My wording of this would have been a little different.
This expresses my sentiment, as well. The ZorinGroups goals appear aligned more toward ease-of-company rather than heavy GnuLinux. On the surface, this may seem to align with Windows OS refugee needs.
I would counter that it is not simply because it is too similar to what the refugees are leaving Windows OS over.
This is truly a hard line to navigate, much less identify.
Some Windows users want Windows and privacy, too. Others, are tired of Windows Micromanagement. The dichotomy is stark and it may not be so easy to please both crowds. But both crowds are relevant and in pretty equal numbers.
You cannot just pick your party and stay the course. It is self-defeating.
To me, the answer lies in something GnuLinux offers already: Diversity and Modularity. This is the profound answer. Yet, the direction of Gnome, Wayland and the like is opposed to diversity and modularity, preferring the integration (just like Microsoft) of core apps making them immutable, rather than having modular apps leaving control at the users fingertips.
Now, it is more important than ever that the ZorinGroup is exposed to the End Users Goals.
Because these are the only goals that matter.
The ZorinGroup can fulfill any needs they want for their own personal distro goals on their own machines. Their placement in Zorin OS is to fulfill the goals of the end users, not their own.
If at any point, the ZorinGroups goals are not aligned with that principle: then at that point they are indeed doing something wrong.
For certain purposes, I can see the benefits. I work a lot with disk images as part of my job, constantly needing to revert to a clean state or snapshot my state. Issuing a rollback command, rebooting, and NOT actually having to go through Redo Rescue or Rescuezilla for 15 to 150 minutes would be great. But, I need to build those images myself, not just layer on them, and making that work while maintaining upgrade functionality is... I don't even know how that would work. I don't have the familiarity necessary to envision that system. So while I'd be happy to use an immutable, "dry erase" system for my testing work, it's not going to work for me otherwise.
I'm inching in that direction. Conceptually, I'm 100% behind it, but starting from Zorin, I need
To replace GNOME with Plasma 6
To get gamescope working properly (I've gotten it installed, but never working)
To get HDR working
To determine and acquire relevant kernel patches (It's my poorly informed understanding that for my use case, the zen kernel is more suited.)
To change the polling rate in the kernel (I have noticed better responsiveness and less screen tearing in certain games under distros that do this, but can't prove the low polling rate is at fault.)
To compile that kernel and switch to it.
The modularity of Linux enables all of this to be done. It doesn't enable me to get it done. The road to that degree of expertise is long, and I've barely started it.
I've seen more than one Windows user cite that modularity as part of why they won't leave Windows. For users who just want their box to turn on and work, wondering whether Pipewire is better than PulseAudio is repellent, and trying to explain why systemd has issues with certain fundamental principles of Linux is a good way to ensure they stay with Microsoft for life.
As for me, I just wish that modularity were easier to leverage. I vaguely remember in ~1998, installing Slackware and then installing KDE by hand after disliking GNOME. Now if I look for KDE detatched from a distro, I have numerous directories of things to compile and no clear "put them here and enter this in the terminal.
...as an aside, I'd like to praise both you for expressing such opinions and Zorin's owners for tolerating discussions that are critical of their work. It can't always be easy, but it's so much healthier than "Zorin's not like this, maybe go elsewhere," or similar reactions.
Modularity means easily moved from one location to another. The problem is that integration defeats the modular approach. Integration disallows the thing you are looking for: Plug n' Play.
Modularity is what allows for a user to just set it up and have it work.
Diversity - this is the other matter. I think some Windows OS users have the mindset of avoiding choice paralysis by allowing their choices to be limited. They do not want to have to deal with learning the system; they want to just turn on the system and have it work for them.
However, this stereotype is atypical. It is often cited, it is even self-claimed; but the majority of users that actually seek out help, answers or other customizations all express that they want choices, even when the stereotype is applied to them - even when their own words say that they "just want it to work."
I believe that this is because Microsoft, Google, Facebook and other powers-that-be teach the concept of the ever marketable "you just want it to work." It is not what people actually want. It is what they are told that they want. And there is a difference.
Never is this difference more stark than once you set a person up working and they start actually trying to apply what they want but are balked by a system set up to "just work" or in other words: Limit User Controls.
This is why teaching those users and helping them to understand their capabilities and to enhance and increase their learning is more important than just applying Microsoft/Google/Facebook doctrine to them.
The ZorinGroup is remarkably tolerant - to the point of creating confusion, even.
I agree that the tolerance is admirable. But it also has led some to the conclusion that the ZorinGroup is detached and apathetic - an answer to which remains unclear.
I would be surprised if they were capable of reviewing and applying user feedback in the way that they do if there is apathy.
It seems to me that standards allow modularity to come a lot closer to plug n' play. I can plug any USB device into any USB port, and it works, provided the standards were followed. As someone still far removed from the details of how Linux components fit together, that is what I hope for out of modularity.
...it also seems to me that we've hijacked this poor mouse pointer thread, but I'd like the conversation to continue. Could it be split off?
There are some things they want to customize, certainly, and bumping up against barriers there will definitely annoy them. But if said Windows user won't touch Linux due to their perception, how they'd feel after the fact doesn't matter, and I'm very confident that even my reluctant coworkers (I work in the game industry, where computer literacy is necessary, and there are many programmers in conversations) don't care whether they're on systemd or not, to use my previous example. They care how much they can customize their desktop, and they care if their screen is tearing, and they care if the system is responsive... but they don't really care if their kernel is up to date or set up with the increased polling rate I've decided I want.
I really think that this is acceptable. I have opinions about SystemD and other things, but I am not so invested in Pipewire. I do not do much with audio other than play music.
We all have our specific focus and the rest, we are more tolerant about. I think that your example of your co-workers shows that they are normal and just like us and it is an excellent starting point for a journey into GnuLinux. They are not obligated to care about everything, just what is their primary focus.
Because "the everything" must relate to their focus; it will end up addressed anyway by necessity if not desire.
You probably do not have any interest in the code of Graphics Drivers. But you are fine with putting in that bit of effort to learn a little to enhance performance.
That's all you need to be successful. Not to be a guru.
The problem, or perceived problem, is that when they hear that there's more than one subsystem available for something and it might work better, they balk at even trying Linux. The Pipewire vs. Pulseaudio example was real-world. Someone asked in a random conversation channel on Slack about switching to Linux because Microsoft Recall put them off. The thread was pretty much every public Linux switching thread ever, with advocates stressing how much it's improved for the desktop over the last 20 years, naysayers claiming you can't use it without constantly using the CLI, and the curious caught between.
When an issue with audio performance was raised, I mentioned that I had heard Pipewire tended not to have it. (The issue itself I no longer recall.) No fewer than three people were appalled at the very notion of having a choice between sound/media servers. They didn't want that choice; they wanted one that worked. Anything the user doesn't really interface with directly, in my (professional, work history based) experience as tech support and software tester, they don't want to deal with any of it, don't care what it is, or what the choices are; they want it to work.
For most of my adult life (and teen years come to think of it), this same trend played out between Mac users and PC users. I see the same thing play out today between Windows users and Linux users, where today we try to convey the benefit of choice and diversity, and they see the horror of having to figure things out.
To the people I'm discussing, those who don't care about the options, the level of experience needed to find kernel patches and compile a custom kernel is guru level stuff. The instructions you (kindly) provided me to strip out my Nvidia drivers, add a repo, replace them, and add a ppa for X-Swat would be terrifying to many of these people.
I'm not decrying Linux's modularity. I favor it, or I would be running Bazzite right now; my games ran better there. But I've seen first hand, admittedly at anecdotal levels, that people's first concern isn't having options; it's not having to fight with their computer.
I really would like to focus on this wording.
"Terrifying." "Horror". These are very leading words.
Yes, people want things to work. They do not want to have a frustrating fight with a machine, uncertain as to whether what they are doing will work - or make things worse.
This makes sense to me and I am sure we can all relate to it.
But that type of situation is a different one from learning. Or gaining familiarity. Or gaining experience along with knowledge.
Let's look for a moment at Real Life Examples:
Learning to drive a car.
Learning how to use a computer (on any O.S.) the very first time.
Learning to use work specific software
Learning a new job
Learning how to effectively communicate with in-laws while balancing your spouses ire, the kids field trip demands, your boss texting you about some emergency with the photocopier that does not even make sense right after learning that the Cowboys lost the Superbowl.
Life...
Ever since I was in grade school, math looked hard. It was just arithmetic... Now, after having taken calculus years ago and moved on to vector analysis and gravitational motions, all that stuff in years past looks so easy and the current stuff looks hard. It only looks that way. Sigma? It's just grouped summation. Which I have been doing since grade school.
Achievement Unlocked
People often do initially balk at the prospect of the hard things. It's a natural reaction. And utterly misleading because we love them. We seek them out. We spend gobs of money buying entertainment, games or fulfilling hobbies chock-full of the hard things. H.O. Scale Modeling, model building, Digital art, sculpting, vintage/antique restoration... Mountain climbing.
Name a hard thing and someone will pounce on it. Name a full list and soon the whole room of people will have picked their poison. Complaining, grumbling, getting testy and loving every bit of it; returning for more then next day.
We moan and we groan and we stubbornly resist... and Humans Love challenges. Bottom of the ocean? We're on it. Outer space? We're goin' there.
When humans balk: Do not believe them.
My years on this very forum can provide you countless examples, in post after post; thread after thread... People always shirk. They squeeze their eyes shut... while peeking with curiosity.
And give them one success... Give them one win... Once Achievement to unlock and bam. They are all over it. Joyous, bragging, looking for more.
I cannot count how many times a user joined and asked for tech support without using the terminal. My response, "Yes, here is the GUI method. But here is the terminal method, too and with that, you can do this, this and also this, too..." A little encouragement instead of pessimism goes a long way.
Most of the posters that said "no terminal" end up rolling up their sleeves, getting into the terminal and then getting excited at the power it gives them.
There will always be a few that will resist to the bitter end. But they are the minority, not the majority. We must stop assuming what People Want, then giving them the bare minimum claiming that was what they wanted.
I think this, or any Linux forum, has a measure of selection bias. By deciding to switch in the first place, they've already demonstrated an interest even if, as you noted, they're resistant to the idea of using the terminal.
Having just pointed out possible selection bias, I'll now commit the same myself, with apologies in advance. Using myself as an example, I am pretty heavily challenge averse. ("But you're trying to get better at Linux!" Yes, because I have specific goals related to making my system better for gaming, and I'm fed up with Microsoft. If I wanted the challenge itself, I'd have stuck with Slackware in '98. Or Mandrake in... '00? '01? Or be using Arch now instead of a system friendly to Windows converts.)
Incredibly small quantities of the human race have contributed anything to such monumental challenges. There are far more cashiers, even with self-checkouts, than there are astronauts or oceanographers, or even wannabes of the same. There absolutely are people who pursue goals that to most of us seem impossible, but they're considered exceptional for a reason.
As for "achievement unlocked," well, people talk about the thrill and sense of accomplishment in beating something as hard as From Software games. I don't feel any of it. I've been carried through two in co-op by someone who does. I abandoned three before reaching the first boss when playing solo, and one at the first boss. I have platinum trophies in... two games I think, maybe three, one of which was a joke, and the others of which made their achievements more about completion than challenge. About the only difficult hobby I've picked up in my life is lockpicking. Which... well, my picks and practice lock have gone untouched for a very, very long time.
When people get hooked on achievement, I think there are two possibilities: either they're having fun (which is not the case for someone who desperately wants their computer to work and is having issues), or they're interested, which I think is usually the case with the people you mentioned you could cite as examples on these forums. I will absolutely grant you that some of the people who think they don't want the choices involved with Linux would find that they actually find Linux pretty interesting if they put in the time. But I think a much larger group, for whom their computer is a tool, not a puzzle, would not. I don't want to figure out which kind of screwdriver I need, or what the appropriate torque is; I want to screw something together. That will never be interesting to me. Someone who enjoys building things might want to know every detail of their tools.
I'd like to back up to something that didn't get a response in what has become more about human nature than anything else:
Aside from getting people to agree on standards, what precludes the sort of things that would make plug n' play compatible with modularity? Linux already has standards for its directory structure. The kernel always goes in a certain place, usually with a symlink pointing to the actual kernel file. This, that, and the other have standards to which all developers adhere to make their software work on... well, any operating system, the standards are just different. What about, say, desktop environments or compiling the kernel precludes similar standards enabling both ease and modularity? (I know what prevents changing the polling rate from being trivial--that's a code change, and creating a menu based system for selecting values in code would be a nightmare.)
Or Olympians? What remains is that they could not be exceptional or accomplish such things without support and interest from the majority - the masses.
No, not everyone will walk on the Moon. Not everyone can. Only a few will. But this does not mean that the majority of people do not care or are not interested in the challenge - it is a group challenge. He did not land on the Moon; WE landed on the Moon.
If it was delegated only to those up to the challenge, there would be no funding, no interest... I would not happen. James Cameron went to Challenger Deep by himself.
But he did not go alone.
There comes a point when a person must accept that they need to know certain things. The torque value for your lugnuts is about 75ft/lbs and not wanting to know that or just wanting to touch the breaker bar and the lugnuts put themselves on perfectly does not change that reality.
So... people grab their torque wrench, apply the right torque, put the tool away and think no more of it.
That is just how life is.
If a person literally is bothered to think they must put thought into how much pressure to apply to a screwdriver... I would honestly suspect that personality type is definitely in the minority! That is pretty extreme.
I am sure most people are not bothered by thinking of how much pressure to apply to the accelerator pedal of the car - they just want it to "go". The majority of humans just get a feel for the pressure needed in the car they are driving, no fuss, no pain.
We need to clearly differentiate between Modular and Diverse.
A Modular system does not have to be Diverse and a Diverse system does not have to lack modularity.
For desktop - please look into the Freedesktop Standards.
For Hardware compat, this is handled primarily by the kernel and so it is something most users do not have to really worry about. The onus is on the kernel teams, not the user. A user can compile or modify kernels if interested, but the goal is that they never need to. Even in extreme cases on GnuLinux, switching the kernel is all any user needs to do which is as simple as just running an installation - much of the time double clicking a self-installer.
Whereas try switching to a different kernel on Windows OS... Good luck.
This actually supplies a good example of something standardized and vetted that people just want to work: But it was so standardized that when it didn't work, the user was left without options (Other than waiting in hopes someone high up the chain would fix it for them.)
Given that choice, many people will rather get in and put in some effort rather than wait for someone else to do it. They might balk if you suggest doing it when they do not need it. Give them a little need and suddenly, balking goes out the window and they are all kinds of motivated.
Research eustress using a Scholar Search - it is very interesting stuff. (Yes, this applies to humans).
Modular, by definition, is being able to switch components of an object or system without affecting the other components. That's what has me confused about your earlier statement that integration is what enables plug n' play, and why I used my USB example. The modularity of Linux allows us (or at least those of us with the expertise to create a distribution) to decide between systemd vs init, or Pipewire vs. Pulseaudio, etc. What I'm struggling with in this discussion is why, given modularity, I can't just grab, for example, a .deb of Plasma 6 and go with it. There's enough modularity that people have suggested I could point to Tuxedo OS' repos to pull it, yet not enough that KDE can simply say, "here's Plasma 6."
The modularity to which I'm accustomed, outside of Linux, is something like the hotshoe on a camera, where you can just swap a flash for a viewfinder for a colored light for a phone holder. Different manufacturers' equipment may not work, but that's a limitation on the modularity.
Here I agree with you, for kernel upgrades at least (I learned just today that Ubuntu has .debs for kernels going a long way back), but in the case of changing the USB polling rate, there seems to be no solution but to compile or switch to a distro that has what you want. Yet this is a valuable enough change that Nobara, Garuda, I believe Draugr, and possibly other gaming focused distributions have done it, and so I find myself apparently needing to do a lot more than run an installation.
There's also (and here I may show my ignorance even more than usual) the Zen kernel, at least for Arch, which I understand carries a variety of performance improvements outside the mainline. This may simply be a split between the goals of gaming focused distros and others, but here it seems that for performance, either kernels aren't one size fits all, or non-gaming distributions are leaving optimizations on the table. Frankly I don't know enough about these optimizations to say which is the case, and it may be some third possibility not apparent to me.
The issue of modularity is confused by Dependencies and I admit, this is a thorn in the paw of GnuLinux users, as much as those moments when the only fix is to really get into the code.
It would take me a bit of time to really address this all - I need to do some other work at the moment. This may give a chance to other users to chime in since our posts have been fast-paced and lengthy.
A quick shorty; Many GnuLinux apps are Modular in that you can install Plasma's Dolphin FM on Ubuntu for example. Or XFCE's panel on LXDE. But the specific Package Version may require certain dependencies that you do not have - such as Plasma 6 which depends on a higher glibc than you have on Zorin OS - Glibc as a Core component is integrated - not modular, which inhibits your ability to fully utilize a modular component.
