It’s the same way Mastodon and the Fediverse is so damn frustrating to many people. They don’t want to have to think and just want shit to work.

Remember that Android is Linux-based – so keeping that in mind, a massive amount of normal users use Linux on a daily basis.

I think the key is, operating systems are meant to exist in the background. If it’s working well, you don’t think about it at all.

Linux user here, also once upon a time a Windows admin. I think the most difficult thing for most users is not that Linux is difficult, but that it is different.

Take Pop_OS for example. For the average “I check email and surf the web” user, it works wonderfully. But most people grew on Windows or Mac so its just not what they’re used to. Linux is kind of the stick shift to Windows and Mac’s automatic transmission… its not hard to learn, but most folk don’t choose to make the effort because they don’t need to.

The following sums up my experience with Linux thus far: “It’s never been easier for the newb to jump right in, but heavens help them if they ever stray from the straight path”.

There’s been a lot of effort to make things easier for a newb (used to Windows and all that shit) to do what they need to do in most cases. There’s been all sorts of GUI-based stuff that means for the ‘average’ user, there’s really no need for them to interact with the command line. That’s all well and good until you need to do something that wasn’t accounted for by the devs or contributors.

All of a sudden, you’d have not only to use the command line, you may also have to consult one of the following:

• Well-meaning, easy to understand, but ultimately unhelpfully shallow help pages (looking at you, Libre Office), or the opposite: deep, dense, and confusing (Arch) Wiki pages.
• One of the myriads of forum pages each telling the user to RTFM, “program the damned thing yourself”, “go back to Windows”, all of the above, or something else that delivers the same unhelpful message.
• Ultra-dense and technical man pages of a command that might possibly be of help.

And that’s already assuming you’ve got a good idea of what the problem was, or what it is that you are to do. Trouble-shooting is another thing entirely. While it’s true that Linux has tons of ways to make troubleshooting a lot easier, such as logs, reading through them is a skill a lot of us don’t have, and can’t be expected of some newb coming from Windows.

To be fair to Linux though, 90% of the time, things are well and good. 9% of the time, there’s a problem here and there, but you’re able to resolve it with a little bit of (online) help, despite how aggravating some of that “help” might be. 1% of the time, however, Linux will really test your patience, tolerance, and overall character.

Unfortunately, it’s that 10% that gives Linux its “hard to use” reputation, and the 1% gives enough scary stories for people to share.

This is always a hilarious conversation because the diehard Linux users will lie up and down about how Linux has no problems and it’s just you that’s too dumb to understand how to use it.

People hate Linux because shows they aren’t computer experts, they’re just Windows power users.

I’m a devops engineer, so I understand Linux well. I actually used exclusively Linux all throughout university.

Linux works just as good as windows for 98% of my uses cases. And for the 2% that it doesnt, I can probably figure out how to get it to work or an alternative.

But honestly, I usually just don’t want to anymore. After working 8 hours, I’m very seldom in the mood to do more debugging, so I switch to Windows more and more frequently.

If this is my experience as someone who understands it, most normies will just fuck off the moment the first program they want to run doesn’t.

I’ve been exclusively using Linux for almost a decade now. I started in high school when the computer we had at home was painfully slow with Windows. At start, it did seem a bit hard to wrap my head around. I was a kid, and there was no one who used Linux to teach me. I guess the installation etc. are much simpler nowadays. And the online spaces are much less toxic.

Even after all that, the main reason, I believe, is that it’s different. If someone is using a stable distro like Debian, and just wants to do what 90% of people do (i.e. browsing, looking at documents media etc.), Linux isn’t really a hassle. The installation process might be daunting to some people. But after that, they don’t need to open a terminal ever if they don’t want to. My sister is basically tech illiterate, and she’s been running Mint for a few years now. Never heard any complaints. Only issue she had was when she deleted her .config folder. But I had set up a script that backed up dotfiles to her external drive, so it was easily fixable.

People get frustrated because whenever something happens on Linux, and they go online, they see all these walls of text that they need to read, and commands they need to run. But they forget that on Windows and Macs, that isn’t even an option. Most of the time, you need to reset your system. Or, in the case of Macs, get it replaced. The frustration that people experience is caused by conditioning. They accept the inconveniences of Windows and Macs because they grew up with it. But since Linux is new to them, the shortcomings stick out much more.

TL;DR: For the average user, the OS doesn’t matter (they should probably still use Linux for increased privacy). For the power user, unless some specific applications they need are missing, Linux is always the best choice. The frustration is mostly due to conditioning.

Have at look at this: https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

I found this to be invaluable when I was borking stuff all the time.

There’s a lot of little things to you need to learn, that you don’t learn until actually messing around with in Linux which absolutely make or break your experience with Linux, and that Linux users will mock you for asking about.

For a lot of people windows just works how they want it, so when they’re convinced to switch by a friend/family member/youtuber they now have to relearn what was incredibly easy for them, which absolutely will cause frustrations regardless.

And a lot of Linux dudes get really defensive and elitist when you ask them to explain or help, like screaming that you’re afraid of the command line when you’ve just never needed to use it before. So the initial learning curve is rough, to het more or less what you had before(For an avg user)

Like. I’m sorry, but having an issue keeping you from using your pc, and only getting advice to read the documentation of the distro, when you could have just kept windows, is going to frustrate people

the year of Linux ladies and gentlemen

For most people computers are just the same as cars. People want a car that will drive them from place to place, are easy to refuel, easy to operate, and can be taken to an expert for anything difficult or that requires specialized knowledge. Same for computers. Most people want a computer to navigate the web, install the apps they are used to and that their friends use, is easy to operate, and can be taken to an expert for any involved work.

Even the friendliest of Linux distro don’t check all those boxes. You cant get ready support from a repair shop, many of the apps are different or function differently, and it doesn’t receive all the same love and attention from major third party developers as Windows does.

Most people could learn to use Linux; it’s not that hard. Most people could learn to change their own oil. But for most people, it’s not worth it. For most people it’s not the journey, it’s the destination and cars and computers are just tools to get there.

My first experience with linux was Ubuntu. Sue me, it was listed under most “most user friendly distro” listicles when I wasn’t smart enough to realize those were mostly marketing.

It worked fine for my purposes, though it took getting used to, but it would wake itself up from sleep after a few minutes. I would have to shut it off at night so that I wouldn’t wake up in a panic as an eerie light emanated through the room from my closed laptop. I did my best searching for the problem, but could never find a solution that worked; in retrospect, I probably just didn’t have the language to adequately describe the problem.

Nothing about the GUI was well-documented to the degree that CLI apps were. If I needed to make any changes, there would be like one grainy video on youtube that showed what apps to open and buttons to click and failed to solve my problem, but a dozen Stack Exchange articles telling me exactly what to do via the terminal.

I remember going off on some friends online when they tried to convince me Linux and the terminal were superior. I ranted about how this stupid sleep issue was indicative of larger, more annoying problems that drove potential users away. I raged about how hostile to users this esoteric nerds-only UX is. I cried about Windows could be better for everyone if the most computer-adept people would stop jumping ship for mediocre OSes.

I met another friend who used Arch (btw) within a year from that hissy fit, and she fixed my laptop within minutes. Using a CLI app nonetheless. I grumbled angrily to myself.

A few years later and everyone’s home all the time for some reason, and I get the wild idea that I’m going to be a(n ethical) hacker for whatever reason. I then proceeded to install Kali on a VM and the rest is history.

The point being that some people labor under the misguided belief that technology should conform to the users, and because we were mostly raised on Windows or Mac, we develop the misconception that those interfaces are “intuitive” (solely because we learned them during the best time in our life to pick up new skills). Then you try to move to linux for whatever reason and everything works differently and the process is jarring and noticeably requires the user conforming to the technology–i.e. changing bad habits learned from other OSes to fit the new one. The lucky few of us go on to learn many other OSes and start to see beyond the specifics to the abstract ideas similar to all of them, then it doesn’t matter if you have to work with iOS or TempleOS, you understand the basics of how it all fits together.

TL;DR Category theorists must be the least frustrated people alive

There’s always software I can’t use properly (and not just Windows stuff), some stuff badly configured with weird error messages… last time I was not able to even use the apt command

I’m not sure what you were doing to break apt, but it was probably something pretty funky (or at least adding a bunch of repos without really thinking about it).

The thing with Linux is that it doesn’t stop you doing stupid shit as much as Windows. If you know what you’re doing, that’s a really good thing. It’s really annoying when your OS stops you doing something for your own protection if you know that you’re not going to break anything. Simple example: Windows locks any file that’s open, Linux doesn’t. That’s really convenient, but you can screw things up badly if you’re not careful.

If you’re a beginner, I would suggest sticking to the GUI, i.e. control panels, software installed, etc. in Ubuntu. If you ever go into command line, be really careful, and understand what you’re doing. Definitely do not copy and paste commands you find online without understanding them reasonably well. Ubuntu puts in pretty good protections in its graphical tools. You’ll be able to do whatever you need to do, but shouldn’t break anything. Over time, you’ll pick up some knowledge and be able to do more in the command line (etc.) without breaking things.

I’ve been using Linux for so long that it’s hard for me to give an approximation of what a new user might find challenging, but I think that something important to remember is that computers are hard. I’ve spent my entire life studying computers and I’m still learning every day.

Most people grew up with Windows and learned how to use it over the years, but remember that it took years, and most of them still aren’t very good at it. Linux requires different knowledge than Windows, but it doesn’t inherently mean that it’s harder. If everyone grew up using Linux we wouldn’t hear about “how hard Linux is” but instead about “how hard Windows is”.

At least when something is broken in Linux, it probably has a cause (usually the user) and solution, and a way to debug what happened. When something breaks in Windows you’ve got about 3 things you can try before the solution is to reinstall.

As for solutions, I don’t know if there’s a certified pathway into Linux - I think installing something like Linux Mint and just using it like a computer would go a long way towards getting you comfortable with how Linux works without forcing you to study. Once you’re comfortable using the GUI, you can take a peek behind the scenes at your leisure - there is documentation everywhere for everything on Linux.