User-friendly Usability
Some Linux distributions go out of their way to make new users feel comfortable. We shine a spotlight on the more welcoming distros
LET’S LOOK AT LINUX MINT FIRST, which continues to be a favorite of ours. In particular, it’s one that we still recommend to users who are taking their first steps with Linux. Initially (the 1.0 release in 2006 was a beta based on Kubuntu), it took the Ubuntu codebase and bundled flash and Wi-Fi firmware to make for a better out-of-the-box experience. It experimented with its own codebase for a couple of years, but then returned to Ubuntu’s, and since then the two have always been package-compatible. It enables Mint to piggy-back off the treasure trove of packages in the Ubuntu repositories, while still providing its own experience.
When Ubuntu switched to its Unity desktop, Mint offered something more conventional in the form of its Cinnamon desktop (which first appeared in Mint 13). Cinnamon was initially based on Gnome 3, but soon became its own thing. For die-hard traditionalists, Mint also offered the then-fledgling MATE desktop a fork of Gnome 2. Both Cinnamon and MATE continue to thrive, while Unity has been abandoned by Canonical (though the latest version lives on in the UBPorts mobile OS, and the penultimate edition is still tended to by a small but loyal community). When Ubuntu 18.04 was released, sans 32-bit ISO, Mint went ahead and produced its own (32-bit packages were still built for 18.04, but this is not the case for the latest edition, so Mint 20 is 64-bit only).
We’re still waiting for Mint 20 to arrive, and Clem and the team have remained largely silent about what to expect. In previous releases, it’s been as much about what they’ve removed from Ubuntu as what they’ve added. For example, the “anonymous” telemetry information that you have to opt out of sending in Ubuntu is banished from Mint.
As Ubuntu moved towards the Snap packaging format, some Mint users voiced concern about whether these would become the norm in Mint, too. They (unlike Flatpaks and AppImages) rely on a proprietary app store after all, which makes Canonical a sort of kingpin in the software-distribution ring. The team reassured users that Mint wouldn’t contribute to this Snap monopoly. Last year they said they’d support Snaps as long as they were useful and “didn’t become the de facto standard [for packages].” Now they’ve put their money where their mouth is. Try installing Chromium with apt in Ubuntu 20.04 and you’ll find you get a dummy package that installs the Snap version. This is irrefutable evidence of a Snap usurping a traditional package, and something the Mint team won’t stand for.
MINT 20 BETA INSIGHTS
As we write this, the first details of what to expect in the Mint 20 beta are starting to emerge. And one of the first is that no Snaps will be installed by default. The snapd daemon will also be absent, but you can add it if you wish. As a precaution, traditional apt packages will be blocked from installing snapd to prevent them acting, like Chromium’s, duplicitously.
Linux Mint made waves by giving users what they want. It sounds harsh, and there are all kinds of complexities behind this, but other distros seemed reluctant to listen to their users. Alas, the most common gripe, “why can’t it just work?” is alive and well today (though this applies to other OSes, and in fact all forms of technology). A sad trend that Ubuntu’s accessibility inadvertently started was frankly unqualified users taking to bug-trackers and venting their rage. People would describe their problems (badly) in angry block capitals, they wouldn’t supply log files or hardware information, they wouldn’t attempt to pin down the problem, they would fail to do even the most cursory search for other people having similar problems or, worse, they would jump onto similar bug reports crying “me too!”—even though their issue was different.
Developers shied away from engaging with such reports. The canned response thanking these newcomers for their submission and referring to reporting guidelines has become ubiquitous. One place where Linux Mint excelled has been through its community helping each other, and developers engaging with that community rather than being bothered by them. Their “Newbie Questions” forum still bears the tagline “all gurus once were newbies” and is still for the most part free of more experienced users being condescending to newcomers’ questions—even when those newcomers didn’t read the helpful guide on how to ask for help.
ENDLESSLY USABLE
Over the past decade, some Linux distributions have appeared that go out of their way to be more usable (and less breakable) by regular humans. One is Endless OS. Originally tied to Endless Computers’s hardware (budget small form-factor PCs aimed at developing countries), the Debian-based distro is now available to all and comes in a few forms. The full desktop edition (available in seven languages) is a whopping 16GB in size, but includes the full text of Wikipedia, several Khan academy lectures, and Endless’s own educational tools. It’s aimed at offline and even off-grid usage. There’s a more conventional desktop version (only 3GB), a VirtualBox image, and finally an image for the Raspberry Pi 4. Besides its hardware (including the Spark kids’ laptop), educational contributions (such as its immersive Terminal Two coding tutorials, see https://terminaltwo.com), Endless has taken a particularly innovative approach to system updates.
Such updates are a necessary inconvenience, but Microsoft has turned a lot of people against it, most egregiously when it force-updated Windows 7 machines to Windows 10, in many cases breaking them. But also, unless you tell Windows 10 to do otherwise, it has a habit of installing large updates at shutdown time (no good if your computer is in the same room you sleep in) or at boot time (no good if you actually want to use your computer when you turn it on). Another sad situation is when disk space is low, large updates will download and not be able to install. In some cases (particularly cheap tablets) this can make them entirely unbootable.
Linux updates tend not to be so disruptive, but they do on occasion break things. This is particularly upsetting for new users, especially if they’re confronted with a confusing error message and a busybox shell or worse, a blank screen. It’s easy to blame these issues on user error, or the Nvidia driver, but people shouldn’t have to learn all about chrooting and modifying system files just to get their desktops back.
Linux Mint conceded this and launched its Timeshift tool for rolling back updates. Endless OS goes one step further: The whole filesystem is updated at once. This so-called atomic upgrade uses OSTree, itself described as “Git for filesystems” (or in this case operating systems). Of course, this doesn’t mean that every Endless OS device ends up with exactly the same filesystem (that wouldn’t work unless every device was identical, hardware and software-wise). Rather, configuration files (say, everything in /boot and /etc) are layered atop the base OSTree image, and individual applications are installed as Flatpaks. You can roll back the entire OS to a previous version of the OS (just like you can switch Git branches) at the press of a button.
While the OS is based on Debian, you can’t readily use apt and .deb packages (or any traditional packaging format) on Endless OS. The OSTree/Flatpak combo is a bulletproof platform because the root filesystem is read only. Even if the power goes out mid-upgrade, the previous incarnation of the OS will be accessible and the upgrade can be resumed. Installing an application won’t break the base image because Flatpaks are selfcontained. OSTree images are incremental too (only changes between versions are stored) so rolling back doesn’t come with a huge disk space cost.