Wrong, Linux need marketing.

Just what kind of marketing?

One issue is that Windows is perceived as simpler. People that don’t know how to solve issues are more likely to use Windows than Linux, because they’re less worried about running into issues on Windows. So the marketer would need to fix that perception, effectively communicate that it has become just as simple.

Another is that the anxiety of trying something new will never be zero for everyone. So the marketer would need to communicate that there are plenty of kind and welcoming people helping with the transition.

Then there is still the question of “who will help me with problems?” For Windows, there are way more guides and videos, forum threads and generally a wider range of assistance already available. I’m not talking about a senior lady taking her computer to the local computer shop for help, I’m talking about all the free stuff online. Linux can’t quite match that in quantity. Again, in case it slipped by, Docs don’t count as guides. They’re generally not meant to guide people in doing something specific so much as provide a technical manual, usually written by technical people that weote the original software in the first place. So the marketer would need to compensate the quantity with quality and assure people they’ll get better help than they would with Windows issues.

And finally, any (unknown) price tag is a potential red flag for people who already paid for Windows. Why should they pay again for a different system? So the marketer would need to communicate that the above - the help with transition, the additional support - are free of charge. I don’t even think a one-time price tag for the Linux distro would necessarily be an issue, so long as people can be sure that whatever care they need afterwards doesn’t cost extra.

And who would do that marketing?

Do you want to wait for a corporate saviour to come along, sell Linux to the masses and hope that they won’t pull off some vendor lock-in shenanigans so they can enshittify ten years down the line?

Or do you want the Linux community to do that marketing ourselves, to be that help and support, to project the image that it’s easy to switch to?

So who needs to do it better?

Who is the one that wants change? They need to put in the work. If we want the Year of the Linux Desktop, we need to make it an appealing desktop platform.

if you think Linux community needs something, do it or help to do it, but don’t tell them “you should do it better”

I’m trying to improve its image. I can’t just do that myself. I’m trying to point out the necessity and the way to do it to help it improve that image, but ultimately, telling them why I think they should do something and what I think they should do is all I can. And that’s the cornerstone or change: Someone needs to recommend it, and others need to follow and repeat that recommendation. I’ve heard this call elsewhere and I’m now trying to pass it on.

those people not learning correctly

So? Do you expect people to just change? I’ll repeat myself, but we need to pick them up where they are if we want them to come with us. With the right incentive, we may be able to coax some to change their approach, but for many people, that’s just the way they work and they don’t want to change. I don’t think they should be gatekept for that, so I think we should accommodate them too.

MacOS is an awful system, GNOME is x100 times better.

On that, we agree unconditionally

Sorry for the late reply.

All good, this is an online forum conversation, no time limits here. And if you’ll dip and come back in four months to pick up the conversation, I’ll be just as happy to continue.

You’re still getting a fundamental detail wrong: Most non-tech people don’t want to “learn (tool)”, they want to “do (thing)” and (tool) happens to be part of the solution. But they don’t search for “beginner’s guide to (tool)”, let a lone a professional to teach them, they search for “vague terms describing what I want to do in non-technical terms”. They may get accurate results, useless results, results targeted at more technical users, or their choice of words may overlap with technical terms meaning something else and more complex.

If they click on a search result they (or google) think is relevant to their search and see an online forum of people responding bluntly, they’ll leave. They don’t know that the response is about something more complex. They can’t possibly tell. All they see is a culture of “You’re on your own, buddy”. That impression may stick with them, may even spread, and create a wall between techies and non-techies.

My vision is one where they’d see helpful answers, even if they don’t understand them, but they feel encouraged to ask. If it turns out this isn’t actually related to their issue, someone will point them the right way. I want that to be the impression we create. That includes answering more complex questions. That would benefit both the non-techies feeling more welcome, the veterans that probably have already read the docs and found them wanting and the beginners that need help learning to understand docs.

“RTFM” should under no circumstances be considered a reasonable answer. If you don’t want to help, don’t. If you want to help, give an explanation while pointing at the relevant section of the docs. Piping up just to tell people to go away and not asking questions is a dick move.

If we want break corporate monopolies, we need to be better than them, particularly in User Experience. Poor User Experience includes poor Pre-Experience while deciding whether to use a product. That means we need to project a welcoming image all around, not just selectively.

I realize that issue has been reported already or documented before I finish writing it, because I do my searches while I write my issue adding context of it.

That’s what I mean: we’re techies. We know what context may be relevant. We know how to read that documentation and we know how to search for it. When we read documentation, we can tell whether we understand it, we can try if a fix applies to our issue, we can recognise if a given issue description matched ours. When we read a message, we know what is or isn’t a technical term and what they refer to. We know synonyms like folder and directory, we understand that a word document, powerpoint presentation or executable all are “files”, we trust our understanding and our ability to compensate whatever we don’t know with searches or educated guesses.

All of these things require understanding a lot of tech words and a degree of trust in your understanding, and that’s where non-tech users hit a snag. I’ll tell them “You don’t need to buy a new Windows key to reinstall it, you can check your current one. Here’s a good and detailed guide.” They’ll get back with “I don’t know what that command thing is, it looks scary, I’m not doing that” because they don’t trust themselves. It’s literally a step by step guide for opening the cmd, entering a command and finding a relevant part of the text it produces, and they get scared that they’ll mess it up because they have absolutely zero understanding of the components. They don’t know what a command line is, they don’t know what a text command is, they know nothing of what we take for granted.

They said they’d need someone to guide them through and basically hold their hand for it, someone to unfuck whatever they fuck up, or at least confirm that what they’re doing is right, to help them understand the output and assure them that the text means exactly what they think it means.

When you sit behind them and tell them what to do, to just read the message without fear of not understanding, that’s exactly the helping I mean. In order to even dare to try Linux, people need the assurance that, whatever their issue, someone will be there for them. And that assurance comes through the way we treat questions online - all question, not just the more complex ones, because the layperson can’t tell the difference.

When they come asking for help, don’t send them away. No matter how familiar the docs and git pages may be for you, don’t just send them there. Show them what they have to do, where it is written, how it is written there and how to understand that writing. Guide them, and they’ll be happier to follow.

I think we’re talking in circles here. My point is: Telling people to go read the docs contributes to the perception of the linux community as closed and unhelpful. That perception doesn’t help with winning over more people. As you note:

if more users uses Linux, more companies will focus their apps for Linux

But that cycle has to start somewhere, and until companies start picking up, we need to do it ourselves, for ideological reasons if not monetary ones. Telling people to start out with easy guides is good, but redirecting further questions to docs and git pages builds a wall.

Why should I do the reading for someone without pay? Because I can, I trust my understanding and I want to help them.

Let me clarify: I myself have used Linux as my only OS since the end of Win7 support, but I’ve used it via dualboot for anything not gaming even before. I’m fairly adept by now, so this whole conversation isn’t about my personal learning.

It’s about coaxing Windows users over to Linux. If you don’t care about that, stop reading and stop replying, because that’s what the whole thread was about and you clearly missed the point. If you do, we need to give people both a reason to switch and an easy transition.

Linux has a public image of “complicated” and will always have the hurdle of having to learn something different. The point is that we need to update the first (the public perception) and help people over the second as smoothly as possible. We need to project the impression that it’s no longer complicated like it used to be, and if you need help with anything, there will be plenty of people willing to help you.

And that’s where we get to the “RTFM” issue: People responding to questions with “You’re on your own” harm that impression. A new user skimming a forum or googling some issue can’t tell whether it’s a simple question or a hard question, whether it’s good documentation or bad documentation, all they see is someone asking for help and getting a “lol no”. That reputation spreads, and it speaks to a self-centered culture where “figure it out yourself” isn’t just acceptable, but the norm.

If you want to win people over, you have to welcome them in. That includes showing a willingness to help them.

Besides, isn’t the whole point of FOSS to help each other out for free, to break the commercial cycle of enshittification and exploitation?

you need to improve it and not get scared [emphasis mine]

That’s the issue. The median user will get scared. They can’t accurately assess their own competence before they try it, and trying something new is scary. “What if I break something? What if I can’t undo it?” They won’t rely on docs or git pages or man pages or --help (they may not want to touch the CLI at all), because ultimately, that would require them relying on their own understanding thereof.

Impersonal docs, particularly if they’re not written with accessibility for laypeople in mind, can’t replace guides, and a general guide can’t replace specific advice, and none of these can replace the assurance of having a universally helpful support community that will hold their hand if they need it and reliably bail them out if something goes wrong. The median user cannot possibly teach themselves, because they lack the fundamental knowledge and confidence to even assess their level of understanding. You and I, we’re on the tech end of the distribution. We have a basic understanding and mindset. The median user does not.

They can’t trust themselves, so they need someone else to trust. If we want to welcome more people into the FOSS ecosystem in general and Linux in particular, we need to be that someone, and they need to know that they will have that support.

It’s not just about helping them, it’s about the public impression. If they google for assistance and only find threads telling people to RTFM, they’re scared to ask, scared to try even. The learning curve you take for granted, the skill “you need to improve”, looks a lot like a wall from that point of view.

Linux is still perceived as a rather technical thing. We need to cultivate the impression - and the community to back it up - that it’s not actually complicated, and that you’ll readily find people to help you if you take the leap.

Improving tech literacy is an important thing, no doubt, but you can’t get people on board by saying “you have to”. You have to coax them over by promising easy returns on a small investment of time and effort, then let their curiosity lead them further - if they need deeper skills at all.

or you are on the wrong documentation.

Ah yes, because you have the choice of so many different documentations for everything, and all those documentations make sure to point out the others in case you landed on the wrong one for you.

other people are just lazy that thinks the work of a programmer is easy

Doesn’t have to be laziness. If your misconception is shattered, that’s a shock. If they don’t have anyone to ease them through that shock, they’ll do the most natural thing: stay away. If you make it easy to get into, you’ll surely have more success than by walling them off so that only those willing to climb can get into your walled garden.

people that can’t read instructions how things works

Pretty sure that’s their point: If the instructions are too complex or intimidating, particularly if they’re technically written, they may genuinely be unreadable to some users.

There’s a certain effect where, if something seems overwhelming, particularly if you already feared it might be, that will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And once the overwhelm starts, once it sounds even a little too complex for users to be confident in their understanding, the brain goes into panic mode and holds on to “aaaah I can’t do this”.

So yes, some people genuinely can’t read instructions because static instructions don’t talk to them, just at them, with no ability to respond and reassure if that panic hits. Human interaction often seems less intimidating because they can (ideally) respond to your confusion, reword just that part, hold your hand through the process, all of which instructions can’t.

Throwing them into the pool and telling them to learn swimming doesn’t help: It makes them want to leave. Learning to read docs is a skill itself that needs to be developed separately, but making it an entry barrier risks scaring people off before their investment of time and focus starts paying off.

and in this open source world everything minimum popular is well documented.

Are those docs written or proofread by noobs? My experience with tech people (including myself, unfortunately) is that we tend to think in specific trained (or perhaps intuitive to us) patterns that don’t neatly map on how non-techies perceive and understand the world. If I try to explain something, I don’t even know where there are parts that I’d need to simplify, explain differently, what metaphors I could use to help understand and so on.

Of course, techies do want those details I’d have to omit for non-techies. Some guides do really well with a “simple” and an “advanced” version of instructions. However, “documentation” doesn’t always equal “guide”, and some docs are really just a dry list of functiond and syntax, which brings us back to the topic of having to learn to read docs.

When someone asks me to teach them to learn to programming

…they’re already past the first threshold of “This is all way too much, I’ll never learn that”. Anyone willing to engage with programming already has conquered - or never had - that initial fear of not understanding stuff. For them, docs might not be much of a barrier, and if they’re well-written may be a good point for slightly more advanced stuff.

I’d argue they’ll still need an initial intro to “how to think like a programmer” (or rather, “like a computer, and to solve backwards from that”), but in any case, they’re not the target audience for “Linux as competitive desktop”.

Non-techies are, and to them, tech may well be scary. We need to account for that and ease them in by whatever means work best for them, if we want them to come to us, not what suits us best.

See, you should have worked with me - I write terrible back-end code too! You’d have gained a whole new appreciation for the people who can do at least that.

tinkers with pulseaudio
“Why does my audio not work?”
tinkers more
“Okay I think it kinda works now?”
it breaks again
“fml”

I found the docs for pulseaudio and particularly for pipewire to be rather hard to use, personally. RTFM works if the manual is readable, but in these cases, the learning curve was very steep for me (and I still don’t know that I properly understood what’s going on, but it’s working, so I’ve stopped tinkering for now).

Ternary if?then:else

That community is… something. For every funny or good complaint there’s a dozen whine posts, mostly by the same person. Did someone piss in their coffee or are they the probably least lucrative M$ shill ever?

Yeah, you’re right. I got hit on a sore spot, responded impulsively and was a dick about it.

Sorry I was trying to match the level of insulting tone of your reply, I guess I went too mean.

Eh, I’d be a hypocrite to point fingers for that. All good.

Technology Connections actually has great CC and Transcripts as I believe Alec adds them directly after proofing an as aired script after his final edit.

I don’t know this specific creator, or many YT tech creators really, since YT isn’t really my main haunt (I’ve tried to explaing that elsewhere, but it boils down to “I rarely have the mental ability to sit and watch them”) and I genuinely prefer articles.

The video having good CC doesn’t solve most of my problems, unfortunately. It’s a good thing to have, don’t get me wrong, just doesn’t help me a whole lot.

it’s about a crappy ‘news’ site generating a two paragraph summary of a YouTube video and screencaping images from said video in order to generate ad revenue with minimal effort and dubious ethics

I’ll grant the dubious ethics point. That subtext didn’t parse for me. My focus was on the fact that the article, being a textual medium, is more useful to me.

I’m mostly upset at the prevalence of video content and the tendency to push people away from text, like “This guy has a great video” is a useful response to “I’m looking for an article”. This topic set me off, but my frustration is independent of the specific context. I’ve had it happen often enough to make it a sore spot, but that isn’t strictly the original comment’s fault.

If you’re so interested in the subject and want to learn more about the subject why not look for one, or even just ask?

It’s not a deep interest so much as a passing “stumble across something interesting”, so I wouldn’t necessarily seek out content on the topic. But if I were offered an essily digestible format, I’d be curious enough to consume it.

I agree that it would be better not to post cheap ripoffs, but they fill a market gap that I’m the audience for. The solution isn’t to complain about the moochers filling the gap, but to fill the gap yourself. I’m not defending sloppy AI text specifically, but the concept of converting content to a different medium.

If the content creators don’t want to cater to those who prefer that other medium - perfectly fine, that’s their prerogative. But to then complain if someone else adapts your content to a medium you didn’t want to, that’s what rubs me the wrong way.

Also, you’re a dingus.

Fair enough. My phrasing was harsh and born of a frustration that I didn’t really convey.

In my experience, YT would still end up loading a section of the video along with previews of suggestion. Maybe that has changed.

If it can make accurate transcriptions, sure. I’d enjoy the option of sending a link to an autotranscriber and get a conveniently readable version out of it.

And a good day to you too. Not sure why you felt the need to be insulting, but anyway.

A transcript of the video

Would you happen to have one handy? Or are these autogenerated these days. Are they better than the autogenerated CCs?

Also there’s a source listed in the description, guess what it is? An article.

Yeah, which would require me to click on YT in the first place, which is already what I want to avoid due to a limited mobile data plan and YT being a wonderful drain on that.

I’m just trying to push the point that “just watch the original video instead” isn’t as great a solution for everyone as some people make it out to be.

No, it’s about me not being able to arbitrarily sit down and watch a video due to various issues like attention span, hearing issues*, limited mobile data and being at work, where an article or summary is much easier and faster to read and can be interrupted at a moment’s notice unlike a video which I’ll have to pause, scrub back through if I missed a detail and wait for it to get to the right point, and I can more easily search for stuff.

My point is that there seems to be a habit of dismissing the value of textual summaries in favour of “just watch the video” in much of the online world, where I’ll be looking for a quick explanation and get presented with some video instead. Some people don’t do so well with videos so it’s not “just” watching the video.

There are advantages to text that I hate seeing people ignore.

(Besides, how would you know I’m incapable rather than just unwilling; or why would you assume either in the first place instead of considering inability?)

* That issue applies to voice messages and phone calls too. While videos occasionally have good CC, I haven’t found them to be reliable or ubiquitous enough. Additionally, they present the speech in fragments and usually are just as hard to search through. Either way, videos are a “sometimes” thing for me.

Does someone have a content description so I can read instead of having to watch it?

Oh wait, here’s an article, nevermind.

deleted by creator

I’ve had to grapple with pipewire. My old pulseaudio config didn’t seem to work and I wanted to migrate to the pw config file format anyway, but I found the pw docs to be highly opaque. You get a thousand solutions for commands online, or tools you can do it visually in, but to apply that config you need to start the tool…

I’m a noob, granted, but there seemed to be a lot of assumed common knowledge that I just don’t have. And if I don’t even know what I’m missing, it’s hard to google for it.