Comment on Microsoft is reportedly banning Palestinians in the U.S. for life for calling relatives in Gaza
todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 2 months agoDo you know what also keeps people away from Linux? Being told that Linux Mint is a good distro for beginners, and then going to the Linux Mint website and finding that there are three different flavors, Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE, and not knowing what any of that means because you’re a beginner. Beginners don’t benefit from incomplete information that requires prior knowledge, and every time I see “use Linux Mint” without any clarification on Desktop Environments, I see a jerk who doesn’t know what “beginner” means.
dukethorion@lemmy.world 2 months ago
As someone who did exactly this, the differences are spelled out pretty clearly for “Linux beginners”. System reqs and included features all there to read…
PepperoniNipple@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
The average person does not read or understands instructions of any kind related to PCs. This is something tech-savy people suck so hard at: having patience for those people. You expect them to be like you or a certain way that is not possible for them or simply won’t ever happen, and you get mad or blame them for it, instead of offering the solution they need, which is a more intuitive software design
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
I remember when I was first learning linux, I found this super evangelistic website explaining how totally easy it is to use linux nowadays (this was about 15 years ago, so that was a fucking lie).
They gave some basic task as the first example of something you might need to do, and they said, no shit, “It’s easy! Just open up the terminal and type…” and I closed the website.
Not because I couldn’t do that instruction, I was working in IT and I already maintained multiple linux servers, but because of how utterly unhinged that instruction was. I didn’t know if their information would be useful, but I did know that I couldn’t trust them anymore. You cannot tell people an OS is “easy” and “fir everyone” then transition straight into “open up the terminal”. They didn’t even explain how to open up the terminal, because of course it’s different everywhere and they wanted universal instructions.
I really, really want to make linux work for me. I have four linux machines in my home, although three of them are raspberry pis, and i have tried it in laptops and on my main machine many times over the years, always finding it more trouble than it’s worth. But I have never seen any indication that the community has ever moved on from, “It’s easy! Just open up the terminal…”
Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
PepperoniNipple@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
You nailed it. They love to repeat that sentence, “it’s easy”, myself, wrongfully included. I do believe that lying to your brain that whatever you have to do is easy kind of makes you try harder and for longer, you break problems down and stuff, but not everyone is like this at all.
Whenever my dad calls me to ask about a problem in his PC, I always start energetic and happy to help him, with a good tone in my voice and everything. But I start losing my shit the longer the call lasts, because he doesn’t know anything, how to stop a process from the task manager, how to disable unnecessary startup programs, how to use a translator quickly in any website, etc. I become condescending because he likes to read me everything he sees on the screen first before clicking on the button I just told him to click on, everything, from top to bottom, every popup and warning. In windows.
I’d lose my entire head if he tried Linux, because instead of buttons and intuitive icons it’d be a bunch of commands that even for me still look mayan most of the time. He’d easily fall for the sufo rm -r command if he followed a tutorial online, and that bothers me a lot. Linux is really not user-friendly as they think they are or claim to be yet, it seems like it’s getting closer, but the fact that a lot of it relies on using a terminal is already an instant-loss. I am sorry, but nobody wants to use the terminal, as cool as it might look while doing so or how gratifying it is to learn about it; the majority of people want speed without having to learn anything about how to achieve that speed