As a non IT person I find Linux way better for installing software. The sort of apps non IT people use. The Software store has most of what I need. There rest I install the Windows way. From a website. Apps with a Linux version almost always detect and offer a Linux button to click to install. I wouldn’t know what to do if that didn’t work. Ditch that application I guess. My distros are pretty standard. Not hacked about. My apps are not too weird. I’ve been doing it this way for 14+ years. Never needed the CLI either.

Its nice to hear about even more ways that Gimp is better than Photoshop.

Constructive criticism is good. I hope you reported bugs. Just saying you hate it, or it sucks, says more about you than the software.

Because Linux had a choice of desktop environments to try out. What a playground.

My first peek was with Wubi. >2008 ish? Then Knoppix had a live boot. Then all the other live boots followed. Very important easy first step.

I’m now on Plasma, tweaked to suit me.

Ha ha. So funny… what’s ‘compile’?

I too am very cautious of getting stuck with Linux. I try to be sure I’m not doing things the hard way. I have found easy distros and easy ways to do most things in Linux despite many people suggesting I do it the IT pro way that they do. Usually because they haven’t investigated easy ways for non IT users. They mean well, but don’t know about usability or if there us an easy way.

Sadly, big business, techies without imagination and community FOSS without enough capacity are the ones that control what is available. Nothing will suddenly change. Usability is way down the priority list.

That’s not necessarily so. There are all sorts of legacy reasons people give for making poor software. From lazy monopolies to programmers with little understanding of usability. To people without the big picture. It will change.

A GUI with good usability can let you repeat commands exactly if required. They use last used values as default. If people in needed that often we’d see more of it in GUI apps. There is often more useful functionality that get prioritised though.

I thought command line users like typing things. I avoid typing where possible, and dont use the command line on Linux.

In Gimp it was the enhancement to the command search. It needs to find a command when you type a slash. Before it would only execute the command. Now it tells you where it is. So you don’t need to search every time. In Inkscape there have been several. Most recently it was to reduce the width of the Text panel by moving some elements. As the Text panel is very wide. A full overhaul is due soon.

I’ve had my feature requests added to both Inkscape and Gimp. I doubt if Adobe devs will ever listen to you.
For my photography, I could get results in Gimp equal or sometimes better than Photoshop. But now Gimp 3 adds productivity features to make it fast too. And using it with DigiKam and RawTherapee means a top notch workflow too.

What was a LibreOffice developer doing using Microsoft stuff in the first place?

If you use Microsoft or Meta or any of the usual suspects, and they screw up or get hacked or behave badly, don’t be all surprised and complain. It’s what they do, and they don’t care, and never listen. You know this.

Windows doesn’t have a real choice of desktop environments. So I moved to Linux 15 years ago. I’m not in IT and always use a mouse. Importantly for me, I’ve never needed the CLI, despite people telling me that’s impossible. Plasma lets me tweak it to my needs. I use Kubuntu, yet don’t care about what’s below the desktop environment. Happy to change distros.

I install graphical and visual design apps. And I’ll navigate to the category by mouse. I don’t memorise the names of all my apps. I’m not in IT, and I’m not working with text all the time. I’ll right click the app icon and go ‘Add to favourites’, so I have a highly productive, 1 click access to important apps. I’m interested in usability, am not a beginner and I know my UI and settings well. I can see why people find this tiny green dot useful. It’s OK if you are not into usability. But note that there are many different user types, with different needs at different times. And the flexibility of KDE Plasma makes it a really great desktop environment.

Avoid being rude please. I’ve been patient, and tried to explain in different ways for you. I’m sure you’ll get it when you see it.

Read back to the types if information I’ve been talking about. Real world things people actually need. Things that need to be shared with people who might not use One Note.

Avoid confusing information with text. Avoid forgetting about open standards.

So the requirement is to display information, such in the examples I gave. Where you can create new, edit existing ones, organise them in your preferred structure, and actively share them. All without doing unnecessary IT operations. All in one UI environment.

Those are the sort of pieces of information people actually have, and need to manage digitally. There will be ways to do this, where you see your information. Not files, or other IT mechanisms. You can create, sort and share them directly. They will have security, and ways to automate processes. You won’t need 10 different applications to do this, or 6 incompatible online silos, or 4 different folder structures to organise it. Just one. Much less to learn, as you use one thing every time. And all using 90’s tech.