This is my old man nerd point every time (and by the way, we all keep having the exact same conversation here, which is infuriating).
It is NOT, in fact, more user friendly than 15 years ago.
Not Linux’s fault, necessarily, but hardware got… weird since the days of the mid 00s when Linux WAS pretty much a drop-in replacement. What it couldn’t do then is run Windows software very well at all, and that was the blocker. If we had Proton and as many web-based apps as we do now in 2004 I’d have been on Linux full time.
These days it’s a much harder thing to achieve despite a lot more work having gone into it (to your point on moving goalposts).
Audio and networking were a shitshow back then, nowadays almost everything just works on those two fronts. Also, having to edit your Xorg.conf is not what I’d call user friendly…
But there was this brief moment, though. Maybe that’s my problem, that I remember it as this momentous piece of Linux history to start getting these cool distros in nice, shiny professional-looking CDs with proper installers that would set up your DE first time every time and get everything mostly there… and it turns out that it was like three years and a couple of Ubuntu iterations.
FWIW, networking mostly works, but I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device last time I went distro hopping. I think audio got better, worse and then better again since the good old days.
I had a heck of a time finding a distro that would properly do 5.1 out of my integrated ASUS audio device
That’s not even close to a common use case though. Using that as an indicator of how user friendly Linux is is unfair.
Especially if you had a soft-modem.
And printing. Oh dear, I might have a headache if I think too much about it.
it definitely is more user friendly, i remember trying ubuntu 10+ years ago and the default driver was awful, the nvidia driver install ran in the terminal and asked questions that i had no answer to, so half the time i fucked it up, and then it didn’t support my monitor so i had to edit the x server conf to get the correct resolution and refresh rate. and when the new drivers came out i had to re-do everything every time
for a few years now you just install with a usb stick and everything runs great
