This is oft repeated but is short sighted, it is NOT that people do not want to think, it is that they don’t have the time and energy to constantly fight their devices to perform simple tasks.

This. I get a wild hair every couple years to daily drive Linux and there’s always something small but crucial that breaks within a day or so and there’s no way for me, a relative novice, to fix it.

Example: I picked up a old ThinkPad on ebay last year. I put Ubuntu on it and after a day or two the wifi just stops working. No error messages. Nothing. I tried digging into the settings via ui with no luck. Googling didn’t help because I couldn’t tell what was helpful, unhelpful, or would have been helpful but is five years out of date.

After a few days of trying to make it work, I just threw on windows and haven’t had any issues since.

Except can’t trust corporate clowns to keep shit working… Once they they obtain market share, they start doing weird things, recent example win11 where they make it less useable just because fuck plebs.

I’ve resorted to just creating accounts for other people for them, updating the avatar and profile, following people and hashtags that might interest them, and then just handing them the login info.

Good news! Sh.itjust.works!

This exactly. Services should always be background. The OS is a service, not a goal.

Remember that Android is Linux-based

People keep saying this without understanding that Android was forked with several billion dollars in funding and aimed squarely at “normal” users, and had a decade of development since then.

Most “Linux” OSes really don’t bother with this. How many times has someone sent you into the Android terminal to fix a problem? Literally never. It doesn’t even exist without connecting a PC. Because you don’t need it.

He is clearly talking about the problems with Linux the OS, i.e. GNU/Linux, not with Linux the kernel, which is what Android is based on. So Android users don’t count as Linux OS users. Besides that, I’ve been using Debian+KDE for over a decade as a daily driver and never had any such issues, It’s hard for me to remember a single issue of importance.

Initial setup can be hard, and then, because GNU/Linux lets you do whatever you want, It’s not hard to bork the system if you’re using commands you don’t understand. The biggest realization for me was that if I want a stable system, I can’t expect to experiment with it / customize it to the nth degree unless I have a robust rollback / recovery solution like timeshift in place. Feeling very empowered after leaving windows, I have destroyed many systems, but truly, if you set up your system and then leave it alone, these days it’s not difficult to have a good experience.

But yea, you’re totally right: the userbase can be toxic AF, and there’s no one place you can go to learn the basics you really ought to know.

Hey, the other day I set up a fresh Arch install in like an hour; it was easy as hell with Arch Installer in its current state. But that’s me - I’ve been running Linux for a while, so i might be a bit out of touch with what new folks have issues with.

That said, I think a lot of problems new users have with Linux really do come down to foolish mistakes, an unwillingness to read manuals, expecting Linux to work like Windows/Mac, or a combination of the above.
Not all problems, but many.

Yeah, but you can’t expect every person using a computer to be a computer expert. In fact, you should expect most of us not to be.

If someone is using a stable distro like Debian, and just wants to do what 90% of people do (i.e. browsing, looking at documents media etc.), Linux isn’t really a hassle.

I see this point repeated a lot, it’s just not true.

For example sudo apt upgrade is broken currently on the debian live images.

Imagine you tell someone “if you want stable, go debian” they hear it and install it and literally first apt update upgrade it’s borked.

There isnt a distro that isnt a hassle, that doesnt exist.

The command line is always going to turn people away from Linux. I’ve only had to use the command line to fix a windows issue once in the past 10 years while I regularly have to use it every time I have to work with Linux.

People like convenience and will almost always go with the more convenient option even if it’s not the best option.

Until the majority of issues can be solved using point and click (and help forums show that method over command line), Linux will always lag behind Mac and Windows.

That’s exactly my experience.

I’ve been doing Linux since the early days when Slackware fitted a “few” floppy disks and you had to configure the low level CRT display timings on a text file to get X-windows to work, and through my career have used Linux abundantly, at some point even designing distributed high performance software systems on top of it for Investment Banks.

Nowadays I just don’t have the patience to solve stupid problems that are only there because some moron decided that THEY are the ones that after 2 bloody decades of it working fine trully have the perfect way (the kind of dunning-krugger level software design expertise which is “oh so common” at the mid-point of one’s software development career and regularly produces amongst others “yet another programming language were all the old lessons about efficiency of the whole software development cycle and maintenability have been forgotten”) for something that’s been done well enough for years, and decided to reinvent it, so now instead of one well integrated, well documented solution there are these pieces of masturbatory-“brilliance” barelly fitting together with documentation that doesn’t even match it properly.

Just recently I got a ton of headaches merely getting language and keyboard configuration working properly in Armbian because there was zero explanation associated with the choices and their implications, thousands of combinations (99.99% of which are not used or even exists) of keyboard configurations were ordered alphabetically on almost-arbitrary names across 2 tables, with no emphasis on “commonly used” (clearly every user is supposed to be an expert on the ins and outs of keyboard layouts) and there were multiple tools, most of which didn’t work (some immediatelly due to missing directories, others failing after a couple of minutes, others only affecting X) and whatever documentation was there (online and offline) didn’t actually match.

(It’s funny how the “genious” never seems to extend to creating good documentation or even proper integration testing)

Don’t get me wrong: I see Software Architecture-level rookie mistakes all the time in the design of software systems, frameworks and libraries in the for-profit sector (“Hi Google!!!”), but they seem to actually more frequent in Open Source because the barrier for entry for reinventing the wheel (again!) is often just convincing a handful of people with an equally low level of expertise.

(anyways, rant over)

My experience is the opposite but the same. I have been a sysadmin for 15 years in mostly Windows and Microsoft only. All my work tools are in Windows.

I actually boot to Linux when I’m not supposed to work since otherwise I just have anxiety or dread and then I’ll open teams, outlook, ncentral, prtg…

Also why I enjoy my switch. Can’t really do projects on it like I can on Linux, but I also am switched off from work.

I work in devops as well and while Windows is easier and more convenient for many things, some processing-heavy tasks are better left to Linux. Doing generative AI stuff, for example, I don’t want to be loading a bulky OS on top of the task at hand.

I thought about dual booting, but it would make multitasking nearly impossible. So, instead, I’m using Linux whenever possible and I have a Windows VM I can enter at a moment’s notice or hibernate if I need the resources. And then there’s the MacBook, but we don’t talk about the MacBook.

That’s part of why I don’t use Linux, outside of my steamdeck which I rarely go out of game mode so doesn’t even count, I just want my shit to work and not worry about compatibility or “figuring it out” I feel like had I used it at a younger age I’d be more fine with it but I just can’t be bothered tbh.

Honestly, I wouldn’t mind being more knowledgeable about cars. I’m just afraid to touch anything, because I figure I’ll break it and incur a massive bill to replace whatever part I broke. PC operating systems carry no such risk; you can give up on whatever you’re trying and reinstall your old OS at any time without paying anyone anything.

Even PC hardware isn’t that risky to tinker with. It’s an order of magnitude cheaper than a car; lots of people have old, obsolete, but perfectly functional PCs lying around that they’d like taken off their hands; most components are within easy reach; and the component that isn’t within easy reach (the power supply unit) is pretty tough to break.

To use your car analogy, using Windows is like using a car that has the hood welded shut and can only be opened with a special key that only the auto manufacturer has.

You can’t repair it yourself. You can’t just take it to any expert to get it fixed. Only the manufacturer can fix it, because the source code (or car hood) is closed.

My Category theorist friend is always trying to explain how I should try to interpret all my research using category theory instead.

Can you explain how category theorists must be the least frustrated people alive? 😅

Linux, even compared to windows, often doesn make things “easy”.

Mac by comparison makes things incredibly easy, often as the detriment to customization options. But they have really made things like security very well integrated and behind the scenes. You can do Full Disk Encryption in a fairly secure manner with a simple check box. On windows its a bit tougher, normally more of a click through session where they try and make it easier, but give you options to retain the keys yourself at your own risk.

linux…its fairly easy during install. Post installl…basically not possible and for some you have to run through a guide like this: https://mutschler.dev/linux/pop-os-btrfs-22-04/

Thats straight up not digestable for 99% of the world.

Similarly mac makes backups a goddam breeze. Windows is a bit harder but theres a lot of developed software to knock it out thats very good and relatively simple. Linux…well see the guide above as well.

There are places macOS falls short. For example docking stations are a fucking mess and tied to the processor version in new iterations. Ie: You need a M2-pro for 2+ screens. M2 ultra for higher resolutions iirc and a M1/M2 standard can only do a single screen. Theres also Thunderbolt considerations. Its so goddam convoluted we bought dell displaylink docs for most at work.

There are also places windows does well. AD and group policy in a corporate environment are awesome. Simply unrivaled. For someone that plays video games. Windows excels at video games, egpus are legit hotpluggable, drivers are unrivaled there. Linux is getting better than ever but even still. Fired up steam on my Pop_OS and cant get games to launch, even when they show as usabled in protondb.

Linux is unrivaled with options and customization though. But not a whole lot else on the desktop space. On the server side, they are pretty goddam solid from a stability and performance standpoint.

Idk if this is really true, I don’t what situations you need to use the command line in Ubuntu or Fedora that would affect more than 10% of users max. You install packages through the store, wifi can be managed through the gui, external drives mount automatically. Imo this should cover the use case for almost everyone.