When a Linux desktop environment breaks, it breaks hard. I’ve lost whole days of work debugging stupid nonsense like where I couldn’t get past the login screen without switching from GDM to LightDM, or not being able to open settings in Gnome until I realized that it was a proprietary display driver issue, or had a previously working secondary display just switch to rendering a distorted image. And these are things that would happen after installing routine updates that the OS prompted! The investigations and fixes were just filled with deep dives into configuration files and all sorts of CLI shenanigans. Searching for solutions brought up inapplicable suggestions from 6 distro versions ago.
Windows and MacOS certainly have their issues but they’ve never broken like that for me. I still use Linux on my work machine but anecdotally speaking I don’t think it’ll ever be daily-driver ready for “most people.”
The Distros mentioned in the article are meant to be used without changing anything else…
If you meant Arch, I agree with your concern. But Arch isn’t designed for beginners in the first place. It was designed to be built.
Any operating system would break if you tinking too much about how it was built. In Windows, if you mess with regedit too much, it’ll start to misbehave or worse, Blue Screen…
I love my Mint laptop and I find it plausible that someone who just does “the basics” could get by with a usability-focused distro.
In my experience, the problem is that not a lot of people really are just sticking to basics on their PC anymore. The truly “just browsing and email” users just use their phone. Someone with a PC is doing something—gaming, photo editing/digital art, audio production, long form writing—where they have a proprietary app they like. Either that, or they’re using it for work and have a company controlled, fully Office 365’d PC.
Linux got usable enough for basic users, but basic users left PCs behind.
As a dual booter such a dumb take. Mac and Windows are much easier for the masses. Have to debug stuff with Linux is not something the average wants to do or even can do. Not to mention the biggest problem, software compatibility. Also the last part gave me a chuckle. “Elderly people who are not familiar with advanced technology and prefer clean and simple computer usage.” Are you fucking kidding me? Mac is the way to go for old people IMO.
Most people cannot install or debug windows. For most people the biggest issue is their support network. My father-in-law and my wife run Linux and have done so for 20 years. They are not technical and it works just fine. My mom uses Windows and I have not suggested Linux because I am not local. She needs a local support network. I spend as much time or more supporting her.
The worst barrier is explicit hardware compatibility not software. Most hardware works but you never know. For software most things have FOSS eqyivalents. If you actually want to run commercial software then sure Windows or whatever platform it runs on.
Debug, you say? Windows is way harder to keep running than Linux. At least an immutable distro like UBlue. You don’t need to debug anything. Just get it running, get some shit installed over the top, and it will auto update forever. I’ve got lots of relatives living comfortably that way for years now. If they were running Windows, it would be a support call every week and a fresh install every 2 years.
Now, Mac I’ll grant you. A Mac will also just keep running forever. But you can run nearly every Windows game on Linux and almost none of them on Mac. And Mac requires special hardware.
