BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO THE LINUX DESKTOP
October 7, 2016 Joe Collins
There is much talk in the Linux world about the mythical “average user.” There is no such thing with Linux. First off, people who use Linux usually are those who know a thing or two about computers to begin with and want to take advantage of all the choices Linux offers. Linux has been considered the place for nerds, hackers and programmers for years. These folks are NOT typical at all. Secondly, it is unfortunate but true that most advanced Linux users are completely out of touch with what an average user really is.
The vast majority Windows and Mac users are those who have learned just enough to get done what they need to get done. They’re clueless about how the machines they use everyday get those tasks accomplished and the idea of popping open a bash terminal to work with configuration files or fix problems is way out of their comfort zones. This does not mean that Linux can’t offer them a safe and friendly environment to work in, far from it. Linux offers a wide variety of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) that make working with a Linux box a point and click affair.
Most Linux Desktop Environment (DE) documentation leaves a lot to be desired. Those who write that sort of thing usually make a lot of assumptions. They assume that the end user understands basic principles about file management, text editing and so on. The dazzling array of choices and options tends to confuse the novice Linux newcomer and therefore they get frustrated easily. What it comes down to is the fact that most users these days didn’t get any formal training. They’ve learned how to use a computer by poking around until they got the machine to do something useful.
With this in mind, I set about to create a series of videos that would go back to fundamentals and give folks a good grounding in DE concepts, regardless of their current skill level.
All the videos are in a YouTube playlist so you can bookmark it and go through them all in order. We’ll get into some detail but I hope they have been presented in a way that the novice user who wants to learn will find easy to follow.
Let’s talk a bit about what each video talks about, shall we?
HOW WE GOT HERE
GNOME 3 looks much different than XFCE and MATE is a far cry from Unity. KDE Plasma is a world unto itself while OpenBox is a blank canvas for users to paint any combination of tools and widgets on to make up their own custom GUI. These are all DEs that you can use on your Linux machine and they all owe their heritage to earlier GUIs that came before Linux was a gleam in Linus Torvalds’s eye.
The one DE of yore that has had the most influence on the evolution of Linux DEs is Windows 95/98. As hard as it might be for some die-hard Linux fanatics to admit, credit must be given to Microsoft for coming up with a graphical way to work with a computer that has become the gold standard. More people learned how to use a computer using a Windows “Start Menu Desktop” than any other other. Linux Mint’s Cinnamon is a really good example of a Start Menu-styled modern Linux DE. Anyone who spent any time with Windows in the past will be familiar with Cinnamon’s ways.
Beyond the look and feel of Windows 95 is the fact that MS provided all the basic tools one would need to manage a computer. Things like a Text Editor, Command Line Terminal and a File Manager were baked right in. The Internet was also an integral part of the DE. Believe it or not, avant-guard DEs like GNOME 3 and Unity offer the very same tools today and they function pretty much the same way they did more than 20 years ago.
In the first video, we take a look at the venerable Windows 95/98 Desktop and talk about some of the basic tools it provided.
Read more: https://freedompenguin.com/articles/how-to/beginners-guide-linux-desktop/
Wed Oct 12, 2016 9:48 am