Linux

Honestly, the entitlement of the "Linux has bad UX" crowd really pisses me off. Yeah Linux is definitely as unusable as a hammer without a handle, guy. Hit the nail on the head with your handleless hammer right there. Give yourself a pat on the back for your metaphor skills 👍

Mac and Windows have billion dollar UX teams. Linux apps have almost entirely volunteer developers with at most some employees in a tiny company or nonprofit with shoestring budgets.

Mac and Windows have invasive UX "research" by recording user interactions behind their back. Most Linux apps don't even have the ability to record interaction data by design and intention.

Mac and Windows make money directly from people using their platforms so obviously they're going to do everything they can to keep you on the platform. Linux apps are donation funded with the occasional enterprise/professional support contract.

Windows and Mac users don't give a shit about how well the underlying code works because they're not supposed to see it, and it's very clear the companies know that and have prioritised accordingly. Linux developers are disproportionately in it for the love of programming and prefer to spend their time actually programming as opposed to doing wireframes or UI markup. Linux UIs tend to get made once and then not touched for years until something absolutely needs to change.

If you compare Linux's (read: mostly random people developing in their free time's) UX to the literal biggest tech companies in the world, then you will never run out of things to bemoan Linux for. This is like complaining that your gearhead buddy's project car has metal toggle switches in random places instead of a nice flowing panel like a brand new car straight off the dealership.

TL;DR: Pull request, long term funding toward establishing a UX team, or STFU. Stop making demands to volunteers and nonprofits and start actually contributing to UX improvements if you care so much. A major ethos of open source is "you don't like it? You fix it."

This article's two qualms with Linux UI are justified but, I think, somewhat overstated. The first point basically boils down to " 'Linux's' network filesystem handling doesn't have a GUI and is half baked", which are both true, but this is what happens when you're making a thousand utilities with a thousand different functions each. There is a will to support SMB, as evidenced by both Gnome and KDE having means to mount it, but the UI isn't great because it's not a focus and most people don't use network shares, so there's fewer feature requests and less development. Nautilus has 500 issues on the repo and 200 are bugs with 27000 commits from only a handful of authors.

The second issue is less justifiable as the author just wants this Linux utility to work like Windows. Partition management should absolutely only do what you tell it to do. Even on Windows I had to Google how to resize partitions, and I think Googling how to do that using the partition manager you're using is fair. Gnome Disks even has a nice help page for formatting a disk.

The author says that Linux should be as usable for grandparents as it is for children, and for people who have never used a computer before and only need to do what children and grandparents do (gaming (various caveats), writing, internetting), I think Linux provides a vastly better UX. For people doing advanced tasks (network shares, video editing, etc) there has to be a reasonable expectation of willingness to learn how to use a new operating system

Do you think a user that never used macOS or windows would manage to use them from minute zero? I can answer that for you. No. Users have habits that comes from their day to day tasks. And that applies especially to such things that we use for hours every day. So a livelong user of macOS would struggle with windows in the same way livelong windows user would struggle with Linux. And btw young generations hooked on phones are not capable to use computer with any OS from minute zero. Seriously, its like watching granpas and grandmas.

MS doesn't blame the user when they get confused by a GUI or become intimidated by a command line interface.

Umm, yes they do. Look at copilot (as one recent example). The full range of opinion I've ever encountered goes from apathy to hatred. (Never heard of anyone having anything positive to say about it, the 'nicest' thing being to the effect of 'I just ignore it, so I don't care'). And yet, Microsoft's attitude is that 'the user is wrong, deal with it', and this has always been the case in both Windows and Mac OS, while the various OSS DEs attempt to fix real user frustrations.

Many of the points they make are true for GNOME specifically, but thankfully, there are plenty of other options, and Linux != GNOME.

First we had "this meeting could have been an email", now we have "this blog post could have been a tweet/skeet/toot".

Most of this article is bashing an imagined strawman and the main meat of the issue is two papercuts.

The kernel does not have good UX, as it's not something you use directly.

Name a specific distribution and desktop UI combination, then we can discuss that.

But generalising all of them as just "Linux sucks" does not help, as they're very diverse.

Oh this article again? Has it been a year already?

This drivel - okay not entirely, but I’m making a point - is all the wrong attitudes. “People like Windows, let’s make Linux more like Windows so people will accept it.”

We are not in a popularity contest. Linux is great - nay, extraordinary, phenomenal - because it has most of its shit together. Priorities, functionality, efficiency. If most people are not up to the task of learning something, that’s their problem. And yeah, that’s most people. In case the author of this article hadn’t noticed, the vast majority of people are, unfortunately, lazy and stupid. I’m not saying it’s always their faults but that’s not the issue. We don’t lower ourselves down to meet them where they are. If Linux remains only a tiny portion of the ecosystem, and needs to keep being the thing for only geeks (translation, got good grades in school, enjoy learning things, challenge themselves, etc.) then why does there seem to be this perception that that needs to change? Quite the opposite; the small bit of mainstream corporate elements that have become involved have only demonstrated they’ll immediately enshittify it, because that’s what they do.

Let Linux continue to be the fringe ecosystem for geeks. Why do we need morons to enjoy using it? Why is this a problem?

the article raises good albeit imperfect points with good examples.

we truly need more ux people and designers to contribute.

I don't think the solution is to make basic software Windows-like.

I think I'd rather see more work being done on newbie-focused distributions to introduce the user to all the key differences of Linux, to literally guide their hand in how things are done here. A welcome app with a simple FAQ, a set of wizards (explaining what's being done behind the scenes) and even direct "click here" advices are all welcome.

Linux way is, for the most part, superior, and once you understand how things work here, you actively don't want it to be too Windows-like.

Linus doing the world a massive favor by showing the flaws of Linux and still getting so much flak for it by the average Linux user is ridiculous.

I've used SAMBA shares for years, and it's dead simple to map a network drive in Explorer. And mounting that drive on boot is a matter of a checkbox in a dialog.

The problem is that knowing how to do something in Windows teaches you Windows and learning it in Linux teaches you computers. For example if you know how to connect to a remote host through the command line, you already know how to connect to one in Nautilus, and vise versa. (via the command ssh://user@host)

I think this cross-pollination approach is going to be a learning curve for Windows users. It is for me. But taking the time has not only helped me understand Linux, I understand how to use Windows better, despite barely logging in for over a year.

Me personally I agree with the first point of the Author regarding SMB Handling. Requiring to Type smb:// in the address bar in Nautilus Network section and then Drag-and-Drop it to the Bookmarks section IS Not very User friendly.

I would also appreciate a simple Wizard to do this.

Regarding the Topic about reformatting a Disk: Even I don't care about GPT, MBR and creating Partitions. And i am Developing in Linux since more then 10 years. I also just want to wipe my Stick and make it empty. I guess Most users also don't care about the Filesystem used. They only want to set:

• Works only in Linux (use ext4 or xfs)
• Works on anything that has a USB Port (use FAT32)

Anything else could be hidden behind an advanced section.

Who the fuck needs UX. Just use the terminal.

On a more serious note I think this person forgets that everything has a learning curve no matter what it is. And the attempt to make that not true is why we have every phone being a boring square and why computer literacy has cratered so dramatically.