I’ve been hearing about Linux elitists for the last 20 years, and I have yet to meet one. But what I do see is an endless wave of trolling and bad faith arguments about the supposed complexity of Linux.
They treat a wide array of developers, maintainers and enthusiasts as employees of Linux inc, and now they’re grumpy because their imaginary ticket submitted to a nonexisting helpdesk is not being processed.
I have recieved much more help and support from the Linux community than from any other proprietary software helpdesk.
There was a long time when a casual user would have been better off on Windows, but I don’t think that’s true anymore, at least not on every distro.
Just as you can use Windows for years and never need Group Policy or Regedit, you can do Linux just the same without terminal.
This is the area where I feel Linux has come the farthest since I became interested in it.
Here’s the thing that a lot of long-term linux users don’t seem to understand: If it involves typing out a command in a terminal, or editing a configuration text file, 99% of casual users are already out. It doesn’t matter if they just copy-paste a command or have change a single number in a text file, they literally don’t even want to try, they consider that “too complicated”.
and that’s why catering to casuals is a loosing game that shouldn’t be bothered with.
Except Windows does cater to it, and despite Linux’ supposed superiority it is still by far the dominant desktop OS.
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.
I can’t say I’ve ever ran into anyone like this. And the Arch wiki is so newbie friendly, I use it all the time and I don’t even use Arch.
The problem is that the road between creating a piece of software that does something well, and then creating simplification layers on top of it is typically much longer than just “edit a config file” and “here’s a readme”.
You need extra documentation, config gating and workflow, warnings, UI/UX work etc.
I know there are Linux elitists but kind of expecting that much extra work for what is still at it’s core mostly volunteer software seems like it’s own form of elitism.
No, seriously.
This mindset of, “If you don’t like to read pages of documentation to figure out how to do the thing you’re wanting to do, then maybe Linux isn’t for you?” Or the “god. How dare you ask such a STUPID question. You’re using Linux wrong and it probably isn’t for you. Go back to baby’s first OS!” Is the biggest gripe I have about using Linux.
To configure most suckless tools you need to… recompile them. The readme says:
Because dwm is customized through editing its source code, it’s pointless to make binary packages of it. This keeps its userbase small and elitist. No novices asking stupid questions.
But if you are trying to compile suckless tools, you are already in too deep.
LOL yes, I had a look at those too when I was looking for a more minimal terminal. Noped the fuck out when I read you had to recompile the tools to configure them.
It’s not that this is beyond my skill level, but that is just so … why would I want to do that?
Acting like this is some impossible task is a bit of a stretch. It’s 2 commands.
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.
Hey, I installed Arch btw with Hyprland and I gotta say, the docs are super newbie-friendly. No problems on my end.
The Arch Wiki is so nice
