this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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In general:
W11: fire up office, oops wait, it wants to set itself as default and for some reason needs you to buy a one drive subscription for that. How about some copilot? Are you sure? How about we wrap it in edge? Oh, but you can install Libreoffice by all means, but it’s not going to be the default app right? RIGHT?!!!
Oh you want to save the file to your harddrive? Look, how do I put this,… there is no more harddrive.
Linux: type one line in the terminal and there you go. Write a novel if you want.
Ironic that now Linux is the more "just works" os.
It’s bad Windows gets so much bad press these days, the longer they stay in denial the better
Unfortunately, it goes more like this...
Linux: type one line in the terminal? Lose 98% of the potential userbase.
The masses hate the terminal, for some reason, and it scares them away.
If you are doing stuff in Linux that requires the terminal, you were probably making edits to the registry in Windows or pasting in wild powershell lines from online guides.
No need for 98% of the user base to ever touch the terminal. Open whatever software store comes with your distro, click install next to whatever you want.
The only exception to that is that sometimes, when a trusted person is supporting you through something, giving them a line to paste into a terminal might be quicker than walking them through all the clicks of a gui. Sometimes.
I don't understand the obsession with presenting the terminal as "the best way". There are literally app stores on every Linux distro for normies to use. Installing LibreOffice from Flatpak in Discover is literally "Search" and "Click Install".
For those of us who love using the terminal......sure......but that's not most people.
Yeah but fortunately is 98% of the masses will never have to touch the terminal at all. Unless they get curious. Hell my girl and boys have been on Linux for several years and they have no issues touching anything and doing anything like a standard operating system. Anything more advanced they just hand me the computer and I take care of. I've introduced other customers and people to Linux re-image laptops and desktops and servers to it and they've never had any issues running it without even worrying about the command line.
for some reason...
several.
mostly conditioning by their abuser pretending to be their salvation. atrophying their potential and capacity and curiosity, deluding them about the challenge and diminishing their curiosity, hiding from them their growing empowerment, terrifying them about calamities technical and social with slippery slope fallacies, all both subconsciously and overtly. + the biases implanted inside the controlled user-lock-in bubble.
You're the type that saw the iPhone's first release and thought, "It's stupid to use my finger to touch stuff on the screen. Just use the tactile direction buttons like an intelligent person would."
So close and so far.
I'm the sort of person who has had wacom tablets since the 90s, and many a penabled and/or multitouch thinkpad nearly multiple decades, and has not had a mobile phone since the Snowden confirmation in 2013. And before that, yes, my phones had full physical keyboards (nokia e90, & n900).
Eh, I think it's just about ease of use and discovery. When you open a terminal, it just shows a blinking cursor. If you've never used the terminal before, how do you know what to type?
In a graphical desktop environment, you see icons, menus, etc. If you open a GUI application, you usually see buttons and things to click, and maybe even some guidance on how to use the app.
A lot of people just want to use their computer without too much of a learning curve. Most people are not powerusers.
Start pushing buttons. Start typing things, try pressing tab variously. Look up guides, introductions, help. Yes it's not like the discovery of gui where you get to discover whatever the developer of the gui made available to you. It's a deeper kind of discovery of what more you can do with command line that you cant do with gui. The gui lets you point at pictures provided. The command line lets you string commands together, like stringing words together to form sentences, to have a more nuanced conversation of your own making. So yes, there's a different initial hurdle and learning curve. Well worth getting over through. Understandable how this is missed by those coming from where the command line is really limited and the gui tries to be all (even if that all is limited). The good stuff's over the hurdle, and keeps getting better as you progress along the learning curve, deep into the wide delta of potential, where we each become each others teachers.
Sure, but my point is: I don't think I've ever seen a terminal present those instructions when you open it. Unless it's immediately shown in some MOTD or something, the average user isn't going to take the time to figure it out if they don't have to.
If my grandmother wanted to draft a letter on her computer, she'd use something that looks more like Notepad and less like Vi.