Is Linux (dumb)user friendly yet?

PoorlyWrittenPapyrus , 14 hours ago (edited 10 hours ago)

It could not be simpler.

My grandfather in law kept getting scammed and installing viruses while on Windows. I installed Linux Mint on his desktop last year, setup automatic updates, created a non admin account for him, changed a few easy configurations to hide the technical stuff that appears when you turn the computer on, and he fucking loves it.

Keep in mind getting this man to login to Netflix on his TV is a minimum 30 minute long phone call. One time, we had to send people to check on him because his phone was off for 3 days straight; he put it on airplane mode and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.

He has had 0, yes, exactly 0, problems with his computer since I installed Linux Mint. It’s faster, to point where he noticed and commented on it, and he finds it easier to use than Windows, which has been on every computer he has ever owned.

He brags to anyone who will give him the time of day how much he loves it.

I promise you, it’s really that easy.

deadbeef79000 , 14 hours ago

Yes it is. Pick a newbie friendly distribution. Say Ubuntu.

IMHO Windows is only “user friendly” because it’s preinstalled on most PC’s.

User friendliness comes with experience.

just_another_person , 14 hours ago (edited 14 hours ago)

I assume you’re talking about Desktop Environments. Yes, of course. KDE and Gnome rival MacOS as far as usability goes. The better part is that other software development groups port their software over to Linux as well and make it as seamless as possible.

People run into confusion here when people flood the comments on user questions like this, so let me shut that down right now.

If you need something that is a straight Desktop Environment, get a distro with KDE or Gnome, and a known OS that will have a lot of user base getting questions and answers if you even run into any.

Fedora or Ubuntu. Don’t listen to anyone arguing for their preferred favorites.

Don’t listen to performance comments.

You want a solid, no issues, not needing to look for help kind of distro. It’s those two, no question, and they both have KDE and Gnome variants.

That’s really about it.

wulf , 14 hours ago

Fully agree with this. There will be a slight learning curve since it will be different from what your used to, but it’s friendly enough to figure out.

If you know the windows program you want to use just search something like “Linux alternative for x” (sometimes there is specific KDE or Gnome progs)

thayerw , 14 hours ago

I would maybe add Linux Mint to that list, but otherwise you’re spot on. Fedora and Ubuntu are the easiest and most robust systems for novice computer users.

just_another_person , 12 hours ago

Linux Mint is Ubuntu with specific changes.

Feathercrown , 7 hours ago

That’s how all distros work. They exist so that you don’t have to make changes yourself.

subtext , 11 hours ago

Only thing I might add would be potentially Bluefin. It is Fedora with Gnome, except Atomic. It markets itself as:

The best of both worlds: the reliability and ease of use of a Chromebook, with the power of a GNOME desktop.

It’s been fantastic for me with automatic updates and everything installed through flathub so you don’t bork your system with any misconfigured installs.

projectbluefin.io

just_another_person , 11 hours ago (edited 11 hours ago)

No. This is your own spin.

Why the fuck can’t y’all just let people have it easy and try shit out before you feel you MUST say your piece about your own fucking experience and offer complicated alternatives?

Fedora and Ubuntu for beginners. That’s it. Nobody’s asking for performance or immutable bullshit until you confused them with it. STFU!

subtext , 10 hours ago

Well this is literally Fedora, and I offered it for consideration, not a recommendation. This seems a tad hostile.

just_another_person , 9 hours ago

*Immutable. Get lost.

subtext , 7 hours ago

Also: should you wish for something with Fedora literally in the name, Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kionite are the upstream—published by the Fedora Project—versions of Bluefin that use GNOME and KDE, respectively.

Either could be an excellent choice should you wish for

Atomic

The whole system is updated in one go, and an update will not apply if anything goes wrong, meaning you will always have a working computer.

fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/silverblue/

fedoraproject.org/atomic-desktops/kinoite/

JustMarkov , 7 hours ago

There’s also a KDE spin called Aurora: getaurora.dev

jalapeno_popper561 , 14 hours ago

Linux Mint is pretty user friendly. I’m also not a fan of typing code, but so far the only thing I’ve HAD to use terminal for came with really easy instructions and the commands were listed out (like a recipe) so all I had to do was copy/paste and things worked out just fine.

The 1 issue I ran into was upgrading from LM 21.3 to 22. I had to go back to 21.3 because 22 couldn’t connect to wifi (I’m guessing because my machine is old) but 21.3 works perfect. My other machine is a lot newer and just about to the end of its warranty period, so once that’s up I plan to switch that one to Linux as well.

teawrecks , 12 hours ago

It’s better to ask which distro is dummy proof. Some are made for noobs and windows users, others are not, and they’re all based on “Linux”.

Mint, Debian, and Fedora are all good starter options, and all are made to get stuff done without having to use the command line.

Brahvim , 10 hours ago

Debian without the CLI?

…What?

D_Air1 , 13 hours ago

I don’t think any Operating System is (dumb)user friendly yet.

bloodfart , 14 hours ago

Everyone is saying yes.

They are wrong.

You will absolutely have to troubleshoot in order to figure out how to do what you want to do.

Linux is different than windows or macos and you’re gonna have to gain an understanding (however dumbed down you might describe it) of those differences in order to use the computer.

If you can get over that hump of understanding then I think you’ll be fine.

theshatterstone54 , 13 hours ago

They are wrong.

The sad truth. Enough said. Linux is still not there, as much as we’d like to pretend it is. And it’s especially not there for dumb users.

cabbage , 13 hours ago

Dumb user here. I completely disagree with this.

I was using Ubuntu for a few years, now I'm on Fedora. I don't really know how to do anything. For my needs it's just very easy.

Maybe my needs just aren't sophisticated enough for me to encounter all those problems I'm supposed to be having. But I've been using it for years and my experience is that it really just works.

christian , 10 hours ago

While there’s a little bit of getting acclimated to slightly different programs for the same tasks, I kind of imagine sophisticated needs primarily comes down to hardware. A company making some sort of computer hardware doohickey might design and test and provide support for something with Windows/Mac in mind, and maybe for other operating systems they’re not cooperative with documenting support, under the mindset that it would reveal trade secrets or decrease shareholder value in some other way. Linux support then comes from other means like reverse engineering. This could mean that it will take time before all the kinks are ironed out, or if the product was short-lived the linux community might not care enough to have someone volunteer to keep up with support. Common, time-tested hardware will have good support. Plugging in some old printer that was discontinued shortly after launch will be more of a crapshoot.

cabbage , 5 hours ago

Yeah. I've double checked that my last few laptops worked well with Linux before buying them. But I don't buy very flashy technology, so it was never really any question.

My printer is from Brother, and it's just plug and play. At work it's all web print and has been since I started working for pay, really.

christian , 54 minutes ago

I’m just speculating on reasons behind why people might feel it’s still not user-friendly. It was a pretty easy transition for me too, and that was years ago.

cabbage , 6 minutes ago

Yeah, I think you're right, and I think that's exactly why it's a blind spot for me.

On several occasions I've also lent an old laptop to friends when theirs broke, and all of them ended up using Linux for months no questions asked. They later went back to Windows because of the Word grammar check, but other than that it just worked for them.

But of course, if you can't get your drivers to work it'll be a completely different experience.

ColdWater , 13 hours ago

Another dumb user here Been using Arch for a year now, things just works without much tinkering… mostly

cabbage , 5 hours ago

If you're ok Arch I guess it at least signals a willingness to learn! I would never dare to go there haha.

Enkers , 13 hours ago (edited 13 hours ago)

I’ve got to agree with this. I love Linux and have run it on my servers for years. That said, I’ve got Mint on my laptop and tried to print an image over wifi at a friend’s place and could not for the life of me get it to print properly.

For the most part things do just work, but there are a lot more “obscure” scenarios that are handled correctly in windows but not Linux.

I also find that when things go wrong on Linux, they are harder to fix. I’ve had several times I’ve had to deal with circular dependency hell to get something to install properly. I did eventually get those problems resolved, but it was often a single person having a tangential problem that hinted me to how to solve it.

Edit: I think if your usage patterns are straight forward enough, it is by far and away the better choice. If you do the same stuff all the time, it’ll pretty much never break, which is not something I could say about windows. So for OP, it sounds like it would be a good fit.

Dagnet , 12 hours ago

I consider myself a reasonably tech literate user and tried to set up dual boot on my pc using a whole separate ssd just for Linux to be safe. Installing it went fine but GRUB wouldn’t let me boot into windows, somehow the instalation nuked my windows boot partition and no amount of repairing would work, I had to completely reinstall Windows and now I’m seriously worried of trying Linux again.

bloodfart , 10 hours ago

That sucks. I’ve done that a lot of times by either not understanding what I was doing or fat fingering some decision.

If you do decide to try again, tag me and I’ll set up a vm environment similar to yours and walk you through any confusing steps.

just_another_person , 11 hours ago

Dude, your wrong. Not what OP was asking about.

Desktop light usage only. DFQOH and don’t come back.

deadbeef79000 , 10 hours ago

DFQOH

I can’t work out what this an acronym for. Please help!

GustavoM , 9 hours ago

So you are saying that dumbs can’t read? Because hey, that is all it takes to troubleshoot a problem on linux.

Thus, even your grandmother can “do google” nowadays.

zer0bitz , 4 hours ago

Start with Mint and use flatpaks. You will be all set.

BananaTrifleViolin , 12 hours ago

Yea it is user friendly. If you’re using your computer once a week presumably its for things like web browsing or working with documents - these are very easy and straight forward to do in linux.

The other big benefit is the cost - linux is free and you’ll save £120 on a basic version of Windows which can be used to get get a better PC or just saved.

Add to that no advertising, much more private and entirely yours to do what you like with. And if you don’t like it you can easily install Windows instead, so its zero risk to try Linux.

Revan343 , 12 hours ago

Linux vs. Windows doesn’t generally affect the cost unless you’re building the machine yourself, or buying from a Linux specific vendor like Framework (which are generally more expensive than what you’ll find at Best Buy anyways). The major PC manufacturers are going to have Windows pre-installed whether you want it or not.

SandbagTiara2816 , 14 hours ago

What do you typically use your computer for? That’s going to have a major impact. If it’s pretty basic stuff (web browsing, text editing, etc) you shouldn’t have any issue. If it’s something that’s more complicated or unusual, then sometimes it’s easy to do and sometimes not, depending on what you want to do. In general, a little bit of comfort searching the web and working in the command line helps a lot with troubleshooting Linux

cabbage , 13 hours ago

A test could be to start by using Libre software on Windows.

Switch to LibbreOffice or some other alternative instead of Word. Gimp, Inkscape, and Krita for graphical stuff. Whatever proprietary software you use, check if it exists for Linux; if not, see if you can find an alternative you're happy with.

For the people I know, Word is the biggest deal breaker.

elxeno , 6 hours ago

Mint should be pretty easy to get used to, solid choice IMO, as for the programs

Word, Excel, ect(I’m fine with alternatives)

If you’re fine with libreoffice, no problems

Spotify

Don’t know.

Gimp (would have been a make or break, so I’m glad it’s supported)

No problems

Brave browser (browser is a browser)

Not sure if there’s a flatpak, U might need to add a PPA, but it’s just a one time copy/paste a few commands.

Steam

Works fine, but some games might not run or require some tinkering, check games u play on protondb.com

Discord

It’s a bit annoying because they require u to have the latest version all the time, it won’t auto update, and the package might take a while to update, so u either download and update manually every time (it will be a different install than the flatpak package) or use the web version, peraonally i just run a script to download and extract the tar.gz version when there’s an update.

wuphysics87 , 6 hours ago

Could you share that script with op?

elxeno , 6 hours ago

Sure

<span style="color:#323232;">#!/bin/bash
</span><span style="color:#323232;">DIRNAME=$(dirname -- "$( readlink -f -- "$0"; )");
</span><span style="color:#323232;">cd "$DIRNAME"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">wget -O discord.tar.gz 'https://discord.com/api/download/stable?platform=linux&format=tar.gz' && tar xvf discord.tar.gz && rm discord.tar.gz
</span>

Edit: DIRNAME is just to find the script location and download/extract there, in case u call the script from somewhere else

red , 6 hours ago

brave has flatpack , and you don’t really have to do all that to update discord just go to software store and click update?

elxeno , 6 hours ago

I don’t use flatpak but i assume there’s a delay between discord and flatpak updates, or even if there is no delay

just go to software store and click update?

This would update everything, right? That’s usually not what i want when i’m opening discord.

arirr , 43 minutes ago

There are also 3rd party interfaces which are basically web client wrappers that add some features.

kyub , 5 hours ago

Dumb user friendly (having no particular background): yes Dumb user friendly (having Windows background): no

Windows knowledge makes learning other OS harder because Windows is the weirdest OS out there.

savvywolf , 10 hours ago

I think user friendly distros (like Mint) are very user friendly if you’re just doing simple things like web browsing or using Steam. Mint (and other distros) have a realy nice software centre that can install a lot of software with a single click from flathub.org , which removes a lot of headaches that there used to be with installing software.

However, when things go wrong (which they do sometimes because computers are complicated), you may have to troubleshoot and play around with the command line.

… But that’s honestly happened a lot with Windows in my experience as well. Only with less command line and more running esoteric exes.

Honestly, given that most Linux distros are free anyway, you may as well try it out and see if everything works. Worst comes to worst, you find something doesn’t work and end up installing Windows over the top of it.

bizdelnick , 13 hours ago

There’s one case when you can’t avoid using command line. If you ask someone on Internet to help you, he will say you to type some commands. No window clicking, no screenshots will help. All GUIs are different, but CLI is (almost) always the same, and its output is well searchable. That’s why you see numerous command line listings in each topic discussing problems and could decide it’s impossible to use Linux without coding.

dhhyfddehhfyy4673 , 14 hours ago

Linux Mint w/ Cinnamon is a pretty painless transition.