this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2025
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It's nothing about learned helplessness, it's about what the average user experience is for new and inexperienced users. And terminal commands are just not new user friendly. If Linux ever wants to consider being true competition for a Windows replacement with the average user, it has to provide easy to use GUI options for most commands, and it needs to do all basic functionality without a terminal ever being needed.
Like @user224@lemmy.sdf.org posted elsewhere in the thread, KDE has a good GUI for an end user experience for this exact situation. It shows files are open from the device, and what has them open, in the same interface an end user would use to eject the drive.
Maybe it's just because I'm old and remember DOS, but I just don't see having to type such simple words into a terminal as complicated. ๐คทโโ๏ธ
It is. And so do I. The terminal isn't hard, it's just for the average user, it feels intimidating and/or extremely old and thus inherently bad. They rely on the GUI as the user experience. And to be honest, they're right. A modern system should not require terminal interaction for every day use cases, or even infrequent use cases. It's just not a user-friendly interface for a consumer.
And that doesn't even get into the youngest generations that have grown up with touchscreens, where many can barely use a mouse. Even those most would probably consider to be more tech-literate, like gamers. PirateSoftware (I know, I know, but it is a real world interaction versus theoretical) brought a demo to one of the conventions, with 2 stations for a game, 1 KB&M and 1 controller. For the few kids that tried to use the KB&M stations, they moved the keyboard out of the way and tried to touch the screen to interact, because they didn't know how to interact with it like that, they knew how to use a controller and a touchscreen. That was how they played games. Their tablets, and controllers probably on consoles. Youtube Shorts video explaining. That's the average user. No one anywhere near a place like lemmy is an average user.
It doesn't.