A New Breed of Linux Users
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I was at an end-user level when I started Linux and worked up to power user.
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Awesome Article. Thanks
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I've been a lurker on a few Linux forums for... almost a decade now. I don't think I've ever seen the original attitude that the author was speaking about. Generally the Linux community is very happy to have newbies join in on the conversation and ask questions. Sure you will get a few "do a search first" comments but overall everyone is willing to answer question.
It makes sense to "dumb down", as the author put it, Linux. The more users you have using a platform the more developers, although I think Linux has more software available for it then Windows at this point, will see it as a viable platform and develop more for it.
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I agree, I've been on Linux since ~1998 and this weird attitude that everyone talks about does not really seem to exist anywhere. No idea where people get that impression from. I think it is articles like this that keep repeating it until everyone is convinced that it is true.
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On top of that, the Linux desktop has never been truly hard to work with. For the last decade (again since I've been watching Linux heavily) the Linux Desktop hasn't needed to do anything like compile apps or open a terminal window to do basically anything. Everything had moved to a more GUI centric design 10 year ago.
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@coliver said:
On top of that, the Linux desktop has never been truly hard to work with. For the last decade (again since I've been watching Linux heavily) the Linux Desktop hasn't needed to do anything like compile apps or open a terminal window to do basically anything. Everything had moved to a more GUI centric design 10 year ago.
I did a test back in 1998 of Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 with KDE 1 and Windows 98 on a new user coming with no experience in UNIX or Windows (only Apple ][ experience.) As a new user without the reconceptions that came from having already learned how to use Windows, he found Linux quite a bit easier to use. All of his apps were easy to find and use, everything just worked. Windows 98 wasn't bad, but it trailed Linux in user friendliness by a bit.
That was 17 years ago! Linux, IMHO, has kept getting easier and easier. This test was back before Linux introduced what is now called the "app store" concept, even though Linux had it many years before Apple did it. That put Linux is 2003 far ahead of Windows even today. It is SO easy for Linux users to get a simple, easy desktop with all of the apps that they need handled right through the OS.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
On top of that, the Linux desktop has never been truly hard to work with. For the last decade (again since I've been watching Linux heavily) the Linux Desktop hasn't needed to do anything like compile apps or open a terminal window to do basically anything. Everything had moved to a more GUI centric design 10 year ago.
I did a test back in 1998 of Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 with KDE 1 and Windows 98 on a new user coming with no experience in UNIX or Windows (only Apple ][ experience.) As a new user without the reconceptions that came from having already learned how to use Windows, he found Linux quite a bit easier to use. All of his apps were easy to find and use, everything just worked. Windows 98 wasn't bad, but it trailed Linux in user friendliness by a bit.
That was 17 years ago! Linux, IMHO, has kept getting easier and easier. This test was back before Linux introduced what is now called the "app store" concept, even though Linux had it many years before Apple did it. That put Linux is 2003 far ahead of Windows even today. It is SO easy for Linux users to get a simple, easy desktop with all of the apps that they need handled right through the OS.
I wasn't going to mention aptitude, YUM, or zypper just seemed like cheating. These curated "app stores", a term I don't really think fits, are probably one of the biggest advances in user-centric computing. No wonder Google, Apple, and Microsoft have found this to be the most effective way to get software and updates to their customers. Not a single company has done it as effectively as the Linux distributors though. Even the Apple App store isn't that great in comparison.
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It's true, the YUM repos leave everyone in the dust. Core repos that are guaranteed and battle tested. Second tier repos that are tested but not guaranteed. Vendor repos and third party repos when you want them. And all built in.
And THEN there is the fact that the entire OS and everything on it gets updated and patched all through a single system!
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Good article, overall, it is important that we see that a new type of user is common in the Linux world now. But I agree with you guys, the stigmas in Linux are not something that I have seen in real life.
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It really just takes time to absorb everything and start to feel comfortable. I have only been working with Linux a couple of years now. There were a lot of new concepts to absorb. The biggest hurdle I found is with Linux moving forward so quickly now, it is difficult to know if the article or book on a topic is current. For example, learning Apache server or should I be using nginx. Is the box really secure? How do I know? What SQL should I be using and why. I find that the reality is you just have to spin up a box and just start learning, which is one of the great things about the platform. The other down side is you feel like you have walked into the library of congress and you should know every book on day one. I do find the newer articles coming out are geared to these newer users.
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That's true, Linux does tend to move faster than other platforms in terms of change, new features, updates and so forth. Although that has slowed a lot now that it is not new in any way. As it matures it slows to rates closer to that of other old systems.
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@bsouder said:
It really just takes time to absorb everything and start to feel comfortable. I have only been working with Linux a couple of years now. There were a lot of new concepts to absorb. The biggest hurdle I found is with Linux moving forward so quickly now, it is difficult to know if the article or book on a topic is current. For example, learning Apache server or should I be using nginx. Is the box really secure? How do I know? What SQL should I be using and why. I find that the reality is you just have to spin up a box and just start learning, which is one of the great things about the platform.
I found this really depends on what platform and distro you are looking to work with. Apache still has its place as does MySQL. So learning and implementing those technologies isn't wasted time. I agree though, the best way to learn Linux or any of skill set is to use it and have set goals to accomplish.
The other down side is you feel like you have walked into the library of congress and you should know every book on day one. I do find the newer articles coming out are geared to these newer users.
I've never really noticed this, generally all manuals and documentation are written for the Linux newbie, it isn't until you get into new projects or ones specifically geared toward one audience where you get way too much technical information, or the other side where there is no documentation at all.
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@coliver said:
@bsouder said:
For example, learning Apache server or should I be using nginx. Is the box really secure? How do I know? What SQL should I be using and why.I found this really depends on what platform and distro you are looking to work with. Apache still has its place as does MySQL.
There was a discussion about this maybe six months ago in another community that I lurk in. Someone was concerned about running nGinx for performance over Apache and was dead set to do it. But the task that they were doing was so trivial that there was no way to measure the difference in performance between any quality web server (even IIS would have been completely fine) and Apache was projected to have been best for him. The basic answer was.... unless you are running massive websites and know your code, the decision doesn't really matter when it comes to web servers. Apache, nGinx, LightTTP and others will all work just fine. Use the defaults and don't worry about agonizing over those decisions.
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Also, if you are on Windows, you have all of those same decisions and more since you have the native Windows tools (IIS, SQL Server) to contend with as well as all of the open source ones packaged on Linux (Apache, nGinx, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) and on and on. If choosing the right product is overwhelming on Linux, it is just as overwhelming on Windows.
Windows users often overcome this by just not looking at alternatives and using either included defaults (IIS) or assumed de facto choices (MS SQL Server) which is odd as those choices have severe caveats that choosing the wrong one that is maintained by your Linux distro of choice does not. If you pick MySQL and later figure out you need PostgreSQL and can't be on Linux anymore, you have no licensing lock in and no platform lock in. Do the same thing with MS SQL Server and you've committed to something much harder to leave.
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From time to time, I still hear the old thing when Windows-only IT people hate on Linux "you get what you pay for." That is to say, since it's FOSS therefore it's automatically terrible, and of course they ignore the vast numbers of servers, quick patches, etc. It's weird to hear it today though, they'll hate on Unix all day long but then bust out their iPhone or Android.
At any rate, I do remember this exact same conversation about 13 years ago or so when Lindows was in stores, about getting regular people using it, and that didn't really seem to work too well. I think there's still an overall intimidation factor, because even now, mentioning Linux or Unix, from time to time I still get people saying "yeah, but don't you miss GUI?" because obviously it's all CLI. That's a lot less common than it used to be, but there still seems to be a gap, though more regular people know that Linux exists, just probably not even what it is.
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@tonyshowoff said:
From time to time, I still hear the old thing when Windows-only IT people hate on Linux "you get what you pay for." That is to say, since it's FOSS therefore it's automatically terrible, and of course they ignore the vast numbers of servers, quick patches, etc. It's weird to hear it today though, they'll hate on Unix all day long but then bust out their iPhone or Android.
This is a really annoying sentiment I encounter on a regular basis. My colleague at our mother company tells me this every time I implement a FOSS technology to offset some outdated application that was in use before I got here. FreePBX was the most recent example. I heard lines like, "That will never work, we invested [a ridiculous amount of money] into our current system 15 years ago how can something free compete?" or "They don't have a very good business model what are you going to do when they fold?" Aggravating to say the least.
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@coliver said:
"They don't have a very good business model what are you going to do when they fold?" Aggravating to say the least.
Since it's FOSS you can manage the project yourself, but every time a closed source company goes out of business, that code vanishes into thin air forever, leaving people behind. That's another thing people don't seem understand. Just because you paid for something, doesn't mean they'll support you when they fold, but if a FOSS company folds, at least you have the ability to fork the project and keep it going, especially from other users.
For example if Microsoft goes belly up Windows will die out, but if Linus Torvalds dies or Richard Stallman or anyone else like that, people will still crank out code for Linux, GNU projects, etc.
Did C support or implementation suddenly drop off after Dennis Ritchie died? Compare that to, say... ColdFusion or some other god awful garbage, those creators still curse the Earth and their products are dying.
