[9dev]

Because for the vast majority of normal people a computer is equivalent to Windows. Many of them don’t even memorise concepts, but areas on the screen where to click, in the order required to achieve a specific outcome. Those are stumped when Microsoft modifies the layout of the task bar or a context menu.

And now someone tells them to install Linux, on a separate partition perhaps, with a shared boot manager, migrate their data from NTFS to ext4 into the correct folders, install their apps or equivalents in the package manager, and get used to a myriad of different interface design approaches? This is just not going to happen, unless the onboarding experience is improved by a few orders of magnitude, and desktop applications use a single, consistent, UI framework.

[baal80spam]

I'd say that for most users the main blocker is the inane (from Windows point of view) Linux partition setup and management.

[9dev]

The whole system setup is just borderline arcane. Tell my girlfriend to do that or hack the government, it will be on the same level of impossible to her. And she’s a smart, digital native.

And that comes before all the user interface struggles mentioned above.

[Izkata]

"Digital native" is more a marketing term than anything else, and because of the age group it referred to, it ended up meaning the opposite of what was originally intended: it's people who didn't experience technology's growing pains, only the simple slick interfaces, and so don't really understand how it works.

[9dev]

There’s a difference to prior generations, though. My parents grew up with machines being brittle; you could break something permanently by operating it the wrong way. That is fundamentally different with computers: Younger people I like to refer to as digital natives have been raised on software and usually just mess around until something works. That doesn’t mean they really understand it, but the mindset around human-technology interaction is fundamentally different, and devoid of the angst of breaking stuff older people tend to show.

So my point here is that even people open to experimenting with technology will be absolutely helpless in setting up and using a Linux distribution, because the onboarding experience demands so much implicit knowledge.

[consteval]

> she’s a smart, digital native

I mean... I don't want to say anything mean because it's not her fault, but I wouldn't say this.

A digital native 30 years ago was writing SQL queries to make reports for their boss. And they were a secretary making hourly pay.

Digital natives today can barely run their goo goo ga ga phone software. Systems have gotten so abstract that complexity is completely hidden from users. So users don't actually know how to do anything.

I mean, I've had friends, digital native friends, who can't explain what a filesystem is. They don't know what a directory is. They don't know what different types of files are. They don't know what an Excel workbook is versus a text document or what .md means or whatever.

Point being, the problem isn't the complexity or "arcaneness" of linux (side note: linux isn't even arcane, many workflows are much more modern/faster than in Windows land). The issue is that nobody knows how to do anything anymore.