There have been multiple accounts created with the sole purpose of posting advertisement posts or replies containing unsolicited advertising.

Accounts which solely post advertisements, or persistently post them may be terminated.

possiblylinux127 , (edited )

Mac OS is not a “just works” experience. It is heavily tied to icloud and Apple services and everything is janky.

Maybe if Mac OS matured a bit I would consider using it but for now it is in a broken unusable state.

Telorand ,

If you appreciate autonomy, avoid MacOS. Their whole business model is to suck you into their technological ecosystem. The fact that their stuff works in any way outside of their expensive, walled garden is unintentional.

GustavoM ,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

By telling users to change their mindset, by showing em how control is important and how the “just werks” mentality imposed by Microsoft is more detrimental than anything.

mumblerfish ,

I have been forced to use mac now for like a year, and I don’t get the whole “just works” opinion of it. Like I have had so many issues with just basic stuff. Turning off mouse acceleration and the mouse still feels all slimy. Highest mouse speed is so slow and setting it higher requires some crazy tricks, which also does not work consistently through boots. It can’t wake up a lot of monitors, I have to turn them off and on manually. If it cannot connect to a monitor properly but tries, it like disables your keyboard for a few seconds while trying. Some items in the settings menu take a long time to load, as in if I reboot, log in, open settings, there is no mouse settings.

Extrasvhx9he ,

Kinda don’t think you can its one of the beauties of Linux, there’s so many different flavors of it. Best thing that would’ve helped me as a beginner would’ve been like a collection of all the wiki’s and basic knowledge in a single space instead of searching through different sites for a problem or terminal commands, which I bet exists but I just never looked too hard. Also documentation of common problems would’ve been big for me (especially for older devices) like drivers no longer being supported by kernels and solutions like using the open source version instead.

jlow ,

MacOS being a bad example here since Apple only needs to make its OS work on a very small set of hardware that they control wheras Linux (and Windows, yes) need to work on probably hundreds of thousand if not millions of devices (including Macs 👌) with at least the same amount of peripherals combined in almost any imaginable way. That’s a completely different task.

wuphysics87 ,

Most people have had great answers coming from the company side of things. I’ll take it from the standpoint of individuals like us helping someone linux curious see the light, while still having the “just works” experience.

Do not give them any choices. None. Put them on your stable distro of choice for a new user, call whatever that is “Linux”, and be on your way.

But why? Isn’t that antithetical to everything we value? Yes and no. We value choice almost above anything else, but that doesn’t “just work” for most people. Which of those do you value more?

deadbeef79000 ,

No-one who buys a PC with windows preinstalled gets any choice at all… and had the preinstalled malware cme with it.

wuphysics87 ,

That’s true. Most are perfectly fine provided they have a computer ready to use. Straight out of the box. Immediately. The lack of choice itself is comforting. Everything moves forward. No lateral motion.

We must provide them that type of “thing that just works”. Constantly move forward. What is comfortable. What is familiar.

PseudoSpock ,
@PseudoSpock@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Simple, start teaching it in elementary school all the way up through high school. Apple did it long ago and got apple users out of those kids. Microsoft does it now, and now you have Windows users. Just need the computer education to be Linux centric from the start. It’s not that it’s different, it’s that it’s not what they grew up with and were taught.

possiblylinux127 ,

Windows hasn’t been in schools for a while. It is all Chrome OS

krakenfury ,

Linux is a tool that big corporate entities have profited greatly from for many years, and will continue to. Same with BSD, Apache, Docker, MySQL, Postgres, SSH…

Valve, Sys76, Framework, etc. Are proving that using Linux to serve an end user market is also profitable, and are capable of supporting enterprise use-cases.

I understand that there may be specific problems to solve wrt improving adoptability, usability, compatibility, etc., but Linux is doing more than ok within the context of the FOSS ecosystem (and increasingly without).

Your thinking is slightly skewed, IMHO. Linux doesn’t have an inherent incentive to compete with MacOS or MS, and if it did, it would be subject to the same pressures that encourage bad behavior like spying on users, creating walled gardens, and so forth.

crimsonpoodle ,

But Linux is open source? So if hypothetically so distro adopted spying al la windows couldn’t people just change distros? tbh I also think the question is slightly confusing as I don’t understand why OP thinks Mac OS is not standardized but I digress.

krakenfury ,

Yeah sure, a distro could start spying on users. How easy it would be would depend on their distribution model, and how willing they are to violate the GPL.

TCB13 ,
@TCB13@lemmy.world avatar

The way to get Linux more appealing is to get proprietary software makers, like Adobe, Microsoft (Office), you know the actual things people need to do their job, to make software for Linux. Steam Deck is a good example of this, it works because Steam ported the games to Linux…

possiblylinux127 ,

Looks at the current state of Microsoft and Adobe

I’m good.

Anyway you can’t really do much about a company not supporting Linux. Either find an alternative or don’t use Linux.

Mandy ,

Linux actually needs to just work first

gravitas_deficiency ,

Atomic OSes should be evangelized more aggressively to laypersons. IMO, they’re great for 3 specific use cases:

  • gaming (bazzite) - personally, I want my gaming box to “just work”
  • thin clients/low-powered laptops used as an entry point to your homelab or other remote systems - again, I like having at least one fairly bulletproof and super stable system to use as a human:homelab gateway/admin machine
  • non-techies. If the update fails, just roll back. Can’t remember if that’s generally an automated recovery process or not, but that sort of idiot-proofing is precisely what the general public needs in the context of Linux. Because there are a lot of idiots out there.
BlueSquid0741 ,

Absolutely. Look at Aeon. I turn it on and do what I need to do.

Later I might see a quick pop up that says system has been updated. It didn’t require intervention. It didn’t even tell me it was happening, it just informed me after the fact.

If anything broke, I would never know because on the next boot if something failed it just uses the previous snapshot to boot. As far as I am concerned the system is working just like it always has.

But even as recently as this week I see people saying: immutable? No don’t make it a bad experience for them! Just recommend Ubuntu for newcomers! >:/

Xiisadaddy ,
@Xiisadaddy@lemmygrad.ml avatar

Honestly Linux does work pretty much just as well as MacOS if you run it on hardware thats super well supported and that tons of linux users use. MacOS has integration with its hardware because its all made by the same company. They only have to support a few models of computer.

If you installed Linux Mint today on a Thinkpad t480, and on some obscure weird laptop with rarely used hardware your gonna get 1 install that just works out of the box and your gonna get 1 that you have to hunt for drivers, and do tons of work on. Its just the nature of being able to use any hardware. Some will work better than others.

If you want an example of how to increase adoption you pick a line of computers thats of high quality and have them be supported by the community a ton. Then you convince the company that makes these computers to ship a version of them with linux pre-installed, and potentially help atleast with funding the development of whatever distro they use.

If your average user bought a laptop, opened it, turned it on, and it had linux on it and worked relatively well, they are never going to change it. Its not a normal thing to just change your OS most people don’t even know that you can do that. I gave my grandmother a linux mint laptop and she thinks its windows.

earth_walker ,
@earth_walker@lemmy.world avatar

Look at the Steam Deck as an example:

  • Linux is preinstalled
  • Integrated hardware and software
  • Immutable OS that is very hard to bork
  • UI is Windows-like which is familiar to the target market
  • Good value for the price
  • Offered by a well-known and well-liked brand
  • Marketed and advertised to the target market

We need more Linux devices like this to gain market share.

MudMan ,

You got it. The moment you surface the idea that there are multiple distros or DEs you've missed the goal the thread is suggesting. Presintalled, customized software built for the hardware is the way to ease people in with zero tweaking, which is crucial for newcomers.

cRazi_man , (edited )

“People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”

The only way to make sure Linux works like that is to have a closed hardware environment. But it has to play nicely with other hardware and services (e.g. printers, webcams, etc + office documents, etc). It has taken a very long time for MacOS to get to this point, but people put up with Mac compromises because enough things worked smoothly.

I’ve just commented about this in another thread…but I’m pretty convinced that Linux is not close to being ready for normies.

jjjalljs ,

but I’m pretty convinced that Linux is not close to being ready for normies.

Yeah. I consider myself somewhat tech savvy (I do software development for work) and I had a really bad time installing mint on my desktop. I got it to work after a day but that was far more than a casually interested person would put up with.

Psyhackological OP ,
@Psyhackological@lemmy.ml avatar

Yeah exactly.

But what about casual usage like office? The option to choose OS preinstalled on the laptops or desktop would be beneficial.

But Microsoft holds its monopolistic grip.

olafurp , (edited )

System76 is doing that these days. They put extra hardware support for their Linux distro TuxedoOS and I’ve heard good things.

Edit: System76 make PopOS and Tuxedo computers make TuxedoOS

pnutzh4x0r ,
@pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org avatar

I think you meant Pop!_OS (is developed by System76). TuxedoOS is developed by Tuxedo Computers, which is a European Linux focused hardware company.

That said, the point stands… there are hardware companies making Linux supported devices.

olafurp ,

Sorry, I mixed those up. Thanks for the correction

Drathro ,

Software-wise, it seems that the relatively fast adoption of flatpaks and other containerized formats somewhat solves the typical dependency hell that was so common in Linux just a few years back (and to some extent still is an issue today depending on your distro and use case). The hardware support side is a little harder. That’s going to be up to vendors to play nice with the Kernel team and/or introduce reasonable userland software that doesn’t break the golden rule. Until Linux gets more market share the latter isn’t likely to happen. A nice side benefit of the emergence of immutable and/or atomic distros is that users can play around and try things with much lower risk of bricking their systems, so I’d also consider that a step closer in the “it just works” department.

ReversalHatchery ,

Automatic updates are essential. and unfortunately, it should not be an option to keep an old version of something, because through shared libraries it will hold back the entire system. fatpaks should be used for those programs.

Fortunately it’s getting there, like KDE is working on it too, but it’s still got a long way.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • [email protected]
  • random
  • lifeLocal
  • goranko
  • All magazines
    •