At a certain point, though, you have to wonder whether a traditional desktop linux distro is better for regular users than just preinstalled ChromeOS on a Chromebook.

I revived an old computer using Mint, and it works great, but that's for my brother who just browses and does spreadsheet and writing. I'm a bit more involved with how I use a computer and it is difficult enough to setup a wireless Xbox controller that I am considering automating it for future use and make that public. Note that I know fuck all about how to even begin, and I might give up halfway through, but the point stands that the motivation was triggered by a lack of user friendliness.

I feel like it depends on which distro and hardware you choose. I remember having some weird pcie errors on xubuntu on an HP pc, and I couldn’t find a fix online. Windows is pretty hassle free on almost all hardware, probably owing to the fact that all the hardware is made to work with windows (or owing to windows excellent compatibility, maybe both?)

Using regular Ubuntu on a laptop now it’s pretty seamless though. I haven’t had to do any command line stuff for setup as of yet, so it’s getting better.

Tried out Pop OS for my laptop which is generally seen as a simpler distro. I had to hit up terminal to attempt fprintd. Getting a fingerprint registered was a pain in the ass. Then when I did get it registered, I could not log back in through the UI. I'll still likely switch to it sometime soom and send the logs to fprintd to eventually fix but it was still frustrating as hell since fingerprint scanners are a pretty basic feature nowadays.

The only issues I've really had with my Linux Mint VM is upgrade issues and my smb mount occasionally failing. Both of those basically required terminal.

Don't get me wrong, Linux is a fuck ton easier than it was 15 years ago when I started testing it out. But there still is a ways to go.