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Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 months agoI 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 3 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
Excrubulent@slrpnk.net 3 months ago
Yeah, I think one of the issues is that a knowledge gap is a very hard thing to bridge. Part of that is the classic thing that “we don’t know how much we don’t know”. But there’s a similar thing with knowledge, where people don’t know how much they know.
Like with the terminal, once you get comfortable with it, it is really easy to get things done, but you really have to have a certain kind of disposition to get to that point, even with the right kind of help - like with your dad, if he’s not interested to learn you can’t make him. You have to already be deep into the ecosystem before you can say “it’s easy”, and by that point you are so far removed from the average user’s experience that you can’t understand why they can’t just do what you do. And unfortunately, the people most expert at using linux and therefore developing it are also the people deepest in the ecosystem.
There’s an empathy gap that’s hard to bridge, but it’s not impossible. Like if you’ve ever finished The Outer Wilds, it’s an incredible game that is only gated by your knowledge. It’s a unique experience that you can’t repeat. The only way to attempt to experience it again is to sit down and watch another person’s playthrough of it. I’ve done it multiple times, and each time is a unique and difficult experience, because you already know the answers, and they are so painfully simple once you know them. It’s a real struggle of empathy to actually be able to enjoy it.
You can do a similar thing with other freeform puzzle games like The Witness. It’s just that The Outer Wilds is unique in that it shows you in stark contrast how vast the gap is between knowing and not knowing, and you have to bridge that gap constantly in order to engage.
So that’s my ramble on that subject, but that’s what I think is happening. I think apart from people willing and able to bridge that gap, the solutions to this issue involve more resources dedicated to improving the ecosystem and making it friendlier, and also just more uptake making the system stronger and exposing its weak points as people learn it, making the empathy gap less of a problem. As we are, proprietary systems have sucked up all those resources and market share, which has starved open source. It’s a slow climb out of that hole but I have to believe that eventually there will be a critical tipping point.