My family is a Linux family: both my parents and my wife use Linux, and so will the kids once they have their own computers. Apart from my Dad, they're all non-enthusiasts.
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@FiXato honestly, not sure. It's one thing to trust a family member or a close friend with maintaining one's system. It's a very different thing to trust a third-party with it.
I'd rather say there's a market for distributions that are easy to remotely manage for friends & family.
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yeah, that is fair.
But it does mean those distributions do have a purpose, but which you deemed to have little value. That was my point.
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@eltheanine I think there's a slight misunderstanding. I do not consider Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc to have little value. Quite the contrary! They're extremely valuable, because they're general purpose distributions that let me (and other enthusiasts) build systems our non-enthusiast friends and family are then happy to use.
What I find little value in are distributions that target non-enthusiasts. Debian, Fedora and the rest aren't in that category. Sure, they work towards making it easier for beginners to install and use them, but there's a huge difference between a beginner (one who is willing to learn how to install and maintain an operating system) and a non-enthusiast (who just wants to get stuff done and not care about maintaining their system).
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@algernon this is fine if you have the TIME to be sysadmin to your family. The great thing about mainline distros that have auto update mechanisms is that for the most part you don’t have to do anything. My kids have Ubuntu and I have security updates automatically installed, and I get an email whenever it happens.
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@Danathar But you get the email, not them, so you're maintaining it, just in an automated fashion.
So do I! Most of the work that goes into maintaining the family fleet is done by a tiny shell script running from cron (and also triggered when on security updates, received via various RSS feeds).
Also, like I said before: I have nothing against mainline distros. They're great, and they're amazing for people who are willing to maintain their own systems. They are useless for people who do not wish to do so.
My personal experience (based on over two decades of troubleshooting all kinds of things for friends and family) is that a whole lot of people don't want to maintain their systems in any shape or form. As such, trying to target them with non-enthusiast-tailored distros is ultimately a doomed endeavor.
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@algernon I don't think I get your point. An easy-to-maintain system isnt just easier for the user, it makes the maintainer's job easier when they're maintaining it for family. I for one would much sooner set up and look after a few installations of a general-purpose GNOME OS built along the lines suggested than something like Nix OS. The less that can break, the better.
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@petruchio An easier to maintain system, yes. But the moment the needs of my users go beyond what a non-enthusiast aimed distro like the proposed GNOME OS provides, it becomes useless. While I could install apps via flatpak, GNOME OS provides GNOME. I can't install XFCE (my Dad's DE of choice) or niri (Wife's preferred compositor) through flatpak, can I?
On top of that, for the family fleet, I have Wireguard set up, so I can remotely log in and do whatever I need to. I have backups set up via restic. I have plenty of automation set up through systemd user services (like, all the apps that need to start on login, conducted by a script to move them to their designated workspace, etc).
Would GNOME OS include all the tools necessary for me to accomplish that? Or would I need to add them myself, one way or another?
I just don't see what GNOME OS would provide for me as an admin. It wouldn't make it easier to maintain the system (99% of the maintenance I do for my parents is
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgradeonce in a while, and anix flake update && nixos-rebuild --flake switchfor my wife), it would lack half the tools my family needs, and would provide nothing over what they have now.The less that can break, the better, indeed. I accomplish that goal by tailoring the systems to each family member: they have what they need, along with some tooling to make remote maintenance and backups possible, and that's it. I can very easily do that with Debian, or NixOS, or any other general purpose distro.
A more limited, non-enthusiast oriented distro would lack a whole lot of things I make use of under the hood, while bringing nothing new to the table.
In other words: easy to use, general purpose system: yes! limited, non-enthusiast aimed system? no, thanks.
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@algernon I'm kinda jealous and yet it sounds so unrealistic for my family, I guess it's basically 3 people who need windows for one reason or another. Fortunately the administration effort is so low that I don't think I'd win any time (and I'm trialing moving my main PC to linux atm, but those games...)
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@wink yeah, we're lucky here, 'cos none needed windows (brother & sister do, Dad covers that, to the best of his abilities). It helps that out of the 4 of us, only Dad and I ever used windows, and we both switched to Linux (me in 1996, Dad in the early 2010s).
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@wink wrt games: lutris & proton are amazing. The Steam Deck dragged linux gaming forward a hundred years. Every single game I play via wine/proton, works better than they did natively: more stable, better fps.
There are a few that don't work, because they insist on installing a rootkitanticheat system that isn't available on linux. I just don't play those. Luckily, most of these I wouldn't play anyway.
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@algernon But what proportion of people have a Linux "IT guy" in the family? 0.5% or less?
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@rspfau Probably less.
But does it matter? Even if there was a distro aimed at non-enthusiasts, the people who do not want to install, nor maintain any operating system (which, in my experience, is the vast majority of them), they'd still stuck with whatever came with their computers, or use something they have an "IT person" for.
What the Linux distro provides makes no difference. Hence my opinion that aiming at non-enthusiasts is a doomed endeavor.
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@algernon
As long as its easy and obvious how to do things like setting up a printer, adjusting mouse settings, etc. There's complete idiots, people that can get by if things are obvious and straightforward, and then the enthusiasts...a spectrum of users. I'm sorta new to linux but not an IT type guy...but I prefer doing things for myself. The easier the better.What are some other distros aiming toward the idiot side of the spectrum that you'd consider unnecessary?
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@rspfau GNOME OS, as proposed here.
BTW, I'm not talking about people who can't maintain their systems. I'm talking about people who don't want to. Many of them could, but they simply do not want to. It doesn't matter how easy you make it, if they won't even try. And it is perfectly fine if they don't, noone should be forced to do sysadmin work (however easy) against their will.
My point is that rather than putting effort into an OS hardly anyone will use (because those who are willing to maintain an OS, can already choose from the myriad of general purpose distributions, and those who aren't, simply won't, no matter how easy it would be), putting the same effort into making the existing distributions easier to admin remotely would be a far bigger win.
For example, in case of GNOME, setting a GNOME desktop up for someone else, remotely, is a pain in the ass, partly because most settings are in dconf or gsettings, which are considerably harder to pre-configure than dropping a config file somewhere. They're also underdocumented: I often found myself just monitoring dconf/gsettings changes, and configuring via a GUI to figure out the necessary dconf keys, and that's not very practical. That, or grepping the sources.
A man page, or any kind of offline viewable document listing the dconf keys for the settings of a particular GNOME app would go a long way towards making its initial setup and maintenance easier.
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So, a friend of mine grew up like that. Linux on her laptop, all through her teenage years, maintained by her uncle. When she needed some app, the uncle would come by and install something similar (that actually worked on Linux). When she went to university, she had no idea how shit worked so she bought a windows laptop because for that one she could actually get help and do things herself.
Switching to proprietary software was an empowering experience for her.
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@guenther Luckily, for our kids, I'm closeby, and both of them are interested in knowing how things work. So if they end up wanting to maintain their own OS, I will teach them how to.
If not, I will teach them how to find Linux help if I am not around.
My point is: if someone does not want to maintain their own system, the best thing I can do for them, is to maintain one for them. One I am familiar with. If they end up wanting to know the details, I'll teach them. If they end up wanting something else - that's ok too, but then I can't help. I'll try my best to point them to places they can get help from, but Linux is the only thing I know.
