this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
318 points (98.2% liked)
Linux
45501 readers
1617 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Meh. Telemetry should be the way to tell if it's really making it easier or worse for newcomers. Why collect telemetry at all if you're not going to use it anyways?
And if the distros are already having it as a default, it's even worse. We're setting it per default because it's set as the default.
Because we're sadly not collecting enough and actually useful telemetry. I think we know from telemetry that a big majority has double click set, but we don't know why (default setting vs user chose it explicitly).
And we can't easily add such things without breaking user trust. We need a new telemetry system that's more useful and extendable, but doing that is a lot of effort that noone has put in yet.
No, we're setting it as a default because a bunch of people that are closer to the users than us decided to deviate from the upstream default. That's a super clear sign that we're doing it wrong
Ah okay. I don't get to choose anyways, because I don't currently use KDE on my main desktop. But I'm one of the people who reverts all those settings first thing after install. It's just that it sometimes gets annoying once I need 20 minutes to configure my desktop environment and answer many questions about privacy telemetry and so on. And disable all the background stuff like updates on shutdown, the desktop search and whatever gets in the way all the times. At this point I could just use windows if that's what I like or use those 20mins to learn to configure some tiling window manager.
I was kind of okay the way it was in the olden days. You just got what the developers liked most. No telemetry involved. Often times that was quite alright. Some times they followed some design philosophy anyways (or just 'ripped off' the MacOS UX). But that also had downsides. And I get it that some people need their computers to do a specific job. And they don't want to learn lots of new concepts just to use their tool. Maybe a bit like when I sit in front of an Apple keyboard and can't find half of the keys. Maybe we shouldn't listen to what I like. Maybe we should have an onboarding dialogue that plainly asks you if you prefer UX concept A or B. I don't really know. But not for just this one thing.
You're 100% right with the last argument. If most of the distros or all of your users configure something a certain way. This should tell you something.
I just wanted to say, I like diversity. Not every UX has to look and feel exactly the same. And we don't always need to go for the lowest common denominator.
Yeah, something like that could be great - personalize the defaults for the person actually using the computer when it gets set up, instead of having only one set of defaults for the masses.