The vast majority of people have no experience installing an OS and likely never will.
The typical user uses whatever is preinstalled when the get the hardware.
My father-in-law wrecked his windows pc with malware over and over so I bought him a Wow PC https://www.mywowcomputer.com/ and he loves it. I don’t think he has any idea its running linux.
Honestly I think the bigger barrier is the BIOS. The button to get to the boot menu is different on every motherboard.
My brother in Christ, do you think an average person knows what BIOS/boot menu are?
That’s what I’m saying. The OS installer can be super nice and intuitive, but the process of getting to that point, messing with the BIOS, is troublesome.
I know in the past there’s been tools that allowed you to install Linux from within Windows. That would be a great way to work around this problem, though I think there are certain limitations with that approach.
How do updates work with WOW computers? Or does the software just never get updated? Or do you just update the computer for him every now and then? What distro is this using underneath?
The updates are automatic. They seem to have rolled their own desktop environment. Not sure which distro. The main selling point was that I don’t need to maintain it for him. I am registered as his “tech buddy” so they contact me if something needs to be done hands on. In 3 years no issues/calls so far.
From the website landing page :
New programs and updates are provided automatically for the life of your WOW! Computer.
From https://www.mywowcomputer.com/open-source/
Distro is based on tiny core
The source files can be found by following 3 links deep to https://www.telikin.com/source/ doesn’t look like they include their frontend though, which might be proprietary, idk.
(you lazy bastard /j)