Ask Lemmy

It is funny to be downvoted on this after working as an IT technician for a decade and a half, including as a Linux sysadmin, a VIP tech, a 365 admin and normal user support.

Currently I would not suggest Linux/BSD to any inexperienced user, this is due to two reasons:

• Market share - Desktop linux has grown massively in the last few years, but it is still in the 5-10% range, Linux is not a mainstream desktop OS as much as the Feddiverse might believe it is, this limits available support, with Windows, people can go to coworkers or friends and ask, the likelyhood that that would work when using Linux is ridiculously small, so whoever introduced them to Linux will be on the hook for supporting them.
• Fractured market share - Despite only having a very small marketshare, desktop Linux is highly fractured, some distributions use APT to install .deb packages, on the RPM side, I have used the following package managers: yum, zypper and dnf, and on Arch based distributions I habe had to use pacman and yay. Then we get to the the init systems, sure the likelyhood is that they will never need to care, untill something fails, depending on the issue, knowing if you use the classic init system, or if you use systemd. The fractured nature of Linux means that support is even more fractured, if you find an active support forum it is quite possible that it is dedicated to another distribution and at best wont be of any help, and at worst be abusive toward you for making the wrong choices.

My point is that Linux is not ready for the normal person without tech interest, I'd gladly recommend Linux to a person disposed to solve their own problems, especially if they are showin an interest in tech.