I saw plenty of efforts that aim to create a Linux distribution for non-enthusiasts, for people who just want to use their computers, and not care about the details - A Desktop for All on the GNOME blog, most recently. While I commend the effort, my own experience is that these efforts are futile, and start off from a fundamentally wrong premise: that people are willing (let alone wanting) to manage their own operating systems.
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My family is using Linux because that’s the system I can maintain for them. Apart from my Dad, they never installed Linux, and never will. They don’t install software, they don’t upgrade, they don’t change settings either. All of that is something I do for them. And to do so effectively, I need a distribution I am familiar with, one that is also flexible enough to fine-tune for every member of the family, because they prefer fundamentally different things!
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The common pattern between all these three is that neither of them maintains their own systems. I do. As such, how beginner friendly the distribution is, is meaningless. The users of the system don’t care, they’ll never see those parts. They’ll have a preconfigured system maintained by someone else, and that’s exactly what they want. To make this work, I’m using distributions I am familiar with. For my parents, that’s Debian, because I was a Debian person when their systems were installed. For my Wife, it is NixOS, because I’m a NixOS person now. For the Twins, it will likely be NixOS too.
I can of agree the focus to make Linux easy to use is not exactly on the right things. There is a bit too much of a “make a GUI of everything”. Which is not wrong per say, but should not be the goal. More a mean to an end.
I disagree that users won’t do stuff on their own. They will, but they will allocate very little time to it, on average, especially when compared to a tech savy person. And that’s just because their computer is a tool.And if they cannot make their tool work for what they want to do, they’ll find another way. Or deem it impossible.
I think distro must make mundane tasks such as system maintenance hands off. As an opt-in option not to upset power user. But things such as updates, full system update, disk space reclaiming, … should have a single “do the right thing without being asked to” toggle. Things a bit more complicated such as printing/scanning document should be more context aware. A bit like on smartphone where, if you have a document open, you can select print and, if no printer is configured, you have the option to add one there and then.
Immutable distro have made good progress on that front IMO. But we still need better integration between applications and the Desktop Environment for things like printing, sharing and so on. I’m hopeful though. Generally speaking, things are moving in that direction. Even if we can argue flapak and snap are a step backward with regards to the integration of the DE, this is also an opportunity to formalize some form of protocol with the DE.
My experience differs here. My parents will not maintain their systems. They could, especially my Dad (he is a techy, after all), they just don’t want to.
That’s the thing: doing this is impossible, unless the distro controls the entire stack (which they don’t). Updates and upgrades can break things, and they will break things. Or if not break, then change things. You may find it surprising, but most users I talked to, regardless of their expertise, hate when the software they use daily suddenly changes.
They just want to get things done. If their tools transform under them, that sets them back. Automated updates don’t help there. In fact, automated updates work against this goal. Which is why I maintain my parents systems: so if anything changes in a way that would break their routine, I can either reconfigure it, patch it, work it around some other way, or prepare them in advance. That needs a human element. And this part is why they have no desire to maintain their own systems.
The technical part of “update all packages” is pretty much a solved problem, and can be automated away in the vast majority of cases. But that’s just a tiny part of the whole system maintenance problem space.
Now, this is something that has not been a problem for my family for literal decades. Printer is plugged in, they turn it on, press “Print”, done. If out of ink, or paper gets jammed, they get a notification, and can fix that, and try again. Scanning… just worked since forever. We did make an effort to buy hardware that works well with Linux - something I helped with, too.
Daily tasks are not a problem, and never were. The maintaining a system parts are, and there, not even the automatable parts.
From personal experience, these distros make no difference whatsoever for the end user. The hard part isn’t upgrading software, that worked fine with traditional packaging too. The hard part is making sure software doesn’t change in a way that breaks the habits and expectations of users. There is no technical solution there, which is another reason distros targeting non-enthusiasts are futile: they solve problems that never were a problem, but leave the real issues unaddressed.
Flatpak did help me, because when Dad said he wants the latest LibreOffice, and doesn’t care if they completely change the UI, I could just install it for him via flatpak, instead of using Debian’s repo. My Mom, on the other hand, does not want the latest LibreOffice. She does not want it to change, ever. Every major upgrade so far brought in something that required her to re-learn parts of it, so she’s sticking to whatever is in Debian stable, and we set aside a few hours every two years or so, to learn the changed things whenever I upgrade her to the next Debian release.
You see, different people have different needs, and there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. A general purpose operating system like Debian lets me build a systems that suit both of my parents. An immutable distro that relies entirely on flatpak for end-user applications would be unusable for my Mom. It would also be unusable for my Wife, because she relies on software I wrote, which I could easily install on her system as a NixOS derivation (something I am familiar with building), but one that I would have a much harder time turning into a flatpak thing (because I have no clue how to do that, and frankly, I’m not interested in learning it either).
also don’t forget that many don’t even have the time and energy