What causes a person to use linux?

[Lean L]

Really? You're going to browse the internet, work on a spreadsheet, edit some video files ... all from the shell?

I'm not even sure this is a serious question. You use a GUI for exactly the same reasons you use a GUI on any other OS.

Except that I find the UI unintuitive enough that I would only use Linux as a server. Make sense?

 

[Jodell88]

Except that I find the UI unintuitive enough that I would only use Linux as a server. Make sense?

Which UI?

Gnome 2? Gnome 3? KDE? XFCE? Cinnamon? Unity? Openbox? Awesome? i3? DWM? Fluxbox? LXQT?

 

[Carson Dyle]

Which UI?

Gnome 2? Gnome 3? KDE? XFCE? Cinnamon? Unity? Openbox? Awesome? i3? DWM? Fluxbox? LXQT?

You know... the unintuitive one.

 

[destrekor]

Which UI?

Gnome 2? Gnome 3? KDE? XFCE? Cinnamon? Unity? Openbox? Awesome? i3? DWM? Fluxbox? LXQT?

I've personally used quite a few of those, and, personally, I'm just going to go against the grain and say it simply: both Windows (even Windows 8! shocking! D: :awe: I actually like it ) and OS X trump all of those in regards to functional UI. There may be arguments of the Windows 8 interface, but if you boil it down to Windows is Windows, well, I still say it's hard to touch. OS X takes all the best ideas of Gnome (or was it the other way around? I don't know the timing and history) and makes it that much better, stronger, and more consistent, of course thanks to quite a bit more control over the OS in whole.

All I know, if anyone dares say Unity or Gnome Shell 3 is great yet Windows 8 is terrible, they should be... well, bad things should be done to them.

 

[Red Squirrel]

All I know, if anyone dares say Unity or Gnome Shell 3 is great yet Windows 8 is terrible, they should be... well, bad things should be done to them.

IMO Gnome3 / Unity is probably even worse than windows 8. At least with Windows 8 you still sorta have the regular UI, it's just that almost everything you try to do, or if you move the mouse a certain way that registers as a gesture, it throws you back into metro. With Gnome 3, it just boots right into "metro" and there's no alternative place to go. I lasted about 5 minutes with it and uninstalled it. I later on decided I should give it another chance, I lasted 2 minutes that time. Hitting the alt + F keys to get a console session was more intuitive than trying to use that UI. The part that pissed me off the most is if you do manage to find a way to open an app, it just takes over any thing else you may have had open. There was no real way to switch between existing opened apps. Completely horrible design. Even Linus Torvalds himself had some pretty nasty things to say about it.

Thankfully there are distros like Linux Mint that use a more traditional UI. I have to hand it to Microsoft because the traditional Windows UI, say windows 2000 era or XP with "classic mode", is probably the best GUI ever and if everything can continue to mimick it, it will be a good UI. The minute you try to steer away from it, it's less usable.

 

[Jodell88]

Gnome 3 has no metro elements.

And if you don't like the application chooser you can change it to a list.

You also can boot into a 'traditional' desktop from the login screen.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Well the lack of desktop and start menu makes it really similar to metro. And the fact that everything you open basically goes full screen. There's no way to easily switch between apps or even access a list of apps without knowing the name. The whole design is horrible. Thankfully in Linux there's lot of choices though and there are much better GUI options.

 

[Leros]

I rarely use anything more than Chrome, a text editor (or IDE), and a crap load of terminals.

 

[ultimatebob]

You know... the unintuitive one.

So, basically all of them