I wanted to take a moment and talk about Linux UX because, let’s face it… it sucks.
Actually, it’s worse than that. Much of Linux’s UX is technically correct and that makes it objectively wrong.
No. I don’t want Linux to be more Windows-like. But I do want the most common Linux desktops to behave in a way that PC-literate folks can wrap their mind around — and do so from minute zero.
Honestly, the entitlement of the “Linux has bad UX” crowd really pisses me off. Yeah Linux is definitely as unusable as a hammer without a handle, guy. Hit the nail on the head with your handleless hammer right there. Give yourself a pat on the back for your metaphor skills 👍
Mac and Windows have billion dollar UX teams. Linux apps have almost entirely volunteer developers with at most some employees in a tiny company or nonprofit with shoestring budgets.
Mac and Windows have invasive UX “research” by recording user interactions behind their back. Most Linux apps don’t even have the ability to record interaction data by design and intention.
Mac and Windows make money directly from people using their platforms so obviously they’re going to do everything they can to keep you on the platform. Linux apps are donation funded with the occasional enterprise/professional support contract.
Windows and Mac users don’t give a shit about how well the underlying code works because they’re not supposed to see it, and it’s very clear the companies know that and have prioritised accordingly. Linux developers are disproportionately in it for the love of programming and prefer to spend their time actually programming as opposed to doing wireframes or UI markup. Linux UIs tend to get made once and then not touched for years until something absolutely needs to change.
If you compare Linux’s (read: mostly random people developing in their free time’s) UX to the literal biggest tech companies in the world, then you will never run out of things to bemoan Linux for. This is like complaining that your gearhead buddy’s project car has metal toggle switches in random places instead of a nice flowing panel like a brand new car straight off the dealership.
TL;DR: Pull request, long term funding toward establishing a UX team, or STFU. Stop making demands to volunteers and nonprofits and start actually contributing to UX improvements if you care so much. A major ethos of open source is “you don’t like it? You fix it.”
Most good programs aren’t designed by billion dollar teams but by a few people (or even a single one) who pay good attention to UX and don’t treat it like a fifth class citizen. Linux is allowed to have the guardrails fall off for users who want it, but it’s 2026 and the experience for novice users is still worse than Windows 20 years ago.
I don’t deny that many Linux apps have bad UX and can benefit from improvement. But I don’t like the pretentious way these blogs talk about it, and act like the developers are somehow obligated to fix it for them like it’s a paid product and they’re the customer. If they identify a problem in open source, why not contribute to the solution instead of just demanding a solution from people working for free out of passion like they owe you?
I don’t disagree but I also want to flip that around. I’ve been recommended stuff which turned out to be a massive waste of time because it was not ready for general use yet, despite people telling me how easy it was. Then after complaining how that just wasted hour of my time people said "it’s free you are not entitled to anything.
If Linux isn’t ready for general users then we aren’t entitled to waste their time by saying it is.
My son installed Linux last week and I’ve been close to a help desk for close to 20 years so I feel comfortable commenting on the experience vs windows.
I walked him through how things worked once, and gave him some suggestions for software. Like heroic launcher for non stream games. Then he installed it himself. Everything just worked when he logged in.
So install, choosing a distro is overwhelming but otherwise easier than windows 20 years ago.
Post install, he saw lutris was cool for one of his games. It didn’t work (shocker). I reminded him to use heroic, walked him through, epics login sucks, but after fighting through that it just worked and he saw a bunch of other games he could just play.
The one problem he’s had is X crashes when he jumps back and forth between discord and games 50 times a second. So I showed him how to switch to wayland and it’s rock solid but his mouse software doesn’t change acceleration anymore and one of his games (roblocks) treats shift as a button press instead of a modifier like it should. This is also a problem for Wayland.
X is a disaster. Wayland is an awesome display server but its input is a shit show for legacy software and software built around MS Windows quirks and this is a problem.
But let’s be honest, if he’d started in Wayland, his mouse would have a broken non essential feature and a weird game would have a bug. Is that really worse than windows at any point? Probably not.
Since then, he’s not had any other problems that I know about.
So are there problems. 100% Is it worse than windows? That’s pretty debatable IMHO.
I think the biggest problem linux actually has is that it’s not Windows. People have spent their entire education and careers and personal lives using Windows. They have a lifetime of tacit knowledge on how to fix and avoid its weird quirks. They’ve had help desks, friends, family, and mentors guiding them. Leaving that behind and trying something they’ve been told is hard their whole life is hard. But maybe not because UX is broken, but because it’s just a hard thing to do.
So we need to be patient, listen, deescalate their frustration, and welcome them to a cool new way of using their devices.
And there’s why it worked.
This is very true, but even after all this tine, somehow Wayland still doesn’t support many basic features and programs, making people (including myself) hesitant on the switch
Yes patience is important but people actually want to make the switch nowadays, but they still run into many issues which really need to get fixed in order for Linux to be a viable desktop OS.
Ok, let’s dig in to it.
Let’s say he was installing windows 20 years ago. First, you have to find it. you’ve got 20 versions of XP Home, Enterprise, Media Edition. You can’t really get most of them online legit so you’ll have to steal it or head to the store. Hopefully you end up with some version of XPSP2. You might not and SP1 was not great. Then hopefully your network drivers work or you’ve got the disc hanging around because none of your drivers are going to work. Otherwise you’re going to need another computer to find the drivers from the manufacturer if they even exist. Maybe one of the sketchy driver sites has it… And hopefully your video card works because that’s not a given, you might have to side load the drivers into the installer or figure out how to boot into safe mode and copy the drivers off a floppy. Then you’ve got to figure out all the random places to find slyour software and where your copy of office is.
Contrasted with “yes mint will work. Yeah Belinda etcher. Yeah the hidden one is your hard drive the only option is the USB drive. Yes those formatting options are fine. Yes that’s the right time zone, our city isn’t directly selectable. Ok you’re done. Yeah everything is just working. Yeah no drivers. Open the software center. Yeah that’s it. No really it’s working. Yeah just type in steam there and install it. No really that’s it it’s really working.”