this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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I hear this a lot, and... I'm not so sure.
I mean, for one with modern installers if you're at the stage where you're on the terminal as a basic user you are having to troubleshoot more problems than you should have and the issue isn't the terminal but the stuff that isn't working that lead you to need to use it.
But also... Windows has one of those, too. Two, actually. Every other troubleshooting page for Windows online has you open a command line and type some stuff up, when not messing with PowerShell. It's not that weird.
I find that Linux users and communities have a tendency to overestimate how much of the issue is "the terminal" or "the interface not looking like Windows". I don't think it's that big of a deal if the distro you're installing works first time out of the box. The problem is when it doesn't, because terminal or not, that's a dealbreaker for most people.
I'm thinking about my husband watching me use Mint. I am comfortable with the command line, I use Linux (and Powershell) professionally so I am quick to jump into the terminal to fix something. Everytime I do he complains that he could never do that.
There are still a few things you need to do in the terminal, like setting flatpak permissions - something many users will want to do - that would benefit from a graphical interface. Linux is almost as good as Windows or Mac in this regard but not quite all the way there.
Yeah, but that's you jumping into the terminal and formatting commands off the top of your head.
That's very rarely required. Most normies will go online looking for help, find the command to solve their issue and copy-paste it over, both on Windows and Linux. Most tutorials for normies will even include step by step instructions to open whichever command line and what to type.
But again, if you're at that point something else went wrong and you're already out of your depth. In most basic OS installs that should never happen, including most widely used Linux distros. That really isn't the barrier to any sort of mass adoption.