It always feels like some form of VR tech comes out with some sort of fanfare and with a promise it will take over the world, but it never does.
It always feels like some form of VR tech comes out with some sort of fanfare and with a promise it will take over the world, but it never does.
I’m going to get downvoted for this
Open source has its place, but the FOSS community needs to wake up to the fact that documentation, UX, ergonomics, and (especially) accessibility aren’t just nice-to-haves. Every year has been “The Year of the Linux Desktop™” but it never takes off, and it never will until more people who aren’t developers get involved.
I’m a reasonably new Linux at a place of trying to learn how to improve/optimise my system, and honestly, Google’s Gemini has become my user manual.
If I can’t figure something out then I could trawl through a bunch of forums where the issue doesn’t really match mine, or the fix has changed since OP had the same problem, or I could just go straight to an LLM. I understand that they have a tendency to make shit up on the fly (this is a great example), but when it comes to troubleshooting setup issues they’re really helpful. And yes, I kmow that’s because they’ve already ingested the support forums. But it is genuinely so much quicker to sort things out, while learning as you go.
Funny you make “missing documentation” an argument against open source and for closed source, as if the average Windows user reads any documentation or even the error messages properly.
your comment is a joke.
While you generally have a point, the year of the linux desktop is not hindered by that. Distributions like Linux Mint, Ubuntu and the like are just as easy to install as Windows, the desktop environments preinstalled on them work very good and the software is more than sufficient for like 70% to 80% of people (not counting anything, that you cannot install with a single click from the app store/software center of the distribution.
Though Linux is not the default. Windows is paying big time money to be the default. So why would “normal people” switch? Hell, most people will just stop messaging people instead of installing a different messenger on their phone. Installing a different OS on your PC/Notebook is a way bigger step than that.
So probably we won’t get the “Year of the Linux Desktop”, unless someone outpays Microsoft for quite some time, or unless microsoft and Windows implode by themselves (not likely either)
Not here to downvote. But I will say there is some good changes as of the past five years.
From a personal perspective: there’s a lot of GOOD open-source software that has great user experiences. VLC. Bitwarden. OBS. Joplin. Jitsi.
Even WordPress (the new Blocks editor not the ugly classic stuff) in the past decade has a lot of thought and design for end users.
For all the GIMP/Libre office software that just has backwards ass choices for UX, or those random terminal apps that require understanding the command line – they seem to be the ones everyone complains about and imprinted as “the face of open-source”. Which is a shame.
There’s so much good open-source projects that really do focus on the casual non technical end user.