I’m obviously going to be downvoted for this, but the second you ask me to use the terminal is the second the OS is not ready.

Last week I reinstalled Windows after trying MintOS. I have a 54" Ultrawide screen monitor and I wanted the windows to snap in 3 sections.

I spent a few hours in terminal trying to install something after trying everything in flatpak. Windows 11 split screens out of the box. It can even tile. You can even use hotkeys to snap left and right.

In order for normies like me to switch, you have to make the OS at as easy to use as Windows. Don’t make us use terminal like I’m on DOS.

Wow, so many wrong comments. My parents using Linux laptops for 10 years (which i give them second hand when i buy a new one). Now i set up NixOS with auto updates, and never needed to touch it again myself.

I’ve used Linux for 25 years now and I remember every time when back then people needed help with windows it was always "go to the registry editor and add the key djrgegfbwkgisgktkwbthagnsfidjgnwhtjrtv in position god-knows-where to fix some stupid windows shit. that, apparently, made windows user ready

On Linux I’d have to edit an English language file and add an English word and that meant it wasn’t user ready

Yeah, Linux was ready long ago

If you want to see what linux was like 15 years ago try installing OpenBSD lol

The problem is that Linux is only ready in certain cases. For me, it isn’t there yet, because I can’t use it for my gaming machine. Every time this is brought up, Linux enthusiast shrug it off as “no big deal”, you can game on Linux, just the games that use kernel level anti-cheat won’t work. Well yeah, that’s a bit the issue, I still like to play some of those games you see?

Meanwhile, I have Linux Mint running on a laptop that I bring on vacation. I don’t game on that one. Then Linux works just as well as any other OS, no issue.

Ship laptops with LM and people will stray on Linux. Some might switch due to windows OS locked apps like ms365 but for most watching YouTube and maybe managing photos is all they do.

I run dual boot and honestly, if only all things which run on windows would run on Linux without tribal shamanism rituals, is never ever had to switch. But my favorite DAW is not running Linux. My occasionally useful editing software is not there (but kdenlive is cool tho). My very specific apps for games are not running native or at all.

When I’m not using these, I just flip a switch and run DAS with Bazzite. And I love it. But you just can’t substitute everything windows offers. It is a gaming and working software OS after all.

Ok, I’ll bite. I tried Ubuntu a few months ago. Logging into Eduroam was a bit of a process, but eventually I figured it out and it worked. Then one day the internet didn’t work and I had no idea why. Something to do with the network drivers. Then I was trying to use OpenOffice (or LibreOffice? The one that came with the OS), and I use Zotero for references. The Zotero plugin had a bunch of glitches that made me not trust it. The Internet (back on Windows) assured me that it worked fine, but it was way glitchier than the Windows version.

The bottom line is that I just need this stuff to work because I don’t have time to debug. I love the idea though; maybe I was using the wrong distro.

People who are like this today, tried to install red hat 5/6 using popular mechanics magazine as an instruction booklet and with floppy disks

Either that or they tried to install Open BSD once and survived: https://xkcd.com/349/

By all standards, a completely understandable outcome

If you see this meme and think “well actually, I had a really difficult time last time I tried to install Linux” - did you ask for help? That’s what the internet is for.

It is in mixed states of ready. Each distro has something it’s ready for and something it isn’t. It’d be nice if all the ready parts were in a single distro, but that’s an XKCD 927 issue. I am hopeful that Valve puts thought and effort into making SteamOS a solid desktop on top of a solid gaming platform.

I just tried using Linux as my main Gaming OS desktop probably about a month and half ago after using it for college for 5 years.

I love Linux but for NVIDIA drivers and gaming it still very much isn’t there.

So, which distro is the ready one?

Tried it again a few months ago when HDR support first dropped in KDE. It didn’t work at all. Everything was desaturated and dim. Literally the opposite of what HDR is supposed to do.

I’m giving it another year before I try Linux again. Hopefully the bugs are sorted by then.

The main problem still is that for some configuration you still need to use the CLI, the average user does not want to touch that no matter how powerful it is, they want a fully functional GUI that lets you so exactly the same thing but by clicking on buttons. Pair that with drivers that either do not exist or will not work for (some) of your hardware, odd crashed like the Bluetooth stack crapping out and not working anymore until you restart the system, or the system that hangs from hibernation with a black screen. So unless those hurdles are tackled the Linux adoption rate will stay low because the average user wants a system that works, and not one they have to debug.

I’ve been on and off different distros of Linux since Ubuntu 6 using Pop_OS! as my daily driver for work a few years now, and the same problems I had then are still here today which is a shame honestly.

The average ‘advanced’ window user: CLI is scary!

Also the average ‘advanced’ windows user: if you open regedit and add this DWORD entry to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Microsoft/application/windows/something, then you can stop Microsoft from screwing you, but it’ll revert after each update so you gotta keep fixing it