My brother is 12 and just like other people of his age he can’t use a computer properly because he is only familiar with mobile devices and dumbed-down computers
I recently dual-booted Fedora KDE and Windows 10 on his laptop. Showed him Discovery and told him, “This is the app store. Everything you’ll ever need is here, and if you can’t find something just tell me and I’ll add it there”. I also set up bottles telling him “Your non-steam games are here”. He installed Steam and other apps himself
I guess he is a better Linux user than Linus Sebastian since he installed Steam without breaking his OS…
The tech support questions and stuff like “Can you install this for me?” or “Is this a virus?” dropped to zero. He only asks me things like “What was the name of PowerPoint for Linux” once in a while
After a week I have hardly ever seen my brother use Windows. He says Fedora is “like iOS” and he absolutely loved it
I use Arch and he keeps telling me “Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”. He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
“Is this a virus?”
Your 12-year-old brother is more security-conscious than most of the adults I work with.
Non techies have two settings. Either everything is a virus or nothing is a virus.
Still better security consciousness than 99% of the population.
Nah, my father is one of those who thinks everything is a virus, especially emails. And so he installs all kind of “clean your PC from viruses”-software …
Tell him that those are viruses too
That’s because everything is a virus.
I remember an old story about a father deleting bat.exe off the family computer and blaming his son for breaking the computer with his Batman game.
My dad is in his 70s, but he is thankfully rather aware of these kinds of things. He forwards me messages or calls me to ask “is this legitimate?”
He’s aware of computer viruses, but I think he’s really on the lookout for scams, which is an interesting and effective approach.
This is a lovely story
I absolutely lost it the first time he called me a nerd for using Arch and straight up started doing Fedora elitism lmao
Time to become a toxic arch elitist user now.
Time to replace Fedora with Gentoo.
What your brother sees in Arch: Oh no another driver update, let me write a paragraph in computer language
He is wrong though? 🤔
Tbh he’s got a point
AHAHAH that is so cute
“Btw i use fedora”
Love at first sight really.
My older sibling did something similar - getting Ubuntu installed on my very first laptop (a 9" netbook) back in 2008 and replacing windows XP. But be warned: it is a slippery slope. At the time , I just wanted a computer that I could take class notes on (high school), and never wanted to touch programming or the terminal. Now I have a PhD in computer science. I still don’t use Arch though.
Tangent, what’s it like going for grad and post grad in computer science? I’ve wanted to try teaching for the longest time but I learned very little new material over the course of my Bachelor’s and the only thing that made it worth my time was the math content lol
The further you go, the more specialized it gets. There are people I know doing their PhDs in CS, but it was pretty much just straight math. I’m now an expert in a very specific area of robotics. But it’s only worth it if you have a specific reason to go to grad school, like for a particular career path. If it’s just because you like learning, it’s not worth it. There’s a big opportunity cost.
Totally fair. Thank you!
Same with me but it was 2012 iirc. My sister installed ubuntu on my first laptop(which was a hand-down btw). Never used windows in any capacity in my whole life except for school.
He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
Your brother is the wise guy of the bell curve
He used a wormhole
I use NerdOS BTW.
(That’s fantastic, I absolutely love it.)
Good work son
Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff
That is a legitimate question. I still don’t fully understand people’s obsession about terminal. It’s 2023, we should be able to do everything comfortably using GUI rather than type everything, remembering all the commands, parameters, paths, permissions etc.
As a terminal fan, my main reasons for preferring them over a gui (for some tasks) are:
- It’s faster to type than to navigate menus
- If I don’t know where something is and can’t guess it instantly, it’s usually faster to search for it in a man page than randomly digging through gui menus
- You can combine commands with each other with pipes or
$() - You can search through your command history to find previous commands
- You can write scripts and aliases to automate common tasks
- The terminal requires less context switching. Typing ten commands is less mentally taxing than opening ten different guis
The barrier for entry is higher with terminals but unless you need visual feedback (e.g. because you’re editing an image) it’s easier and faster for both common and rare tasks.
And even for some types of image editing, terminal is way faster and easier. Some of the things i’ve done that are a simple command with imagemagick i wouldn’t even know which gui app to install, let alone how to do it
Well some if those are only true for smie people. Add in a vad case of dyslexia and it get real hard to kniw if what you just tyoed is correct, and does any cli have a spell checker.
Fair enough, I’m not against people making guis as well for people who prefer them for whatever reason, my point is that people don’t just prefer terminals because of elitism or something. I imagine terminals can be better than guis for some disabilities as well.
Because it just works ™. And it is flexible to a point that no GUI can ever accomplish. It’s liberating. It’s repeatable, It’s automatable. It’s about control. And most importantly, it’s FAST!
If you try to max out the control, GUI comes out of as an UX disaster. Check any enterprise software GUI to see what I mean. There will be lot’s and lot’s of buttons all around, and you would also end up with some kind of text input or programming environment inside it.
Consider this but triple the complexity and everything https://wiki.wxwidgets.org/images/1/1f/BinPjOptions.PNG
I agree in certain circumstances. For example a file manager I don’t understand why people use in a terminal. When I need to do like batch deletions or something I can easily just write a couple terminal commands. Everything else I just use the default file manager. Either Finder on MacOS or the Gnome one on Linux.
But stuff like vim, a terminal text editor, is simply more fluid and enjoyable than a GUI program. I’ve tried using vim plugins for various different GUI text editors like Sublime or VS Code but there’s nothing like a personalized vim install. It takes a little bit to get used to the commands, but once you do it’s like riding a bike. You just feel faster and muscle memory takes care of the rest. You don’t actively think about it
same thing with for example package managers. it’s faster to just press my hotkey to open up terminal, type in “sudo dnf install <whatever>” and it’s installed. why do we need a GUI here? it doesn’t make anything faster. In fact, it just gets in the way.
so some things GUIs don’t actually improve. Some they do. It’s a per case thing I think
I just find certain things to be quicker in the terminal than doing it through a GUI.
Like installing software. I think it’s quicker and more direct to do something like sudo pacman -S Firefox than to go through a gui. Especially if Im using a drop down terminal that I have hot keyed.
As for remembering everything, I’d say it’s just a matter of experience. Like, you had to learn how to use a GUI app at one point or another.
There should be a good GUI for everything but a terminal offers more options to do certain things a lot faster. Especially in work environments. And once you’re used to this level of efficiency and control you’re not likely to stop doing that in your home network.
I mean you could certainly have both but Linux treating its terminal as a first class interface is a big part of why it’s still used so much in the server/dev world I think. Having a command line interface that’s not an afterthought, fully scriptable, and can be automated is very convenient whereas on Windows you have things like PowerShell where not every program you want to do things with in PowerShell has a way to interact with PowerShell, since in Windows you have the opposite problem of GUI being the only first class interface.
It’s way easier to communicate a terminal based solution over the internet. Instead of making a guide with images, possibly needing annotation, you can just say “run x, y, z in order” and the user can just copy and paste it (even though it’s a bad habit to run random commands off the internet)
You still need similar memorisation when using a GUI.
You don’t give the GUI process a second thought as you’re used to the steps, similar to those using the terminal.
For example, in Windows to create a new text file, save it, and copy it.
You need to know the name of the application (notepad), how to find and open it from the Start menu, the steps within notepad to save the file and the path to save to (file -> save -> navigate to path), the name of the file explorer (Windows Explorer) and how to find and open it, how to navigate to the file, the steps to copying a file (right click copy or ctrl-c), and pasting the file (right click paste or ctrl-v).
On the terminal, it’s a case of remembering commands/switches:
vim document.txt
:wq (write quit)
cp document.txt documentnew.txt
rm document.txtBoth processes require memorisation of specific sequence of steps which overtime you’ll become accustom to and not have to actively think about when repeating a similar process.
My preference is the terminal as it is quicker and simpler in most instances and without the clutter of everything that comes with a GUI application.
- Press the Super/Windows button
- Type the letter ‘n’ (or ‘t’ if on most Linux distros)
- Press the ‘Return’ key.
Congratulations, you now opened Notepad / Random open source text editor.
- Ctrl + S = Save for pretty much everything
The above pattern works for almost every program. There is no need to memorise the ridiculously inconsistent nuances of the 4 different commands you specified.
9/10 times I personally prefer GUI over terminal for efficiency. With three buttons I already have a text editor open. At this point, you’ve just started typing the letter ‘v’ in your first step.
Because you have much more control
This is what sucks about Linux. It’s still not as complete as Windows in that regard… Things being too techy, even the real user friendly ones still got it.
You got this the wrong way around. Windows is lacking a proper terminal. You are at the mercy of constantly redesigned GUIs for literally everything. Windows is an absolute pain to use if you aren’t used to it and have developed a certain amount of Stockholm syndrome.
Same way other way around.
An amazing story! I doubt I ever have kids, but if I do I’ll do something like this. God knows what sort of dumbed down tech crap they’ll be fed in school.
How to copy paste from chatgpt 4 will ne furture
😍😍😍
IDK about plasma, but in GNOME, if you search for PowerPoint, it shows LibreOffice Impress as a result.
maybe unpopular opinion here but while it was user error, Linus breaking the OS by installing steam is something that should have never been possible, anyways glad to hear your brother is learning Linux!
the os should do as i say, that includes breaking it if i please. the problem are people writing into the terminal “i understand that i uninstall half my os with this command but want to do it anyway” and then wonder why half their os gets uninstalled.
I say this as a desktop Linux user for about 5 years at this point, but there is a big difference between typing “I understand I will uninstall half my OS with this” and typing “do as I say”. One requires directly repeating what is going to happen, and one is a more verbose version of typing Y.
Yes, the user should still be allowed to break their system however they want, but the warning should definitely be more obvious so the user can actively know if something they are changing might completely break their system.
wasn’t linus’s issue a rare packaging issue or something that happened and was fixed within a few days’ period?
I use Arch
I mean, the outcome speaks for itself. Although I would likely have gone for Gnome instead of KDE for somebody who is completely new to Linux and not exactly techy. I use KDE myself, but I have to say that the out-of-the-box look and feel of Gnome is a lot more polished.
Yeah, I installed KDE because it functions similarly to Windows. But something like Budgie would be ok too I guess
Also, I think young people like theming. My brother uses KDE’s theme store a lot
That’s amazing and encouraging, I want to hear more stories like this because when my kid grows up I plan on trying to guide him into not being tech illiterate, so far my plan is (more or less, but not exactly) to start him with a crappy but usable computer and give him upgrades he has to work for or tinker for, I feel like I learned the most by trying to squeeze performance and usability out of outdated hardware.
I don’t intend to make him have my passion for computers, my intention is that he’ll have the initiative to Google problems and the curiosity to solve them when it’s not that easy, just having those two can get you 80%-90% there.
Who would’ve thought tech literacy was going to go down with the years? Not me…
Well, it has been obvious for quite a while now, pretty much since we noticed that it wasn’t just the old people who “didn’t grow up with it” who needed excessive amounts of hand holding when using a PC.
Glad to be part of Gen Y then.
He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
lol he’s already a true linux user.
But probably best to have a talk about gatekeeping linux though. There’s no wrong way to run linux.
haha I thought exactly the same thing lol He’s linuxplained why his distro is better. That’s the spirit.
I mean, there are definitely wrong ways to run Linux, like a single root user with no password, but your point is well taken. If Linux fanboys would keep the subjective gatekeeping to themselves the new user experience would be much more pleasant.
Or a disabled root account with unconfigured sudo and/or doas
