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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
In several of the entries for 2021's December Days about computers I have known and used, the operating systems for those computers are increasingly Linux as the time goes on. After a false start at university, where I tried to make a Linux work on my desktop, most of my experiences with Linux have been smooth for installation and operation, except when I do something foolish and bork the operating system, or it gets crufty enough that it starts not performing optimally and needs to be reinstalled. Those reinstallation points are also when I distro-hop, if I haven't been fully satisfied with the way that this particular distribution has done everything.
I'd say this particular group is bigger than it looks, but mostly that's because anyone with an Android smartphone in their pocket, or an Android tablet, a Kindle Fire, most smart TVs, streaming boxes and sticks, many smart watches, or a Chromebook is also technically a Linux user, as the Linux kernel powers all of those OSes and devices, and probably several of the game consoles of the last few generations as well. People who have to maintain web servers or who have websites they update are also likely Linux users, even if their hosting company is who actually handles the Linux updating and system administration. Many of the things that have been built around the Linux kernel are things that most people wouldn't recognize as any kind of Linux at all, because they have a specific idea in mind of what Linux is and does, and what kind of people use Linux.
That stereotype in their head is not made up out of whole cloth. There are a lot of bros around who sneer at less technically ept people, or who think of them as lesser for using either the Microsoft or the Apple operating systems. Going into forums and trying to ask for help on certain Linuxes and devices has a very high percentage of having people tell you that you've asked the wrong question, are asking it in the wrong way, haven't provided the right materials for others to help, haven't looked to see if there's a similar question or whether the question has already been asked, or will tell you that the solution to your question is all there in the man (manual) pages and why did you bother them with your n00b-ness. (Some of this crankiness can come from having to deal with people who really do need to work on their social skills on a regular basis, but not all of it.) There are evangelists who believe that the perfect setup for them is the perfect setup for everybody and anything else is either Simply Wrong or makes the person using a different setup insufficiently hardcore to be a real Linux user. In short, there are a lot of Linux users out there who exhibit the same behaviors as other gatekeepers, trying to build their own perfect No Homers Club to sit in and feel superior about. Many of them also gatekeep women out of their spaces, either through deliberate hostility or unexamined assumptions and expectations. They're hostile to new people and people who are looking for help, and don't want to do the work of having to either document well or help people, even if it's pointing someone to the documentation or FAQs, but instead put all of the burden on the person asking the question to prove that they've already done all the work they can and haven't come up with a solution. (And that they know what tools to use and what output to produce so that someone else can help them.) And, frankly, a lot of the guys in the Free Software movement are well-documented jerks, if not worse. Why anyone would want to join that community with any of those kinds of guys in it is a legitimate question to ask.
Most of the evangelism to use Linux and Linux-compatible things is going to start at the idea of software freedom, that your computer should be able to run programs for you, and not be arbitrarily blocked from doing things because Microsoft wants to charge you for that feature, or Apple has decided it doesn't want to let you do that. Or Google and Apple have decided that only certain applications will be allowed in their stores, and everyone else can either pay them to get inside the stores or go take a hike. There's also an element of freedom from, as in freedom from those companies collecting data on what you use, how you use it, and sending that back to themselves and/or sharing it with partners so that you can get targeted advertising. And freedom from the idea of your operating system having backdoors planted in it because the government wants to spy on people without going through the proper channels to obtain court orders or other legally-challengeable means of spying.
Software freedom is a lovely idea, and it's a great philosophical thing to wield when the context is right and receptive to the idea, but most people are not going to be swayed to learn an entirely new operating system just because someone says that it's the morally and ethically responsible thing to do. Some of those still-reluctant people can be captured by pointing out that Linux distributions are also usually free of cost and charge, which produces the phrase "free as in beer" to go along with "free as in freedom" as to why someone would want to use something other than Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.
An operating system and software suite that's without charge and without artificial limitations to use is an appealing possibility. In many case, though, it turns out to be neither "free as in beer" or "free as in freedom," but instead, "free as in 'free kittens.' " The additional amount of work that it takes to get a good Linux setup going and to use it is usually the reason why people don't switch to Linux or stick with it if they try it out. Without a compelling reason to be spending a lot of time working and doing things in Linux, most people would rather stick with operating systems that have had effort put into them to make them easy to use, and that will Just Work out of the box with whatever hardware they have inside. Even for me, Linux has been a "use this on my spare computer" for the longest time, because it wasn't the greatest about things like gaming, which are very important to me, in addition to all of the other multimedia aspects that a primary computer needs to do for me. I'm still holding on to a Windows install for apps that don't work properly in Linux, because having a safety net is important. For people who don't have or can't afford a spare computer, there's really no reason to switch to something that may or may not work for their purposes. Philosophy is wonderful, but practicality is what gets people to change over to what your operating system or distribution is. (In fairness, there have been leaps and bounds of improvements in getting things to Just Work since I first made a foray into the Linux world at university.)
I think some of the greater adoption of Linux has to do with a couple of factors: it costs significant amounts of money to include a Windows / macOS license in a computer, while, at least for the moment, using a Linux distribution is free. So for hobbyist devices or people trying to create inexpensive devices for limited purposes, Linux is usually the way to go. Beyond that, there's definitely been effort getting put into making the user experience smoother and less intimidating to people who are interested. While there is an abundance of ways that someone can put together a graphical user interface in Linux, most distributions have settled on one and use that as their default, and the default configurations tend toward the look of either the latest Windows or the latest macOS environments, so that someone who is looking to try out Linux will see things that look mostly familiar to them. I haven't yet seen that many distributions that offer a one-touch change between the two paradigms, or that have a question in their installer programs that say "Hey. Which of these two general ideas are you more familiar with?" and then set up the desktop environment to match that. There will always be tweaking, of course, as most people don't actually like the stock version of any desktop environment, but if most of the things are in a familiar place and act in a familiar way, it reduces the learning curve for figuring out what's going on. (And it means less hunting through the settings to find where to change that behavior that will be the equivalent of a sharp stone in your shoe if it's allowed to continue.)
For less-resourced computers, or the intended-inexpensive hobbyist or single board computers, there's a much less diverse set of available distributions, but they do exist, and even those ones generally try to follow similar paradigms, and many of them have managed to get enough power behind them that they can support a GUI and running many familiar applications, even if they can't necessarily run all of them all at once or support thousands of tabs. The costs associated with those boards and kitting them out is pretty similar to getting a used laptop, much of the time, and while there is progress being made toward getting these boards into laptop shells so they can be sold as Linux laptops or tablets, that's still some time away from hitting the Just Works part, and the costs are, again, about the same as buying a Chromebook or a used laptop, both of which will be smoother in function than these efforts, at this specific moment. (And which both could be converted to being Linux devices if you have a knowledgeable friend or can follow the documentation involved.) There's also a small thing about how many of these boards use a different instruction set than most desktop and laptop computers, which also reduces the available distributions for them, but that's mostly a technical digression not germane to this post. (ARM and/or RISC-V versus x86_64/amd64, if that makes sense to you.)
I still wouldn't recommend Linux to anyone who wants a device that Just Works and that mostly handles everything automatically, seamlessly, or without needing to think about what's going on. Or for people who don't want to have to touch a terminal or a command line. Great strides have been made for people so that they don't have to touch the terminal if they don't want to, but there are still things that work best (or only) when they've been invoked from the command line. The closest someone might get to that kind of experience is if they buy a computer from an organization that specifically makes machines with Linux installed on them, and possibly has their own distribution that they maintain along with those computers, so they can do as tight of integration and testing as possible to make sure the user experience is perfect. Even then, there's still likely to be something where a terminal has to be invoked, or a useful program exists but has no GUI element to it, or an update causes issues if you don't carefully navigate it, rather than being able to just touch the update button and go. For as much as someone might dislike Windows or macOS, they really do a much better job (and have the resources to do that job) of making their processes automatic, seamless, and unlikely to cause disruptions, and they make sure that all of their OS components have graphical elements to them and that most of them have entries so that someone can just find it in the list of programs and launch. In exchange, they sometimes forbid you from doing things, but most of the forbidden things are things that average users are not interested in doing.
Because I am someone who can put time into administrating systems, reading documentation, checking issues, customizing my workflows and environments, and because I do not fear the terminal or the possibility that I might have to nuke an install and start again from scratch after getting my data off to some other entity, Linux works for me, and I can do interesting and powerful things with it. This experience and knowledge has come from experimentation, and from having the privilege to have a spare machine (or several spare machines) to experiment with. And from having things explode in my face and having to either figure out how to fix them, or how to get the data off, wipe the drive, and start all over again, this time with something else. It also comes from reading the documentation, or someone else's readmes, and using my powers of search engine whispering to get things to appear that are helpful and that I can either drop in unmodified, or that document how they work and let me then try to modify them to make my situation work. It's very much not magical at all, like so many of the things that I do, but there's a lot of expertise that's working under the surface that means sometimes I know which pathway to take toward results, and sometimes I think I know which way, and that a fair amount of the technical language that gets deployed is comprehensible to me, at least in the abstract of "what's supposed to happen here?" so that I can figure out what's working for me and what isn't, and possibly interpret error messages to glean the most information out of them. It's all skills that come with time and with working with machines, which is not something that everyone has the privilege for.
The thing I would like the most for people, especially for people who are curious about Linux, is some kind of entity that will make an affordable spare computer, probably in a laptop form. And by affordable, I mean something in the sub-100 USD range, so that when kids get at it, or when some learning happens, the actual machine itself is pretty easily repaired or replaced and the learning on Linux can happen all the same. If a large amount of Linux experience comes from experimentation and trying to figure out whether or not something does work, and experimentation which sometimes results in having to recover from the experiment, and other such things, then a spare computer to do all of that experimentation on is essential. One that is not controlled or managed by work or school, or essential to the same, but it instead fully available to tinker, use, and otherwise try to find good life out of, and that either has a straightforward Linux installation process or comes with it already on the device. Refurbished and used computers are more likely to fit the price point, at this juncture, and that's not a bad thing, since support for older machines is usually more solid in the Linux environment. (Several of my older machines have had some new life breathed into them because they are running a Linux suitable for their abilities, rather than trying to keep up with Windows or macOS's increasing system requirements.)
I've tried a few distributions at this point, and while I'm no expert, I can try to steer people along the way if they're curious but don't know where to start. (As with so many things in this universe that run on open source or free software, knowing where to start is sometimes ninety percent of figuring out whether you're going to have a good experience with it all or not.)
In several of the entries for 2021's December Days about computers I have known and used, the operating systems for those computers are increasingly Linux as the time goes on. After a false start at university, where I tried to make a Linux work on my desktop, most of my experiences with Linux have been smooth for installation and operation, except when I do something foolish and bork the operating system, or it gets crufty enough that it starts not performing optimally and needs to be reinstalled. Those reinstallation points are also when I distro-hop, if I haven't been fully satisfied with the way that this particular distribution has done everything.
I'd say this particular group is bigger than it looks, but mostly that's because anyone with an Android smartphone in their pocket, or an Android tablet, a Kindle Fire, most smart TVs, streaming boxes and sticks, many smart watches, or a Chromebook is also technically a Linux user, as the Linux kernel powers all of those OSes and devices, and probably several of the game consoles of the last few generations as well. People who have to maintain web servers or who have websites they update are also likely Linux users, even if their hosting company is who actually handles the Linux updating and system administration. Many of the things that have been built around the Linux kernel are things that most people wouldn't recognize as any kind of Linux at all, because they have a specific idea in mind of what Linux is and does, and what kind of people use Linux.
That stereotype in their head is not made up out of whole cloth. There are a lot of bros around who sneer at less technically ept people, or who think of them as lesser for using either the Microsoft or the Apple operating systems. Going into forums and trying to ask for help on certain Linuxes and devices has a very high percentage of having people tell you that you've asked the wrong question, are asking it in the wrong way, haven't provided the right materials for others to help, haven't looked to see if there's a similar question or whether the question has already been asked, or will tell you that the solution to your question is all there in the man (manual) pages and why did you bother them with your n00b-ness. (Some of this crankiness can come from having to deal with people who really do need to work on their social skills on a regular basis, but not all of it.) There are evangelists who believe that the perfect setup for them is the perfect setup for everybody and anything else is either Simply Wrong or makes the person using a different setup insufficiently hardcore to be a real Linux user. In short, there are a lot of Linux users out there who exhibit the same behaviors as other gatekeepers, trying to build their own perfect No Homers Club to sit in and feel superior about. Many of them also gatekeep women out of their spaces, either through deliberate hostility or unexamined assumptions and expectations. They're hostile to new people and people who are looking for help, and don't want to do the work of having to either document well or help people, even if it's pointing someone to the documentation or FAQs, but instead put all of the burden on the person asking the question to prove that they've already done all the work they can and haven't come up with a solution. (And that they know what tools to use and what output to produce so that someone else can help them.) And, frankly, a lot of the guys in the Free Software movement are well-documented jerks, if not worse. Why anyone would want to join that community with any of those kinds of guys in it is a legitimate question to ask.
Most of the evangelism to use Linux and Linux-compatible things is going to start at the idea of software freedom, that your computer should be able to run programs for you, and not be arbitrarily blocked from doing things because Microsoft wants to charge you for that feature, or Apple has decided it doesn't want to let you do that. Or Google and Apple have decided that only certain applications will be allowed in their stores, and everyone else can either pay them to get inside the stores or go take a hike. There's also an element of freedom from, as in freedom from those companies collecting data on what you use, how you use it, and sending that back to themselves and/or sharing it with partners so that you can get targeted advertising. And freedom from the idea of your operating system having backdoors planted in it because the government wants to spy on people without going through the proper channels to obtain court orders or other legally-challengeable means of spying.
Software freedom is a lovely idea, and it's a great philosophical thing to wield when the context is right and receptive to the idea, but most people are not going to be swayed to learn an entirely new operating system just because someone says that it's the morally and ethically responsible thing to do. Some of those still-reluctant people can be captured by pointing out that Linux distributions are also usually free of cost and charge, which produces the phrase "free as in beer" to go along with "free as in freedom" as to why someone would want to use something other than Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS.
An operating system and software suite that's without charge and without artificial limitations to use is an appealing possibility. In many case, though, it turns out to be neither "free as in beer" or "free as in freedom," but instead, "free as in 'free kittens.' " The additional amount of work that it takes to get a good Linux setup going and to use it is usually the reason why people don't switch to Linux or stick with it if they try it out. Without a compelling reason to be spending a lot of time working and doing things in Linux, most people would rather stick with operating systems that have had effort put into them to make them easy to use, and that will Just Work out of the box with whatever hardware they have inside. Even for me, Linux has been a "use this on my spare computer" for the longest time, because it wasn't the greatest about things like gaming, which are very important to me, in addition to all of the other multimedia aspects that a primary computer needs to do for me. I'm still holding on to a Windows install for apps that don't work properly in Linux, because having a safety net is important. For people who don't have or can't afford a spare computer, there's really no reason to switch to something that may or may not work for their purposes. Philosophy is wonderful, but practicality is what gets people to change over to what your operating system or distribution is. (In fairness, there have been leaps and bounds of improvements in getting things to Just Work since I first made a foray into the Linux world at university.)
I think some of the greater adoption of Linux has to do with a couple of factors: it costs significant amounts of money to include a Windows / macOS license in a computer, while, at least for the moment, using a Linux distribution is free. So for hobbyist devices or people trying to create inexpensive devices for limited purposes, Linux is usually the way to go. Beyond that, there's definitely been effort getting put into making the user experience smoother and less intimidating to people who are interested. While there is an abundance of ways that someone can put together a graphical user interface in Linux, most distributions have settled on one and use that as their default, and the default configurations tend toward the look of either the latest Windows or the latest macOS environments, so that someone who is looking to try out Linux will see things that look mostly familiar to them. I haven't yet seen that many distributions that offer a one-touch change between the two paradigms, or that have a question in their installer programs that say "Hey. Which of these two general ideas are you more familiar with?" and then set up the desktop environment to match that. There will always be tweaking, of course, as most people don't actually like the stock version of any desktop environment, but if most of the things are in a familiar place and act in a familiar way, it reduces the learning curve for figuring out what's going on. (And it means less hunting through the settings to find where to change that behavior that will be the equivalent of a sharp stone in your shoe if it's allowed to continue.)
For less-resourced computers, or the intended-inexpensive hobbyist or single board computers, there's a much less diverse set of available distributions, but they do exist, and even those ones generally try to follow similar paradigms, and many of them have managed to get enough power behind them that they can support a GUI and running many familiar applications, even if they can't necessarily run all of them all at once or support thousands of tabs. The costs associated with those boards and kitting them out is pretty similar to getting a used laptop, much of the time, and while there is progress being made toward getting these boards into laptop shells so they can be sold as Linux laptops or tablets, that's still some time away from hitting the Just Works part, and the costs are, again, about the same as buying a Chromebook or a used laptop, both of which will be smoother in function than these efforts, at this specific moment. (And which both could be converted to being Linux devices if you have a knowledgeable friend or can follow the documentation involved.) There's also a small thing about how many of these boards use a different instruction set than most desktop and laptop computers, which also reduces the available distributions for them, but that's mostly a technical digression not germane to this post. (ARM and/or RISC-V versus x86_64/amd64, if that makes sense to you.)
I still wouldn't recommend Linux to anyone who wants a device that Just Works and that mostly handles everything automatically, seamlessly, or without needing to think about what's going on. Or for people who don't want to have to touch a terminal or a command line. Great strides have been made for people so that they don't have to touch the terminal if they don't want to, but there are still things that work best (or only) when they've been invoked from the command line. The closest someone might get to that kind of experience is if they buy a computer from an organization that specifically makes machines with Linux installed on them, and possibly has their own distribution that they maintain along with those computers, so they can do as tight of integration and testing as possible to make sure the user experience is perfect. Even then, there's still likely to be something where a terminal has to be invoked, or a useful program exists but has no GUI element to it, or an update causes issues if you don't carefully navigate it, rather than being able to just touch the update button and go. For as much as someone might dislike Windows or macOS, they really do a much better job (and have the resources to do that job) of making their processes automatic, seamless, and unlikely to cause disruptions, and they make sure that all of their OS components have graphical elements to them and that most of them have entries so that someone can just find it in the list of programs and launch. In exchange, they sometimes forbid you from doing things, but most of the forbidden things are things that average users are not interested in doing.
Because I am someone who can put time into administrating systems, reading documentation, checking issues, customizing my workflows and environments, and because I do not fear the terminal or the possibility that I might have to nuke an install and start again from scratch after getting my data off to some other entity, Linux works for me, and I can do interesting and powerful things with it. This experience and knowledge has come from experimentation, and from having the privilege to have a spare machine (or several spare machines) to experiment with. And from having things explode in my face and having to either figure out how to fix them, or how to get the data off, wipe the drive, and start all over again, this time with something else. It also comes from reading the documentation, or someone else's readmes, and using my powers of search engine whispering to get things to appear that are helpful and that I can either drop in unmodified, or that document how they work and let me then try to modify them to make my situation work. It's very much not magical at all, like so many of the things that I do, but there's a lot of expertise that's working under the surface that means sometimes I know which pathway to take toward results, and sometimes I think I know which way, and that a fair amount of the technical language that gets deployed is comprehensible to me, at least in the abstract of "what's supposed to happen here?" so that I can figure out what's working for me and what isn't, and possibly interpret error messages to glean the most information out of them. It's all skills that come with time and with working with machines, which is not something that everyone has the privilege for.
The thing I would like the most for people, especially for people who are curious about Linux, is some kind of entity that will make an affordable spare computer, probably in a laptop form. And by affordable, I mean something in the sub-100 USD range, so that when kids get at it, or when some learning happens, the actual machine itself is pretty easily repaired or replaced and the learning on Linux can happen all the same. If a large amount of Linux experience comes from experimentation and trying to figure out whether or not something does work, and experimentation which sometimes results in having to recover from the experiment, and other such things, then a spare computer to do all of that experimentation on is essential. One that is not controlled or managed by work or school, or essential to the same, but it instead fully available to tinker, use, and otherwise try to find good life out of, and that either has a straightforward Linux installation process or comes with it already on the device. Refurbished and used computers are more likely to fit the price point, at this juncture, and that's not a bad thing, since support for older machines is usually more solid in the Linux environment. (Several of my older machines have had some new life breathed into them because they are running a Linux suitable for their abilities, rather than trying to keep up with Windows or macOS's increasing system requirements.)
I've tried a few distributions at this point, and while I'm no expert, I can try to steer people along the way if they're curious but don't know where to start. (As with so many things in this universe that run on open source or free software, knowing where to start is sometimes ninety percent of figuring out whether you're going to have a good experience with it all or not.)
