For most use cases. There are a set of odd behaviors that turn some people away. LinusTechTips is doing a set of videos where they (Linus & Luke) installed Linux based OSs on their home gaming desktops. They are QAing Linux as "the average tech enthusiast would see it" and it is very insightful.
These are just their discussions (foreshadowing the upcoming videos) but there is some really insightful discussion about what is still hard for someone who hasn't used Linux and what isn't. Some of their first hurdles they had to overcome was issues with their DE, window manager, and other random things that sort of worked correctly but needed a lot of polish to be "just right" or competitive with Windows or MacOS for most users.
And those discussions on the WAN Show really highlight how much of a bubble some people live in. People disagreeing that there's anything wrong with the Linux way of doing things. People not realizing that there are plenty of people who sit in a spot between hacker nerd and web browsing grandmother.
Linus is coming at it from a very realistic angle, but some people are very defensive about the criticisms. They're basically telling him he's "holding it wrong".
The Linux community needs to listen to criticisms and find ways to improve the user experience. The nature of choice when it comes to everything you run on Linux means that nothing needs to be compromised for the power user. So what's the harm in making the default experience more friendly and seamless?
> People disagreeing that there's anything wrong with the Linux way of doing things
There is a lot wrong with Linux usability. But Linux != desktop environments.
The main usability problems that I've encountered with my non-tech friends are app availability and hardware support. Neither of those will be affected by rewriting a desktop environment from scratch in another language.
This has been pretty interesting to watch, because the dichotomy between Luke and Linus is what really interests me. Linus' cynicism is what lead him to reject oft-requested distros like Fedora (which he wrote off as a "meme"), and with nearly every problem he has it seems to be exacerbated into a total disaster. I've seen this kind of behavior before though, where heavy Windows/MacOS users unknowingly engage in self-sabotage when they try out a new OS. Nothing new, but I was surprised that Linus from Linus Tech Tips was the one uninstalling his own desktop environment.
Even more surprising was how calmly Luke handled everything. Contrary to Linus' disposition, Luke meets every problem with a thoughtful solution and a willingness to learn, which leaves me rather unsurprised that his Linux experience has gone a lot smoother. On the latest WAN show, Linus flies off on a six-minute tangent where he tries to argue that CLI tools shouldn't exist, only to have the chat dogpile him and remind him that piping between CLI programs is an essential component of Linux. Luke caught onto this pretty quickly, and played devil's advocate, while Linus continued spinning his wheels with the 'muh accessability' bit.
In other words, to nobodies surprise, Linus lets his ego stand in the way of correct technical solutions.
> I was surprised that Linus from Linus Tech Tips was the one uninstalling his own desktop environment.
I didn’t find it that surprising, mainly because nobody getting into desktop Linux without prior knowledge is going to expect any connection whatsoever between a random third party app and the OS’ desktop environment. It’s like if clamping a smartphone mount to your car’s dash caused the car’s rear left wheel to fly off, it’s completely unintuitive and unexpected.
And realistically, the two shouldn’t have any influence on each other. As much as he should’ve read the package manager’s warning, it shouldn’t have been a possibility in the first place.
> On the latest WAN show, Linus flies off on a six-minute tangent where he tries to argue that CLI tools shouldn't exist, only to have the chat dogpile him and remind him that piping between CLI programs is an essential component of Linux. Luke caught onto this pretty quickly, and played devil's advocate, while Linus continued spinning his wheels with the 'muh accessability' bit.
This feels like a mischaracterization. His argument wasn’t a that CLI tools shouldn’t exist, but instead that for 99.9% of common use cases pulling them out shouldn’t be required.
> In other words, to nobodies surprise, Linus lets his ego stand in the way of correct technical solutions.
I also noticed the difference between the two, and you highlight important aspects of it. But are you sure the cause is ego so much as age?
When I got into Linux, I was a kid. I had a lot of time, and that gave me a certain kind of patience and determination for tinkering, for customizing, for breaking and fixing things, and for learning to do things in new ways.
By comparison, nowadays I'm pretty much a grumpy old man when it comes to my desktop environment and software management tools: I like using my computer a handful of ways, and when I am in an environment that can't support a pretty similar workflow, I find it very irritating.
Linus also has a more bespoke setup, using a somewhat cutting edge hardware configuration, and he likely has more responsibilities than Luke at home (he has children!).
I do think there is an ego element: Linus thinks of himself as someone who's technically competent— who knows how to use computers— and being in an environment where working like he's used to doesn't work well is probably especially frustrating on that basis. But I don't think it's all of it.
I hope other readers don't dismiss all of your observations just because of your apparent personal animus for Linus.
This, though:
> In other words, to nobodies surprise, Linus lets his ego stand in the way of correct technical solutions.
> correct technical solutions
We should be pretty careful about how we use the concept of ‘correctness’ when we're talking about desktop operating systems run on our personal computers for activities we undertake for pleasure. Otherwise we can end up saying something pretty silly.
I wI’ll ignore the question whether piping between CLI programs is an essential component of Linux, the OS, but if it is one of Linux, the UI, Linux will never get significant desktop market share (1)
In the 1980’s, computer users had to use a CLI, but very few of them could do more than start programs. Using output redirection or pipelines was extremely rare; understanding them (rather then copy-pasting magic incantations from computer magazines) even rarer.
I don’t see why that would be different today.
(1) unless the size of the desktop computer market shrinks significantly, of course. If we get to a situation where most desktop computer users are programmers, that may change.
I really hate to get pedantic here, but Linux is not an OS or a UI. Linux is a kernel, and the kernel's sole obligation is to handle processes and programs that exist outside of userland, and that's where redirection is a huge deal. Whether or not the user chooses to engage with it through a shell or CLI is up to them, but the feature is decidedly integral to running any Linux-based operating system these days.
> Linus' cynicism is what lead him to reject oft-requested distros like Fedora (which he wrote off as a "meme")
I don't think this is uncommon behavior for the name of a product to effect who is willing to try it out. He likely thought Fedora was being suggested by his users because of the meme of fedoras. Google "fedora meme" for more information.
Now, is this the most rational behavior? No, not at all but it is what you need to expect from the average user. Branding is important. If I started an advanced system service company for IT and called my business "ASS Help" I'm going to get a lot of errant requests.
> with nearly every problem he has it seems to be exacerbated into a total disaster
Linus plays an energetic character. I wouldn't put much stock into how "irate" he seems. I would however expect anyone who hits similar roadblocks to him to actually act this way. If an average user plugs in another monitor and it doesn't instantly work they will be very upset.
> Even more surprising was how calmly Luke handled everything
Also important to note: Luke adjacent to software developers, has done some software development work, and has used Linux before for an extended period of time.
Luke also plays the straight faced silent type in their Penn and Teller.
> Linus flies off on a six-minute tangent where he tries to argue that CLI tools shouldn't exist, only to have the chat dogpile him and remind him that piping between CLI programs is an essential component of Linux
1. I don't think Linus thinks CLI tools should not exist (as he uses them often for advanced tasks) but he feels like they shouldn't be the only option. As someone who daily drives Linux on my desktop, laptop, and work computers since 201Xs I rarely use the command line for average user things.
2. The end consumer user of a product doesn't really care about the philosophy of the software they are using for. I'd even go so far as to say that the Linux community doesn't even feel this way. If we did, we would all be using BSD-style 100% POSIX compliant systems. I'm much faster with the CLI than I am with a GUI for most development related tasks (installing software, unzipping things, moving files, diagnosing performance things) but that is not representative of the average user. For example: ask the average Mac power user how to check how overworked their CPU is. Will they pull out `top`? Probably not.
> Linus continued spinning his wheels with the 'muh accessability' bit
Mockingly saying "muh accessibility" doesn't address the concern: if we want Linux adoption on the desktop we need to make it so that the average Windows or MacOS user can be productive in the system without any CLI involvement. Or, at least, no more CLI involvement than with Windows and Mac.
> Linus lets his ego stand in the way of correct technical solutions
I think, ironically, this is the ego of the Linux community. We cannot expect users to be rational. We need to make things simpler (not in terms of "purity" like POSIX adherence) for the end user. Linus brings up a great point: almost no distro has a full time team working to A/B test the OS to see if it's friendly for new users. I can think of only one instance of this happening sometime around 2015: Gnome.
Also, if this was pure ego, Linus' opinions would be very different. From this Friday's episode Luke was negative on the prospects of the Steam Deck being shipped with Linux while Linus thinks it will be great. I agree with Linus, and the reason he thinks it will work great. Steam Deck, and Steam OS, will tune all the nobs and installed packages in a standard way for game devs to target. This makes it simple! Linus and Luke both agreed that for non-gaming normal user tasks Linux OSs are currently at an A to an A+ in terms of usability.
> 1. I don't think Linus thinks CLI tools should not exist (as he uses them often for advanced tasks) but he feels like they shouldn't be the only option. As someone who daily drives Linux on my desktop, laptop, and work computers since 201Xs I rarely use the command line for average user things.
Yeah, I totally understand his attitude on this. I'm not a daily Linux user myself and it's been about a year since I last tried it so please take what I say with a huge grain of salt, but all the times I've tried it out and set up my dev environment, I've run into issues which the forum or Stack usually tells me to resolve using the command line.
It's not that I personally mind using the command line, since I use it all day long as a programmer, but there have been plenty of times where I don't feel it's "warranted". People shouldn't be forced to touch the command line unless it's really necessary.
In general whenever I try out Linux I run into a lot of things in the UI that seem just plain strange and not quite right, even though I understand you can't expect things to work the way you're used to on a different system.
Substantiation for some idiots who will downvote me despite parent comment not providing substantiation: Slowness, slowness, bugs, bugs, more bugs, security vulnerabilities mostly due to insane NIH ways of doing basic IPC stuff.
IMO the DEs themselves are excellent, the problems that keep consumers from adopting Linux have nothing to do with DEs themselves (network effects, hardware support, etc.).
The only reason my wife doesn't use Linux is b/c it doesn't have the apps she wants, and hardware issues (Bluetooth headsets don't work without ruining the audio quality, sleep/hibernation is hit-or-miss, etc.). I just don't see any issues with DEs that are preventing people from using Linux...I would love to shown wrong, because I would love to see more Linux adoption.
> It’s been the year of the Linux desktop for a couple of decades now.
Funnily enough, since when Linux started and somehow some people thought it'd be the "Windows killer", Linux now powers pretty much the entire real world (servers / routers / phones / appliances). There are billions of devices running Linux.
And still... Because somehow Linux never got to more than 2.5% desktop market share, many see Linux as a failure.
