Iā€™m going to very carefully poke the hornetā€™s nest here and ask this basic question that I never really explicitly formulated. It seems apt here on Lemmy in particular because people take as a given the superiority of Linux as the starting point of conversations involved computers generally.

Iā€™m not here to refute this, but I am thinking I should interrogate it a bit more. Iā€™ll start with an ā€œaverageā€ user, to which Iā€™ll have to give some sort of definition.

Imagine somebody with a low to moderate concern about privacy, more than none, but not much more and will happily trade it for useful or enjoyable services. Imagine the use case of a desktop computer for this type of person is productivity software they use at work/school, and occasionally for their own purposes too because theyā€™re familiar with it. They also like to watch movies, browse the web, and communicate with friends and family using popular free software packages. Security isnā€™t much of a worry for them, but they do engage in private communication and also banking and will pour a lot of personal information in to the machine in exchange for a lot of useful abilities like paying bills and organising their life.

Now also picture this person is open minded, at least a little and willing to hear you out on the concept of operating systems and of Linux in particular. Is it automatically in such a personā€™s interests to switch to Linux? And is it always a good idea to start with supposition that it is and that the only barrier is hesitancy and ignorance? Would any of their needs actually be better met should they switch? A lot of this discussion tends to devolve in to whether it is or isnā€™t hard for such a person to use Linux should they make the switch and whether using Linux is inherently more difficult than for example Windows but I think whatā€™s missed here is, assuming itā€™s super easy to switch for an ā€œaverageā€ user and perfectly easy to operate thereafter, is it actually better in such a case? If the needs are so basic, what has been gained? Is it mostly an ideological preference for the philosophical concepts behind the open source movement? That could be enough in and of itself perhaps, you could pitch Linux as ā€œbetterā€ within that framework at least for the ideals it promotes. I feel like I sense thereā€™s a desire to push Linux for this reason on the thinking that if just one more person joins the fold so to speak, then it generally pushes the world at large vaguely in the right direction in some small way. But is there anything more tangibly superior for an ā€œaverageā€ user? It seems like nowadays hardware has long surpassed the needs of users like these such that things like ā€œperformanceā€ donā€™t seem all that relevant considering almost any available platform could fulfill these needs so thoroughly that theoretically superior performance from the software would seem not to play a role. There is the security and privacy aspect, certainly for me, that definitely puts me off Windows but if an ā€œaverageā€ user says they donā€™t care about this things, can you really say theyā€™re being foolhardy in a practical sense? In a wider view, arguably, in the way that it pushes the world in a generally worse direction, but for them directly in the near to medium or even long term, whatā€™s going to happen if they just donā€™t even worry about it? People say Windows has poor security, but for the number of people using it, just how many will personally experience actual measurable harm from this? Despite pouring so much personal information in to their computer, I suspect they could likely go a lifetime without experiencing identity theft, or harrassment from authorities, or tangible/financial losses. I suspect they probably know that too. That seems to me again like it really only leaves more of a ā€œdigital veganismā€ approach to Linuxā€™s virtues. Thatā€™s appealing to some, to me a bit even but itā€™s a much narrower basis for proclaiming it ā€œsuperiorā€

Now at the other end of the spectrum, the users that are not the least ā€œaverageā€ who run Linux on their home systems and probably at work, use open source alternatives for every possible service and do not need conversion as they themselves are Linux preachers. What is it that they typically get out of Linux? Iā€™ve heard many say they enjoy ā€œtinkeringā€. I get that, is that the main benefit though? It seems then that the appeal is that itā€™s kind of ā€œhardā€, like a puzzle, but I donā€™t think any of this crowd would like that assessment. What do you want to tinker with though that closed systems would prevent you from doing? This probably goes to the heart of it because itā€™s the point at which I think probably most diverge from say an IT professional or programmer that loves Linux, I am too ignorant here to know what I donā€™t know and I just canā€™t really conceive of a scenario where I might for example want to personally modify the kernel of an operating system. Most examples I see if that type of thing is people making hardware work, and itā€™s ingenious and impressive but the hardware is usually that part of the setup thatā€™s not democratised and not open source, itā€™s usually something off the shelf it seems to me that that hardware would have worked already on a more popular platform. Likewise when you eke out of last bit of performance out of a system, what are you actually doing with it? I mean I get that itā€™s a crying shame for hardware to be hobbled by lousy software but if the use for the hardware, the need for computing to be done can be met with existing platforms, what is done with the savings from the better software?

    • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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      1 year ago

      Iā€™m a software engineer, and habitual tinkerer. I also like near total control over my desktop behavior and aesthetic. With a handful of tiling windows managers to choose from, and customizable elements and decorations that I can slim down, itā€™s perfect for me. But thatā€™s a big time investment, and lots of previous trial and error.

      • commie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        i want hybrid tiling/float. i am a single-monitor user over 95% of my time so i have learned to use transparency to view documents (or videos or whatever) through my working window. but i donā€™t want to deal with aranging the windows on the floating layer. do you know of a wm that can handle this for me? i have some hope in the proposal for gnome.

        • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.org
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          1 year ago

          I donā€™t, sorry. I use a lot of key bindings to navigate and manipulate my windows. However, I believe most tiling managers worth their sand support layouts and rules. IE, if opening Gimp, always open it on workspace 1, on the top half. Though admittedly, I donā€™t use that functionality.

    • Potatos_are_not_friends@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Not OP but Im the same.

      It solves a lot of use-cases for my profession. Iā€™m a programmer in my 40s.

      When Iā€™m coding in Windows, I find that thereā€™s a lot of mysterious black boxes. To get X to work, I have to do Y. Thereā€™s so much bloat. Thereā€™s so much fussing with GUIs. Microsoftā€™s work in making sure Windows is stable for grandma means lots of stupid proofing things that I need to get my job done.

      Where Linux, you wanna break your system with a command? Go for it! And I need that when Iā€™m programming. It allows me to debug faster. It allows me to fully own the code Iā€™m writing versus wondering if itā€™s some ā€œmagical Windows thingā€.

      The browser has become a great solution for most problems, and phone apps solve another major set of problems. A week ago, I demoed Adobeā€™s new cloud Photoshop in the browser. No download. It just worked! My kid fully edited a family video on her phone. All things that I would have done on my very expensive computer back in 2005.

      If I wasnā€™t a programmer, Iā€™d be pretty satisfied with a Chromebook and playing video games off my SteamDeck.