PieFed
Hammers Without Handles
https://gardinerbryant.com/hammers-without-handles-linux-ux-sucks/
I wanted to take a moment and talk about Linux UX because, let’s face it… it sucks.
Actually, it’s worse than that. Much of Linux’s UX is technically correct and that makes it objectively wrong.
No. I don’t want Linux to be more Windows-like. But I do want the most common Linux desktops to behave in a way that PC-literate folks can wrap their mind around — and do so from minute zero
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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.
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
The author says that Linux should be as usable for grandparents as it is for children
My problem with this statement constantly bombarded on us is that it assumes that someone somewhere out there who cares.
To me, it seems that is the actual deciding factor in sticking with Linux… Realizing that if you want something that doesn’t exist, you’ll have to make it.
HiddenLayer555Honestly, 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 article raises good albeit imperfect points with good examples.
we truly need more ux people and designers to contribute.
The entire industry does. It’s a chronic shortage of UI/UX people who are backed by engineers actually taking the designs under advisement and executing on them.
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.
This drivel - okay not entirely, but I’m making a point - is all the wrong attitudes. “People like Windows, let’s make Linux more like Windows so people will accept it.”
We are not in a popularity contest. Linux is great - nay, extraordinary, phenomenal - because it has most of its shit together. Priorities, functionality, efficiency. If most people are not up to the task of learning something, that’s their problem. And yeah, that’s most people. In case the author of this article hadn’t noticed, the vast majority of people are, unfortunately, lazy and stupid. I’m not saying it’s always their faults but that’s not the issue. We don’t lower ourselves down to meet them where they are. If Linux remains only a tiny portion of the ecosystem, and needs to keep being the thing for only geeks (translation, got good grades in school, enjoy learning things, challenge themselves, etc.) then why does there seem to be this perception that that needs to change? Quite the opposite; the small bit of mainstream corporate elements that have become involved have only demonstrated they’ll immediately enshittify it, because that’s what they do.
Let Linux continue to be the fringe ecosystem for geeks. Why do we need morons to enjoy using it? Why is this a problem?
I don’t think “correctly label FAT32 as FAT32 instead of a versionless FAT” is “lowering ourselves down”. In fact I’d say it’s the opposite, let’s be technically precise and correct, instead of a simplified label that confuses everyone.
And on the other issue, what do you have against file managers being able to mount a network drive? Yeah I can do it in fstab but if I could do it faster right from the file manager I would.
Why is making things better a problem? If Gnome add the mounting feature to their file manager in the future, you will be against it, talking about the good old days where real men edited fstab uphill both ways? Whom does that help?
Nah, that’s not what I mean. I’m not opposed to those things, I guess I just think that things should get the time and attention based on how important they are. I agree that these things would be nice, but I don’t think the developers are deliberately keeping these things the way they are out of a sense of honor and tradition; rather I’ve just figured they always have something that’s more pressing to focus on.
dieTasseDo 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.
I’m a lifetime user of linux/unix and struggle when I have to use MacOS or Windows. I’m used to X11! Select (and copy on select) anything you can see. Paste on middle click on the mouse. Fat scrollbars that tell you how much there is to scroll. Arrow-buttons on the scrollbar, preferrably one pointing up at the top and two at the bottom, one pointing up, one pointing down. Draggable scrollpiece in the scrollbar. Click in the scrollbar to jump. Buttons that look like buttons. Focus follows mouse. Etc. etc.
I picked up both GNOME and KDE as a long time Windows user like that. On both mouse and trackpad.
I can’t even figure out how to drag and drop on my friend’s Macbook. Or a lot of other basic things.
If anything Macs are the odd one out with their control scheme, though I’m certainly not ruling out skill issue. But if you claim skill issue on my inability to use a Mac then I’m claiming skill issue on your inability to use Linux.
For me the transition from windows to gnome also was somewhat smooth, not it was also because when I didn’t know how to so something I just searched for “how to..” And found out. This surprised me in the ltt video, if they searched how to format flash to fat32 in Disks they would easily know that they need to add the partition, but instead of web searched they were jumping here and there chaoticaly. And its weird they are my generation and my generation knows how to google… Or maybe they are already brainwashed by using llms?
I didn’t even google much about GNOME or KDE. But I did have an exploration period where I opened every dropdown I saw to see what options are there and perused through the settings to see all the things I can change, mapping out how the software works.
A little curiosity goes a long way for getting to know a GUI software IMO. A computer is a complex tool that needs to be mapped out at least a little bit before you need to seriously use it.
Yeah I also like to do this (also with phone) but here I understand many people want to go straight to the point.
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.
Works on anything that has a USB Port (use FAT32)
…assuming your disk and file sizes are below the limit, otherwise exfat.
SavvyWolfFirst 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.
I’ve used SAMBA shares for years, and it’s dead simple to map a network drive in Explorer. And mounting that drive on boot is a matter of a checkbox in a dialog.
The problem is that knowing how to do something in Windows teaches you Windows and learning it in Linux teaches you computers. For example if you know how to connect to a remote host through the command line, you already know how to connect to one in Nautilus, and vise versa. (via the command ssh://user@host)
I think this cross-pollination approach is going to be a learning curve for Windows users. It is for me. But taking the time has not only helped me understand Linux, I understand how to use Windows better, despite barely logging in for over a year.
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.
Vendetta9076Who the fuck needs UX. Just use the terminal.
On a more serious note I think this person forgets that everything has a learning curve no matter what it is. And the attempt to make that not true is why we have every phone being a boring square and why computer literacy has cratered so dramatically.
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Yeah the basis of the whole logic is bullshit.
This guy is doing the OS equivalent of the left parties trying to be less on the left, to appeal to the far right. It doesn’t work and just ends up with the shit propagating and everyone getting used to it and lowering their standards.
I have to agree. I think there’s something to be said for making the transition easier, but the idea that Linux needs to copy windows to that extent is very restrictive.
Hey guys, Windows is dominant so we need things to be designed more like Windows!
If we wanted a Windows experience we’d use Windows am I right? It’s painful enough I have to use it for work, at least let me have a better time at home.
All he’s really saying is that it is important for things to be easy for people to figure out how to do, and for that you need to be aware of what mental models they already have and design interfaces with the goal that the largest number of users can succeed in using the software. A better analogy might be that if you’re trying to run a political campaign, you should probably be speaking the language the majority of voters speak, and caring whether they understand you.
The examples the article gives seem like good ones. The starting point is a video of people new to linux trying to use software and failing to figure it out, acknowledging that as a problem to be solved. The proposed solutions are basically to have wizard guis that can walk users through the most common tasks for disk management and network drives. Usability matters and none of that should be very controversial.
The problem with that philosophy is that all the fundamental problems reinforce themselves, generation after generation after generation. Assuming familiarity with Windows as your baseline guarantees that you will be stuck in a rut of horrible UI design “because that’s the way it’s always been”. The lowest-friction choice will always be to carry forward all the bullshit.
I don’t think you can truly call someone “computer literate” if they can’t tolerate moderate friction and learn new things quickly.
This is also why apple’s UI sucks so bad now. They used to have fantastic UI design because they made software with the fewest possible assumptions about the user. Now they design software assuming you are ass-deep in their previous software. It is the design equivalent of inbreeding.
Are the specific suggestions made in the article “horrible UI design”? IMO it is good UI design to have a basic goal of people being able to use it without consulting with external resources, and not requiring them to know much more than is strictly necessary for the given task. The real fundamental problem is the marketshare of proprietary operating systems, not using them needs to be accessible, not a badge of computer literacy. The author is absolutely right that you should be able to format a disk and set up a network drive by just clicking through and selecting basic options about what you are trying to do.
The specific examples seem reasonable, but do not support the overall thesis.
If you had a video of people new to Windows you’d find the same issues or worse.
My wife was struggling so badly to run her windows laptop (she was used to a cellphone only), partly because windows does quirky things we just get used to when running Windows; so we swapped the OS to linux and she’s much happier, its the same everyday and doesn’t get in her way.
What is this guy on about? Windows has TWO places for settings and neither are to parity of each other. Linux does not have that. Gnome and KDE actually provide really nice settings.
I’m on Manjaro, and it actually does have two places for settings. The KDE settings menu is usually the place to go, but Manjaro’s settings menu is where you can do a few obscure things like installing different kernel versions.
This might just be a Manjaro thing though as I haven’t seen this on other distros, and Control Panel does way more than it should really on Windows with how long the Settings app has been around.
At least on Linux if you dont want it that way you can remove it, depending on the distro. Control Panel and Settings are there seemingly forever in Windows.
I really dislike dumb and entitled takes like this. First he somehow complains about both GNOME and KDE when literally none of the complaint apply to KDE, second switching between different operating systems will break the way you are doing things anyway, and third - who cares.
It didn’t even apply to GNOME. Samba servers just show up in the network section of nautilus.
Everything in the article seems misplaced or mispoken. GNOME Nautilus, click on network, if a server exists it shows up, you click it and login to the share (same as Windows except you don’t have to assign a drive letter), and options asks of you want to remember user name and password. Done. Or you type smb://host/share.
Seems easier than Windows non GUI of: net use D: \host\share /USER:username password.
And when I was new to Linux GNOME Disks just made perfect sense to me. Select a drive, format it, partition it, add a relevant filesystem.
The whole article is a guy complaint it doesn’t work like he thinks it should because he knew windows way first.
Thats kind of his point though.
New users, are coming from Windows. They know “the windows way”.
Hell I had to dump all my mapped network shares on my laptop because when I wasn’t at home, the whole thing just stalls out constantly, looking for them, instead of just saying “Oh, its not there” and moving on, or just ignoring it until I actively click on it.
counterpoint: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Btrfs#Partitionless_Btrfs_disk
Or you intend to
ddan image onto it. Or you intend to turn the entire disk over to a VM and want to partition it from inside the VM. I think there might also be a (rare and esoteric) use case involving PostgreSQL.I have run into weird issues when installing GTK apps in KDE, it’s annoying but I did enough research to know that if you use KDE you should avoid GTK apps.
I don’t have a problem with his take other than saying people who disagree with him are “objectively wrong”. There’s nothing objective about it, and feel like this is the new “literally” where its used improperly so often that it just becomes meaningless.
Imitating the Windows UI makes things easier and more intuitive for people switching from Windows, which, let’s face it, is virtually everyone.
But its not necessarily the way everyone should be doing it, because the Windows way is sometimes not the best way.
There are lots of DEs with their own opinionated way of doing things and none of them are “wrong”.
I really like this take on it: https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/github-actions/#familiarity-instead-of-compatibility
I think the same thing applies to Linux DE’s. Linux is not and never will be a 1 for 1 to windows workflows. If we chase perfect compatibility, we will be perpetually behind on a wild goose chase.
But, doing things like what KDE does, where most of the common keyboard shortcuts are the same, and things like virtual desktops allow for similar workflows with very little adaptation, is very reasonable.