Free software scares normal people

Familiarity is massively undersold in the Linux desktop adoption discussion. Having desktop environments that are near 1:1 clones of the commercial platforms (preferably paired with a distribution that's designed to be bulletproof and practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window) would go so far for making Linux viable for users sitting in the middle of the bell curve of technical capability.

It's one of those situations where "close enough" isn't. The fine details matter.

What do you see as wrong or missing "fine details" in, say, Cinnamon?

Assuming that the point of comparison is Windows (since it’s a rough XP/7 analogue), any difference in behaviors, patterns, or conventions that might differ from what a long time Windows user would expect, including things that some might write off as insignificant. In particular, anything relating to the user’s muscle memory (such as key shortcuts, menu item positions, etc) needs to match.

The DE needs to be as close to a drop-in replacement as possible while remaining legally distinct. The less the user needs to relearn the better.

For example, practically every text box in practically every Linux system handles ctrl+backspace by deleting a word. This clashes with a Windows user's expectation that ctrl+backspace deletes a word in some system applications while inserting a small square character in others.

The main problem with this is that the commercial offerings are pretty much just bad.

Windows isn't the way it is because of some purposeful design or anything. No, it's decades of poor decisions after poor decisions. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, is intuitive on Windows. It's familiar! But it is not intuitive.

If you conform to what these commercial offerings do, you are actively making your software worse. On purpose. You're actively programming in baggage from 25 years ago... in your greenfield project.

I don't even think that it remained very familiar aside from a taskbar (that also changed in win11) and the fact that there are desktop icons when you install things via double clicking (the double click installing also optionally changed with the Microsoft store and the msi installers are almost entirely gone these days, totally different uis pop up now). Even core things that people definitely use like the uninstallation, settings etc. ui has changed completely for the worse. Windows has also changed a lot of its core ui over the years like the taskbar, the clock, the startmenu etc. I guess one thing you could say is that it was a gradual change over many versions but everytime people hate it. Really, what Linux should have done is what Windows has done with WSL: Offer a builtin compatability layer so that you can install windows apps on linux, perhaps prompting you to enter a windows license and then it will launch those apps in a VM, even per window/app.

> Familiarity is massively undersold in the Linux desktop adoption discussion

Totally agree. My first distro was Elementary because it was sold to me as Mac-like. It’s…sort of that, but it was enough for me to stick with it and now I’ve tried 3 other distros! Elementary is still in place in my n150 server. Bazzite for my big gaming machine. Messed with Mint briefly, wasn’t for me but I appreciated what it was.

Familiarity is so important.

Lol, have you not noticed how every version of windows moves everything and the users are no longer able to do anything?

No, this is poison. They constantly change things, and Free Software would be racing to clone them, continually leaving familiarity behind in order to be a wonky version of the real thing. That battle is lost when it starts. Firefox was a great version of Firefox, everybody loved it (except when it locked up the entire system), nobody thought it was a knock-off of IE. Firefox then became a shit version of Chrome (I assume on Google's orders), and eventually developed into a good enough version of Chrome, shedding all of its users along the way. The Linux desktop is doing better than Firefox now.

The advantage to Free Software is that you don't have to change everything with Windows, Apple, Adobe, or Google demand you do (unless they grab control of a FOSS project, like in Firefox's case.) There are a number of writers who recommend Linux and Free software only for that reason - that once you get a workflow going, you don't want to change it according to corporate whims.

> practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window

This can be a problem. But it will be less of a problem with LLMs. We need to encourage amateur (and proficient) Linux adopters and users to lean on AI to deal with anything giving them problems. I had an LLM walk me through updating a .deb package in MATE to match HEAD upstream, and to do it in a way that would be replaced when Debian updated the package itself. This is something I've been carefully avoiding learning for a decade, and if I had taken the effort to try to learn, it would be weeks of research and I'd have messed up the system multiple times along the way. Instead, after a few false starts, I did it and gained the knowledge to do it again.

It's not necessary to chase, just copy what Windows users have largely agreed to be good and stick to that.

So for example, a hypothetical Windows DE could offer XP, 7, and 10 modes which the user can freely switch between which would never change. This delivers on two fronts: first, it presents a familiar, comfortable UI for the user, and second, it offers a promise that most of the popular Linux desktops do not which is that significant changes will not occur, even over long time scales.

I disagree on LLMs/terminal use. Too many things can go wrong in too many different ways for LLMs to be of much use to users for troubleshooting in many cases, and there's also the issue of the user even knowing what to ask for in the first place (even many moderately technical users aren't going to have the foggiest clue what a Debian package, MATE, HEAD, or upstream are).

The system really just needs to be engineered to 1) be extremely robust and not break in the first place 2) when it does break, have the ability to silently self-heal 99% of the time. A non-essential but excellent bonus would be 3) to be able to express what's wrong and what needs to be done to the user in that last 1%. This won't be easy to accomplish, but the first distro that does will be richly rewarded with user loyalty.