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Microsoft is reportedly banning Palestinians in the U.S. for life for calling relatives in Gaza
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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I use Mint and I like it. It does everything I need it to do.
What keeps people away from Linux, or at least it helped keep me away, were people arguing with each other about distros like a mini-OS war within the OS wars and it makes the whole thing sound like it's a lot more trouble than it's worth.
Most people's computers are "toasters" because most people's computers are used for things like web browsing, word processing and maybe a few games. They don't need the modern features, they need something that works better than a Chromebook and isn't super bloated.
Do you know what also keeps people away from Linux? Being told that Linux Mint is a good distro for beginners, and then going to the Linux Mint website and finding that there are three different flavors, Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE, and not knowing what any of that means because you're a beginner. Beginners don't benefit from incomplete information that requires prior knowledge, and every time I see "use Linux Mint" without any clarification on Desktop Environments, I see a jerk who doesn't know what "beginner" means.
As someone who did exactly this, the differences are spelled out pretty clearly for "Linux beginners". System reqs and included features all there to read...
I remember when I was first learning linux, I found this super evangelistic website explaining how totally easy it is to use linux nowadays (this was about 15 years ago, so that was a fucking lie).
They gave some basic task as the first example of something you might need to do, and they said, no shit, "It's easy! Just open up the terminal and type..." and I closed the website.
Not because I couldn't do that instruction, I was working in IT and I already maintained multiple linux servers, but because of how utterly unhinged that instruction was. I didn't know if their information would be useful, but I did know that I couldn't trust their judgement anymore. You cannot tell people an OS is "easy" and "for everyone" then transition straight into "open up the terminal" in the same goddamn breath. They didn't even explain how to open up the terminal, because of course it's different everywhere and they wanted universal instructions.
I really, really want to make linux work for me. I have four linux machines in my home, although three of them are raspberry pis, and i have tried it in laptops and on my main machine many times over the years, always finding it more trouble than it's worth. But I have never seen any indication that the community has ever moved on from, "It's easy! Just open up the terminal..."
Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged.
Yeah, I think one of the issues is that a knowledge gap is a very hard thing to bridge. Part of that is the classic thing that "we don't know how much we don't know". But there's a similar thing with knowledge, where people don't know how much they know.
Like with the terminal, once you get comfortable with it, it is really easy to get things done, but you really have to have a certain kind of disposition to get to that point, even with the right kind of help - like with your dad, if he's not interested to learn you can't make him. You have to already be deep into the ecosystem before you can say "it's easy", and by that point you are so far removed from the average user's experience that you can't understand why they can't just do what you do. And unfortunately, the people most expert at using linux and therefore developing it are also the people deepest in the ecosystem.
There's an empathy gap that's hard to bridge, but it's not impossible. Like if you've ever finished The Outer Wilds, it's an incredible game that is only gated by your knowledge. It's a unique experience that you can't repeat. The only way to attempt to experience it again is to sit down and watch another person's playthrough of it. I've done it multiple times, and each time is a unique and difficult experience, because you already know the answers, and they are so painfully simple once you know them. It's a real struggle of empathy to actually be able to enjoy it.
You can do a similar thing with other freeform puzzle games like The Witness. It's just that The Outer Wilds is unique in that it shows you in stark contrast how vast the gap is between knowing and not knowing, and you have to bridge that gap constantly in order to engage.
So that's my ramble on that subject, but that's what I think is happening. I think apart from people willing and able to bridge that gap, the solutions to this issue involve more resources dedicated to improving the ecosystem and making it friendlier, and also just more uptake making the system stronger and exposing its weak points as people learn it, making the empathy gap less of a problem. As we are, proprietary systems have sucked up all those resources and market share, which has starved open source. It's a slow climb out of that hole but I have to believe that eventually there will be a critical tipping point.