I feel like the gap between windows and more user friendly distros like Ubuntu and Mint is pretty narrow now. Linux still has to shake off the reputation of being difficult to use though. I’m not sure what that will take.

Microsoft has held onto the market with a variety of tools, even some downright anti competitive practices. Even if Linux was hypothetically a better OS, in every way, for every user, toppling MS as the dominant player would be still met with some resistance. That’s what happened with OS/2, and that was backed up by IBM.

It’s probably not that bad, but the attitude towards novice users is a red flag. I get not having the time or energy to respond to each and every help request, but putting that in a readme is basically telling users that they’re on their own. I think I’d get ridiculed if I started asking for help.

It’s a good strategy if you’re trying to keep your software niche though.

To be clear, it seems like cool software. Compiling every time you need to change your config seems excessive to me, but I think I get the vibe. There’s just no reason to be preemptively hostile to new users.

You can just visit a different community, but it won’t help. Lion King Linux memes will follow you to the ends of the earth.

That is BSD. You can go there. Cool people. Hardware support is a bit spottier though.

Documentation has gotten worse too. Veronica Explains discussed this issue in one of their videos. If you look at some good examples of documentation like the Commodore 64 manual, it explains concepts to an audience unfamiliar with computers in a way that’s easy to understand. Lots of modern software doesn’t have docs like this anymore. Then, on top of that, you have the condescending users in help forums.

Is Wayland better for gaming than X?

Uninstall Call of Duty.

For a meme community, is it really worth drawing the line at BSD? It’s in the same spirit. Tomato potato.

Yeah shifting production to the US is much more complicated than just making it more expensive to import things. Even when it’s on goods that can be produced here, I’m skeptical that any of these tariffs will result in increased production here.

Yeah this is a reasonable take. GIMP has its core set of users, and, even though I could be wrong about this, I suspect that they like the UI as it is. They’re not beholden to making the most generalized image editing software for Linux.

This was my thought as well. Unix was built from the ground up as an OS to support researchers and engineers. Later people adapted it to desktop use. Windows was built to be easy to use for the average person from much earlier on. I don’t think anyone claiming that it’s not easier to use than Linux has used it lately or is being completely honest.

Fortunately, today the gap is really small compared to what it was IMO. Compatibility with games has gotten really good which pretty much leaves behind the proprietary professional apps in terms of raw functionality. With Microsoft testing the limits of how much they can exploit their user base, I think we’ll see slow but steady growth in the desktop Linux space.

No one does, but people like it when you install an application and it just works. It makes it easier to install applications regardless of which distro you’re on as well.

I think I could get by with Bitwarden/uBlock as a minimum. Addons like enhancer for youtube are super nice though.

mythical “average casual user”

Mythical? You realize people like this exist, right? This is why programs like this exist. Take Audacity for example, it was made with non-professional audio people in mind. Just people who have odds and ends to do with audio. It’s simple enough that someone with no prior knowledge can start poking around and figuring things out, and it’s advanced enough that it can get the job done for most people who need to work with audio files.

I’m not saying that GIMP needs to prioritize the first time user experience. If making the UI/UX more approachable for new users would necessarily make it worse for established users, then it may be a decent tradeoff. Denying the existence of people who just need to edit an image here and there is absurd though.

Hopefully someone more technical can pitch it, but it did feel very easy to set up and use. The utilities that it comes with just feel very well designed and thought out. If Debian was gone tomorrow, I’d probably try openSUSE again.

That’s a good point. I think Canonical offers some services where they will actively support your system, so it makes economic sense for them to make choices that limit transparency a bit for stability and predictability.

I think the dislike comes from the fact that Ubuntu was and still is many people’s intro to Debian based OSes, and it’s just not as user-centric as it used to be. Thankfully alternatives like Mint exist to bring it back a little bit for people who care.

I remember in college we had access to a Unix box via these computers that remoted into it. I don’t know the technical details, but I was able to log in with my account and it was presented as a GUI on my end. We used No Machine as the client if that’s relevant. I wonder how something like that can be set up.

They could call it SIMP, for specialized image manipulation program.

Well the comparison I’d draw is not even needing to worry about that kind of thing on Windows. I went from getting about 200 to 300 Mbps on Windows without doing anything besides connecting to a network to getting 10 to 30 Mbps on Pop!_OS and Linux Mint (Before fixing this issue.)

The strength of Windows is not easy access to more settings (especially after they split the setting between the new settings app and the old control panel), it’s not needing to access most of them in the first place. That will vary between users and use cases of course. Some people moved to Linux well before the enshittificafion of Windows got really bad because it suits their needs better.

No maintainers yet. Any volunteers?