My brother is 12 and just like other people of his age he can’t use a computer properly because he is only familiar with mobile devices and dumbed-down computers
I recently dual-booted Fedora KDE and Windows 10 on his laptop. Showed him Discovery and told him, “This is the app store. Everything you’ll ever need is here, and if you can’t find something just tell me and I’ll add it there”. I also set up bottles telling him “Your non-steam games are here”. He installed Steam and other apps himself
I guess he is a better Linux user than Linus Sebastian since he installed Steam without breaking his OS…
The tech support questions and stuff like “Can you install this for me?” or “Is this a virus?” dropped to zero. He only asks me things like “What was the name of PowerPoint for Linux” once in a while
After a week I have hardly ever seen my brother use Windows. He says Fedora is “like iOS” and he absolutely loved it
I use Arch and he keeps telling me “Why are you doing that nerdy terminal stuff just use Fedora”. He also keeps explaining to me why Fedora better than my “nerd OS”
In a GUI, your options are human-readable and all presented to you. In a terminal, you have to know the names of the programs/commands. It’s not a big deal for something like Notepad or vim, but it gets more complicated when you don’t know the name of what you’re looking for. It’s easier to remember the which program you need when you have a list and icons. You can do all the same things, but a GUI is much more intuitive for the majority of people.
- Press the Super/Windows button
- Type the letter ‘n’ (or ‘t’ if on most Linux distros)
- Press the ‘Return’ key.
Congratulations, you now opened Notepad / Random open source text editor.
- Ctrl + S = Save for pretty much everything
The above pattern works for almost every program. There is no need to memorise the ridiculously inconsistent nuances of the 4 different commands you specified.
9/10 times I personally prefer GUI over terminal for efficiency. With three buttons I already have a text editor open. At this point, you’ve just started typing the letter ‘v’ in your first step.
