I saw plenty of efforts that aim to create a Linux distribution for non-enthusiasts, for people who just want to use their computers, and not care about the details - A Desktop for All on the GNOME blog, most recently. While I commend the effort, my own experience is that these efforts are futile, and start off from a fundamentally wrong premise: that people are willing (let alone wanting) to manage their own operating systems.
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My family is using Linux because that’s the system I can maintain for them. Apart from my Dad, they never installed Linux, and never will. They don’t install software, they don’t upgrade, they don’t change settings either. All of that is something I do for them. And to do so effectively, I need a distribution I am familiar with, one that is also flexible enough to fine-tune for every member of the family, because they prefer fundamentally different things!
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The common pattern between all these three is that neither of them maintains their own systems. I do. As such, how beginner friendly the distribution is, is meaningless. The users of the system don’t care, they’ll never see those parts. They’ll have a preconfigured system maintained by someone else, and that’s exactly what they want. To make this work, I’m using distributions I am familiar with. For my parents, that’s Debian, because I was a Debian person when their systems were installed. For my Wife, it is NixOS, because I’m a NixOS person now. For the Twins, it will likely be NixOS too.
Imho, the best way to help a beginner should have happened many years before they put their hands on any Linux distro. It should have happened when they were still a small child, at school. In the way they were taught how to… learn and how to get better… aka, by expecting difficulties and by expecting to fail, often.
Failing should be expected as a beginner learning anything new. Like, say, we all learned to walk as toddlers. It was not by being told we walked perfectly but by falling on our diapered butt. Failing at outing one foot in front of the other and falling, over and over again.
That sounds obvious but, to my old eyes at the very least, it also sounds almost like an heresy when compared to what I see kids being taught nowadays. That things should be frictionless and that nobody should fail at anything, ever. That’s such a poor choice that doesn’t prepare them much. Well, imho.
When I switched (from 35+ years being an Apple user) to Linux, it was frustrating.
Even when where things went smooth, it could still be frustrating and it often was. If only, because it required me to change 35 years old habits. And when it wasn’t going smooth, even when I was using the best docs and guides, at times it could be incredibly and utterly frustrating, when not completely maddening. Either nothing on my machine was ever exactly like described in the doc, or the app version was different and some setting had changed, or my issue was a somewhat different, or the solution simply did not work, or I missed a tiny detail or a word somewhere in the guide. Whatever. Frustration was a constant.
That’s what people should be taught to expect and to be fine with. And not just with Linux, btw ;)
Long time Mac user here because of a steam deck. I’ve enjoyed KDE so much because of how much tweaking I can do. It basically feels like my Mac now, with the dock and the placement of the window management buttons, but also more colorful and “game-y”.
A week ago, I started tinkering a bit more with some other new options and it just wigged out, forcing me to reset it to default appearance in order to see anything again, and I spent and afternoon putting things back to how I liked them, albeit a bit different.
Also, now searching for global themes only results in an error and I have no idea why, nor how to fix it.
Nothing I do really makes it perfect, and I find myself a little put off by things such as my window styles not perfectly color matching the application styles because they were created by completely different artists with different goals in mind.
That said, my steam deck is a toy, and playing around is pretty much the only thing I’m doing with KDE and Linux at the moment. I am finding fun in it, ever if frustration is involved.
I’m going to disagree here, partially. I agree that teaching people how to use a computer, at an early age, is important. It’s also important to teach them about failure, and set realistic expectations.
That has little to do with constant system updates & maintenance. That is an entirely different skillset. Like, I can use my oven just fine, I know how to get around its kinda awkward menu system, to tell it whether I want to heat up frozen pizza, or if I’m baking bread, and stuff like that. I’m okay with learning a new menu system if I have to replace my oven. I will, however, leave the replacement to a professional. I will let a professional fix it too, should it break.
Same goes for computers and my family: they are perfectly capable of using computers. They can - reluctantly - adapt to change. They do not want to fix or maintain things, however. And that’s fine! It’s not their area of expertise, nor are they interested in it.
Most end-users are like that: they can use their systems, but don’t want to keep up with the constant change. That’s tiresome and distracting and annoying and error-prone. I believe these things are best done by someone who can smooth out the experience, someone who can help the end-users adapt, too, perhaps even prepare them in advance. That is what we should focus on, rather than trying to force unwilling people into maintenance. That never ends well.