I wanted to take a moment and talk about Linux UX because, let’s face it… it sucks.
Actually, it’s worse than that. Much of Linux’s UX is technically correct and that makes it objectively wrong.
No. I don’t want Linux to be more Windows-like. But I do want the most common Linux desktops to behave in a way that PC-literate folks can wrap their mind around — and do so from minute zero.
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Yet another reason why KDE Plasma is the G.O.A.T
First we had “this meeting could have been an email”, now we have “this blog post could have been a tweet/skeet/toot”.
Most of this article is bashing an imagined strawman and the main meat of the issue is two papercuts.
This drivel - okay not entirely, but I’m making a point - is all the wrong attitudes. “People like Windows, let’s make Linux more like Windows so people will accept it.”
We are not in a popularity contest. Linux is great - nay, extraordinary, phenomenal - because it has most of its shit together. Priorities, functionality, efficiency. If most people are not up to the task of learning something, that’s their problem. And yeah, that’s most people. In case the author of this article hadn’t noticed, the vast majority of people are, unfortunately, lazy and stupid. I’m not saying it’s always their faults but that’s not the issue. We don’t lower ourselves down to meet them where they are. If Linux remains only a tiny portion of the ecosystem, and needs to keep being the thing for only geeks (translation, got good grades in school, enjoy learning things, challenge themselves, etc.) then why does there seem to be this perception that that needs to change? Quite the opposite; the small bit of mainstream corporate elements that have become involved have only demonstrated they’ll immediately enshittify it, because that’s what they do.
Let Linux continue to be the fringe ecosystem for geeks. Why do we need morons to enjoy using it? Why is this a problem?
This article’s two qualms with Linux UI are justified but, I think, somewhat overstated. The first point basically boils down to " ‘Linux’s’ network filesystem handling doesn’t have a GUI and is half baked", which are both true, but this is what happens when you’re making a thousand utilities with a thousand different functions each. There is a will to support SMB, as evidenced by both Gnome and KDE having means to mount it, but the UI isn’t great because it’s not a focus and most people don’t use network shares, so there’s fewer feature requests and less development. Nautilus has 500 issues on the repo and 200 are bugs with 27000 commits from only a handful of authors.
The second issue is less justifiable as the author just wants this Linux utility to work like Windows. Partition management should absolutely only do what you tell it to do. Even on Windows I had to Google how to resize partitions, and I think Googling how to do that using the partition manager you’re using is fair. Gnome Disks even has a nice help page for formatting a disk.
The author says that Linux should be as usable for grandparents as it is for children, and for people who have never used a computer before and only need to do what children and grandparents do (gaming (various caveats), writing, internetting), I think Linux provides a vastly better UX. For people doing advanced tasks (network shares, video editing, etc) there has to be a reasonable expectation of willingness to learn how to use a new operating system
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