R A Montante, Ph.D. via Dng said on Sat, 17 Aug 2024 08:44:25 -0400

>On 8/16/24 23:17, dng-request@??? wrote:
>> Unfortunately Linux is much less user friendly these days than it
>> used to be...
>
>I never expected to see this statement.

I don't think that statement is true for ***non-systemd*** distros. I
consider Runit a huge improvement over sysvinit, and still and so far
consider udev easier than mknod, although if the poetterists keep
messing with udev I might go back to mknod. For some reason I find much
less need to mess with drivers than I did in 2001, and almost never use
lsmod and modprobe, etc, anymore. Universally installers are much
better than in 2001. Pulseaudio is much more difficult than the ALSA
and OSS it tried to replace, but it's easy to run an ALSA-only system,
and from what I hear there's now Pipewire, which I assume is also
easier than Pulseaudio. Linux fonts are an order of magnitude better
than in 2001.

Some applications have gotten worse. Gimp went from pretty good
software in 2001 to unfathomable junk in 2024. Gnome went from good
software in, let's say, 2005, to bloaty, entangled, encrusted excrement
in 2024. Sigil no longer exists. Kmail and KDE went bad. Sigil ceased
to exist.

But there are still plenty of user friendly applications for Linux. If
you like the old Win95 user interface (I certainly do), you can still
use KDE (urk), LXDE, LXQt, XFCE (I'm not a fan, but) or IceWM, although
with IceWM be aware that it's unmaintained and its start menu is
difficult and defective and doesn't know about new software you install
after system installation. You can get the Win95 user interface by
taking simplistic window managers like twm, jwm, ctwm, etc, and adding
one of many add-on panels that exist. Or you can do what I do and just
use Suckless Tools dmenu in place of a start menu, and that is VERY user
friendly.

I'm not sure what the OP defines as "user friendly", but as a full time
Linux user for 23 years and a part time user for 3 years before that, I
think it's gotten easier to use. Or maybe I've just gotten more
knowlegeable about it :-).

By the way, if you want user UNfriendly, try Windows 11 some time. I
can't get to first base with that OS.

SteveT

Steve Litt

http://444domains.com