advertised functionality, then it has failed as a consumer product.

> GUI instructions can't be copied and pasted

Training my nontechnical friends and relatives to copy, paste, and execute terminal commands they found on the internet does not strike me as a very good alternative.

Your comment is correct but it's a response to an entirely different and orthogonal point which I did not propose and wouldn't try to.

As such I can answer in several different ways which try to approach the point you're making, but they can only do it by trying to nudge your comment slightly back in the direction of "how things really are".

Point 1:

Why what you're saying does not address the real situation.

The thing is that about 99% of Linux distributions are not products.

They are the collaborative efforts of many small teams of volunteers. In rare instances, a few of them are collaborative efforts of large teams of paid engineers. However most of those are server OSes where UI is not a factor.

(The real competitive criteria of paid server distros are things like "what certifications do you have?" and "how long will you provide patches for?" They're nothing to do with its technical capabilities. That's why the paid enterprise distros are much smaller, much simpler, and technologically far inferior to free ones.)

They are not products, and they are definitely not CONSUMER products.

Point 2:

How to do easy end user 3rd party apps on Linux: prohibit them.

There is an easy answer to the question of "software installation on a consumer Linux desktop." There's only one consumer Linux desktop. It's ChromeOS. And you can't install native software. There is no native software.

(Some ChromeBooks can run Android apps but they are not native.)

Note, this product outsells all free distros by, conservatively, 10-20x over.

So this is clearly not a handicap.

Point 3:

Docs are really hard and don't pay.

I've written product documentation as my paid full-time job for 4-5 years.

Nobody reads it by choice, and it's expensive to produce, which is why consumer products mostly don't come with any now. You may get a quick-start guide and most customers ignore that.

This is why the only desktop Linux with users in the hundreds of millions is so stripped-down you can't install apps on it.

Point 4:

The real context here.

Given these aren't products and aren't for consumers, what we get is sub-optimal but it really is not bad these days.

> Your comment is correct but it's a response to an entirely different and orthogonal point which I did not propose and wouldn't try to.

You're right, I was mixing up threads, I apologize. Your original point seems to be that it's less effort for a Linux distribution to write documentation for shell commands than for them to create a GUI and write the same level of documentation for that GUI, right? If so, I agree, and I understand why a volunteer-driven project would take this route.

However, two points:

First, a properly-designed GUI should require less documentation in the first place.

More importantly, I don't see how this refutes my original point that running shell commands copied from the internet is less efficient, learnable, and secure for end-users than using comparable functionality through a GUI.

Again, I understand why distros take this route, I'm merely pointing out that it is less efficient, learnable, and secure. With respect to the four points in your last post I agree so I'm not sure there's much worth discussing there.

> Your original point seems to be that it's less effort for a Linux distribution to write documentation for shell commands than for them to create a GUI and write the same level of documentation for that GUI, right?

Er, no, not at all. TBH I am puzzled by this interpretation. I had nothing like that in mind, no.

Of course, it's not 'intuitive', but I firmly believe that the actual process of using just about any CLI package manager is easier to use than a GUI-installer approach. By "easier" I mean more streamlined, and a more standardized process. Every single time I install a piece of software on my machine with my package manager, I do it exactly the same way, with literally zero different steps taken. The same cannot be said for GUI-based installers. Surely the former would be a better experience for most home PC users?

I think it depends on how you define "easier". Once someone learns how to use the requisite terminal commands and does so frequently enough that they do not forget them, I agree that it is significantly faster and more consistent.

> Surely the former would be a better experience for most home PC users?

Our experiences with home PC users must be qualitatively different.

I have trouble getting the PC users I help to remember the name of their web browser or to understand the difference between a webpage and an application. And of the few people I know who might be able to learn how to use the terminal, none have the slightest interest in devoting time to doing so -- they would prefer to use their computer time doing actual work or playing computer games than wasting it learning how to do computer admin tasks more efficiently.

The prospect of teaching anyone but a fraction of a fraction of a percent of PC users to successfully run terminal commands seems so removed from the realm of possibility I have trouble imagining it. Maybe I could see it catching on with an LLM as an intermediary to actually structure the commands?

I wonder what OS you were trying.

For most, it would be:

1. Open the app or software store

2. Type "spotify"

3. Click "install"

If it doesn't, then it's not a distro for non-techie end-users.

You don't need to type anything into a terminal with gnome and KDE software center supporting snaps and flatpaks which make installing proprietary software as easy as anything else.

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