What are the main challenges in Linux adoption for New users, and how can it be addressed?

fugepe@lemmy.mlbanned from sitebanned from site to Linux@lemmy.ml – 351 points –
380

You are viewing a single comment

At this point, my biggest dream is that these 'new user' distros used only Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd and Flatpaks simply to simplify things. Hopefully we're less than 2024 away from NoVideo Wayland support.

Also as soon as XFCE releases their Wayland support, that soon it'll become the most famous DE choice of Mint.

What I am really happy is to see how well supported Pipewire already is. Pipewire has never showed any problem in the new installs for me.

So ... basically Pop!_OS.

That's what I'm using now, and it's what I'd recommend for most desktop users. I've been using Linux systems on-and-off since before kernel version 1.0: Slackware, then Debian, then Ubuntu, then Mint, then Pop.

(Admittedly, my use cases are pretty simple: a terminal, a browser, Signal, VLC, and Steam.)

Pretty much. Pop is my go-to recommendation for pretty much anyone these days. It's so well polished and just easy.

This PopOs ?

Yes, that pop os. As luck would have it, Linus installed it during a very brief period where the steam package in their repo was broken. This is not a common occurrence, and I have never heard of it happening before or since.

This whole series triggered me so hard. They went out of their way to test it under the worst possible conditions.

  • last at night
  • setting a goal with a deadline/time constraints for first run
  • not stopping and reading or thinking, just assuming away
  • copy paste from google frsit thing that looks vagualy right
  • tunnel vission
  • not resources like Emily, ensuring they make big mistakes

Then they follow up with hypocrisy of this shit, after going on and on about UI not being right or hard to use for the end user.

The problem with that is most major distros market themselves as "new user" distros to some extent though. Noob-friendly, out-of-the-box, easy, etc are all distro-marketing buzz-words that mean nothing.

You can't expect them to only use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks because that dream requires every distro to use Wayland, Pipewire, Systemd, and Flatpaks, which will never be reality.

Most distros will probably eventually adopt these tools, but there won't be a sudden shift. It will be gradual.

Well, for Pipewire it's the apps which needs to adjust at this point. Only thing missing currently is the Wayland but it's coming. Making Linux less fragmented (read: confusing), the more new users will give a try.

pipewire seems ready for primetime but I'm more dubious about Wayland. For instance KDE appears to still be a bit flaky and sway still works poorly under Nvidia and will never have proper mixed DPI for xwayland apps. Still seems like a tradeoff vs X which doesn't require a compromise. XFCE is roughly 10% of Mint users. Mint users are unlikely to switch because of wayland support

Systemd

Fridge art. Fuck, they MAYBE have nfsroot working. MAYBE. After a decade of fucking around, when it was available for ages. The number of bags on the side of lennart's piece of crap, just to reinvent the wheels we had before, is absolutely ridiculous.

and Flatpaks

... break single source of truth for as-built information and current software manifest. This kills validation, which dissolves certainty on consistency, then repeatability. And given the state of the software load exported to management tools is NOT the flatpak source of truth, you now have a false negative on the 'installation' of a flatpak resource when checking it via management.

Oh. That needs to be on the interview questions.

Gonna be honest with you I'm an intermediate user and understood jack shit of what you just said. A beginner and average user would have probably been scared off by Linux by this point rewding this.

If I understood the funny words magic man correctly, he is complaining that flatpaks don't come from a single trusted source and may become a vector for malware, unlike official distro repositories. Still, that was a very technobabble way of saying it.

A beginner and average user would have probably been scared off by Linux by this point rewding this.

Maybe thats what he/she was trying to achieve.