I too am very cautious of getting stuck with Linux. I try to be sure I’m not doing things the hard way. I have found easy distros and easy ways to do most things in Linux despite many people suggesting I do it the IT pro way that they do. Usually because they haven’t investigated easy ways for non IT users. They mean well, but don’t know about usability or if there us an easy way.

Sadly, big business, techies without imagination and community FOSS without enough capacity are the ones that control what is available. Nothing will suddenly change. Usability is way down the priority list.

That’s not necessarily so. There are all sorts of legacy reasons people give for making poor software. From lazy monopolies to programmers with little understanding of usability. To people without the big picture. It will change.

A GUI with good usability can let you repeat commands exactly if required. They use last used values as default. If people in needed that often we’d see more of it in GUI apps. There is often more useful functionality that get prioritised though.

I thought command line users like typing things. I avoid typing where possible, and dont use the command line on Linux.

Windows doesn’t have a real choice of desktop environments. So I moved to Linux 15 years ago. I’m not in IT and always use a mouse. Importantly for me, I’ve never needed the CLI, despite people telling me that’s impossible. Plasma lets me tweak it to my needs. I use Kubuntu, yet don’t care about what’s below the desktop environment. Happy to change distros.

I install graphical and visual design apps. And I’ll navigate to the category by mouse. I don’t memorise the names of all my apps. I’m not in IT, and I’m not working with text all the time. I’ll right click the app icon and go ‘Add to favourites’, so I have a highly productive, 1 click access to important apps. I’m interested in usability, am not a beginner and I know my UI and settings well. I can see why people find this tiny green dot useful. It’s OK if you are not into usability. But note that there are many different user types, with different needs at different times. And the flexibility of KDE Plasma makes it a really great desktop environment.

The good thing about Dolphin is you can have the real tree following your navigation. Want to go up a few levels, just click once, directly where you want to go next. None of this up, up, up nonsense. Great for snooping in many different folders in quick succession.

Set a large pencil brush size and click a large black dot. Then make the brush smaller and white, then click once in the middle.

sure. those are reasons it’s missing some stuff. But I was referring to other important things also missing from Windows. Which is what Linux seems to follow. Linux has a great opportunity to break away, and come up with something really good. But sadly, there will be reasons not to, I suspect.

AutoCAD might be widely used at the lower end, where many just create a sketch and extrude it. But that is no good for car or aircraft design, where you need high end smooth shape commands, and high productivity workflows.

Great. But AutoCAD and Solidworks are not high end CAD. Acceptable for some I guess. But we need serious CAD.

We have to use Windows at work for our high end CAD. There’s no FOSS alternative.

I use Linux at home. Which is basically a, less crap, copy of Windows. But is still missing important stuff.

Why not both? It’s simple to install both and decide for yourself. I use both for different tasks.

I’m also not a text first person. There are a lot of us about. I have found GUI applications to do most commands I need. Most IT users don’t know them, as they’ve never searched for them. I pin the apps as Favourites in the launcher, to help remember my processes. The apps typically keep the last used values, making them quite productive.

Get a spare computer. Then you will feel more inclined to mess with it. And your main computer is always ready to look up issues and set up boot USB sticks. You will definitely try out lots more distros without hesitation.

And there are some cool mini PCs to buy quite cheap.

Yes. I use that option. But as I rarely see the desktop, hiding any files or folders makes little difference to using Plasma.

My desktop is hidden by all the open apps all the time. Sure you can get there via the file manager, but it’s just another folder. And sure you can deliberately minimise all the apps. But the content is, by default hidden, and not in your face, to be stumbled upon like an inbox. Desktops can only contain closed files, and are a flaw in the UX logic.

English is slightly ambiguous here. As tighten has 2 meanings. Turning a screw clockwise is to tighten it, as opposed to loosen it anticlockwise. But it’s quite loose. Finally, to make it tight and secure, you tighten it with one last turn.

In KDE Plasma, if you right click on the launch menu button, there is an option Show Alternatives. Here, you can immediately select and use one of the installed alternative start menus. On top of that, you can install further launcher menus, which will then appear in the Show Alternatives list. I installed Simple Menu (from Eike Hein) that has categories, favourites and search. And let’s you move the icons around. But its that easy to try out different launchers. I hope you find a good one.