Not OP, but my experience with Linux is that seemingly absurd usability issues just keep piling up the more you use it and at some you just kind of give up and abandon any expectation of even a decent level of common sense from whoever is developing the system.
I've listed some of which I encountered on Mint here https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/folders/273/usability-iss... Among them: AppImages just don't run unless you know how to make them run. This could be fixed with literally a single dialog box. There is no way to install fonts by default other than knowing where to put them and knowing how to get there. Every app that uses Alt+Click, e.g. for picking a color, won't work because that's bound by default by the DE.
These issues may sound small at first but think of it this way: did nobody making this OS think about how users were going to install fonts? Or ever used an application that used the Alt key? Or did they just assume everyone would know what to do when they download an appimage and double click on it and nothing happens?
And you can just feel that the whole thing is going to be like this. Every single time in the future you want to do something that isn't very extremely obvious, you'll find a hurdle.
I even had issues configuring my clock because somebody thought it was a good idea to just tell users to use a strftime code to format the taskbar clock. I actually had to type "%Y-%m-%d%n%H:%M" to get it to look the way I want. And this isn't an advanced setting. This is right clicking on the clock and clicking "Configure." When I realized what to do I actually laughed out loud because it felt like a joke. Fellas, only programmers know these codes. Make some GUIs for the normal people.
Not to argue with you, but is that Linux Mint specifically? I never used it, and its DE looked very unprofessional to my liking. Personally, I prefer modern Gnome, but I also like KDE. Everything else looks very unfriendly to an average user, I won’t ever install it. I’d go Gnome for Mac users and KDE for Windows refugees.
This is why Linux will always be a terrible OS. Every time someone says "Linux is bad because XYZ" someone will tell you "actually that's your distro, if you used distro ABC you wouldn't have that problem." But ABC has a different set of problems, which if you wasted 2 months to realize them and start complaining about, someone would just direct you to distro JKL.
The fragmentation of Linux leads to a ping-pong of responsibilities. Linux can never be a bad OS because it isn't an OS.
On Windows, if the file manager is bad, that's Microsoft's fault. Period. Nobody tries to say "actually..." it's Microsoft's fault. Period. The same goes for the taskbar, for the control panel, for MS Paint, for even Microsoft Office. If Microsoft will fix it or make it worse depends on them, but nobody denies who is to blame and everyone know where the blame lies. Meanwhile I don't even know if the basic utilities that my distro distributes are under the responsibility of Mint's team or if they will just direct me to some random open source project's issue tracker if I start complaining about Celluloid or the "Drawing" app.
You can't talk about Linux thinking only about the good parts, or you aren't inviting people to try Linux, you're inviting them to try your distro. "Linux" means the whole ecosystem, including all of its problems.
Au contraire, I would say that Mint is probably the closest to stock Win11/macOS experience right now. Gnome, on the other hand, looks utterly alien and non-discoverable
They have been converging for some time now. The taskbar in Win11 is very much a macOS Dock wannabe, for example.
Personally, I find modern Gnome insufferable because it is non-customizable to the extent that even macOS only dreams of, and it doubles down on the modern trend of hiding important UI behind poorly discoverable gestures (active corners etc). Except their take on it is even worse in general for mouse users because of how much more "legwork" it adds - e.g. in a default Gnome setup on Fedora, you need to move mouse cursor in the top left corner for the dock to show up (so that you can switch apps or launch a new one)... but then it shows on the bottom of the screen, so now you need to move the cursor all the way there across the screen.
But that's all subjective and not really my point. The point, rather, is that Gnome looks and behaves very different from Win11 and macOS both, in ways that don't make it easy for users to migrate (and in fact they specifically state that their UX design does not consider that a goal).
I never thought of this, the excessive mouse movements, like top left to bottom. What I thought of is that it killed this silly minimise and full screen option, even when everyone and their granny trained for those three buttons.
I like they ditched all the unnecessary things from the settings. I think all the pro-level settings must be dealt with via terminal. That way, it’s both of two worlds. Me, I don’t mind it. But if I manage the computer for someone, I want them to have only the minimum things, so they won’t be overwhelmed. That’s very wise, and unfortunately all these Win3.1 geeks are complaining it’s bad. Yeah, okay, keep using your favourite XFCE then, or whatever.
I’d install Gnome for elderly, even if they have some previous Windows experience. Because they can afford to just ignore it. My mum, she has no computer, and last time she used Windows was like, idk, a decade ago. Explaining Gnome to her is easy: here is the Windows (or CMD) button, you press it once, you have this iPad like interface. Here is the Dock, you have all the necessary apps in there. More of them if you press that Windows button one more time. But actually you don’t need it 99% of the time, so you can survive with top left corner pressed once. Two times press is for me. Closing the app is that X button. What else does she need?
Now, try to explain the [any other DE basically] to elders the same way. Considering most of these people have iPads. And if they’re not, well, I don’t really get why, they should. My guess is that their interface appeal to that audience. And to me that’s a great thing, that’s most of non-tech people now.
However, I’m (being an obviously pro user) able to use the default Gnome productively. Almost as productively as I use SwayWM. To me, that’s very impressive.
I go to Pinterest, no shorts because it only plays 1 video per screen, but on mobile the screen is smaller so, shorts.
I go to Reddit, shorts.
I go to Bluesky, shorts.
I don't go to Twitter.
Tumblr is probably the only social media that isn't filled with vertical videos and that has an algorithmic feed. I go to Explore and I get dandelions. A static photo of them, not a video. I'm crossing my fingers it stays that way.
Waiting for the Show HN browser extension that reformats all HN posts to fit into a shorts frame. Then rather than just displaying the text, it puts it in an annoying animated font. Maybe even adds an AI character to read it to you
I guess the likes of Youtube and Facebook are trying unsuccessfully to replicate TikTok. This is effort #2 for Facebook, which is/was also trying unsuccessfully to replicate Youtube with their take on some-attention-span-needed videos.
(Seriously though... Facebook's video playback UI. What the fuck is that? Why is it so bad?)
I guess they don't get that there's going to be only one winner in each niche, unless TikTok goes down for political/national security reasons. Why do I need Youtube shorts if I have TikTok? Why do I need Google+ if I have Facebook? Why do I want Facebook videos if I have Youtube? Unsolved puzzle.
> I often wish there was a convenient way of doing such an operation in the shell: if path start with "/", leave it, otherwise prepend "./"
Both bash and zsh have enough functionality exposed via shell functions and variables for you to define a keybinding that does exactly this, interactively. Good idea.
Did you mean an interactive command? Or something else?
I meant non-interactive, for use in scripts which take user input. We already have "--" for end of options, but the support for it is not universal and even with that some programs will interpret certain strings in a special way. On the other hand, prepending the dot-slash should work for any program or argument passing style.
Prepend for all paths on a command line? Or just for the executable?
For all paths it could be dangerous and should very probably not be done. But for executables it's less dangerous and can easily be done by putting '.' into $PATH.
I had someone argue that Wordpress had terrible security.
The only CVE's it had for 2 years only happened if you allowed random users to sign up.
There is a firewall plugin and basically the only thing it does is check if you have outdated plugins and log all the times a bot tried to log in by going posting user:admin password:admin to /wp-login.php. It's rare but a few of them tried my ___domain name as username instead. It sends me e-mails about new vulnerabilities found, and it's always some plugin. Sure, some of them are "installed" in thousands or millions of websites, but it's never anything in the Wordpress core itself.
If you hide /wp-login.php and avoid dependencies, it's practically impenetrable since it has to be the most battle-tested CMS out in the wild, and yet people swear it's Swiss cheese of security holes.
"WordPress is fairly secure as long as you don't use any extensions and don't let arbitrary users sign up" is technically true, but it's no surprise that a lot of WordPress use cases collide with these two things.
For example, a WooCommerce site is both more sensitive than a blog and more likely to have sign-ups open and functionally necessary additional plugins running.
For better and for worse, WordPress is the ecosystem, not just the software itself.
This is why I dislike how the Internet has become increasingly about politics and drama and less about memes.
It's not a system that can support serious debates without immense restrictions on anonymity, and those restrictions in turn become immense privacy issues 10 years later.
People really need to understand that you're supposed to have fun on the Internet, and if you aren't having fun, why be there at all?
Most importantly, I don't like how the criticism on the situation, specially some seen here, push for abdication of either privacy or of debates. There is more than one website on the Internet! You can have a website that requires ID to post, and another website that is run by an LLM that censors all political content. Those two ideas can co-exist in the vastness of the web and people are free to choose which website to visit.
I'm pretty sure Reddit as a company couldn't care less it's a bot or AI posting so long as it gets people to upvote it. People say they don't like it, but they keep posting on Reddit instead of leaving.
You're giving a lot of credit to marketers when they usually spend a budget without care and then report they had x views/likes/impressions taunting that as a success.
It's a bullshit oriented industry with almost zero scrutiny.
Flooding human forums with AI steals real state from actual humans.
Reddit is already flooded with bots. That was already a problem.
The actual problem is people thinking that because a system used by many isn't perfect that gives them permission to destroy the existing system. Don't like Reddit? Just don't go to Reddit. Go to fanclubs.org or something.
Ok, need you to clarify a few implicit and explicit statements there: The study destroyed the subreddit? The authors of the study believed they had permission to destroy the subreddit? the subreddit is now destroyed? The researchers don’t like reddit? The researchers would achieve their aims by going to fanclubs.org or something?
I have never had a single problem with Wikipedia in 20 years, and I don't believe an alternative exists. All text written on Wikipedia is royalty free and so are most of the images. The meaningfulness of that can't be overstated. Wikipedia is the web's greatest website and a wonder of the world.
You can't love the web without loving Wikipedia, so I'm wary of anyone who disrespects it.
I've listed some of which I encountered on Mint here https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/folders/273/usability-iss... Among them: AppImages just don't run unless you know how to make them run. This could be fixed with literally a single dialog box. There is no way to install fonts by default other than knowing where to put them and knowing how to get there. Every app that uses Alt+Click, e.g. for picking a color, won't work because that's bound by default by the DE.
These issues may sound small at first but think of it this way: did nobody making this OS think about how users were going to install fonts? Or ever used an application that used the Alt key? Or did they just assume everyone would know what to do when they download an appimage and double click on it and nothing happens?
And you can just feel that the whole thing is going to be like this. Every single time in the future you want to do something that isn't very extremely obvious, you'll find a hurdle.
I even had issues configuring my clock because somebody thought it was a good idea to just tell users to use a strftime code to format the taskbar clock. I actually had to type "%Y-%m-%d%n%H:%M" to get it to look the way I want. And this isn't an advanced setting. This is right clicking on the clock and clicking "Configure." When I realized what to do I actually laughed out loud because it felt like a joke. Fellas, only programmers know these codes. Make some GUIs for the normal people.
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