I wanted to take a moment and talk about Linux UX because, let’s face it… it sucks.
Actually, it’s worse than that. Much of Linux’s UX is technically correct and that makes it objectively wrong.
No. I don’t want Linux to be more Windows-like. But I do want the most common Linux desktops to behave in a way that PC-literate folks can wrap their mind around — and do so from minute zero.
You must log in or # to comment.
I don’t think the solution is to make basic software Windows-like.
I think I’d rather see more work being done on newbie-focused distributions to introduce the user to all the key differences of Linux, to literally guide their hand in how things are done here. A welcome app with a simple FAQ, a set of wizards (explaining what’s being done behind the scenes) and even direct “click here” advices are all welcome.
Linux way is, for the most part, superior, and once you understand how things work here, you actively don’t want it to be too Windows-like.
Linus doing the world a massive favor by showing the flaws of Linux and still getting so much flak for it by the average Linux user is ridiculous.
Honestly, the entitlement of the “Linux has bad UX” crowd really pisses me off. Yeah Linux is definitely as unusable as a hammer without a handle, guy. Hit the nail on the head with your handleless hammer right there. Give yourself a pat on the back for your metaphor skills 👍
Mac and Windows have billion dollar UX teams. Linux apps have almost entirely volunteer developers with at most some employees in a tiny company or nonprofit with shoestring budgets.
Mac and Windows have invasive UX “research” by recording user interactions behind their back. Most Linux apps don’t even have the ability to record interaction data by design and intention.
Mac and Windows make money directly from people using their platforms so obviously they’re going to do everything they can to keep you on the platform. Linux apps are donation funded with the occasional enterprise/professional support contract.
Windows and Mac users don’t give a shit about how well the underlying code works because they’re not supposed to see it, and it’s very clear the companies know that and have prioritised accordingly. Linux developers are disproportionately in it for the love of programming and prefer to spend their time actually programming as opposed to doing wireframes or UI markup. Linux UIs tend to get made once and then not touched for years until something absolutely needs to change.
If you compare Linux’s (read: mostly random people developing in their free time’s) UX to the literal biggest tech companies in the world, then you will never run out of things to bemoan Linux for. This is like complaining that your gearhead buddy’s project car has metal toggle switches in random places instead of a nice flowing panel like a brand new car straight off the dealership.
TL;DR: Pull request, long term funding toward establishing a UX team, or STFU. Stop making demands to volunteers and nonprofits and start actually contributing to UX improvements if you care so much. A major ethos of open source is “you don’t like it? You fix it.”
Most good programs aren’t designed by billion dollar teams but by a few people (or even a single one) who pay good attention to UX and don’t treat it like a fifth class citizen. Linux is allowed to have the guardrails fall off for users who want it, but it’s 2026 and the experience for novice users is still worse than Windows 20 years ago.
My son installed Linux last week and I’ve been close to a help desk for close to 20 years so I feel comfortable commenting on the experience vs windows.
I walked him through how things worked once, and gave him some suggestions for software. Like heroic launcher for non stream games. Then he installed it himself. Everything just worked when he logged in.
So install, choosing a distro is overwhelming but otherwise easier than windows 20 years ago.
Post install, he saw lutris was cool for one of his games. It didn’t work (shocker). I reminded him to use heroic, walked him through, epics login sucks, but after fighting through that it just worked and he saw a bunch of other games he could just play.
The one problem he’s had is X crashes when he jumps back and forth between discord and games 50 times a second. So I showed him how to switch to wayland and it’s rock solid but his mouse software doesn’t change acceleration anymore and one of his games (roblocks) treats shift as a button press instead of a modifier like it should. This is also a problem for Wayland.
X is a disaster. Wayland is an awesome display server but its input is a shit show for legacy software and software built around MS Windows quirks and this is a problem.
But let’s be honest, if he’d started in Wayland, his mouse would have a broken non essential feature and a weird game would have a bug. Is that really worse than windows at any point? Probably not.
Since then, he’s not had any other problems that I know about.
So are there problems. 100% Is it worse than windows? That’s pretty debatable IMHO.
I think the biggest problem linux actually has is that it’s not Windows. People have spent their entire education and careers and personal lives using Windows. They have a lifetime of tacit knowledge on how to fix and avoid its weird quirks. They’ve had help desks, friends, family, and mentors guiding them. Leaving that behind and trying something they’ve been told is hard their whole life is hard. But maybe not because UX is broken, but because it’s just a hard thing to do.
So we need to be patient, listen, deescalate their frustration, and welcome them to a cool new way of using their devices.
I walked him through how things worked once
And there’s why it worked.
X is a disaster. Wayland is an awesome display server but its input is a shit show for legacy software and software built around MS Windows quirks and this is a problem.
This is very true, but even after all this tine, somehow Wayland still doesn’t support many basic features and programs, making people (including myself) hesitant on the switch
Yes patience is important but people actually want to make the switch nowadays, but they still run into many issues which really need to get fixed in order for Linux to be a viable desktop OS.
I walked him through how things worked once
And there’s why it worked.
Ok, let’s dig in to it.
Let’s say he was installing windows 20 years ago. First, you have to find it. you’ve got 20 versions of XP Home, Enterprise, Media Edition. You can’t really get most of them online legit so you’ll have to steal it or head to the store. Hopefully you end up with some version of XPSP2. You might not and SP1 was not great. Then hopefully your network drivers work or you’ve got the disc hanging around because none of your drivers are going to work. Otherwise you’re going to need another computer to find the drivers from the manufacturer if they even exist. Maybe one of the sketchy driver sites has it… And hopefully your video card works because that’s not a given, you might have to side load the drivers into the installer or figure out how to boot into safe mode and copy the drivers off a floppy. Then you’ve got to figure out all the random places to find slyour software and where your copy of office is.
Contrasted with “yes mint will work. Yeah Belinda etcher. Yeah the hidden one is your hard drive the only option is the USB drive. Yes those formatting options are fine. Yes that’s the right time zone, our city isn’t directly selectable. Ok you’re done. Yeah everything is just working. Yeah no drivers. Open the software center. Yeah that’s it. No really it’s working. Yeah just type in steam there and install it. No really that’s it it’s really working.”
Do you think a user that never used macOS or windows would manage to use them from minute zero? I can answer that for you. No. Users have habits that comes from their day to day tasks. And that applies especially to such things that we use for hours every day. So a livelong user of macOS would struggle with windows in the same way livelong windows user would struggle with Linux. And btw young generations hooked on phones are not capable to use computer with any OS from minute zero. Seriously, its like watching granpas and grandmas.
I picked up both GNOME and KDE as a long time Windows user like that. On both mouse and trackpad.
I can’t even figure out how to drag and drop on my friend’s Macbook. Or a lot of other basic things.
If anything Macs are the odd one out with their control scheme, though I’m certainly not ruling out skill issue. But if you claim skill issue on my inability to use a Mac then I’m claiming skill issue on your inability to use Linux.
For me the transition from windows to gnome also was somewhat smooth, not it was also because when I didn’t know how to so something I just searched for “how to…” And found out. This surprised me in the ltt video, if they searched how to format flash to fat32 in Disks they would easily know that they need to add the partition, but instead of web searched they were jumping here and there chaoticaly. And its weird they are my generation and my generation knows how to google… Or maybe they are already brainwashed by using llms?
I’m a lifetime user of linux/unix and struggle when I have to use MacOS or Windows. I’m used to X11! Select (and copy on select) anything you can see. Paste on middle click on the mouse. Fat scrollbars that tell you how much there is to scroll. Arrow-buttons on the scrollbar, preferrably one pointing up at the top and two at the bottom, one pointing up, one pointing down. Draggable scrollpiece in the scrollbar. Click in the scrollbar to jump. Buttons that look like buttons. Focus follows mouse. Etc. etc.
The kernel does not have good UX, as it’s not something you use directly.
Name a specific distribution and desktop UI combination, then we can discuss that.
But generalising all of them as just “Linux sucks” does not help, as they’re very diverse.
First we had “this meeting could have been an email”, now we have “this blog post could have been a tweet/skeet/toot”.
Most of this article is bashing an imagined strawman and the main meat of the issue is two papercuts.
Who the fuck needs UX. Just use the terminal.
On a more serious note I think this person forgets that everything has a learning curve no matter what it is. And the attempt to make that not true is why we have every phone being a boring square and why computer literacy has cratered so dramatically.
This drivel - okay not entirely, but I’m making a point - is all the wrong attitudes. “People like Windows, let’s make Linux more like Windows so people will accept it.”
We are not in a popularity contest. Linux is great - nay, extraordinary, phenomenal - because it has most of its shit together. Priorities, functionality, efficiency. If most people are not up to the task of learning something, that’s their problem. And yeah, that’s most people. In case the author of this article hadn’t noticed, the vast majority of people are, unfortunately, lazy and stupid. I’m not saying it’s always their faults but that’s not the issue. We don’t lower ourselves down to meet them where they are. If Linux remains only a tiny portion of the ecosystem, and needs to keep being the thing for only geeks (translation, got good grades in school, enjoy learning things, challenge themselves, etc.) then why does there seem to be this perception that that needs to change? Quite the opposite; the small bit of mainstream corporate elements that have become involved have only demonstrated they’ll immediately enshittify it, because that’s what they do.
Let Linux continue to be the fringe ecosystem for geeks. Why do we need morons to enjoy using it? Why is this a problem?
I don’t think “correctly label FAT32 as FAT32 instead of a versionless FAT” is “lowering ourselves down”. In fact I’d say it’s the opposite, let’s be technically precise and correct, instead of a simplified label that confuses everyone.
And on the other issue, what do you have against file managers being able to mount a network drive? Yeah I can do it in fstab but if I could do it faster right from the file manager I would.
Why is making things better a problem? If Gnome add the mounting feature to their file manager in the future, you will be against it, talking about the good old days where real men edited fstab uphill both ways? Whom does that help?
Nah, that’s not what I mean. I’m not opposed to those things, I guess I just think that things should get the time and attention based on how important they are. I agree that these things would be nice, but I don’t think the developers are deliberately keeping these things the way they are out of a sense of honor and tradition; rather I’ve just figured they always have something that’s more pressing to focus on.
This article’s two qualms with Linux UI are justified but, I think, somewhat overstated. The first point basically boils down to " ‘Linux’s’ network filesystem handling doesn’t have a GUI and is half baked", which are both true, but this is what happens when you’re making a thousand utilities with a thousand different functions each. There is a will to support SMB, as evidenced by both Gnome and KDE having means to mount it, but the UI isn’t great because it’s not a focus and most people don’t use network shares, so there’s fewer feature requests and less development. Nautilus has 500 issues on the repo and 200 are bugs with 27000 commits from only a handful of authors.
The second issue is less justifiable as the author just wants this Linux utility to work like Windows. Partition management should absolutely only do what you tell it to do. Even on Windows I had to Google how to resize partitions, and I think Googling how to do that using the partition manager you’re using is fair. Gnome Disks even has a nice help page for formatting a disk.
The author says that Linux should be as usable for grandparents as it is for children, and for people who have never used a computer before and only need to do what children and grandparents do (gaming (various caveats), writing, internetting), I think Linux provides a vastly better UX. For people doing advanced tasks (network shares, video editing, etc) there has to be a reasonable expectation of willingness to learn how to use a new operating system
The author says that Linux should be as usable for grandparents as it is for children
My problem with this statement constantly bombarded on us is that it assumes that someone somewhere out there who cares.
To me, it seems that is the actual deciding factor in sticking with Linux… Realizing that if you want something that doesn’t exist, you’ll have to make it.
MS doesn’t blame the user when they get confused by a GUI or become intimidated by a command line interface.
Umm, yes they do. Look at copilot (as one recent example). The full range of opinion I’ve ever encountered goes from apathy to hatred. (Never heard of anyone having anything positive to say about it, the ‘nicest’ thing being to the effect of ‘I just ignore it, so I don’t care’). And yet, Microsoft’s attitude is that ‘the user is wrong, deal with it’, and this has always been the case in both Windows and Mac OS, while the various OSS DEs attempt to fix real user frustrations.
Many of the points they make are true for GNOME specifically, but thankfully, there are plenty of other options, and Linux != GNOME.
Oh this article again? Has it been a year already?
the article raises good albeit imperfect points with good examples.
we truly need more ux people and designers to contribute.
The entire industry does. It’s a chronic shortage of UI/UX people who are backed by engineers actually taking the designs under advisement and executing on them.
I’ve used SAMBA shares for years, and it’s dead simple to map a network drive in Explorer. And mounting that drive on boot is a matter of a checkbox in a dialog.
The problem is that knowing how to do something in Windows teaches you Windows and learning it in Linux teaches you computers. For example if you know how to connect to a remote host through the command line, you already know how to connect to one in Nautilus, and vise versa. (via the command ssh://user@host)
I think this cross-pollination approach is going to be a learning curve for Windows users. It is for me. But taking the time has not only helped me understand Linux, I understand how to use Windows better, despite barely logging in for over a year.
Me personally I agree with the first point of the Author regarding SMB Handling. Requiring to Type smb://<my-network-share> in the address bar in Nautilus Network section and then Drag-and-Drop it to the Bookmarks section IS Not very User friendly.
I would also appreciate a simple Wizard to do this.
Regarding the Topic about reformatting a Disk: Even I don’t care about GPT, MBR and creating Partitions. And i am Developing in Linux since more then 10 years. I also just want to wipe my Stick and make it empty. I guess Most users also don’t care about the Filesystem used. They only want to set:
- Works only in Linux (use ext4 or xfs)
- Works on anything that has a USB Port (use FAT32)
Anything else could be hidden behind an advanced section.
Works on anything that has a USB Port (use FAT32)
…assuming your disk and file sizes are below the limit, otherwise exfat.
