How is it the least user-friendly? In Ubuntu, for example, nothing in regular use seems particularly different. My grandma started using it as her first OS at 84, and she’s still doing fine.
I'm commuter savvy and tried to get HBO Now to play on Ubuntu. Searched Google and found many different commands to try and run but had no luck. How could something so simple be so difficult?
Because it's not so simple. I have no experienced with HBO Now but similar services. And typically they use DRM like Microsoft Silverlight or the like to prevent people from playing videos without proper access.
The reason why such things are harder to get to work in Linux sometimes is because such DRM-solutions are not always baked in or provided by the same providers as in windows, and might be proprietary.
Also companies like Netflix have been known to filter peoples useragent leading to the exclusion of Linux users. nowadays it's as easy as installing a Silverlight-alternative in your favourite browser or just running a chrome derived browser.
my main point being: it's not always Linux's fault that some things are hard.
Of course that's correct, but we're talking about users that consider their device broken when an icon is not in its place. All they will perceive is "I cannot watch this video because Linux".
> we're talking about users that consider their device broken when an icon is not in its place
I wonder why such people exist at all? They do - reading the comments up to here I saw them mentioned four or five times. Yet the mindset such people supposedly display is totally incomprehensible to me. I can't for the life of me understand why would anyone, when faced with a problem, automatically give up without researching and trying to solve it. This is how I - and probably most of us on HN - learned "computers" in the first place: hours and hours of typing and clicking random things until something happens.
Aside from where do they come from, another question is if we really need to cater to them? Are they truly a majority of users? Is the condition in-born, uncurable, or can they be educated?
> That one quarter of the population can’t use a computer at all is the most serious element of the digital divide.
Frightening... but why?
> To a great extent, this problem is caused by computers still being much too complicated for many people.
Ok, but this doesn't answer my other question - is it possible to educate these people to use the current computers, or do computers really need to be streamlined that much?
I asked myself the same question when I saw a documentary about analphabets. They quoted a number of about 8 million total and functional analphabets for Germany (among 80 million population), which is absolutely staggering.
To witness, people who cannot use a computer are often called "digital analphabets" or similar.
> is it possible to educate these people to use the current computers[?]
Some can be taught, but not all of them.
There is a significant fraction of the population that simply can't "get" certain concepts in a usable form. These are the same folks that are only capable of solving an algebra problem by rote, don't see the difference between making a word bold & italic and doing it indirectly by applying a custom style, etc.
It is important to note that this doesn't have anything to do with a lack of intelligence. Many smart developers struggle in an analogous way with pointers and pointer arithmetic, for example. Some people's brains just don't easily bend very far in certain directions.
Then make them install a distribution preconfigured with these things. I'm quite sure distros like that are around, they were last time I checked for them like 5-10 years ago anyways.
