Linux is basically this experience all the time btw.

"this experience" being "in order for things to work i have to put a semantically opaque bash command in my command line that a stranger posted online; and then figure something out from a github"

Also ALSO software devs and techies don't like things like pop-up tutorials that are helpful to new users and hold your hand; and are very hostile to attempts to add them. My onboarding modal for Mastodon received a LOT of resistance from sysadmin types who said it should be something you go look at like documentation; or a button you opt-into

but like ppl who don't go poking in every nook and cranny aren't gonna find a tutorial unless it presents itself to you

@shel Thinking about it, this experience is much more common on Windows than a Linux distro, right? I wonder if this isn't always on purpose. Like they're trying to frustrate Windows users into switching. "Officially" (I'm talking rms & co.) you shouldn't support Windows because it's proprietary and so making something good for Windows users is helping proprietary software, so it's all bad and stuff. (I think this is their perspective.)

@shel Of course this is probably more likely to frustrate most people into using proprietary (and easier to use) software. Oops.

@lanodan @shel I'm saying that he and others would seem to prefer if you COULDN'T run free software on Windows, and see it as a necessary evil at best. They'd probably put a Windows kill switch in if being free software wouldn't make it trivial to remove. And yeah they're not always the most coherent bunch on licensing.

@shel when designing an onboarding for @SealasApp we were gonna do exactly this

"DESPITE" the EXPLICIT goal that it should be usable by people who don't know how to do accounting, or are "non-technical"

@shel there's always someone noting that you need to know what files and commands you're using to make sure they're safe, but there's very little explanation of what commands or files do what things, unless you go digging (and know what to look for)

@shel LibreOffice was originally developed (as OpenOffice) by a multi billion dollar corporation and development is now sponsored by a foundation that pulls in around a million euros a year

They have slightly more resources than the vast majority of open source projects

@vi fair
though installing software w/o running a mysterious command line command from github shouldn't cost billions of dollars

@shel supporting deployment of a software package across a very heterogeneous range of PC platforms is a very different skillset than is required to write the software itself. the people doing the work of making the libraries aren't wrong for putting it on github - but we need more people doing the work of *carrying the ball from there to the goal* to make it accessible to all. it's less exciting work but extremely necessary, as you've discovered

@shel to be clear, I *totally* agree with this thread, and my concerns about it are why I package software for Debian (end users shouldn't have this much overhead to install and use a thing!), but I wish I had a real, sustainable solution :(