ian

Newbie: Hi I just want a distro to go shopping and for family tasks.

Mechanic: You want a racing car. Lift the hood and I'll show you how to operate all the adjustments. Racing cars need lots of tuning and youll need wide tyres too.

Newbie: Can't I just drive to the shops?

Mechanic: But you need to learn under the hood first. That's what Linux is all about.

Newbie: there is also no room for shopping in this racing car.

Mechanic: there is if it's just text files. Don't bother with all that jpeg and binary bloat.

Newbie: You know, as much as I hate Windows, either I didn't need a mechanic, or got one who didn't insist open the hood to operate it.

Todays desktops from commercial and open source are all stuck in the legacy, file-app-document world. The tired old, paper inspired, pre-Internet, pre-mobile way of working. PDFs, online silos, 10 different UIs to get simple things done.

Commercial companies want to keep their monopolies and don't want to spend on any development.

FOSS Communities have little clue of what the next generation user information space will look like. And will likely copy the commercial world again when it all kicks off.

The terminal is not a good way to interact with visual tasks such as drawing, 3D modelling, and working on complex schematics or where things don't have names. Especially where the typical type of user is a visual, not a text thinker. Its not efficient to leave your working environment to go to the terminal and back either. And text thinkers are often not good at those visual tasks. So I'm not expecting terminal commands to appear in areas where I spend much of my time. I, like many, are not in IT.

Does it come in a special container to attach to some huge headphones. So people can see how serious I am about perfect sound whilst on the underground trains.

I want some of that mud!

I want everyone to have the benefit of Linux. It's not just about me. We'd then get those missing applications and drivers. And if anyone wanted to get away from the mainstream, there are distros just for that.

I need a good DE for launching apps and switching tasks. As a mouse user I found Gnome poor in launching apps. Huge mouse movements needed, and hard to lay out the launcher apps as I need them compared to Plasma. Id consider Gnome if I found a suitable replacement launcher. It would need favourites, category navigation and search.

Yes. Tap the Spacebar during the drag, to get a copy at that position.

It's a very quick way to create lots of copies at different positions.

I never do any of that. I'm sure a lot of non IT people don't either. At best they'd get an app to do specialised tasks for them. Sadly too many gatekeepers tell people considering Linux, they must use the command line. But I never use it. So that's clearly not true for normal users.

People do use it differently. I never use the CLI on Windows or Linux. I'm not in IT. I just do everyday user things. Many of which don't even have a CLI command.

> i get made fun of a lot.

Yes. They don't understand you need a way that works for you. We are all different. There is no one-size-fits-all.