The Free Software and Open Source ecosystems are, at their best, about communities putting together projects to serve their own needs and then generously sharing those solutions out.
I think an easily discoverable UI for non-technical people is not a problem that many technical communities have. Anyone who does try to start that project is signing themselves up for a lot of complaints from outside the project, almost by definition. I don’t really see why anyone would do it.
The Chromebook is probably the right way to go. I’d recommend them to my non-technical friends if they weren’t designed by an ad company. As it is, I have no idea, there legitimately doesn’t seem to be a good desktop OS for non-technical users anymore.
Re:Microsoft Is Driving Users Away
by philistine on Sunday February 25, 2024 @09:46PM
(#39507136)
macOS !!
I've maintained an in-house distro for a couple years so I know the ins and outs of systemd, dbus, polkit, xorg and whatever crap is needed to run a desktop session, and how to track down what's broken if the system misbehaves in some way. So switching every machine I use to Linux wasn't really an extra burden. Ironically it made me switch to i3 as my WM and ditching a file manager, gvfs and other moving parts. I'm doing a lot of things in the terminal. I loathe complicated setups - less moving parts, less things that can break. But I'm fully aware that I'm a complete oddball here, and I don't think nor care whether the day of the Linux desktop will ever come. Unless maybe we're at a point where really absolutely everything runs in the cloud and people only need a browser. But at that point just get a Chromebook?