Have you ever taught programming? People get - and – mixed up, “ vs ‘ vs `, / and \, etc. And they get genuinely stuck and give up. This isn’t to blame people, its that human brains are literally wired differently and stuff others can do people like you and I cannot and vice versa except with a high degree of difficulty. I’ll put it this way: It all comes down to failure tolerance. For my phone, I have a near zero level of tolerance. I want it to work and do not want to debug it - ever. There are even problems I probably could fix that I just gave up on (my keyboard spacebar is slightly off). With my computer, I have a very high level of tolerance (though ever since my kid, that’s changed). If stuff doesn’t work or crashes or I need to do manual maintenance, I will not mind that. Its kinda fun. I suspect that the vast majority of humanity have very low levels of tolerance. This would explain why the most the most successful Linux deployments in the world do not even have terminals: ChromeOS and Android. (They also come pre-Installed at stores). If my suspicion is correct, then whatever optimal distribution should be extremely simple to use, install software on, upgrade, does no demand console usage. There already is at least one good candidate that comes to mind: ElementaryOS. I haven’t really used Pop_OS much, but they seem solve the right problems too: pre-installed, clean interface that does not demand console usage and hardware support. What’s currently (hopefully not forever) lacking is being sold in stores.
That means having a LOT of testing and warning users before letting them break stuff...my two cents.
@fikran @stsp@bsd.network @claudiom@mastodon.sdf.org Some of the help sites form part of the issue, In that they encourage what I call administration-via-copypasta. For example the liberal use of sudo, to the extent the user does not understand in this context it's basically 'do this as root' and thus they do not understand the risk level.
@fikran @stsp@bsd.network @claudiom@mastodon.sdf.org It didn't help that after Vista, MS reduced the warning level of UAC down to a simple click, rather than a password because it was annoying. The password is a very good prompt you're doing something significant, though.
@fikran @stsp@bsd.network @claudiom@mastodon.sdf.org ...as nobody has every trained them in the ethos of superuser commands. It's like using a chainsaw to prune a rose bush.