Mint With A Hole
An opinion piece plopped into my phone's news feed this morning that got my goat (which I guess meant it did its job well).
The article's premise was that Linux Mint wasn't the best place to start for an ex-Windows user. It explained that proper "full" customisation was difficult to achieve - unless you dug right into its guts like a pro software dev and the whole OS was not as flexible as other Linux distributions. As far as I'm concerned that viewpoint is utter bollocks. And I'll tell you for why:
I've used Windows in many of its versions for about 30 years now, both for work and home, and never in all those years have I wanted to customise it beyond wallpaper and taskbar colour. I suspect there are a lot of people who are the same on that score. So Linux Mint; stupid, inflexible, uncustomisable Mint - that I installed alongside Windows last year - is absolutely everything I need in an operating system.
The article fell into the same trap that I see an enormous amount of Linux stuff also fall into. It thinks everyone who installs Linux is a tinkerer, a fiddler, a customiser - some kind of Megamind computer whizz who has 15 Terminals open all running complex scripts doing Extremely Technical Computery Things. They don't consider that, for a lot of users, the operating system should be almost invisible, just the platform that seamlessly delivers the thing you actually want.
I'm not knocking the tinkerers; after all, they're the ones that have created this operating system FOR FREE, in their SPARE TIME, purely out of their love for tinkering (and possible hatred for Bill Gates' trousers). I think Linux is a wonderful thing. I just think the people involved with Linux, in whatever fashion - tech journo, programmer, wiki writer, FAQ writer - need to be aware that a lot of computer users are, like me, technical dunces that Just Want Things To Work.
The Year of Linux will be the year when technical dullards like me can install and operate a distro with zero hassle and no recourse to bafflingly worded technical FAQs or indecipherable forum posts.
We're not all tinkerers and customisers.