- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
You’ve heard the “prophecy”: next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right? Linux is no longer the niche hobby of bearded sysadmins and free software evangelists that it was a decade ago! Modern distributions like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint are sleek, accessible, and — dare I say it — mainstream-adjacent.
Linux is ready for professional work, including video editing, and it even manages to maintain a slight market share advantage over macOS among gamers, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey.
However, it’s not ready to dethrone Windows. At least, not yet!
What’s even worse is that even for the things you can do with GUI settings there’s no standardisation.
Say you want to do something simple like changing your password. Most distros can do that via GUI, but how you do that exactly depends on your DE, sometimes also your distro, and always too your distro/DE version.
So if an older relative calls me and wants some help with something like that, I’d first have to boot up a live stick of that distro and version and hope they didn’t install anything that would change the settings.
That’s why almost every single tutorial/guide online about stuff like that doesn’t even bother telling you how to use the GUI settings and instead just defaults to CLI, because that’s more standardized.
But yes, when it comes to slightly more obscure settings (e.g. horizontal scrolling for touchpads) you are generally SOL on most distros. Heck, can’t even change the vertical scroling speed for a touchpad on Gnome with GUI settings. And when you ask about how to do it you get called an idiot for even wanting to change that setting.