Just say no to Linus and his opinions …
At the risk of committing whataboutism, I find that Windows is actually worse in terms of weird things going wrong, getting bricked, or needing to bodge together stuff to get it to work.
Making it more difficult to actually break the system is a good thing, insofar as it does not actually restrict the freedoms of the users who know what they are doing. I think the fix introduced by PopOS:
To prevent such incidents in the future, Pop!_OS patched the APT package manager. Now, POP!_OS won’t be able to enter “Yes, do as I Say”. Instead, they will have to add a special a file to enable it (if someone really wants to remove the packages).
is reasonable, because the user can override the protection if they really feel they need to (and know what they are doing, of course).
Linux is a tool, not a toy. Pop os may be (idk), but thats not the fault of Linux. No one would expect to be able to operate a cnc mill without at least reading the quickstart manual. Not even if they already know how to operate one made by a different brand and especially not when they only know how to use a dremel.
There are a lot of beginner friendly guides out there, there are some really really bad rehashes of those guides made for content too. There is a (secret?) trick on how to avoid tge latter: turn adblock on and javascript off and most of them magically just show a blank page.
Linux distributions usually aren’t meant to be idiot proof, since they don’t assume you are an idiot. Which, I think, is generally required for decent and respectful interaction.
I completely agree that as it is now, Linux is a tool, suited to a variety of purposes, hard core gaming not being one of them. That being said, I have nothing against people who wish to spend their time and energy to make it suitable for a wider range of purposes. Linus came from the POV of a random gamerbro trying to get stuff running (with some exotic hardware) and he actually managed to point out some valid UX flaws.
The way I interact with computers as a dev is different than of other users, it’s refreshing to see a different perspective.
I’d argue gaming on Linux is much more hardcore than gaming on Windows currently.
The command line method clearly warned, “You are about to do something potentially harmful. To continue type in the phrase ‘Yes, do as I say‘”.
But people often do not care about warnings. Linus Sebastian went ahead with it and ended up with a broken system that cannot be logged in graphically.
It’s almost as though reading warnings / error messages is helpful! Imagine that! Sure, it may take an extra minute of one’s time, but that’s just too much, man!
It is not too much to ask people to read something prefaced by a warning label. Don’t understand it? Ask for help!
Roads have warning signs, cars themselves come with a booklet explaining the check engine light and its meanings, microwaves come with warnings about putting metal inside, and cleaning supplies have tons of labels about potential hazards in case of misuse. If one can learn to understand different warnings for these, one can learn to understand computer warnings.
Reminds me of this classic IT scenario:
User: “Something went wrong! I got an error message!”
Technician: “Okay? What did the error message say?”
User: “I dunno, I just closed it.”
It’s like shooting your OS in the face with a pistol, turning to the camera, and asking why Linux is like this?
Good point, my general expression of new users is often, not always - there are exceptions, that even if you spoon-feed them they still cry. If you entirely design the OS around this problematic, lots of power-users are getting salty because it ends up with more clicks, and more time-wasting doing simple tasks.
This is why the new Windows 11 design for example gets criticized even by their own community, you overall need more clicks doing or finding the same stuff among the newly created inconsistency because they try to get rid of old stuff while replacing it with new stuff.
I especially always find these design decisions difficult, because most noobs actually do a perfectly fine job navigating their computers without randomly clicking on every button nor changing every setting.
It’s basically designing your software, so that 5% of users cannot fuck up in 0.1% of situations.
And those exact users usually have someone to help them with their computer anyways.
I’ve nuked myself in Linux a couple of times, as well as in Windows (NTLDR? I don’t need that!) It was always my fault, though, not the OS.
I had been looking forward to the Linux challenge videos, but after that video I unsubbed and blocked any channel related to LTT. I honestly feel like he did that on purpose and played it up to try to make a point. If you point a loaded gun at your foot, turn off the safety, and pull the trigger, YOU CAN HURT YOURSELF!!.. Yeah, that’s disingenuous BS, at best.
Same like you, at first it was interesting but that it was obvious that it is staged for what ever reason, but definitely not sincere. (i do have ideas, like interesting coincidence with release of buggy win11, or just thought this will generate more views so i decided not to help in that further.)
Linux has issues especially for newcomers and non experienced users, but Linus missed all of it and complained on something else.
Not to mention that compared to win is much much simpler to install and use. Just imagine someone who never installed anything (os, drivers, software) and you give them linix live usb and windows install usb… linux will:
- work and be usable without instal
- have all the drivers instaled and working
- have software to actually use that computer
windows will have non of those, and will be unusable for normal person.
My big issue overall with him saying he just wants things “to work”, and to an extent, with what he demonstrated by not reading WTF was going to happen when he typed that murderous phrase in, is that most people don’t know what the hell they’re doing with their computers. They install so much garbage, more and more OS security has to be designed to protect users from themselves. Uninstall a bunch of “things” that I have no idea what they are? Sure, I hate my foot and want to blow it completely off my leg!
How long until we get to Idiocracy style computers where we just get some Fisher Price toy style buttons to smash for most people to use their PC? We’re wandering deeper and deeper into an information driven age of humanity and the complete ignorance of most people who demand to use their expensive equipment to do their banking, manage their budgets, pay their home loans… it all just makes me shiver. Learn how your computer is actually working!
Why would anyone learn how their tools work? You don’t need to learn how a hammer works to hammer in a nail, you don’t need to know how a drill works to drill a hole and you certainly don’t need to know how an angle grinder works to make perfect cuts in flesh.
I would certainly hope you would learn enough about the angle grinder to understand that the spinning disc is meant to grind material out or or cut through metal before before you turn it on and start swinging it around, or that the hammer isn’t meant to be used on your leg. Linus saw a bunch of packages listed and just applied a tool without understand what that tool was going to do to his computer.
What’s the last word of that comment of mine? Do you think I was serious?
completely unrelated to this topic, but happy cake day :)
As a relatively new linux user, Linus is right about a lot of UX concerns and it’d be really nice if people were more receptive. It should be harder to brick your system in Linux, just have a default where you can’t and power users can easily disable that block, like with immutability
Did you mean to write ‘Linus is right about a lot of UX concerns’? If so, which exactly?
Yeah. Stuff like this.
But here’s the thing, many users won’t care for “warnings”, no matter how technically advanced they are. People just assume that pressing Y or other similar stuff is just part of the procedure without thinking twice.
I can agree with that sentence, but if a computer makes you type in “Yes, do as I say!”, you better make sure you’re not about to wipe out the human race.
Especially when it tells you within the same sentence that it is about to do something potentially harmful.Like, I’m all for noob-proofing. I myself rarely read warnings properly. And I’m the type of idiot that closed the welcome screen on Linux Mint, because I didn’t need no stupid tutorial – shortly before spending 3 days having no clue whether it was even possible to install any software on this Linux thing.
But even I got tripped up when my computer asked me to type that in.So, yeah, please do reflect on whether noob-proofing could be improved, but don’t take an entertainment video as genuine feedback. It’s simply more entertaining when the guy plays the more daring, more careless person.
I installed windows 11, and to be fair it was the beta version, it installed, let me do my thing, updated one day, and then marked everything on my hard drive as admin locked, meaning nothing would run, I couldn’t save files, my system was useless. It would not let me turn it off, it didn’t tell me it was going to do it, or why it did it. I only discovered the issue by chance whilst troubleshooting why nothing worked, a normal user would have just been screwed. Not that I wasn’t I guess, my only recourse was to reinstall and hope it didn’t do it again. My point being that you can’t expect things to always just work when it comes to computers. Any system is going to have issues, and coming in to a whole new experience like he is, is going to make those experiences feel worse. He’s even said as much himself. Personally I find running Linux to be very rewarding, I’ve had weird issues, but the solutions are always available somewhere. Windows is a black box, if things break it’s good luck and nothing else. Case in point I’m pretty sure if he read the warnings it even told him what command he would need to run to fix it if he did ignore the warning and it broke everything. Linux will work just fine for mainstream, if people are willing to learn how to use Linux, the same as they’ve learned how to use windows, or Mac. If you’re not willing to learn at all it’s not going to work.
