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Comment by hanniabu | Hacker News Reader

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hanniabu

I really wish the linux community would polish off the UX for ubuntu so it's more attractive and usable for mainstream

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You don't need to use Ubuntu. A distro with recent KDE release is better.

I really wish Ubuntu would stop going their own way and work with everyone else.

And that's a more general comment than just this.

I think these days there are other distros that do it better, like Pop!_OS

In your opinion how does Pop!_OS it better?

I direct newbies to Kubuntu; I've never had anyone struggle with using it - modern KDE is an incredibly intuitive experience - and any tech support is easy as they're pretty much on stock Ubuntu.

Honestly I think a lot of newbie gripes about "Linux" are just gripes about Gnome, sometimes quite justified ones.

If you think that UX polish is the reason why "mainstream" people use microsoft/apple products over linux you are really deluding yourself.

not a productive comment to call someone deluded without at least explaining why. The UX does seem like a significant hurdle to maintream adoption to me.

Does it really require an explanation? All you have to do is observe that literally everyone besides a few free software zealots use "non-free" operating systems. What company is developing consumer linux computers for retail sale? If someone even wanted to buy one they would have to really look. There are many unknowns about what programs will run on linux. Will a buyer encounter a situation where they are literally blocked from doing what they need to do because they are using a fringe operating system? There are a million services that have integrations into these operating systems that would go out the window with linux. And this doesn't even begin touch the entire ecosystem of enterprise device management. But yeah maybe it's the UX. Just a couple more polished features in GNOME and then Walmart will roll out an entire fleet of new linux computers for their financial department! And grandma will finally switch over to that sweet FOSS laptop! And genz will drop their nice macbook pros and get on a nice fedora laptop! Just one more UX release.

If you make it polished, it will be usable to more people. More users equal more of their favorite apps being made for linux.

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