My brother is 12 and just like other people of his age he can’t use a computer properly because he is only familiar with mobile devices and dumbed-down computers
I recently dual-booted Fedora KDE and Windows 10 on his laptop. Showed him Discovery and told him, “This is the app store. Everything you’ll ever need is here, and if you can’t find something just tell me and I’ll add it there”. I also set up bottles telling him “Your non-steam games are here”. He installed Steam and other apps himself
I guess he is a better Linux user than Linus Sebastian since he installed Steam without breaking his OS…
The tech support questions and stuff like “Can you install this for me?” or “Is this a virus?” dropped to zero. He only asks me things like “What was the name of PowerPoint for Linux” once in a while
After a week I have hardly ever seen my brother use Windows. He says Fedora is “like iOS” and he absolutely loved it
I use Arch and he keeps telling me “Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”. He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
This is great lol. When my friend tried Linux Mint he had to go into the terminal to install Brave, as they don’t just provide a .DEB like other browsers do. Maybe I should recommend Fedora to him as well.
Brave 🤮
i find the fall from grace amusing. i’ve been hating on them for years just because they’re a chrome derivative. now they do some telemetry and all of a sudden everyone hates them.
What’s wrong with it?
I use Vivaldi (and Firefox if a site doesn’t work in Vivaldi) which is part of that “other browsers” bracket so I’m good lol.
not open source and based on chrome
why not just use firefox for everything?
Because I need tab organisation to stop my arse from overflowing with tabs and getting overwhelmed, which Vivaldi does nicely with workspaces and Firefox can’t really do at all.
I looked it up and while Firefox has most of the tab features Vivaldi does (tab pinning, tab duplication, moving tabs, muting tabs) it doesn’t have tab stacking, which was novel to me
there are a couple firefox addons that more or less replicate this feature in different forms from some brief research
for example tree style tabs is a popular addon
i also found tab stack and simple tab groups although they do not look as streamlined as vivaldi
regardless, thanks for the info. i’m going to try out tree style tabs because it seems like a useful feature for me too that i hadn’t considered before
No prob! I did use Tree Style Tabs and that helped a bit but Vivaldi’s extra features and how streamlined it is just edge it out as better than Firefox + addons for me. There’s also tab workspaces for grouping tabs into screens, typically on what type of browsing you’re doing, and tab tiling which Firefox was able to do back in its XUL days but can’t do in Quantum. I think Firefox would be pretty neat with a power-user oriented fork to bring back some missing features.
My only issue with Vivaldi is, if a site is still providing insecure HTTP for whatever reason (7digital for some reason still provides purchase downloads this way) then Vivaldi silently fails. Firefox clearly warns the user, so that’s my reason for having Firefox on hand - for those stragglers.
You can find the flatpak version of Brave in the Mint software center. Many package maintainers don’t allocate space for multiple web browser forks because they take a very long time to compile and update frequently (or have nonfree components like Vivaldi) so flatpaks are your best option.
I knew Fedora had Flatpak baked in but didn’t know Linux Mint had it. I know they’ve got a hatred for Snaps, though lol. Thanks for the explanation!
Linux is spreading among gen z. Source: I’m 13 and use NixOS, and my friend who’s around the same age as me also uses it.
I’m 15 and I use NixOS too.
Based teach me how 2 package and module
Based.
Linux is spreading among Gen Z.
It’s kinda not true, see my other comment, it’s not that about NixOS.
“Is this a virus?”
Your 12-year-old brother is more security-conscious than most of the adults I work with.
Non techies have two settings. Either everything is a virus or nothing is a virus.
Still better security consciousness than 99% of the population.
Nah, my father is one of those who thinks everything is a virus, especially emails. And so he installs all kind of “clean your PC from viruses”-software …
Tell him that those are viruses too
Honestly, they do seem to be malware more often than anything else
That’s because everything is a virus.
I remember an old story about a father deleting bat.exe off the family computer and blaming his son for breaking the computer with his Batman game.
My dad is in his 70s, but he is thankfully rather aware of these kinds of things. He forwards me messages or calls me to ask “is this legitimate?”
He’s aware of computer viruses, but I think he’s really on the lookout for scams, which is an interesting and effective approach.
My brother is the kind of people that installs stuff without reading a single option, just ‘next next next’ until the installer closes.
Good work son
Did you add Flathub or rpmfusion? the store without those things is kinda barren
yup I did
My 3 year old daughter has a 2010 MacBook running AntiX. She knows how to boot it, press Enter on the dual-boot screen, and is getting close to being able to select Stardew Valley from the app menu. She also enjoys playing GCompris.
This is the kind of things I like to hear!
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Do you think I would have a similar experience if I got my 70 year old mother to install Linux? She’s on the other side of the country, but she’s always asking me questions about Windows 11 and breaking things. I have never even used Windows 11, so my capacity to help her isn’t great, especially since we haven’t been able to get Remote Desktop working since she switched from 10 to 11.
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My wife is bad with tech and was frustrated with Windows. i set her up with linux and GNOME. Its a simple interface. Settings are all in one place like a phone. Files, Photos in the overview tray. No more frustration with “what is Windows doing now?” and No more “why is this so slow”
Is she happier with it than Windows? Does she struggle less? My mom already used Libra office, so at least that much wouldn’t be an adjustment. My fear is that she’ll lock up the first time she has to use the terminal or install something that isn’t in the software center.
PS, Gnome is simple, but it’s also awesome! I’ve been using Linux off and on for 20 years now and I prefer Gnome.
She could careless about the OS, just as long as it is peppy like her phone and simple. So yes much happier than her Windows experience. some distros do a nice job at presenting a software store that is easy, like ZorinOS or ElementaryOS. if she isn’t getting IT help from anybody and you think terminal install may become an issue, there is OpenSUSE with oneclick install of downloaded RPMs (if you are outside of repos). But SUSE is a bit of its own learning curve.
Thanks for the advice. Learning curves won’t work for her. It needs to be like a phone, like you said. I have a lot of experience with Pop and I think she’d be fine with that as long as she doesn’t need to use the terminal. The first time it asks her to sudo her head will explode.
Yep, understood. For my wife’s I put the apps she needed on the dock and nothing else. And then for the browser I set the default page to always show her main websites as tiles. Backups are automatic to a raspberry pi running samba. So far there has been no issues unless the wifi extender goes goofy and she has to reconnect.
Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff
That is a legitimate question. I still don’t fully understand people’s obsession about terminal. It’s 2023, we should be able to do everything comfortably using GUI rather than type everything, remembering all the commands, parameters, paths, permissions etc.
I mean you could certainly have both but Linux treating its terminal as a first class interface is a big killer feature of Unix/Linux I think and why it’s still used in the server/dev world so much. Having a command line interface that’s not an afterthought, fully scriptable, and can be automated is very convenient for large tasks that need to be chained together whereas on Windows you have things like PowerShell where not every program you want to do things with in PowerShell has a way to interact with PowerShell, since in Windows you have the opposite problem of GUI being the only first class interface. I think I’d be worried that if you de-emphasized the terminal more you’d get the weird situation that happened to Windows and PowerShell whereas it’s usually not super hard to build your own GUI around an open source terminal program. A lot of people aren’t especially motivated to do that so some programs don’t have GUIs, but if you’re feeling like more programs need one then go for it.
I just find certain things to be quicker in the terminal than doing it through a GUI.
Like installing software. I think it’s quicker and more direct to do something like sudo pacman -S Firefox than to go through a gui. Especially if Im using a drop down terminal that I have hot keyed.
As for remembering everything, I’d say it’s just a matter of experience. Like, you had to learn how to use a GUI app at one point or another.
Good username reference.
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In a GUI, your options are human-readable and all presented to you. In a terminal, you have to know the names of the programs/commands. It’s not a big deal for something like Notepad or vim, but it gets more complicated when you don’t know the name of what you’re looking for. It’s easier to remember the which program you need when you have a list and icons. You can do all the same things, but a GUI is much more intuitive for the majority of people.
- Press the Super/Windows button
- Type the letter ‘n’ (or ‘t’ if on most Linux distros)
- Press the ‘Return’ key.
Congratulations, you now opened Notepad / Random open source text editor.
- Ctrl + S = Save for pretty much everything
The above pattern works for almost every program. There is no need to memorise the ridiculously inconsistent nuances of the 4 different commands you specified.
9/10 times I personally prefer GUI over terminal for efficiency. With three buttons I already have a text editor open. At this point, you’ve just started typing the letter ‘v’ in your first step.
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Because it just works ™. And it is flexible to a point that no GUI can ever accomplish. It’s liberating. It’s repeatable, It’s automatable. It’s about control. And most importantly, it’s FAST!
If you try to max out the control, GUI comes out of as an UX disaster. Check any enterprise software GUI to see what I mean. There will be lot’s and lot’s of buttons all around, and you would also end up with some kind of text input or programming environment inside it.
Consider this but triple the complexity and everything https://wiki.wxwidgets.org/images/1/1f/BinPjOptions.PNG
one of the most important things about text based interfaces is reproducability. Being able to run commands and get the expected results every time and easily share it with others. GUIs can be customized and re-arranged, and its much harder to automate things with a GUI program vs a text based one. Those are handy features which will probably prevent the terminal from ever dying.
Terminal fan here (though I’m on Mac). GUIs, in an attempt to contain all the features of a CLI program while being user friendly, make compromises on simplicity. It’s difficult to remember the combination of buttons to click to get what you want. For CLI programs, you have man and —help to figure it out. Of course there’s the pipes and automation aspects of it too.
It’s way easier to communicate a terminal based solution over the internet. Instead of making a guide with images, possibly needing annotation, you can just say “run x, y, z in order” and the user can just copy and paste it (even though it’s a bad habit to run random commands off the internet)
There should be a good GUI for everything but a terminal offers more options to do certain things a lot faster. Especially in work environments. And once you’re used to this level of efficiency and control you’re not likely to stop doing that in your home network.
As a terminal fan, my main reasons for preferring them over a gui (for some tasks) are:
- It’s faster to type than to navigate menus
- If I don’t know where something is and can’t guess it instantly, it’s usually faster to search for it in a man page than randomly digging through gui menus
- You can combine commands with each other with pipes or
$() - You can search through your command history to find previous commands
- You can write scripts and aliases to automate common tasks
- The terminal requires less context switching. Typing ten commands is less mentally taxing than opening ten different guis
The barrier for entry is higher with terminals but unless you need visual feedback (e.g. because you’re editing an image) it’s easier and faster for both common and rare tasks.
And even for some types of image editing, terminal is way faster and easier. Some of the things i’ve done that are a simple command with imagemagick i wouldn’t even know which gui app to install, let alone how to do it
To add to point 4; in most Unix terminals you can use Ctrl+R (mnemonic “reverse”) to search commands from your history, press Ctrl+R repeatedly after typing to keep going back up, start using the arrow keys to leave the search or hit [Enter] to run the result
Well some if those are only true for smie people. Add in a vad case of dyslexia and it get real hard to kniw if what you just tyoed is correct, and does any cli have a spell checker.
Fair enough, I’m not against people making guis as well for people who prefer them for whatever reason, my point is that people don’t just prefer terminals because of elitism or something. I imagine terminals can be better than guis for some disabilities as well.
yeah. you can change font size / change font on a terminal much easier than many GUI applications. and terminal is going to have that same standard apply to everything
from what i understand, there are fonts for people with dyslexia
I’m sure there are ways to make it more convenient to use a terminal with dyslexia but I’m gonna guess that it’s always going to be a bit of an uphill battle. It might make more sense to use a gui in that case for many applications. Conversly, it’s also good to make sure you have a proper terminal interface as well for disability reasons, but also for the convenience that a terminal interface can provide for people who are familiar with the terminal.
Open dyslexic, and ironically comicsans
There’s this aptly-named utility that I’m currently using:
https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck
I do think GUI is the way to go for “typical” usage, but if you wanted to set up a faster way to run a command you use often, you would create an alias to handle a complex command or something you do often.
For example, I have ‘updateall’ as my command to run ‘sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade && flatpak update’. Why not GUI for this? I like to see what’s going on during my updates. It’s also kind of satisfying for some reason.
Anyway, I suspect your problem then would end up being not running a syntax, assuming it even exists, but the correct syntax, which I often encounter, but that’s what ‘history | grep’ is for.
I work a lot with building engineering programs with GUIs, and while you can get a lot of functionality in a GUI, there’s always some things that just aren’t worth the time to accomodate or even be a common enough issue to even think of
This is what sucks about Linux. It’s still not as complete as Windows in that regard… Things being too techy, even the real user friendly ones still got it.
You got this the wrong way around. Windows is lacking a proper terminal. You are at the mercy of constantly redesigned GUIs for literally everything. Windows is an absolute pain to use if you aren’t used to it and have developed a certain amount of Stockholm syndrome.
Same way other way around.
I agree in certain circumstances. For example a file manager I don’t understand why people use in a terminal. When I need to do like batch deletions or something I can easily just write a couple terminal commands. Everything else I just use the default file manager. Either Finder on MacOS or the Gnome one on Linux.
But stuff like vim, a terminal text editor, is simply more fluid and enjoyable than a GUI program. I’ve tried using vim plugins for various different GUI text editors like Sublime or VS Code but there’s nothing like a personalized vim install. It takes a little bit to get used to the commands, but once you do it’s like riding a bike. You just feel faster and muscle memory takes care of the rest. You don’t actively think about it
same thing with for example package managers. it’s faster to just press my hotkey to open up terminal, type in “sudo dnf install <whatever>” and it’s installed. why do we need a GUI here? it doesn’t make anything faster. In fact, it just gets in the way.
so some things GUIs don’t actually improve. Some they do. It’s a per case thing I think
A gui helps when you don’t know the package’s name
Because you have much more control
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Is this a made-up story? Be honest
The kid’s name? Little Bobby Tables.
Not op but I lived with a younger nephew for some years. He looked up to me in every aspect and if I introduced him to something he would learn it to talk about it later. I unfortunately just introduced him to League of Legends, I was too young and wasn’t into linux myself.
Yes, it’s just for OP to say “I use Arch”.
This is a lovely story
I absolutely lost it the first time he called me a nerd for using Arch and straight up started doing Fedora elitism lmao
“Btw i use fedora”
What your brother sees in Arch: Oh no another driver update, let me write a paragraph in computer language
AHAHAH that is so cute
Time to become a toxic arch elitist user now.
Time to replace Fedora with Gentoo.
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Tbh he’s got a point
Love at first sight really.
From now on I’m only refering to arch as “the nerd OS”
What does that make Gentoo?
The nerd OS for irritable people. I could use Arch, but choose to retain what shreds of sanity I have left.
Haha, that’s perfect
The OS for masochists?
Such a wholesome story 😊
So happy to hear that he is enjoying Linux and you guys are doing things together.
