this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
1668 points (96.3% liked)
linuxmemes
23985 readers
1636 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
- Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
5. π¬π§ Language/ΡΠ·ΡΠΊ/Sprache
- This is primarily an English-speaking community. π¬π§π¦πΊπΊπΈ
- Comments written in other languages are allowed.
- The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
- Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
6. (NEW!) Regarding public figures
We all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations. - Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
- We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
- Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed. Β
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The main problem still is that for some configuration you still need to use the CLI, the average user does not want to touch that no matter how powerful it is, they want a fully functional GUI that lets you so exactly the same thing but by clicking on buttons. Pair that with drivers that either do not exist or will not work for (some) of your hardware, odd crashed like the Bluetooth stack crapping out and not working anymore until you restart the system, or the system that hangs from hibernation with a black screen. So unless those hurdles are tackled the Linux adoption rate will stay low because the average user wants a system that works, and not one they have to debug.
I've been on and off different distros of Linux since Ubuntu 6 using Pop_OS! as my daily driver for work a few years now, and the same problems I had then are still here today which is a shame honestly.
At this point this is just misinformation... you can easily live and configure everything an "average user" would via GUI in Ubuntu (and most of it's derivatives) or anything running KDE Plasma as a desktop
The reason must of us still CHOOSE to use CLI is because it's powerful but unless you are crazy as I am and running Hyprland as a daily driver, you really do not need CLI...
PS: I fucking love Hyprland! hehehehe
The average user wants their problem gone. And will use whatever helps. Windows users were editing register and editing ini files since Windows was an addon to DOS, and continue doing it. For a literate person there is absolutely nothing more inheritly more intuitive or easy in clicking a checkbox in a fifth submenu than entering a command in a console. Stop perpetuating this weird myth.
This is correct. I work with the "average user" of technology daily as IT support, and honestly, they don't give any shits at all about why it's messed up, or what needs to be done to correct the problem. Box broken, make fix.
The argument that I think the poster is trying to make is that, if a user needs to do any self troubleshooting, which is basically inevitable with technology at the moment, having to use a CLI to get things done is undesirable for the average person. They barely want to bother opening control panel in Windows (or the new "settings" app.... Ugh.) nevermind understand any of it.
Box broken. Make fix.
It's not a weird myth, have you ever worked with average users? Some of them have trouble opening a PDF or don't know how to import a CVS file in Excel. Power users have always been tinkering in their OS that's nothing new, but I'm talking about the average Joe.
People you described don't have better or worse time with different types of user interfaces, it's all incomprehensible to them. Average Joe with zero skills can't check boxes in some weird menus, just as they can't write text in a weird black box. We're talking about people who are at least a little curious about their OS.
It's not a myth though. How do you know what to type in a CLI? You either google it or you read the man pages and god help you if you have to do that because they are not noob accessible documents. What do you do in a GUi? You either google it or you read plain words that are low in technical information on the screen in the menu labeled after what you want to change. GUIs exist for a reason. They brought in the masses for a reason. Pretending that they aren't easier is a demonstrably wrong position.
What is that reason? To obfuscate what is really happening? To make it difficult to support a computer because it takes 20 pages of pictures and a flow chart to explain something when a person could just copy paste a single line? I don't buy that gui's are easier or intuitive, or all that useful every time.
I don't see any difference ~~googling~~ using a decent search engine for one over the other.
And lets not forget that windows is a confusing mess of self help support pages and command line entries for almost everything that goes wrong.
Windows: "PROGRAM_NAME experienced an error: DEEZ_NUTZ"
Yep that's what we're calling a useful error prompt these days. So much better than Linux lol
"I'm sowwy, something went wrong :(". No logs, no error message, no nothing.
God I hate it so much.
You can definitely have your opinion. But seeing how so many people have a hard time switching to Linux because of this particular issue, I'd say your position on the subject is quesionable. There are hordes more people on Windows and Mac because they made things easier through accessible software. A large part of that was the GUI.
Because it came with their computer. I have not used a command line at all on two laptops over the past year. It is the exception not the rule these days.
However I have had to use the command line many, many times with Windows. Which is fine, it is MUCH easier to do this "Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted" instead of trying to find the gui to deal with it.
Most people I know that are on Windows are there for two reasons: they either have no idea what they're doing, they bought a laptop that had Windows on it already, they have a flowchart of buttons to press to achieve results, and when interface changes, they are in panic and I need to come to them to make a new flowchart. Or they're using Windows for the last two decades, never tried anything else, and know about Linux from random comments on the internet that scare them into believing that evil Linux is completely incomprehensible.
My wife is an English teacher. When we got her a new laptop, instead of buying Windows, I installed Arch (I use Arch btw), which is wildly considered the most evil of the evil Linuxes, and believe it or not, she is completely happy with it (well, as happy as one can be using a computer). The amount of times she needs my help with some random bullshit OS throws at her decreased since she learned a bit about how stuff works. Even using terminal to input some commands turned out not to require wast amount of knowledge like some people imply.
The same way you know where the setting you're after located. As my little experiment showed it's not obvious if your problem isn't trivial. And if it's trivial, you can be sure it's trivial on every modern OS.
If you spend a fraction of time you spent learning your GUI on learning the set of commands you have, it will be very easy for you. There is autocomplete and there are various helps, and there are conventions a lot of the software follows. If you're literate, it's fine.
It's funny you listing out that experiment, because that's more akin to the bullshit I run into with Linux when I need to fix some weird ass quirk. Tons if incorrect or outdated information, and forum assholes calling people idiots for not knowing and refusing to help or being autistically pedantic because you misspelled something. Support on either platform is a garbage experience. I haven't denied that at all.
It's a curse of the tech world. There are always some bullshit problems, there is always the need for tuning, tinkering, and generally fucking around with your system. No matter the OS, you will encounter some non-trivial problem at some point, that's just the price of complexity. At least Linux is made for that and is opensource.
Yeah, that sums up my experience quite well.
I'd argue that as Windows continues to abandon its (relatively) sane configuration UI for the newer useless Settings screens, it has reached the point where it really is sometimes easier to just look up what you need to do in Powershell.
This problem is only getting worse over time, so I don't think it's fair to hand the win to Windows.