This is gonna be an unpopular opinion here but telling people who have used Windows their entire lives to just switch to Linux as if it's that easy is entirely unhelpful and makes the Linux community look elitist and out of touch.
this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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I mean... they are out of touch. I'm sure its possible to have a pain free switch over but when I had trouble the advice was interspersed with quite a few caveats. In essence Linux is 'easy to setup but...' Still gonna try again though, also guys that laptop you all said was dying because linux made it crash is still working fine on windows with no sign of trouble.
Itβs easier to use than Windows
Just give GUI troubleshooting instead of CLI
Itβs easier to use than Windows
LOL, good one!
I especially loved the user friendliness of my distro randomly disconnecting my BT mouse and refusing to reconnect. Had to edit grub to get it back to working order.
Or how I changed the lock screen image through settings. Now I can see it - in Settings. Only. Because if I lock my device, I still see the old one.
Or how on Kubuntu, my previous distro, the applications' menu (the one with "File", "View", "Help", etc.) just disappeared from all apps. Spent two days trying to sort it out and ended up switching to Tuxedo OS.
Such an easy to use OS, especially for those who've never done one bit of troubleshooting themselves!
Life is a long learning experience. Installing (or asking that nerdy relative to install) a Linux distro is no biggie anymore and when picking a good all-around distro like Mint, for example, pretty much anyone who has some basic experience on computers can do it.
I do agree that life is a learning experience, but I might say that you're overestimating what "basic experience on computers" means, and I tend to find that this is fairly typical of people who have more advanced skills because this stuff is basic to us. But we can sometimes lack perspective in that regard.
Basic experience on computers for most people means "can use Office apps, can send emails, can more or less use the internet". Essentially, they can use the computer for their work or for some light entertainment. It certainly doesn't mean that they know how to or that they even can configure the BIOS to boot from a USB, or for that matter what the BIOS is or that it exists. It doesn't mean that they can use the terminal, or use WINE to run their favourite Windows applications or troubleshoot an operating system that is entirely alien to them. I'd even go as far as to say that most people don't even know what an operating system is - to them, Windows is the computer and they don't know or care about anything different. This is the kind of person I'm talking about. Everything you said might as well be Ancient Greek to that person.
I get it. That's why I included the part about "the family tech guy". And I think some sparkle of interest must be had in order to learn about that stuff. Or any stuff, like learning Ancient Greek. One has to be able to use a web search (or write a prompt to an LLM) for "beginner install linux" or some such. If the spark isn't there, maybe buying a new Windows/Mac is the correct way to go.
Id run Linux if it could run the apps I need efficiently
use alternatives if possible
try mas for activiating ESU
I stopped using windows while using Win XP, maybe 16 or 17 years ago. When I try using current windows I become useless, I can barely figure out how to use it.
That's how I feel when I use Linux or MacOS
Too bad, only 1 out of my approx. 150 customers have their IT dept. using Linux as server during my 6 years in - the rest of it is Windows... all the users have either Windows 10, 11 or they use Apple.
Halp.
Edit: not counting the educational users, as they come in hordes
My CPU and motherboard are from 2016. I don't mind updating harware to reach windows 11 compability, it's about time anyway.
I would be angry if updating to 11 from 10 would also cost money directly.
Probably what I'm gonna do. I used to live in a country where it was completely normal to illegally download software from ThePirateBay, and that's how everyone got their Windows versions, but I don't even feel like doing that anymore.
It's like they are not even trying. I have a laptop with 7th gen CPU that works perfectly fine. I don't have any choice than install Linux, lol.
Windows is becoming increasingly uncomfortable in that regard. I've been thinking about switching to Linux Mint for a while now.
Make a flash drive bootloader so you can preview what it is like? Why not?
if it is something I would like to do.
I did that 2 moths ago and rarley boot into windows any longer. It's a learning curve for sure, and I'm at the bottom part of it, but it feels nice to expand your knowledge bit by bit.
Yeah, I love the DIY mindset but sometimes it feels like people are trying to learn to surf in big punishing waves and deciding that if they can't learn to surf those that surfing is too frustrating.
It is totally legit just to dip your toes in bit by bit, thank you for making that point!
As someone tried to build the snes9x-nwaemu fork from scratch today after spending hours fighting the Linux mint updater getting stuck, ahhhhhhhhjjj. I still have to have windows for a couple of things anyway which makes this all the more annoying. The update also wrecked my davinci install which I need to produce videos. Also, I work two jobs so not a ton of time for this.
I get this, I have limited time and it realy only works "out of the box" on the surface. Still, so get it's been worth putting in the effort.
Don't build from scratch then. I also use resolve in Linux, other than the odd Nvidia driver botch it works fine
My alternative is to try to run a bunch of stuff in wine (not sure if it would work) for the one case and I'd rather run it natively. I don't know, for the video editing case, if it would run in wine (and if it did, would I lose my ability to use hardware rendering).
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