this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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I think the issue is Linux users think user friendly means 100% freedom to adjust and configure as desired (the system is friendly to users), and most other people think user friendly means a single obvious green path to getting things done.
These are not strictly incompatible, theyβre just difficult to balance.
I think KDE does it well? "simple by default, powerful when needed" works a charm on their applications
KDE was a nightmare for my wife since it has the configuration right in the desktop bars and dialogs. Misclicks and drags meant she was making changes she didn't want to. GNOME was a better choice, 100% simple and no surprises.
I like Gnome too, and I think their settings done via terminal is genius. I know Apple has it too. I have no idea who invented this first, but I love it. The pro user can tune the things they like, but an average user donβt need that many configuration options.
That's stupid. We do not design cars such that it's impossible to crash if someone starts yanking on the wheel randomly.
Expecting an OS to do as much is ... just beyond pathetic.
You make a point but, hey now, let's not be cruel to people. I think we've all had a situation where a click was accidentally a click-and-drag and now things aren't how they were before, and we didn't realize exactly what was happening.
I feel like KDE might have features to lock down taskbar customization a little better but, I haven't looked for such a feature... π€
I've done that click and drag many times. Nothing worse than accidentally dragging a folder designated with pseudo random numbers into another pseudo random numbered folder, and not knowing if you actually dragged it into a folder, or missed and did nothing
Part of basic computer literacy is to not barrel forwards when something unexpected happens. It's not the end of the world to have to pause and go, "wait what?" and figure out how to get back or undo it.
Except GNOME did exactly that. Sh can't accidentally alter anything. Some people just have a hard time with computers and expected UI. Ever tried watching a good grampa deal with printer install and windows popups...you have to simplify things for less tch savvy people. Just like cars now have auto ebrake and lane assist
And cars are one of the most dangerous things on the planet, accounting for nearly 2% of all annual deaths by themselves. So maybe safety features are actually good?
Nobody is dying because they accidentally started desktop customizing on KDE. It's beyond pathetic to expect an already safe environment to protect you from yourself when the consequences are a moment of confusion.
Yeah I'm saying cars should be safer, not that KDE should kill you
There can't be single obvious green path for a lot of complex things and most of the things that we do on computers actually are complex like that. I would think that user friendliness is more of an indicator of a sane default behaviour or something that people already are taught to expect. Balancing that is even harder i think.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Arch_Linux#User_centrality
Recently been playing around with Mint. For the most part it's user friendly. Where it falls apart is it's not intuitive, it took me hours of googling to try to figure out how to add windows specific drivers (because the manufacturer didn't create Linux drivers) for a Bluetooth mouse so I could program the mouse buttons. There were community created drivers on GitHub but no direct way to get them, I would have had to download and configure several support files before I could even try to install. I eventually gave up and just bought another mouse.
Most people would have given up in the first 5min and tossed their PC out and kept the mouse.
It's not that Linux doesn't work, it's that it takes work to get it to work.
If Linux worked in the sense of clear step by step instructions and the developers/legacy users didn't expect everyone to be experts or expect everyone to spend hours trying to figure out world peace just to perform a mundane task, then it would probably replace windows pretty quickly.
To an extent that's an anathema to how software tutorials on linux are designed: Developers don't know which distro a given user may be using, have no idea what sort of edge cases a random person may find themselves within, and as such are reliant on the only universal component to unite them all - the terminal.
Installing a windows driver on Linux Mint is a definite edge case - there's no chance that the Mint developers had that in mind as expected user behavior. In addition, there's no way they could have determined the originated issue and suggested a solution in a nice GUI prompt, because unlike Microsoft, there is no telemetry involved that could be utilized to determine an appropriate package like that community made driver automatically.
So yeah - a bit unfair to those making tutorials.
I guess that's the problem with having multiple distros and this example might be an edge case. But I would also make the argument that installation instructions can and should be clear cut for the terminal for novice users. For example, the instructions for the terminal commands shouldn't assume that I know the inside lingo or acronyms. I shouldn't have to be indoctrinated to use Linux, that's gatekeeping and seems to be pretty common on websites for the Linux community.
Fortunately most of these tutorials have copy/paste fields that list out the contents of each command in plain text so you can make sure you know what you are running. Although unfortunately there's no easy way to incorporate non-acronym or shorthand text within the actual commands themselves (since terminal commands are intentionally shortened for decreasing the amount of typing required per manual command), but good tutorials will include an explanation of what each copy/paste line is doing (sounds like you might've witnessed some bad ones).
In regards to gatekeeping, at some point it's an unfortunate byproduct of users on forums sharing answers that "you should already know why this command is here and what it does", because they're tired of explaining to people who should really read the troubleshooting guides included in their distro, or are burnt out from offering their time repeatedly over and over. Nobody is being paid to give you advice, and that's a double edged sword - because they are doing this out of a genuine desire to help users like you, but aren't willing to deep dive like a professor would during their paid office hours.
With all that being said, those of us who enjoy using the terminal whenever possible are more than happy to share our secrets with you - just realize you may have to read and copy some lines of text from time to time and check a wiki, instead of a GUI installer. Since we're not all on Mint XD
meh, we already have an option for the first (KDE Plasma) and for the second (GNOME) as far as I'm concerned, so what else is missing