On 2/27/2016 at 12:32 AM, Heliocentrical said:I definitely agree that Linux is severely lacking when comes to GUIs. I often thought of it as just a different kind of thinking as I like using the command line considerably more than I do using a GUI. But then I took sometime to think about it and clearly one mode of thinking is valued more than the other. At the end of the day all I want to do is support Linux as much as I physically can and one means of getting effective support would be to increase it's accessibility. So why would you discriminate against GUIs? I will say that even though I don't find Linux in general to be very toxic there's this one particularly frustrating quirk that seems to be pretty universal with all of them. There seems to be this unwillingness to open up to every opportunity with the Linux community to gain them traction. It's almost like their doing this deliberately out of spite or something. With Linux being Open-source there are countless possibilities that Linux could pursue and technically they have although not the realm of actual OSes. So while Linux has improved significantly over the past couple of years I would still say that the opportunities for them still lie in the dark due to them being not willing to pursue those opportunities and quite frankly that's a shame. I can only imagine the things Linux could've accomplished if the community was more open.
While there is a small minority of users that don't want linux to be more popular to feel more superior, saying that's the whole reason linux isn't going to get popular is short-sighted.
The real reason the linux community doesn't want it to become popular is because you lose a shit ton of things when it becomes popular. For example CLI, most people here think that adding a GUI to a CLI program is easy task, but it's very much not, whether you're using QT or GTK gui is way more (annoying) work than just doing a few simple commands like CLI, but let's ignore that and say it's easy, then you have to maintain two interfaces to the same program, adding a few features means you have to change both the CLI and the GUI code, so lazy developers will end up just allowing one interface, in a mainstream OS that'd be GUI, so that means if linux becomes mainstream it'd lose its CLI capabilities (to prove my point, just look at most pre-web utility applications for windows, most of them feature no cli at all even though powershell and CMD exist).
Now considering that the majority of linux users are developers, do you think they'd like to lose their flexible, efficient but "difficult" interface to a simple one that'd can't do quarter as much? (please don't misunderstand this as saying CLI is the best interface for all scenarios)
Another problem the linux community is built on most its users being programmers, most of the software is "By developers, for developers", when someone develops something most people expect that the code is at least readable so they can modify it to their needs, and the developer in return expects that if anyone finds a bug they'll do as much as they can to help the dev fix it (counterexamples exist of course, but they're the minority), normal users (most of them at least) don't really know how any of this works, they open an issue on github or something describing the bug as vaguely as possible with no logs or anything to help attached because they expect it to be a product, not just a hobby project for someone. Normal users don't understand community, they just see a tool.