This article’s two qualms with Linux UI are justified but, I think, somewhat overstated. The first point basically boils down to " ‘Linux’s’ network filesystem handling doesn’t have a GUI and is half baked", which are both true, but this is what happens when you’re making a thousand utilities with a thousand different functions each. There is a will to support SMB, as evidenced by both Gnome and KDE having means to mount it, but the UI isn’t great because it’s not a focus and most people don’t use network shares, so there’s fewer feature requests and less development. Nautilus has 500 issues on the repo and 200 are bugs with 27000 commits from only a handful of authors.

The second issue is less justifiable as the author just wants this Linux utility to work like Windows. Partition management should absolutely only do what you tell it to do. Even on Windows I had to Google how to resize partitions, and I think Googling how to do that using the partition manager you’re using is fair. Gnome Disks even has a nice help page for formatting a disk.

The author says that Linux should be as usable for grandparents as it is for children, and for people who have never used a computer before and only need to do what children and grandparents do (gaming (various caveats), writing, internetting), I think Linux provides a vastly better UX. For people doing advanced tasks (network shares, video editing, etc) there has to be a reasonable expectation of willingness to learn how to use a new operating system

MS doesn’t blame the user when they get confused by a GUI or become intimidated by a command line interface.

Umm, yes they do. Look at copilot (as one recent example). The full range of opinion I’ve ever encountered goes from apathy to hatred. (Never heard of anyone having anything positive to say about it, the ‘nicest’ thing being to the effect of ‘I just ignore it, so I don’t care’). And yet, Microsoft’s attitude is that ‘the user is wrong, deal with it’, and this has always been the case in both Windows and Mac OS, while the various OSS DEs attempt to fix real user frustrations.

Many of the points they make are true for GNOME specifically, but thankfully, there are plenty of other options, and Linux != GNOME.

Honestly, the entitlement of the “Linux has bad UX” crowd really pisses me off. Yeah Linux is definitely as unusable as a hammer without a handle, guy. Hit the nail on the head with your handleless hammer right there. Give yourself a pat on the back for your metaphor skills 👍

Mac and Windows have billion dollar UX teams. Linux apps have almost entirely volunteer developers with at most some employees in a tiny company or nonprofit with shoestring budgets.

Mac and Windows have invasive UX “research” by recording user interactions behind their back. Most Linux apps don’t even have the ability to record interaction data by design and intention.

Mac and Windows make money directly from people using their platforms so obviously they’re going to do everything they can to keep you on the platform. Linux apps are donation funded with the occasional enterprise/professional support contract.

Windows and Mac users don’t give a shit about how well the underlying code works because they’re not supposed to see it, and it’s very clear the companies know that and have prioritised accordingly. Linux developers are disproportionately in it for the love of programming and prefer to spend their time actually programming as opposed to doing wireframes or UI markup. Linux UIs tend to get made once and then not touched for years until something absolutely needs to change.

If you compare Linux’s (read: mostly random people developing in their free time’s) UX to the literal biggest tech companies in the world, then you will never run out of things to bemoan Linux for. This is like complaining that your gearhead buddy’s project car has metal toggle switches in random places instead of a nice flowing panel like a brand new car straight off the dealership.

TL;DR: Pull request, long term funding toward establishing a UX team, or STFU. Stop making demands to volunteers and nonprofits and start actually contributing to UX improvements if you care so much. A major ethos of open source is “you don’t like it? You fix it.”

The kernel does not have good UX, as it’s not something you use directly.

Name a specific distribution and desktop UI combination, then we can discuss that.

But generalising all of them as just “Linux sucks” does not help, as they’re very diverse.

First we had “this meeting could have been an email”, now we have “this blog post could have been a tweet/skeet/toot”.

Most of this article is bashing an imagined strawman and the main meat of the issue is two papercuts.

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Do you think a user that never used macOS or windows would manage to use them from minute zero? I can answer that for you. No. Users have habits that comes from their day to day tasks. And that applies especially to such things that we use for hours every day. So a livelong user of macOS would struggle with windows in the same way livelong windows user would struggle with Linux. And btw young generations hooked on phones are not capable to use computer with any OS from minute zero. Seriously, its like watching granpas and grandmas.

Me personally I agree with the first point of the Author regarding SMB Handling. Requiring to Type smb://<my-network-share> in the address bar in Nautilus Network section and then Drag-and-Drop it to the Bookmarks section IS Not very User friendly.

I would also appreciate a simple Wizard to do this.

Regarding the Topic about reformatting a Disk: Even I don’t care about GPT, MBR and creating Partitions. And i am Developing in Linux since more then 10 years. I also just want to wipe my Stick and make it empty. I guess Most users also don’t care about the Filesystem used. They only want to set:

• Works only in Linux (use ext4 or xfs)
• Works on anything that has a USB Port (use FAT32)

Anything else could be hidden behind an advanced section.

Linus doing the world a massive favor by showing the flaws of Linux and still getting so much flak for it by the average Linux user is ridiculous.

Yet another reason why KDE Plasma is the G.O.A.T

I don’t think the solution is to make basic software Windows-like.

I think I’d rather see more work being done on newbie-focused distributions to introduce the user to all the key differences of Linux, to literally guide their hand in how things are done here. A welcome app with a simple FAQ, a set of wizards (explaining what’s being done behind the scenes) and even direct “click here” advices are all welcome.

Linux way is, for the most part, superior, and once you understand how things work here, you actively don’t want it to be too Windows-like.