This post is about expectations and behaviors people have with switching to Linux, as well as our community’s contradictory beahvior and expectations towards new users. It is not meant to attack any particular section of the FOSS community, LMG or LTT community. There will however be some speculation regarding learned behaviors from both the Pop!_OS maintainers as well as LTT staff’s total disregard for security practices in running any commands they find without understanding what the commands do.

Newcomer Friendly Distributions don’t focus on the right things.

Breaking Windows users of bad habits should be a priority, not hiding the CLI from the user in hopes of winning them over. If a user is afraid to open a terminal, Linux is not for them, this is not the way we do things. It is fine to have a visual frontend for a Software Center, but the user should be familiar with how to work with the package manager. This means that your package manager should be well documented and have QUALITY verbose outputs. As well as have sane defaults for the base system. We also need to encourage users to use a system which meets their needs. Telling a user to install Arch or Debian on their first go is setting all but the most dedicated users up for failure.

Linux does not need to become more like Windows to succeed, Windows users need to approach trying out Linux Distributions as something new to learn. I have another post about Manjaro as an example, almost all newbie focussed distributions end up having some of these issues out of fear or allowing the user to maintain their own system.

We as a community need to work on more approachable Documentation

The FreeBSD Documentation has this situation mostly solved, Things like the Arch Wiki are not as great as we make them out to be. Verbose Documentation != Quality Documentation. If it takes a user 10x as long to solve an issue because of your documentation is too verbose and your system doesn’t ship with sane defaults, your system is at fault, not the user. Focus on solving the user’s issue first, and explaining how it solves their issue as a secondary. They will be more willing to understand why it it solved their issue. We should encourage users to research their own problems, but not gatekeep them away from obvious solutions behind confusing walls of text.

LTT needs to focus on learning as opposed to doing

You can’t daily drive a system you don’t understand. Linus would likely have a lot of the same issues switching to MacOS. If you don’t take the time to get familiar with your system you can’t be surprised when it breaks. This arguement can easily be made for people Transitioning to and from MacOS, Windows, and ChromeOS. Windows frustrates the hell out of me because I don’tuse it on a daily basis.

Closing

apt is a piece of shit nightmare package manager and that’s the real source of most of these problems. Fuck apt.