People online complain that Linux is hard to install for new users. But who are these people and why do they levy these complaints? The biggest barrier for the new Linux user isn't the installer; i...
Just saying, not my experience. I have used linux for over 25 years and nontechnical users in my family have also for almost 20 years. By in large it has worked just fine.
The big issue is Linux is not the OS that is supplied when people go to the store and buy something (well except for Android and Chromebooks which are Linux and are popular). It is also not the system or have the apps their friends use. It also does not have the huge supply, support, and word of mouth ecosystem. Buying hardware especially addons is confusing. Getting support is hard unless you have friends that use. Buying Linux preinstalled often costs more. Change too is hard and there has to be some driver and for most people there is not.
I’ve been a “heavy” user(/admin) of Linux in the server space for about 12 years now, but only recently through a new employment opportunity have I become a daily Linux desktop user. Last weekend - slowly coming to the realization that Linux can really satisfy all my personal needs (including gaming that supports DLL injection) - I thought I’d like to see how feasible this would now be for the kind of end-user that I encounter as customers and friends, family members etc.
Having chosen CachyOS for myself a lot of my needs are now met brilliantly by the AUR, but of course I don’t see this being a realistic proposal for an end-user. Flatpaks on the other hand I am now (and previously through my Steam Deck) encountering as a super straightforward way of covering a lot of ground in terms of the kinds of apps people may need, and having them remain usable across system upgrades and such. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but with Flathub I feel that there’s not just everything there that probably covers 95% of non-tech-savvy people’s needs, there’s even stuff in there that you can’t get anywhere else with a simple install button. Like a youtube-dl UI for example.
Anyways this isn’t even the story I’m trying to tell, sorry for the tangent. So I thought if I’m ever going to recommend any distro to someone it’s gonna have to be an immutable one, but based on what I just said I’d say any distribution (immutable or not) is going to be dead in the water if it doesn’t come with Flatpak support out of the box. And so the choices in terms of popular ones (according to ChatGPT) were VanillaOS and Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. (Personally I use KDE now but I think the most approachable DE is always going to be Gnome hands down unless you’re talking outdated hardware.)
So I set up VanillaOS in a VM, latest ISO from their website, went through the installer, all went fine until the reboot where I was basically just met by a lengthy splash screen and then some GTK error saying it failed to launch or whatever and then the screen just remains black indefinitely. Obviously this isn’t supposed to happen, it’s probably something to do with my virtualized setup, but if there’s any chance of this happening on the physical machine of a person in need of a digital revolution in their life then this is certainly not what I’m going to recommend to them.
Next up, Fedora Silverblue. Went through the installer, the Fedora one is already a great starting point in terms of simplicity. Rebooted into a working Desktop Environment, so already winning on that front. I had one minor problem there where the last step of the Initial Setup process would just hang if I wanted it to enable Third party sources straightaway. If I left that off I could finish and finally get to my Desktop. Then I would open the Gnome “Software” app and it would basically ask the same thing in a more convoluted manner but basically that means there’s a second “chance” to enable third party sources without having to find something in a settings menu. It’s a little more fussy than if the checkbox had just worked on the Initial Setup but I guess I could see many people work through this if I told them “don’t check that last checkbox and then check it in the Software app”.
It’s weird that both avenues I tried came up with problems that seem way too on the nose to be overlooked. Or who knows what factored into those problems, but really they shouldn’t even be within the realm of possibility. For a setup process to yield a black screen or hang itself if the wrong checkbox is clicked are the kind of things that (imho) are going to define when the “Year of the Linux Desktop” meme will stop being a meme. If you can give me an immutable Linux with Flatpak support out of the box which can be booted on a SecureBoot enabled computer and which will reliably install to a working Desktop then we’re talking. For now, my recommendation is Fedora Silverblue. Slap that onto a USB-Stick and you have a somewhat attainable Linux installer that mere mortals can make use of.
Keep in mind you choose basically uncommon niche distributions. Go to distrowatch and choose one of the top 5 or so and use the distro repos and security updates. No flatpack is not needed for a well supported distro. That is especially true for one of the common Debian based distros.
Of course people can have different opinions on this, but the point for me is that I am of the firm belief that immutable is a must for people that just want their OS to work indefinitely without having to take care of that aspect. And once you got that covered, I feel that you need some sort of “App Store” app out of the box where you can get whatever people may need. Ubuntu has Snaps, which to my understanding is just a different take on what Flatpaks are accomplishing.
Currently the Top 5 of the past 6 months on Distrowatch are all mutable, 2 of them are Arch-based, one comes with Xfce. I have been a Mint user myself and again, of course this is a matter of opinion, but for me the ship of using Debian derivatives has sailed, which might also subconsciously be the reason why no Ubuntu-based immutable distro has made it into my experiments. (No disrespect to Canonical and what they have done for the community since 2004, my first ever hands-on with Linux was on their 04.10 release.)
Either way I just can’t see myself recommending any of those Top 5 to people who just want to use a PC reliably. And if I’m going to be the one they turn to with their problems I don’t want those to potentially be about system-level breakages. When filtering by the “Immutable” tag on Distrowatch it seems that they just bunch those spins into their main distros like Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. I guess you can say VanillaOS is niche in comparison, but Fedora Silverblue is basically an immutable version of a well established distribution with Red Hat backing no less. And once it is set up like my pilot is now it works just fine. I guess the plan now is to keep that installation running and see how it behaves across updates/upgrades and such.
But we know why Snaps and Flatpaks started existing. I also think they are architecturally ugly.
And I think you have a point in terms of patches potentially coming too slowly onto an immutable system. But that problem isn’t an inherent one, it’s just a problem if distribution updates are slow because community support is lacking. At which point you’re just trying to compare Open Source to Proprietary solutions where support is explicitly paid for. I’ll trust a year old Linux kernel over the latest and greatest Windows release any day.
Actually I both do and do not understand why they exist. I use Debian based distros and do not use either well except when I am using Ubuntu which is forcing more and more snaps.
I do actually use exactly one appimage. I use to use the snap but found it was not that stable. One also generally has to have relatively new distro releases too as both flatpack and snap need to be fairly current which can be problem for near EOL Debian stable. Hence neither flatpack nor snap is that portable.
Where flatpacks and snaps look a lot better is smaller distros with smaller repos. Hence, not that interesting for Debian based distros.
I love The Debian Project as an entity and I hope it exists until the end of time. I have this old 2005ish Sony Vaio which was built right at the cusp of the switch to x64 and thanks to Debian (who I believe are the only ones who still do 32 bit builds) I was able to bring my nostalgia for the device into a modern age. But I digress.
I think ultimately we need to find a way to make dependency conflicts a thing of the past. Just install two versions of the same library if 2 of my programs need different ones. Maybe I’m thinking too naively about this and of course this isn’t something you could do on an immutable system, but if we’re talking Linux as a concept there are definitely some common practices today no one would’ve even considered 15 years ago. We need to make it irrelevant whether my installer is called pacman, zypper, apt, dnf or what have you. AppImages can give us that freedom and portability right now. Maybe we could combine the convenience of packaged apps with the beauty of centralized package management.
Yes I would disagree regarding immutable. Such a distribution cannot be secure for any lenght of time. Security updates are required. As soon as it customize in any way it is not immutable including adding flatpacks. So I do not see the attraction.
Just saying, not my experience. I have used linux for over 25 years and nontechnical users in my family have also for almost 20 years. By in large it has worked just fine.
The big issue is Linux is not the OS that is supplied when people go to the store and buy something (well except for Android and Chromebooks which are Linux and are popular). It is also not the system or have the apps their friends use. It also does not have the huge supply, support, and word of mouth ecosystem. Buying hardware especially addons is confusing. Getting support is hard unless you have friends that use. Buying Linux preinstalled often costs more. Change too is hard and there has to be some driver and for most people there is not.
I’ve been a “heavy” user(/admin) of Linux in the server space for about 12 years now, but only recently through a new employment opportunity have I become a daily Linux desktop user. Last weekend - slowly coming to the realization that Linux can really satisfy all my personal needs (including gaming that supports DLL injection) - I thought I’d like to see how feasible this would now be for the kind of end-user that I encounter as customers and friends, family members etc.
Having chosen CachyOS for myself a lot of my needs are now met brilliantly by the AUR, but of course I don’t see this being a realistic proposal for an end-user. Flatpaks on the other hand I am now (and previously through my Steam Deck) encountering as a super straightforward way of covering a lot of ground in terms of the kinds of apps people may need, and having them remain usable across system upgrades and such. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, but with Flathub I feel that there’s not just everything there that probably covers 95% of non-tech-savvy people’s needs, there’s even stuff in there that you can’t get anywhere else with a simple install button. Like a youtube-dl UI for example.
Anyways this isn’t even the story I’m trying to tell, sorry for the tangent. So I thought if I’m ever going to recommend any distro to someone it’s gonna have to be an immutable one, but based on what I just said I’d say any distribution (immutable or not) is going to be dead in the water if it doesn’t come with Flatpak support out of the box. And so the choices in terms of popular ones (according to ChatGPT) were VanillaOS and Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite. (Personally I use KDE now but I think the most approachable DE is always going to be Gnome hands down unless you’re talking outdated hardware.)
So I set up VanillaOS in a VM, latest ISO from their website, went through the installer, all went fine until the reboot where I was basically just met by a lengthy splash screen and then some GTK error saying it failed to launch or whatever and then the screen just remains black indefinitely. Obviously this isn’t supposed to happen, it’s probably something to do with my virtualized setup, but if there’s any chance of this happening on the physical machine of a person in need of a digital revolution in their life then this is certainly not what I’m going to recommend to them.
Next up, Fedora Silverblue. Went through the installer, the Fedora one is already a great starting point in terms of simplicity. Rebooted into a working Desktop Environment, so already winning on that front. I had one minor problem there where the last step of the Initial Setup process would just hang if I wanted it to enable Third party sources straightaway. If I left that off I could finish and finally get to my Desktop. Then I would open the Gnome “Software” app and it would basically ask the same thing in a more convoluted manner but basically that means there’s a second “chance” to enable third party sources without having to find something in a settings menu. It’s a little more fussy than if the checkbox had just worked on the Initial Setup but I guess I could see many people work through this if I told them “don’t check that last checkbox and then check it in the Software app”.
It’s weird that both avenues I tried came up with problems that seem way too on the nose to be overlooked. Or who knows what factored into those problems, but really they shouldn’t even be within the realm of possibility. For a setup process to yield a black screen or hang itself if the wrong checkbox is clicked are the kind of things that (imho) are going to define when the “Year of the Linux Desktop” meme will stop being a meme. If you can give me an immutable Linux with Flatpak support out of the box which can be booted on a SecureBoot enabled computer and which will reliably install to a working Desktop then we’re talking. For now, my recommendation is Fedora Silverblue. Slap that onto a USB-Stick and you have a somewhat attainable Linux installer that mere mortals can make use of.
Keep in mind you choose basically uncommon niche distributions. Go to distrowatch and choose one of the top 5 or so and use the distro repos and security updates. No flatpack is not needed for a well supported distro. That is especially true for one of the common Debian based distros.
Of course people can have different opinions on this, but the point for me is that I am of the firm belief that immutable is a must for people that just want their OS to work indefinitely without having to take care of that aspect. And once you got that covered, I feel that you need some sort of “App Store” app out of the box where you can get whatever people may need. Ubuntu has Snaps, which to my understanding is just a different take on what Flatpaks are accomplishing.
Currently the Top 5 of the past 6 months on Distrowatch are all mutable, 2 of them are Arch-based, one comes with Xfce. I have been a Mint user myself and again, of course this is a matter of opinion, but for me the ship of using Debian derivatives has sailed, which might also subconsciously be the reason why no Ubuntu-based immutable distro has made it into my experiments. (No disrespect to Canonical and what they have done for the community since 2004, my first ever hands-on with Linux was on their 04.10 release.)
Either way I just can’t see myself recommending any of those Top 5 to people who just want to use a PC reliably. And if I’m going to be the one they turn to with their problems I don’t want those to potentially be about system-level breakages. When filtering by the “Immutable” tag on Distrowatch it seems that they just bunch those spins into their main distros like Ubuntu, Fedora and SUSE. I guess you can say VanillaOS is niche in comparison, but Fedora Silverblue is basically an immutable version of a well established distribution with Red Hat backing no less. And once it is set up like my pilot is now it works just fine. I guess the plan now is to keep that installation running and see how it behaves across updates/upgrades and such.
By the way, in my view, Ubuntu using Snaps rather then native packages is a negative.
But we know why Snaps and Flatpaks started existing. I also think they are architecturally ugly.
And I think you have a point in terms of patches potentially coming too slowly onto an immutable system. But that problem isn’t an inherent one, it’s just a problem if distribution updates are slow because community support is lacking. At which point you’re just trying to compare Open Source to Proprietary solutions where support is explicitly paid for. I’ll trust a year old Linux kernel over the latest and greatest Windows release any day.
Actually I both do and do not understand why they exist. I use Debian based distros and do not use either well except when I am using Ubuntu which is forcing more and more snaps.
I do actually use exactly one appimage. I use to use the snap but found it was not that stable. One also generally has to have relatively new distro releases too as both flatpack and snap need to be fairly current which can be problem for near EOL Debian stable. Hence neither flatpack nor snap is that portable.
Where flatpacks and snaps look a lot better is smaller distros with smaller repos. Hence, not that interesting for Debian based distros.
I love The Debian Project as an entity and I hope it exists until the end of time. I have this old 2005ish Sony Vaio which was built right at the cusp of the switch to x64 and thanks to Debian (who I believe are the only ones who still do 32 bit builds) I was able to bring my nostalgia for the device into a modern age. But I digress.
I think ultimately we need to find a way to make dependency conflicts a thing of the past. Just install two versions of the same library if 2 of my programs need different ones. Maybe I’m thinking too naively about this and of course this isn’t something you could do on an immutable system, but if we’re talking Linux as a concept there are definitely some common practices today no one would’ve even considered 15 years ago. We need to make it irrelevant whether my installer is called pacman, zypper, apt, dnf or what have you. AppImages can give us that freedom and portability right now. Maybe we could combine the convenience of packaged apps with the beauty of centralized package management.
Yes I would disagree regarding immutable. Such a distribution cannot be secure for any lenght of time. Security updates are required. As soon as it customize in any way it is not immutable including adding flatpacks. So I do not see the attraction.