I saw plenty of efforts that aim to create a Linux distribution for non-enthusiasts, for people who just want to use their computers, and not care about the details - A Desktop for All on the GNOME blog, most recently. While I commend the effort, my own experience is that these efforts are futile, and start off from a fundamentally wrong premise: that people are willing (let alone wanting) to manage their own operating systems.
…
My family is using Linux because that’s the system I can maintain for them. Apart from my Dad, they never installed Linux, and never will. They don’t install software, they don’t upgrade, they don’t change settings either. All of that is something I do for them. And to do so effectively, I need a distribution I am familiar with, one that is also flexible enough to fine-tune for every member of the family, because they prefer fundamentally different things!
…
The common pattern between all these three is that neither of them maintains their own systems. I do. As such, how beginner friendly the distribution is, is meaningless. The users of the system don’t care, they’ll never see those parts. They’ll have a preconfigured system maintained by someone else, and that’s exactly what they want. To make this work, I’m using distributions I am familiar with. For my parents, that’s Debian, because I was a Debian person when their systems were installed. For my Wife, it is NixOS, because I’m a NixOS person now. For the Twins, it will likely be NixOS too.
Or we can just decrease the importance of desktop. Users like mobile more. So I just self host stuff and offload data and apps to my server. Thin client (desktop/laptop/mobile/tablet) + thick server.
That does not address the problem at all, though. That solves the upgrade and maintenance problem, but does nothing for users who just want things to work as they always did. It does not address change.
By maintaining a system for my family, I can address that: either by undoing things, working them around, or preparing them in advance. No amount of automation will solve that. It’s not a technical problem.
Lots ppl nowadays don’t even own a pc or mac. The market shares already prove lots of ppl can live without desktop. Unless your family need to use complicated softwares like cad, compilers… My point is most ppl do consider their phone and tablet just work. And those two’s maintenance are a lot simpler. Of course, your family, your choice.
Again, you’re misunderstanding the problem. Keeping applications up to date is not a problem. Keeping things working the way my family got used to is an entirely different matter, and it’s actually worse on Android & iOS (thus, most phones and tablets).
The main reason the family even has desktop PCs is because we couldn’t make tablets work for them. Something as simple as reading email was a problem, because the various email apps (gmail, k9, etc) changed their UIs, confusing the heck out of my parents. It would’ve been possible to improve that situation, but the tooling to remotely manage an android phone are far more limited than on a bog standard Linux desktop.
A lot of people do use phones tablets as their main computer, yes. Ask them how happy they are about it, how much trouble updates and random UI changes cause. Just because they “can live with it” does not mean they enjoy the experience, or want to live with it. Chances are, they don’t have other options. My family does. I think more people should have those options available to them.
(Also, the blog post is about desktop, specifically, and is a critique of distros trying to aim at non-enthusiasts. When it comes to mobile, those efforts are even more futile, because those specialised distros will have absolutely no chance of working on anything but a very tiny subset of mobile devices.)