Linux needs to grow. Stop telling people it’s ‘tech-y’ or acting like you’re more advanced for using it, you are scaring away people. Linux Mint can be used by a senile person perfectly.
Explain shortly the benefits, ‘faster, more secure, easier to use, main choices of professionals and free’. Ask questions that let you know if they need to dual boot, ‘do you use Adobe, anti-cheat games, or Microsoft Office’, ‘how new is your computer’.
And most importantly, offer to help them install.
They don’t understand distros, just pick Linux Mint LTS Cinnamon unless they’re curious.
That’s it, spread Linux to as many people as possible. The larger the marketshare, the better support we ALL get. We can fight enshittification. Take the time to spread it but don’t force it on anyone.
AND STOP SCARING PEOPLE AWAY. Linux has no advertising money, it’s up to us.
I don’t buy the whole “the more users a software has, the better it gets” rhetoric. Historically this has been the opposite of the case. There’s an even higher users-to-contributors ratio amongst the general population. Not all users share the same respect for the philosophy behind FOSS.
If the driving force behind design decisions becomes “what keeps people happy so they’ll keep using our software” and not “freedom,” there’s now a practical incentive to sell out and introduce more Intellectual Property shenanigans into the ecosystem. After all, it’s a lot easier to hire devs and churn out new features and keep the software actively developed for the foreseeable future if there’s money in it. And the only way there can be money in it is if there are proprietary licenses shitting up the place, and Shit As A Service suscription models as far as the eye can see.
Linux always has been, and should always continue to be, about freedom. If that freedom comes with user-friendliness, great! If not, then we have to pay the price: taking responsibility for the tools and tech we use and learning how to use them properly and contributing to them to maintain a community of likeminded people. Otherwise, we’re not worthy of the freedom and the responsibilities it entails.
I get your point about elitism and gatekeeping. We’re no better than Windows users or Mac users or any other OS’ users. We just have a set of values unique to our community, and they have sets of values that differ. We also shouldn’t be throwing users under the bus in the name of politics, but part of what makes Linux slightly more bearable is the way the driving philosophy of Free Software is evident throughout. Linux is better than it could be because it attracts the people who want to be here for the community’s values, not the people who have to be coaxed and coerced into accepting the values to use the “best”/“easiest”/“friendliest” software.
I wish Free Software, Free Society were mandatory reading…
❤️
PDF: https://www.gnu.org/doc/Press-use/fsfs3-hardcover.pdf
Physical: https://shop.fsf.org/ (when it’s back open)
OK I’m searching in vain for the mega-upvote button.
I would add that desktop Linux only exists today as an alternative to Windows because of those values. This history of Linux desktop environments and applications is rife with examples of popular or personally important bits of software that were forked and kept alive by the freedom granted by FLOSS licensing.
If “Linux” was a thing that MS could have bought and then destroyed or enshittified, they’d have done it twenty years ago. And make no mistake, they continue to play the long game.
Yes, we should all be good to newcomers. No, the direction of desktop Linux should not be steered by wanting more of them. It should be steered by a need to provide desktop Linux for people who enjoy using desktop Linux.
This. GNU/Linux should be sold on the premise of the values of software freedom.
Stuff like:
Imagine being able to take a piece of software to any programmer you know or can find to fix a bug, or add something, or improve something, the same way you can take your car to any mechanic. And if you’re inclined, you can even work yourself. Think of how liberating that would be for the world’s communities.
Stuff like that
I just give IBM all my money.
All I want is to be able to post a question in a forum and get an answer besides "Until you read these 3 texts and 20 MAN entries I don’t want you to even stain this forum’s pages with your ignorant drivel’.
I’ve been trying to go linux for 20 years now and every fuckdamn time a problem I cannot solve or find an answer for online leads to the above and I’m done.
You guys may have cleaned up your community now but I don’t have the energy or patience to try it again.
Full Disclosure: IT admin with 3 decades of experience including supporting linux servers. If I have a hard time with it, think about what your average ‘raised on a smartphone’ newbie is going to think.
Linux sysadmin here too. I run Windows on my main workstation now because I have no patience for issues like sound not working when I join a video call and shit like that. Your post perfectly describes my gripe with Linux.
Windows sucks but 99 percent of problems are solved by simply rebooting the motherfucker.
I’ve seen a couple of posts in here about sound. It’s wild that I’ve been through dozens of distros since the start of high school (12 years ago), installed them on at least 10 machines over that time, and can’t remember one issue with sound that took more than 15 seconds to fix (e.g discord choosing the wrong sound device because I have 6 things plugged in that can technically output sound, which also happens to my friends who use Windows).
Maybe I’m just lucky. The only issues I recall having in the last decade are essentially graphics related. Either game compatibility (though proton/wine is much better than it was in 2015) or desktop environments being finicky (freezing on sleep for example), but the latter afaict was entirely due to proprietary nvidia drivers. There are proper, high-performance open source drivers in the works, so nvidia might be on par with amd in 2-3 years on Linux (which is to say literally no issues for the vast majority of people, probably far more stable than Windows).
In the same time I’ve had lots of people come to me with problems that we’ve specifically troubleshooted and found Windows to be the issue even when it seemed like hardware problems. Like monitor flickering/black screening, and plugging in a different monitor the issue goes away. On the surface it seems like a hardware problem, but both monitors worked flawlessly on Linux for literally months. Full reinstalling Windows did not fix the issue. Upgrading from Windows 10 -> 11 did not fix the issue.
Same thing with another friend’s external SSD. For some reason it wasn’t being detected on his Windows 7 install. We installed Linux and the drive was picked up. Maybe Windows 10 would’ve also picked up the drive in this circumstance, but a lot of people hated the idea of Windows 10 at the time (this was just after Windows 10 was released, when Windows 7 still had a similar market share).
There’s likely a huge percentage of problems people attribute to hardware that are actually Windows being a shitty O.S, but nobody actually checks if Windows is the problem.
Similarly, maybe just luck, but I’ve not really had a problem with windows since windows 10/server 2019. Yeah it’s resource heavy but I can’t even recall anything I’ve specifically had to delve into forums to troubleshoot. That said I haven’t had to do any windows desktop support since windows 7, thank the gods.
I deployed several server 2022 vms at work due to special circumstance and its actually good out of box, I only disabled some print services and my gold image was ready. Those have been running for a year and I’ve only rebooted them due to patching. Very different than the windows I adminned back in the 2000s.
Every word you speak is truth.
Something in my heart feels that if instead of spreading out a huge topheavy ecosystem of near identical distros that change their hippy dippy naming structures on a regular basis and instead on GETTING F$@KING PERIPHERALS TO WORK CONSISTENTLY then it would be a mainstream option.
I think the current massive distro ecosystem is actually cointelpro by the OS big boys to cripple competition.
Stop being elitist, spread Linux without systemd!
I got the joke
I wrote it here some time ago. Tried Linux Mint with the intention of finally switching from windows on my notebook. Bricked one partition that I forgot I had set to dynamic, Headphone jacks didn’t work even after fiddling around with arcane parameters in the cli. If you mainly need the command line to set your system up and stuff doesn’t work out of the box people don’t have the nerve to switch and learn all that. Love Linux, great on steamdeck, have a couple of Virtual Machines to play around with on my old Poweredge server but it’s not ready for me, the average user. That and I’ve to use windows for my cad work at my job anyways. I’ll take the downvotes but you’ll have to realize you are tech savvy people who have fun learning all that. Most people don’t.
I think Mint is better out of the box than it used to be. I was on it maybe 5 or 6 years ago and had to troubleshoot a few issues, but I just came back to it a few months ago and everything worked flawlessly out of the box.
The average user doesn’t install windows. I used to get paid when I was a kid to install windows in my village.
wait did you install linux mint regular or edge??
I haven’t seen anyone scaring people away. All I see is people saying “try Linux” and others complaining that it’s too much Linux encouragement. They want to stay with their windows. Not our fault. :)
I like a small Linux community so I’m fine. The more people who stay on windows, the more likely it is that Microsoft feels like they have enough users to leave the rest of us alone.
Stop being elitist
That takes away most teenagers’ motivation to use Linux xD
Things are about to get worse for onboarding those from other platforms. There’s been this massive push the last year to get every window manager to switch to Wayland & drop X11 support… meanwhile Wayland doesn’t support color profiles or color management (just sRGB). How are you going to convince someone with an awesome screen to drop down to sRGB? How will you convince someone with a poor screen that has been color calibrated to make it usable to go back to off colors? How do you expect content creators to migrate & still create content if they can’t have access to all the color tools they use in their workflow to come to Linux when Wayland won’t support them? A lot of Linux folk act like this doesn’t matter, but to a lot of people, a computer is a magic box that they interact with via a screen + keyboard + mouse, & if non-niche peripherals aren’t supported (which DCI-P3 is becoming the norm & saving a screen from a landfill can often be fixed to ‘good enough’ thru calibration), users will think it’s trash & unfinished.
x11 is still supporred by mint and realisrically will be for years???
The Mint team recently made experimental Wayland support available. Still very alpha but I don’t think it will be years.
The vast majority of people don’t know what sRGB or DCI-P3 or color profiles are, or care about it. I understand that you may be frustrated about bad support, but it is just not that big of a deal for most people. That said, color management and HDR support for wayland is being actively worked on, and I wouldn’t be suprised if it works better on wayland than X11 in a year or two. Also the distro suggested here (linux mint cinnamon) uses X11, not wayland. I agree with OP that we shouldn’t scare people away from linux. Forcing people to have an opinion on X11 vs Wayland or color profiles, definately could scare them away.
I have used labwc (a really close equivalent to openbox) with great excitement with the exception of one thing.
Running a graphic application as a different user within a user’s session is impossible. Even if a different seatd session is active for the 2nd user, wlroots refuses to draw anything as a different user than the one initiating the session.
It is a form of containerization for me that just requires x11
I’m not anti-Wayland… I’m anti-saying-it-good-enough-when-the-featureset-doesn’t match. I know it’s being worked on & I’ve followed the work pretty closely for over 4 years fingers-crossed there would be less bike-shedding & having things come out in easy-to-digest phases instead of holding back the monolith that they are building.
Knowing sRGB vs. DCI-P3 vs. AdobeRGB might not be immediately known as marketing teams like to hide the names behind marketing terms, but users very much understand ‘this displays a more vibrant range of color’. The whole ASUS laptop line is basically banking on having these great, color-calibrated 100% P3 OLED panels up all the price ranges because when a casual buyer walks in a shop, that those dominates the showroom & will sell better because it’s easy to compare even at a distance without looking at the spec sheet or touching the device; users are also used to it because smart phones have followed Apple’s P3 lead & expect better from laptops & monitors where the market can actually cater to this crowd (which is great since for years it seemed it was only dominated by how many frames you could get for the gamer crowd). Folk are getting QD OLED & other such monitors / TVs which have support. Imagine you buy that monitor, looks great, then move to Linux & now it doesn’t–which will become even more obvious when HDR is more mainstream, as you definitely noted. You don’t need to know the names of every technology or how they work to have a validated ‘bad feeling‘ about something not working as intended.
id really like to use linux, but not before this is working. i dont understand how you linux people can live witout ahk.
Anything you can do with AHK you can do with Python. No need to ahk on Linux tbh.
Auto Hot Key, that’s something I haven’t heard of in a while. Probably because it’s not as essential in a Linux environment when you can more easily accomplish most of what you’d accomplish using AHK in a shell script. What problem are you trying to solve using AHK? Someone might be able to tell you how to solve it.
mostly just abbreviations like
:*:ty-::Thank you very muchI know its possible in linux. but on windows in ahk it takes me seconds to add/remove/deactivate/activate them. and on a good working day do that maybe 20 to 50 times. and they are all in one single file.
i also use it for simple shortcuts or things like
:R*?:ddd:: FormatTime, CurrentDateTime,, dd.MM.yy SendInput %CurrentDateTime% returnor stuff like search selected text in search engine X or Y; but if selected in program A, then use search engine Z or open program B and enter it there. but those are the most complicated ones i use and dont need quick changing.
Check out
keyd, might be what you are looking for. I used it to customize dead keys.
???
I’m thinking of switching and will run mint off a live USB on my rig. Just need to find a new guide on setting up persistent data from the USB.
What do you use your pc for?
what do you mean by persistent data
Booting to a Linux live USB doesn’t save user data right? I’m talking about installing Linux on a USB and maintaining data/configuration across reboots.
This way I can slowly build out my ideal environment with distro and apps. Goal is to document the process so I can replicate it onto a laptop permanently. Then my main desktop.
@Landless2029 @jackpot
MX Linux- MX’s graphical tools provide an easy way to do a wide variety of tasks, while the Live USB and snapshot tools inherited from antiX add impressive portability and remastering capabilities.
https://mxlinux.org/
install on a usb drive and make sure that there is enough free space for creatng a live usb(double)with persistence.there are user curated lists of software on github-linux and lightweight.
https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesomeThat’s my goal for the USB part.
MX Linux seems like a different distro? I plan to play with my Nvidia gpu / proton / wine / bottles / steam / gog to figure out my install/config requirements.
Goal is to figure it out and back it up in my personal git.
I was going to start with mint cinnamon
@Landless2029
mx linux is based on debian,so mint might be bettet for your needs(fresher packages).for mint there are explanations on reddit for the best way to do it.mx linux has a subreddit.it works for gaming but may be it is the best to do a domain query for reddit and protondb
what is best for your needs.
Irony: being elitist about the most egalitarian operating system
Trying to do that
what youre missing here is a windows application that scans a users apps and puts them into a markdown and then auto-installs all of them once back on linux (or adds a checkbox for which you want re-installed).
You wouldnt use markdown, more like json
People can make their own choices. I have 6-7 Linux machines, and asked my brother to install it too. He hated the experience. He bought a Mac at the end, and he’s very happy with it. Some people just don’t want Linux. They don’t care about its philosophy, or that it’s free. They want an ecosystem, and a status symbol.
I think GNU/Linux (What you’re refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux.) is a great fit for non-technical people when they don’t have an established workflow on another OS. If their needs can’t easily be translated over, though, I think it’d turn users away.
Well, one of the benefits of Linux is that it’s extreme customizability allows you to emulate whatever workflow you want. I think that Zorin OS has the right idea of asking what workflow you want to use. This way, even a noobie use can feel at home
I want to open the internet but its not on my desktop. How do I get it back? Also, what happened to my C drive? All the files are gone now, and there’s all these other ones I don’t need called like “lib” and “home.” I tried using that app store you showed me, but I couldn’t find microsoft word; it tried to install something else instead, I think I might have a virus. It’s probably that “wine” virus I tried installing, some guide on the internet said it would give me word, but it didn’t bring word back. I don’t think it did anything, but you should still do a virus scan. I tried to, but I couldn’t find the Norton button.
…
check the Downloads folder, OfficeInstaller(1).exe through OfficeInstaller(12).exe
…
It worked before you messed with it. Why did you do that? What do you mean you were “installing word” it’s just a program you click, why’d you need that black window with text in it?
try to teach them about the terminal
I shouldn’t have to learn all this hacker shit to install a simple program.
TL;DR: you overestimate what “noobie” means
No. Mint is fine for my dad who uses a browser and an email program and nothing else. I’m not gonna recommend it to people who do a lot more with their machines. I can tell them I use Linux and they can ask me anything if they are ever curious about making the switch, but that is it. If they don’t make the conscious decision to use Linux, then they won’t stick with it anyways.
I am genuinely curious what “more with their machines” actions you found Mint to be lacking in?
I can’t speak for OP, but I remember reading about two years ago that Linux Mint is a poor choice for gaming because Cinnamon’s compositor can’t handle more fast-paced games (even just 60 FPS) and will reduce them to a stuttery mess even if the game’s otherwise running fine. I’m not sure if this is still the case, but I did deal with it back in late 2021.
There was also the stuff about Lutris developers abandoning their support for Mint (in a letter I feel was frankly way too harsh, rude and unprofessional) due to it doing some weird stuff with system packages that made the Lutris program generate weird bugs that couldn’t be replicated in other Ubuntu-derivative distributions. However, that can be circumvented by using the Lutris flatpak.
Honestly, I do hope those are no longer issues. I have a soft spot for Linux Mint since it was the first distro I daily-drove (and has a similar UI to Windows XP my beloved), and even though I don’t use it anymore, I still follow its development from time to time and I’d love to see it getting better and universally usable for everyone.
proprietary software that won’t run under wine
I guess this is the purpose of Mint Linux? But I think it has a terminal, emacs, python as well? Then it’s ok. A distro is only a tool for needs. I don’t like this arch-talk, how cool it is and then you need month to write your configuration. By the way: what goes quicker on a laptop: Mint with xcfe or Ubuntu with xfce? I want to have a quicker boot. At the moment Kubuntu on the machine. Too slow.
Mint because Snaps
And Mint because Gnome (shudder)
