How inconvenient freedom can be?
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I've been using Windows since I was a kid, from Windows 95 to now Windows 8.
I had never heard about free or proprietary software until a few months ago. It all started when I searched for alternative operating systems as I was very disappointed with Win 8.
Then I stumbled upon GNU/Linux and some of its distros, I searched about them, and that is where I first heard Richard Stallman's speeches. I was outraged and still am about the commercial practices and surveillance that have been used on us users. Then I heard about Trisquel gnu/linux as a free (as in freedom) OS, I downloaded it and installed it on the Virtual Machine.
Even though I liked it (The design, the speed, and the apparent resemble to Windows OS) I can't see it as my only operating system.
A lot of applications are out of reach, as they are proprietary, including gaming (except a free few very dated games). But I think I can live without these (as soon as I get out of college, because, for now, I need several statistic programs, such as IBM's SPSS). The problem is I am illiterate in IT, I don't know how to use the Terminal, nor I want to learn (It's boring...).
Is it hard to make Trisquel as user friendly as Windows or Mac are? Where I can completely ignore the Terminal, regardless of what I am doing. What has been your experience with it?
You should dislike proprietary applications for the same reasons you dislike proprietary operating systems.
Instead of SPSS check out https://www.gnu.org/software/pspp/
Don't fear the terminal. But if you don't want to use it, you don't need to. Just expect to be limited by the boring GUIs. :) (graphical user interface)
Trisquel has been my sole OS (operating system) for many years. Love it.
Thanks for you replies so soon. And I appreciate you being so supportive. Is there anyone who has used this operating system everyday as his/her only OS? How many of you users are beginners like me?
Purely free GNU/Linux operating systems have been the only ones I've used over the past 41 weeks and 6 hours (How long I've been on this forum)-- I was a beginner, and found Trisquel to be quite user-friendly. You won't ever need to touch the terminal unless you want to, so don't worry about it!
I haven't touched Windows in about two years (I used Ubuntu for a year, then switched to Trisquel)
Good mate! :D Trisquel's been the best distro I've used! Thanks to the
people who made it, especially Ruben!
On 05/26/2015 12:09 AM, name at domain wrote:
> Purely free GNU/Linux operating systems have been the only ones I've
> used over the past 41 weeks and 6 hours (How long I've been on this
> forum :p)-- I was a beginner, and found Trisquel to be quite
> user-friendly. You won't ever need to touch the terminal unless you
> want to, so don't worry about it!
> I haven't touched Windows in about two years (I used Ubuntu for a
> year, then switched to Trisquel)!
Do you guys think Trisquel is already user-friendly enough for the
masses? You know, like will it be as user friendly as Windows? People
who aren't really familiar with Windows tend to get a grip on it easily,
same goes with Mac OS. Something tells me the hype behind those OSes
helps them to get a grip on it way faster than other OSes.
On 05/26/2015 12:27 AM, name at domain wrote:
> Good mate! :D Trisquel's been the best distro I've used! Thanks to the
> people who made it, especially Ruben!
>
> On 05/26/2015 12:09 AM, name at domain wrote:
>> Purely free GNU/Linux operating systems have been the only ones I've
>> used over the past 41 weeks and 6 hours (How long I've been on this
>> forum :p)-- I was a beginner, and found Trisquel to be quite
>> user-friendly. You won't ever need to touch the terminal unless you
>> want to, so don't worry about it!
>> I haven't touched Windows in about two years (I used Ubuntu for a
>> year, then switched to Trisquel)!
Unless there's been substantial improvement with Windows 8, I don't think Windows is as user-friendly as GNOME Flashback, let alone GNOME Shell. Windows just has a lot of users, so whenever someone is confused, they ask the person next to them.
Super agree on that! Hype indeed is a major player on both of those
distros I said.
On 05/26/2015 12:53 AM, name at domain wrote:
> Unless there's been substantial improvement with Windows 8, I don't
> think Windows is as user-friendly as GNOME Flashback, let alone GNOME
> Shell. Windows just has a lot of users, so whenever someone is
> confused, they ask the person next to them.
I have been exclusively using Trisquel GNU/Linux for five years. And so have my wife and my parents. I am a university professor in computer science, my wife is a journalist and both my parents are accountants. I take care of administrating their systems... but there is so little to do with Trisquel! I must spend a few hours per system and per year, top. No virus, no malware, all common applications installed by default, tens of thousands of additional applications that are three clicks away in the Synaptic package manager, a backup system that you setup in three clicks too, an helpful community, etc.
In my opinion, Trisquel GNU/Linux is far more user-friendly than Windows! However, you have to learn that simple way. For example, many beginners do not know about the package manager and try to install applications the Windows way: search the Web, download an installer, search for that installer on the disk, launch it, click "Next" a gazillion times including for accepting an unacceptable license, clean the menu for all the crap that was added, ... congratulations: you have just installed something that probably is malware!
When one opts for the terminal instead of the GUI and calls oneself dumb for it then one is dumb for not realising how otherwise un-dumb one is :P
I don't have enough recent experience with windows to have a valid opinion since I haven't really used it since Vista came out.
The same actually applies to me. Windows XP was the last windows I used more than a few hours.
Entering the free software world does involve some small sacrifices. E.g., abandoning some sites with Flash and no free software solution (not the case of the most common ones), some (bad) friends who would only communicate through Skype or Facebook, etc. But there is freedom to gain and, overall, the best applications are free software... Emacs rules! :-)
"too much of a dumb blonde"
please do not reinforce this stereotype
Agree!
On 05/26/2015 09:25 PM, name at domain wrote:
> "too much of a dumb blonde"
> please do not reinforce this stereotype
I'm sure there are many people here, who use Trisquel as a main and only everyday OS. :)
I've used exclusively Trisquel for 5 years now, judging by how old my forum account is.
I can't comment on Mac OS X, but I think Trisquel is much more user-friendly than Windows. You just don't see it that way because you're used to Windows. :) Granted, the GNOME Flashback environment is a little more primitive; you might appreciate GNOME Shell, KDE Plasma, or Cinnamon, which are more modern. Trisquel doesn't use these by default because they can be slow on systems with unaccelerated graphics, e.g. anyone with an AMD/ATI GPU.
The terminal isn't required in Trisquel any more than in Windows. The same applies to most modern GNU/Linux distros that aren't aimed at power users. I'm not aware of any GUI interface we use which is any worse than Windows GUI interfaces. We just tend to use the terminal more because it works better for certain tasks than GUI interfaces, and it's almost always easier to give someone the instruction "enter this command in the terminal" than to tell them how to do it with the GUI interface.
I am a translator!
Consider if learning a couple of terminal commands (you don't need to by the way, with Trisk) or dumping a couple of proprietary applications to do your computing in freedom is better than using an OS which as you said makes you "outraged about the commercial practices and surveillance that have been used on us users".
I can't comment on user friendliness compared to Windows or OS X because I don't use them. I can comment, however, that Trisquel is derived from Ubuntu which has the reputation of being “user-friendly”.
I do not like the term “user-friendly”, but I do not oppose it on ethical reasons. It is usually associated with an attitude of designing computing systems so that they demand the least from the user (interest, knowledge and effort), at the expense of flexibility, capability and control. It is not clear that this approach ought to be called “friendliness”.
As an illustration: Trisquel has both a graphical installer which is “user-friendly” and a text based installer that gives the user more control, though it requires some technical knowledge about GNU/Linux (the user must know how to make a sane partition layout, for instance). Package management (installing, updating and uninstalling software part of the distribution) can be done through a graphical interface which doesn't requires any special knowledge, but there is also the text based “apt” and ”aptitude”, and you can edit directly the configuration files with any text editor and gives access to “advanced” features like version pinning.
Most modern GNU/Linux distributions work “out of the box”, without any further configuration needed to have a working environment ready for web browsing, text editing, etcetera.
There are plenty of free as in freedom games, check Libregamewiki. Some examples of well developed games are The Battle for Wesnoth and Warzone 2100.
P.S: I forgot: welcome to GNU/Linux!.
There is a list of free software applications in the FSF website. It will be of great use to you in future. The list is well categorized.
"Is there anyone who has used this operating system everyday as his/her only OS?"Not me but if I'm pretty close to and if I had to I won't mind a bit.
"Is it hard to make Trisquel as user friendly as Windows or Mac are?" It already is in my opinion. I use the terminal for a few tasks but they're perfectly doable without it. Is there anything you want to do which you find to only be doable in the terminal (we might be able to point out a point-and-click way of doing it)?
Oh, and by the way, in terms of OS installation, Windows is significantly harder (or at least more complicated) to install than Trisquel (I've installed Windows XP, 98, and Windows 8 Preview....so perhaps one should believe me:)
Burn Trisquel to a DVD-RW (or flash drive), and try it (WITHOUT MODIFYING THE OS ALREADY ON YOUR COMPUTER ONE WEE BIT), if only to see how well it works with the hardware (since you've tried the OS on VM).
If it works nicely you can then, and you can then install it alongside Windows (make a backup of at least the My Documents folder before doing that, though) :)
One more thing: User-friendliness is really a relative thing. I find OS X very unfriendly, but thanks to some brilliant marketing (which I feel is a bit lacking in the free software world) instead of complaining about it being unfriendly, people just get on with getting used to it.
P.S I REALLY, REALLY hope you don't use an AMD GPU :) (If you do, well.....Trisquel should still run rather nicely but it's a long story)
Well OSX does have the advantages of entire programs being packaged up into what appear to the user as a single object... that is about the end of its usability features that benefit most people. :P
Windows too. And Canonical is pushing something with the same advantages (but more secure and with delta updates) into Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/tools/snappy
But that approach has its drawback: by packaging all dependencies with every user application the same libraries (possibly in different versions, including insecure ones) are loaded several times into main memory, i.e., you end up with higher memory requirements.
What are delta updates?
"Well OSX does have the advantages of entire programs being packaged up into what appear to the user as a single object"
Wait for Snappy.....
I also switched to Trisquel this year after being annoyed with Windows 8, and I haven't looked back since! GNU/Linux is very customizable and there are always tons of options for getting things done.
I'm also not an IT guy and I installed Trisquel because of the free software philosophy :)
The terminal and .tar files looked kinda scary at first but luckily there is plenty of information on the web and a lot of tutorials and troubleshooting!
A .tar file is little more than a concatenation of files into one single file (plus where to "cut" to get the individual files back, plus their metadata such as their names, permissions, etc.). The .tar archive is usually compressed, i.e., you have a .tar.gz or a .tar.xz or...
And you need not use the terminal to deal with .tar archives (compressed or not). You can use "File Roller", GNOME's archive manager, which is installed by default and integrated into the default file manager. For instance you can select some files, right click on them and choose "Compress...". Or you can right-click on an archive and choose "Extract here". By double-clicking on the archive you get more options (e.g., to add files to the archive or to extract individual files).
More generally, with Trisquel, all basic (and not so basic) things can be done without the terminal if you wish. That said, taking the time to learn the use of a terminal (and of the most basic commands) will save you a lot of time for the rest of your life.
Yeah but installing from a .tar file still gives me chills. Why can't they just make .debs?
Usually, if you're a software developer, you distribute source and possibly run-in-place binaries, and let distro maintainers package them. The only reason debs are distributed by upstream developers, usually, is to let users of Debian and Ubuntu get the latest release more easily.
Oh, you are talking about compiling! The difficulty does not comes from how the source code is archived. It comes from the fact that you must first install the compilation chain, find the dependencies of the program you build, read README or INSTALL files to know how to build the program and its dependencies, etc. That is definitely not easy. But most users only need to stick to what is in Trisquel's repository, more than 40,000 packages!
I am a translator!
Compiling is much easier than it first appears to be. Just start with easy ones. Read the instructions. And try to understand the outputs of the messages. When you reach a point of no-go in compiling it will output an error message that contains the answer to solve it.
Compile happy people, compile!
Much better than blindly trusting external .debs!
Especially if its Python. Lol.
Compiling one single Python script is easy.
Well, you don't need to (and shouldn't) think about it, so that's not really a meaningful example. If you actually manually compile your Python code, you're doing it wrong; you're supposed to let the interpreter handle that for you (and pass -O or -OO if you want optimizations).
But even C code is perfectly easy to compile as long as a good build environment is set up (e.g. Autotools or CMake), and the procedure to compile the program is explained properly. The hardest part is installing dependencies, not actual compilation.
In a trisquel workstation you don't need to run periodically anti malware software or defrag the disks. Just update the system when required.
And install/remove software is very easy with tools like synaptic.
In my opinion, this makes trisquel very user-friendly. Although freedom is more important than user-friendliness.
I am a member!
It's not usually Trisquel that people find difficult. It's usually that without the proprietary bits (not included in Trisquel) there are certain things you just can't do/figure out. Sometimes there is a solution and asking here is the first step, but sometimes there is no good solution- or its too difficult.
If your finding thats the case and you can't pull Trisquel off consider the next least-bad option: another distribution. Most distributions include some non-free bits and/or enable you to install non-free bits. That fixes the functionality problem at the expense of your freedom. That's bad for your freedom, but it's still a lesser problem to solve than remaining on a completely proprietary system like Microsoft Windows.
On a distribution like Ubuntu which includes non-free bits (popular for its ease of use and broad developer support) you can still avoid most non-free software and as time / ability / energy permits try and get off the remaining non-free bits your still using.
You can always ask questions about free software concerns (like is xyz free software) here even if your not on Trisquel (yet). While that isn't something you'd do normally on most distribution-specific forum/irc channel/etc the people here care about one thing: your freedom. Not what distribution your on. People will help. It's a great community and there are people here running other free distributions like Parabola GNU/Linux even (harder, but the distribution doesn't have a specific forum, I don't think). Everybody who cares about freedom is welcome.
Proprietary software is terrible.
Plus the terminal is a helpful tool. Learn it (in my humble opinion).
GNU/Linux-libre does not require a user to always use the terminal (if you have a desktop environment).
We are all about Freedom over convenience.
"We are all about Freedom over convenience."
and hopefully
freedom and convenience
Though initially you realize Terminal (command-line) is hard and difficult, But I am sure you will find it powerful, fast and secure. For new user visit Introduction to The Command Line.
Have a look: Why we must insist on free software.
Both very good links right there, I would recommend the person who posts this thread reading them. Even I am going to read them :D.
Trisquel is my only OS and has been since 2010
But I' not coming from windows
I'm come from Solaris and net bsd
for me Trisquel is user-friendly
I love it
I am a member!
I've been using Trisquel as my only OS for almost two years now. I used Ubuntu briefly and then found Richard Stallman. Was lucky with my hardware in that it worked without problems. Then I was inspired to get a free bios in the form of libreboot and got a gluglug http://shop.gluglug.org.uk/
No problems. The terminal although daunting at first is now my go-to guy for most tasks.
One thing I found very useful at first is dragging a file from a nautilus window and dropping it in the terminal. This gives you a working path to the file without having to rack your brain.
;)
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