Try installing an app, like Cursor, which I hear is all the rage among my friends who aren’t professional developers, on Ubuntu. It doesn’t just work!

I kid you not, you have to contort your body and brain and jump through a series of hoops to arrive at an application showing in your desktop.

Wanting to install an app can be as time-sensitive as needing to take a shit after holding it in for an hour, and so Linux makes you shit in your pants.

The only ways to prevent this is:

1. Hope that you find a clear enough, up-to-date enough tutorial on the web that you can follow to the tee and just works.
2. Go learn about the operating system.

I am a developer with 10 years of experience and even I don’t want to be forced to read a manual just to get an app installed. I just want it to be installed, damn it. In fact, I just want to use the app — if I can skip the concept of installation altogether, I would.

Asking of user to do #2 is the equivalent of telling someone that before they are allowed to walk into a building they need to familiarise themselves with the floorplan. Maybe attempt to make buildings that aren’t mazes?

So as a developer, this could be one’s calling: to powerfully mix technical know-how with a tinge of empathy to remove toil from users. Consider the effort goodwill, albeit one that would actually provide a competitive edge among the shit.

Users really shouldn’t need to conjure up the ancient knowledge of filesystems, terminal, and sudo commands just to be able to launch a piece of software.

Yes, there are some Linux (Ubuntu) apps that can be installed via the command line or App Center, but the ones that don’t appear to be downloadable and installable via those avenues are the ones that define the user experience.