- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
You’ve heard the “prophecy”: next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right? Linux is no longer the niche hobby of bearded sysadmins and free software evangelists that it was a decade ago! Modern distributions like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint are sleek, accessible, and — dare I say it — mainstream-adjacent.
Linux is ready for professional work, including video editing, and it even manages to maintain a slight market share advantage over macOS among gamers, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey.
However, it’s not ready to dethrone Windows. At least, not yet!
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Every year is the year of the Linux desktop.
We aren’t claiming it when we say it. We are celebrating.
IMHO as long as linux don’t have a full UI for main settings it will be difficult for it to impose himself.
I know a lot of people will say that now you don’t need the terminal but actually you do!
I am using Fedora with KDE and for instance it offers no GUI to easily create and manage user groups. You want to look at your service, stop them, start them, schedule a task… It’s all with terminal ! And I am sure there is plenty of other examples.Don’t take me wrong, I am still a Linux user! But I would appreciate not having to look/check online to change some basic things once in a while! 😉
Yeah give the people what they want- a registry!
it offers no GUI to easily create and manage user groups
Correct, a very common task for little grandmas and other average users.
I mean, to be fair, user groups and services really aren’t a thing that a “normie” would be messing with on any platform under most circumstances, and if they would be then there’d be some understanding that it’d involve some sort of “hackerman tooling” as one might call it, whether it’s Windows’s service manager or the magic black window with a blinking cursor in it.
I, for one, had no idea what
svchost.exeon Windows did (thought it was just M$ bloat, really) until after I started using Linux and had already made several systemd units on there and realized that Windows kinda-sorta-but-also-not-really-sometimes has that as well.A bigger problem imo is how Linux always seems to have a point-and-click way to do most of everything that your “average computer user” needs to do… but then somebody (cough Canonical and their snapd stuff cough) fucks it up and makes it so that you can’t just say “you can install everything using the app store”, which results in encounters like this one.
Oh, and your “why is this even an issue anymore” things like (shameless plug) this. Seriously.
SUSE has had YAST for literal decades and nobody cared.
An effective terminal is a feature, not a bug. Every Linux problem has the same solution: search the web, ctrl-c, ctrl-v.
No navigating through “settings” and “preferences” and “tools” menus to figure out where this particular developer decided to hide that particular setting. Just copy and paste, problem solved.
That’s a bad take. Learning the bad habit of copy/pasting command and depending on the Internet to do the most basic changes to your computer is not a “feature” of the terminal. I can Google how to navigate Windows control center too.
Setting search is a solved problem, you simply search for the setting name in the UI, it’s way easier than navigating terminal flags and switches.
Setting search is a solved problem, you simply search for the setting name in the UI,
This assumes the developer bothered to make that setting available through the UI.
With the terminal, that isn’t a problem: You’re using the same UI as the developer.
That assumes the programmer bothered to make user friendly flags… The terminal doesn’t magically just work.
With open source, the delineation between “user” and “programmer” is arbitrary and capricious. The GUI-centric Windows approach reinforces that artificial distinction; the terminal breaches that barrier.
What’s even worse is that even for the things you can do with GUI settings there’s no standardisation.
Say you want to do something simple like changing your password. Most distros can do that via GUI, but how you do that exactly depends on your DE, sometimes also your distro, and always too your distro/DE version.
So if an older relative calls me and wants some help with something like that, I’d first have to boot up a live stick of that distro and version and hope they didn’t install anything that would change the settings.
That’s why almost every single tutorial/guide online about stuff like that doesn’t even bother telling you how to use the GUI settings and instead just defaults to CLI, because that’s more standardized.
But yes, when it comes to slightly more obscure settings (e.g. horizontal scrolling for touchpads) you are generally SOL on most distros. Heck, can’t even change the vertical scroling speed for a touchpad on Gnome with GUI settings. And when you ask about how to do it you get called an idiot for even wanting to change that setting.
I know I have used a gui on linux for users and groups. I find it hard to believe there is not longer a gui interface. same with starting and stopping services. I just went to the system monitor now and there is an option to kill processes on my laptop and my settings has a gui for adding and removing users. It does not have groups but im not running a distro meant for the enterprise.
Probably you used yast on opensuse.
we did use suse a lot at that time but we did go redhat for some reason but more workstations and clusters I think. It was long ago.
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More irrelevance about desktop market share in a world where soon almost nobody will have a desktop computer.
Yeah, sure. I heard that ürediction for 15 years now and still everyone and their grandma has a PC. Might not be a tower but a laptop instead, but the PC isn’t going anywhere.
