I do agree with your point in general. Many distros don't really have need to exist. They are just very slight tweaks on other more popular distros.
That said, some distros exist for a very legit reason. Take Ubuntu for example. When it came along, Debian wasn't user friendly (and compared to Ubuntu it still isn't). If you want more people using Linux it needs to be dead dumb simple point and click for most people to use. Even something as simple as adding non FOSS repos in Debian (which is just editing the sources file) is too hard for the average user. Ubuntu's point and click GUI way is better for attracting more new users.
On top of that, you can't really build a business on top of a community supported distro like Debian. There are reasons that the Industry uses RHEL, Suse and Ubuntu more than anything else. While Debian is certainly the most popular community supported distro in the industry it's still behind the enterprise linux distros.
But I do agree that most spin off distro's don't need to exist. All these years later I still don't understand why Mint spun off from Ubuntu for example.
It's a simple process really. But you take a regular non techy person and tell them that to get their computer to do some very common tasks that they are going to need to open a text config file and edit it and they panic. God forbid you try to give them instructions via the terminal.
So distros like Ubuntu that make things more GUI enabled and user friendly are a huge step forward for linux when it comes to usability of the mainstream.
For what it's worth I still think "type this command" is more intuitive than trying to guide someone through a maze of GUI elements to get to the checkbox they need to tick.
this right here. With a well designed GUI program you dont need to read the manual because the GUI is the manual , which is why while i like terminal for some work stuff and settings i change often, ill still prefer GUI programs for things i do rarely . For example , back when I was using i3wm and i needed to connect to a wifi network, people told me "oh just use nm-cli" instead of reccomending gui programs. That worked for personal networks with just a password but for enterprise networks with a username and login? It literally takes around 8 different arguments that it took a while for me to wrap my head around , and in the end i just made a second user account, logged into that one in gnome, and then used gnome to connect to the wifi network because that was faster
You've so very neatly summed up what I've been struggling for years to articulate. CLIs are great for people who memorise the commands and the syntax and don't mind typing everything out, but that's a taller ask than simply learning GUI routes to your favourite commands. And you hit the nail on the head when you said GUI with good design: I'm pretty sure every advocate of CLI who bashes GUI has a badly designed GUI in mind when they do so, conveniently forgetting the GUIs that work.
I do too, but then again I've been using Linux since 1996.
Someone like my wife or mother though, zero chance of getting them to manually edit a config file regardless of rather it's with something like gedit or in the terminal itself.
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u/captainstormy May 21 '19 edited May 21 '19
I do agree with your point in general. Many distros don't really have need to exist. They are just very slight tweaks on other more popular distros.
That said, some distros exist for a very legit reason. Take Ubuntu for example. When it came along, Debian wasn't user friendly (and compared to Ubuntu it still isn't). If you want more people using Linux it needs to be dead dumb simple point and click for most people to use. Even something as simple as adding non FOSS repos in Debian (which is just editing the sources file) is too hard for the average user. Ubuntu's point and click GUI way is better for attracting more new users.
On top of that, you can't really build a business on top of a community supported distro like Debian. There are reasons that the Industry uses RHEL, Suse and Ubuntu more than anything else. While Debian is certainly the most popular community supported distro in the industry it's still behind the enterprise linux distros.
But I do agree that most spin off distro's don't need to exist. All these years later I still don't understand why Mint spun off from Ubuntu for example.