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(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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if you think FOSS makes anything better for the average user, especially UX, I have a bridge to sell you.
Whenever I get to use windows and I face their byzantine directory structure, I wonder how people put up with that shit.
The average windows user is tech illiterate. They don’t know what a directory is. I work with a person who opens .docx files by opening Word and using its internal search function. She does not comprehend how or where files are stored.
Unironically one of MS Word (and Google Docs)'s better features. Its easy to lose track of where you save a file when you've got a bunch of them open at once, and the ability to recall recently opened files and search by file name is a lifesaver.
People don't know what files and folders are anymore.
Ask a non-tech person where they JUST downloaded something to... they can't tell you.
Nobody really bothers to change the default though, so it only really matters if they later try to find the file without using their web browser. And if they do try to do that, "Downloads" is a pretty obvious place to look.
On ~~my Android phone~~ the Android phone I have, I find it hard to tell where the stuff I downloaded is.
Until I connect it to the computer and see the directory structure easily.
The Files app seems to be trying to do some kind of Abstraction over here.
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Luckily you can just use a different one tho
Do you mean the byzantine directory structure for system files? The default of installing to "Program Files" doesn't seem too unusual, although adding "x86" bit seems unnecessarily complicated for a typical end user. Same with the rest of the standard directories that people use most often.
The directory structure for system files is bad, but that's true for Unix-derivatives too. Unix has /bin and /lib, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /var/opt, etc. Different versions of Unix have different ideas of what belongs where. Even different flavours of Linux have their own ideas.
I keep explaining this to my grandmother but she just stares at me and says "When I was your age, we wrote things down in our Trapper Keepers"
Mostly for user files.
For system files it's not too bad. At least there's some logic to it.
Well going to .local/share/... Isn't very Intuitive either. Try asking someone who's new to find their Steam Directory.
If you try to get a professional Photoshop or After Effects or Resolve or Solidworks or Quickbooks etc etc. user to use a FOSS equivalent you will be laughed out of the building.
It's not that they won't learn, it's that the alternatives literally can't do so much of what people need it to do. And at the same time they most often look worse, are harder to use, and are sometimes less stable.
A prime example myself, I have tried to use kdenlive for YEARS to do simple subtitling. Every few years I try the latest version. Without fail it ALWAYS crashes within 20 minutes.
Same for Audacity. 5 minutes into clipping some audio... crash. 3 times in a row. And it looks dog ugly enough to turn me off to even wanting to try it in the first place.
Or GIMP, it can't do non-destructive editing, this makes it completely unusable for many professionals.
It's not just one or two things here or there in these apps, it's huge sweeping problems across the entire FOSS landscape, almost none of the options are comparable for professional users.
So I'll counter an anecdote with an anecdote, my dad is a draftsman by trade and was an engineering technologist for decades, he's looked at Freecad back and forth and is now seriously looking at it over solidworks for his personal projects now that he's retired, I also flipped from solidworks which I used professionally for about 5 years before changing roles. Does it have quirks, yeah it does, but so do other cad packages, and lets not pretend that solidworks is a beacon of stability, there's a reason it was drilled into us in uni to save frequently and why it has autosaving. The UI is relatively simple, there's plugins to customise it and it has substantially improved over the last decade when I first gave it a try, way better than my memories of using solid edge (and I personally disliked fusion, just didn't click with me, at least freecad has a near identical workflow to SW). Am I more accepting of jankiness with Foss solutions, straightup yes, it's provided for free without restrictions on its usage vs solidworks where if you have a maker license for example, only other maker licenses can open the sldprt file.
Another example, I'd wager it's why you see a lot more r and python usage in statistical spaces where SPSS and SAS were used because those tools are extremely expensive for licenses (I recall a colleague talking about it costing 10s of thousanda at leaat, maybe more, company was always looking into ways they can get off of it) cost alone makes the Foss solutions more accessible.
I'll be also fair that both of my anecdotal examples we're using for personal projects but the point is that professional users aren't a monolith.
This is one reason I'm still paying my monthly Microsoft dues. I'm an advanced [I guess] Excel user and none of the other spreadsheet programs out there can do everything Excel can do. At least not easily.
Pssssst, Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS(
I fundamental thing that makes FOSS better is not the product that exists, but that, when you see a problem, you have the option to think, "let's see how to fix it".
Now I have used MS Excel for most of my life, up until University end, and only recently started using LibreOffice Calc instead.
And despite me telling all my colleagues how much better the new versions of LibreOffice fresh are, I know very well that there are still some glaring problems in these programs even in general use.
However, I had experienced some problems in MS Office too and back then all I could do was feel powerless for a few seconds and then either find some workarounds or ignore the problem, depending upon what it was.
In case of LibreOffice, I can make a note of the problem and plan to report a bug and maybe even help fix it, which leaves me on a +ive note at the end of the day.
Digression: Problems with LibreOffice:
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
A lot of people are also just dumb. FOSS won't fix dumb.
I had to run an alias every time I wanted to change the brightness on my laptop, and it defaulted to max brightness every time it was restarted.
I get that if I was a better person I could just pull myself by my bootstraps and teach myself to sync the brightness buttons on the keyboard to work again but I'm not. On windows it just worked.
This. Straight up this. Just fucking use Linux, it's ready for casual everyday use.
Yawn. Yelling at people to just use Linux is ineffective and it comes across as really condescending. It also does nothing to address the issue if how disruptive it is to switch operating systems, especially for less technical users.
No, it isn't.
Linux on a laptop can't even reliably wake the system when you close then open a laptop lid. There are some basic things that need to work 100% of the time before Linux can be considered ready for casual everyday use.
Can you provide an example of this? Only time I've encountered that behaviour was with a laptop that had a defective lid-switch.
Honestly, just google it. Tons of people have that problem and if you search for it you get pages and pages of results.
LOL it absolutely is not. Not even close.
In what way is it not? It has a desktop, a browser, free app for a word processor. For the CASUAL user it's fine. Just don't go into the terminal, like you wouldn't for the command prompt.
Hardware compatibility. I have one machine that won't boot any Linux installer at all. Another with constant gpu driver problems. Another where Bluetooth doesn't work at all. Another where wifi firmware crashes all the time. It never ends.
Hell, even if you do go into the command prompt it's pretty easy if you're on something Debian based, apt is really easy to get a hang of.
"Why does my .docx document look all mess up on my computer?"
I can open .docx just fine with LibreOffice.
Bro I actively challenge you to install Mint and have problems with it. It's nearly impossible. Worst case you'll need to wineskin some niche Windows-only game or program, but honestly even that isn't necessary all that often in my experience. You're going to have a no-stress install finished in a quarter the time that a windows install would be, and a robust OS that apes the windows environment to such a degree that average non-technical users won't have any idea they're even using Linux.
Barring some sort of hardware incompatibility that I haven't experienced personally, I've installed Mint on around a half dozen machines in the past several years and have yet to recieve a complaint from the end users. It just works.
Seriously. I'm pretty sure my housemate hasn't noticed the difference between Mint and Windows. At least they haven't asked me to help them with anything in over a month, and they would have, if they needed help.
I’ve been daily driving Mint at work for a few months and I love it. It was painless to install, and I like all the GUI/DE stuff better than windows. It also has better multi-monitor support than when I boot into windows.
But it’s still Linux so all the techy development shit works great too. I’m always in the terminal, etc.
Had some windows users loving the Cinnamon DE on Mint. They managed to get right into it straight away. Plus, on most Linux distros they come with easy to use package managers. And you can still get deb or rpm packages that can be used to install applications just like a windows installer exe.
the problem is always hardware incompatibility.
Mint installer does not boot on any machine I have.
I acquired an ewaste laptop with a 5+ year old Celeron, 4GM of RAM and a spinning rust drive. I tossed mint on there after fighting with Windows update to try to apply 3 years worth of updates and while the installer took 2 hours to complete, it actually is a bit more usable and once it's booted it's amusingly chirpy with random slowdowns whenever it has to hit the disc for data.
I might set it up as my daughter's first computer. She's getting to that age already so it's about time to do it
My mother and aunt picked up on it just fine, they're actually enjoying it more because there aren't full screen ads that confuse them and it made their computers faster.
Tell me you haven't used Linux recently without telling me you haven't used Linux recently.
I use it every day across many machines. Still continue to have serious hardware compatibility problems with a wide range of devices. It's extremely frustrating.
I realize not everyone's experience is the same, but it can still be a really bad time for some people. Maybe the same can be said about Windows too but I still think it's not as bad.
Remember, hardware incompatibilities is very often the issue because we don't have many users so many don't care about Linux
The more people use Linux the more drivers will come. The better hardware will work