I would encourage you to look up “user-friendly Linux distros” on your favourite search engine and check the first few results.

PopOS is System76’s distro. It’s quite popular among beginners and frequently recommended to those just starting with Linux. I don’t personally use it.

It’s not, but what distros frequently top the list of “user-friendly” distros?

Ubuntu, PopOS, Fedora, and friends.

Maybe it’s not how it should be, but that’s currently how it is.

I think it is unreasonable because a Windows user (i.e. myself) can quickly get up to speed with MacOS within five minutes without the need for external instruction. I can manage a MacOS system perfectly fine even without any prior knowledge of how it works. I can figure out how to configure the settings to do what I need it to do without needing to search for how to do it online.

GNOME took almost a week to get used to and remember where things are located, such as what is located in Settings, how the task flow works, and so forth. I never got used to the “disappearing dock”. I had to use an extension for that. GNOME is just way more different than the others. Meanwhile, my grandpa picked up Cinnamon as a lifelong Windows user within five minutes.

I think most of the time if they have a Github/Gitlab repo open to the public opening issues, they will accept an issue that merely describes a problem that needs to be fixed along with how it might be fixed.

Something like this is generally appreciated:

I’m an HCI expert and ____ should be improved to do ____ because of ____. I’m willing to volunteer to do design work on this to help the project out

…and if the maintainers ask for contact info, provide it and there you go.

I love and use GNOME daily, but I think it’s still the case that the interface “needs some getting used to” for a Windows/MacOS user. The design paradigm is just not familiar or self-explanatory to anyone who has regularly used desktop computers in the past decade.

This problem is pretty common across most parts of the Linux space. Everyone wants to volunteer coding work, which is great, but not what’s desperately needed right now.

The Linux community needs more than programmers, or else it will consist only of programmers. We need UI/UX experts, or we’ll never have the simplicity and ease of use of iOS. We need accessibility designers or we’ll never match up to the accessibility of MacOS. We need graphic designers and artists or we’ll never look as good as Windows 11. We need PR professionals and marketing experts or we’ll never be as notable as the Windows XP startup sound.

We don’t have enough volunteers that fit into these categories. The next best thing you can do is contribute your money so that your favourite project can hire the people they need.

“IPv6 is not a feature; its absence is a bug”

• Someone on the Flathub repo, I think