[Workaccount2]

The worst thing about linux is that it is made an maintained by people who like linux.

I would love more than anything to see a paid fork of linux whose goal was to make a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI.

People will come out of woodwork here to suggest whatever shitty half-assed CLI wrapper enviroment. No. No. No. They suck. I have been using them on and off for 20 years. Including right now.

I'm someone who does way more than email and youtube, but has less than zero interest in spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux so I can become a proper user.

[screamingninja]

Please correct me if I am wrong, but is this not a straw man argument?

> spending 6 months learning the nomenclature and structure of linux

> become a proper user

Care to elaborate? My parents have been using Ubuntu successfully for over a decade now for "email and youtube". They do not even know what a CLI is. What are you trying to accomplish that does not work out of the box?

[ghastmaster]

>My parents have been using Ubuntu successfully for over a decade now

Add my 87 year old grandmother to that list. Firefox->email, youtube, kroger, banking etc. These days most users just need access to a web browser via their OS.

[Tactician_mark]

Absolutely agree. For most people, their entire OS is just now just a bootloader for their web browser. More and more I feel like downloading any program at all is treated like a "power user" task

[Workaccount2]

Troubleshoot network issues using a GUI.

That's the thing, linux is great for linux power users and absolute hands off users. Its terrible for people in the middle, and hence why it cannot get the ball rolling towards adoption for 30 year now.

There are tons of tech literate people who know what a problem is, know what the fix is, but do not want to deal with climbing through forum posts and documentation to figure out the correctly structured command to do the actions (and how to unfuck if the command wasn't right). Just make fucking buttons, toggle switches and drop down menus.

[adambatkin]

Debugging and troubleshooting a networking problem is approximately the same on Windows vs Linux (except that there are additional powerful tools available built-in to most Linux distributions). Which is to say that anything non-trivial likely needs a command line. Windows does have some graphical network troubleshooter thing, and I've let it do it's thing a few times, and it has never done anything (at least nothing noticable).

[postmodest]

There is a FreeBSD fork that does exactly that, but to use it you need to buy a $3000 hardware dongle....

That's the path a lot of Mac Users are on, though we also have a telemetry problem; the only advantage is that it stays "in house".

[okanat]

Mac has never been power user friendly.

[washadjeffmad]

> never

Oh, yes it was. The Macintosh was once a platform for independent professionals and small businesses to build their own software using native tooling. The add-in cards you could buy for the Apple II would shock you in today's anti-consumer ownership war being waged by vendors.

[joshspankit]

I’d say it’s actually been power-user friendly 3 times:

1. The Apple II

2. Late 80s/early 90s when screen savers and [I can’t remember the name. Something makes me want to say ‘shell extensions’? small apps that made deep and wondrous tweaks to the system] were allowed to experiment with almost complete freedom

3. OSX. The first version was specifically designed for power users who had existing Unix/Linux skills. Special shout-out to some of the early tools as well: Automator, Quartz Composer, Audio Unit Lab, and even Applescript.

[qwytw]

> FreeBSD fork

Isn't NeXTSTEP quite a bit older than FreeBSD?

[ign0ramus]

What's the name of the fork?

[bbatsell]

They are jokingly referring to macOS, which is descendant from a fork of BSD with the Mach kernel.

[elkhadiy]

He used a periphrasis to mean macos.

[pdntspa]

If you didn't have that attitude you could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months and then you wouldnt have to worry about it.

Also, "power user friendly" but hates CLI..... I see. You might have to hand in your power user card over that one

I am a diehard windows user but the OS's affinity for burying settings in nested, labyrinthine setting dialogs gets old super fast.

[Workaccount2]

This comment perfectly sums up why linux is perpetually stuck with close to zero adoption.

"It's not linux that's the problem, it's you!"

[pdntspa]

Yeah, forgive me for thinking that people need to meet the computer halfway. I keep forgetting that most are too stupid that they cannot be trusted to make effective use of such powerful machines.

[wwtrv]

> forgive me for thinking that people need to meet the computer halfway

Seems like a very defeatist attitude to have..

[pdntspa]

Defeatist? How? We don't just put anyone in a vehicle, they have to have a license. That's a bit much for a computer but what is wrong with having to learn?

[wwtrv]

> what is wrong with having to learn?

Often that just seems like an argument used to justify poor UX. There is nothing wrong with learning but many people have other interests and/or prefer/have to spend their effort on learning other things.

Outright dismissing them as "too stupid" seems a bit elitist especially if you want them to user your software.

[skeaker]

> If you didn't have that attitude you could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months and then you wouldnt have to worry about it.

The issue is that this has to scale to everyone if the goal here is mass adoption (meaning your family, maybe including your grandma, running Linux). If someone says "I don't have 6 months to learn this" or "I couldn't learn this even with 6 months to do so" and your goal is mass adoption, your action should be resolving whatever the roadblock is, not blaming the individual with the issue.

[short_throw]

"You could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months"

"You might have to hand in your power user card over that one"

And these attitudes are why most consumers almost exclusively use proprietary software. You have to let people be lazy to get mass adoption. Businesses know and exploit this, the foss world writes tools with steep learning curves and says "take it or leave it." And that's perfectly fine as long as we can be honest with ourselves: the vast majority of people will never invest the time to learn to use cmd line applications, or debug wifi drivers, or learn to use an environment that's more complicated than what they already have. Time is money so even a highly motivated person should question spending months to learn new tools.

I love Linux for being superior for servers and hackable and having so much powerful software available for free...but if I weren't a software developer and I didn't enjoy this stuff there'd be no justification for the time I spent learning it.

[pdntspa]

And when you look around you and realize that everything sucks, now you know why.

Enshittification is real. Knowledge is the antidote...

[iraqmtpizza]

linux bros think CLI is required for everything but they don't realize that it's only required for everything in linux

[pdntspa]

yeah because clicking through half a dozen nested dialogs to change my DNS settings is good fucking design

Or even better, for many things the option doesn't exist any more? Why? Because fuck you thats why!

I just LOVE watching Windows take away features because some normie asshole decided options were bad for usability and testing.

Typing this on my Windows daily driver, btw. And I have to drop into CLI on a pretty regular basis.

[iraqmtpizza]

Tree structures are terrible design, yes. They shouldn't teach trees in computer science. Everything should be flat. Just like the Earth.

I love watching Linux stay stuck on design choices from 1970 because to change the interface now would cause the operating system to implode and the resulting riot would exceed even the asspain over systemd

[pdntspa]

Some of those design choices are pretty good, they stick around for good reason. Everything is a file/chaining together tiny commands/text-based configuration files are computing zen for a large portion of users.

A lot of text config now has way more documentation -- right there above the freaking setting! -- than a Windows design analogy could ever cram into (never-used) help files. The majority of config I deal with is like 25 lines of comments for every 1 line of setting.

Systemd's not that bad either, I will take writing systemd config files over trying to make a service daemon in init.d scripts any day of the week.

[iraqmtpizza]

So what happens if you accidentally delete the comment in the text config? There's a parser that generates an error and recovers from there? Or it's just gone? LOL.

Do you know how annoying it is to have to go into etc/netbeans.conf, scroll all the way down, then find the JDK path from somewhere else and paste it in the quotes after netbeans_jdkhome= just to get Netbeans to run? That's not computing zen! It's the reason nobody uses Netbeans -- old, bad design.

The more people use your help files, the more you know your program sucks. This is not disputable. This is why Linux requires a literal support group called LUG.

[femiagbabiaka]

Power users require CLI on every OS. Not just Linux, but also Windows or OSX, to be specific.

[qwytw]

Especially macOS. Generally I feel like it's way easier to avoid the terminal on Linux since there are GUI apps for most stuff.

[femiagbabiaka]

Yep, the difference between the Ubuntu experience and the Mac experience is stark. Also when the time comes to do power user stuff, macOS has many differences from Linux that have not been translated to documentation well, basically issues there are less Googleable.

[dylan604]

>power user...that never needs to pull up a CLI.

What strange creature is this? Is it a mythical creature like a unicorn or closer to big foot?

[iraqmtpizza]

The ultimate power user is he who has CLI powers but does not need to use them

[account42]

> a power user friendly user OS that never needs to pull up a CLI

ERROR: Does not compute.

A CLI is the pinacle of power user friendlyness.

[joshspankit]

You might like the ability to use natural language on the CLI, then have AI create and run the command for you.

One example of many: https://github.com/mattvr/ShellGPT

[rdp36]

It's called a Chromebook.

[sukruh]

FWIW ChatGPT is pretty good in generating the specific Bash incantations you need to perform if you describe what you want to do in plain English and don't forget to add the specific version of the OS you're using. Unless what you're trying to do is pretty advanced and would be cumbersome in any other OS as well.

Learning specific API's are over. Mostly.

[ycombinete]

Yeah I used chatgpt to write the string for a cronjob yesterday, and then an awk script to parse the output.

[joshspankit]

Don’t know why you’re getting downvoted.

I think you’re currently right and will be even more right in a year or two.