It reads to me like someone trying to build a persona that Elon would like.

They will say, while simultaneously ignoring every NIST recommendation

Ok, I think I see your position more clearly now:

You’re thinking about people who are interested and installing based on technical interest and curiosity.

In those cases, I think you’re probably right. There is probably some base competency at play. A desire to learn. Probably someone in their sphere to support.

I’m thinking more about the type of people who would buy a Chromebook. Or my cheap ass parents who want to squeeze another 5 years out of an ailing laptop. They don’t want to spend any money and just want to use Facebook and YouTube. Send some emails. Connect to wifi. Print their boarding passes. Not have their machines riddled with viruses within minutes because their windows OS isn’t getting security updates anymore. I think this is actually a massive use case, and I want Linux to be accessible to them without needing to use the terminal for anything.

I can’t even begin to count the number of times I’ve seen absolutely terrible advice posted and taken regarding how to do things in Linux. Can’t connect to something? Easy, make a blanket iptables rule to permit everything. Something can’t read a file? Chmod 777. Install isn’t working? Just install as root and use root as your general login from there on out.

It’s hard to learn Linux.

But it’s even harder to FORGET what you’ve learned, to empathize with what it was like to not understand it at all. That’s why it’s SO HARD for us who’ve been using it daily for a decade to empathize with newcomers.

It’s why people literally can’t fathom why people are afraid of the terminal.

It’s why, even when someone takes the time to explain why, people go, “nah, that couldn’t possibly be it”

It’s like when gun people can’t comprehend why people are afraid of guns. The answer is obvious they just can’t hear it.

Edit: I think I better understand that there are more nuances around the cases now, and I think I’m being unfair by making blanket statements about what is and isn’t obvious

Right, and so if you have no idea what ANY of it means you just bail back to windows.

IMO, caution, wariness, concern, and unfamiliarity manifest as revulsion.

EVs. Solar panels. Heat pumps. Anything outside of CIS heteronormal relationships.

I’m my experience, after the age of like, 25, people (in GENERAL… Obviously many expectations) feel like they’ve got life figured out and push back against pretty much anything that challenges whatever they’ve grown accustomed to.

Nobody bitched about the DOS prompt when nobody knew how to use computers. Young people learned it. Old people insisted computers were a fad and pushed back entirely.

In my calculation, it’s just typical and predictable human response. Open to other theories though.

I mean, the answer to this is obvious if you can empathize.

Gui has baked into it hints on cause and effect. The terminal is a freeform incantation machine where you need to know and utter magic spells.

sudo rm -rf /

Is just as magically nonsense as

sudo apt-get update

If you don’t know what ANY of it does, your capacity to fuck things up is unbounded on the terminal. In a GUI, rightly or wrongly, you expect your capacity to fuck things up is bounded by the context at hand. I do not expect that I can nuke my system clicking through Firefox.

You can claw the terminal from my cold dead hands, but I’m not offended by the notion of a GUI.

Why? Because developer attention scales broadly by usage. Well used projects get more love. If we could even break 10% home adoption of any Linux distro and the runaway effect of net new developer input would destroy closed source operating systems, and I’m here for it. If that means adding a fucking Ubuntu checkbox to let people enable Wayland without strictly requiring the command line go fucking nuts.