Linux needs to grow. Stop telling people it's 'tech-y' or acting like you're more advanced for using it, you are scaring away people. Linux Mint can be used by a senile person perfectly.
Explain shortly the benefits, 'faster, more secure, easier to use, main choices of professionals and free'. Ask questions that let you know if they need to dual boot, 'do you use Adobe, anti-cheat games, or Microsoft Office', 'how new is your computer', 'do you use a Mac'.
And most importantly, offer to help them install.
They don't understand the concept of distros, just suggest Linux Mint LTS Cinnamon unless they're curious.
That's it, spread Linux to as many people as possible. The larger the marketshare, the better support we ALL get. We can fight enshittification. Take the time to spread it but don't force it on anyone.
AND STOP SCARING PEOPLE AWAY. Linux has no advertising money, it's up to us.
Offer family members or friends your help or copy and paste the below
how to install linux: 1) copy down your windows product key 2) backup your files to a harddrive 3) install the linux mint cinnamon iso from the linux mint website 4) use etcher (download from its website) to put the iso on a usb flash drive 5) go into bios 6) boot from the usb 7) erase the storage and install 8) press update all in the update manager 9) celebrate. it takes 15 minutes.
edit: LET ME RE-STATE, DO NOT FORCE IT ON ANYONE.
and if someone is at the level of ignorance (not in a derogatory fashion) that they dont know what a file even is genuinely dont bother unless theyre your parents cause youll be tech support for their 'how do i install the internet' questions.
Linux sysadmin here too. I run Windows on my main workstation now because I have no patience for issues like sound not working when I join a video call and shit like that. Your post perfectly describes my gripe with Linux.
Windows sucks but 99 percent of problems are solved by simply rebooting the motherfucker.
I've seen a couple of posts in here about sound. It's wild that I've been through dozens of distros since the start of high school (12 years ago), installed them on at least 10 machines over that time, and can't remember one issue with sound that took more than 15 seconds to fix (e.g discord choosing the wrong sound device because I have 6 things plugged in that can technically output sound, which also happens to my friends who use Windows).
Maybe I'm just lucky. The only issues I recall having in the last decade are essentially graphics related. Either game compatibility (though proton/wine is much better than it was in 2015) or desktop environments being finicky (freezing on sleep for example), but the latter afaict was entirely due to proprietary nvidia drivers. There are proper, high-performance open source drivers in the works, so nvidia might be on par with amd in 2-3 years on Linux (which is to say literally no issues for the vast majority of people, probably far more stable than Windows).
In the same time I've had lots of people come to me with problems that we've specifically troubleshooted and found Windows to be the issue even when it seemed like hardware problems. Like monitor flickering/black screening, and plugging in a different monitor the issue goes away. On the surface it seems like a hardware problem, but both monitors worked flawlessly on Linux for literally months. Full reinstalling Windows did not fix the issue. Upgrading from Windows 10 -> 11 did not fix the issue.
Same thing with another friend's external SSD. For some reason it wasn't being detected on his Windows 7 install. We installed Linux and the drive was picked up. Maybe Windows 10 would've also picked up the drive in this circumstance, but a lot of people hated the idea of Windows 10 at the time (this was just after Windows 10 was released, when Windows 7 still had a similar market share).
There's likely a huge percentage of problems people attribute to hardware that are actually Windows being a shitty O.S, but nobody actually checks if Windows is the problem.
Ubuntu resets my default audio every time I put it to sleep. I have no idea why, other distros didn't do this. Sometimes it fails to detect the speakers on my laptop completely.
I've found Ubuntu to need a lot less effort than other distros so I'm not planning to ditch it yet, but even Ubuntu still has weird quirks like this.
Also, some apps fail to open in x11 for some reason so I have to switch to a Wayland session every now and then. And then switch back to x11 because other apps won't open in Wayland.
Linux always has some weird usability issue no matter how many distros I've tried. It's getting a lot better but it's not there yet.
Similarly, maybe just luck, but I've not really had a problem with windows since windows 10/server 2019. Yeah it's resource heavy but I can't even recall anything I've specifically had to delve into forums to troubleshoot. That said I haven't had to do any windows desktop support since windows 7, thank the gods.
I deployed several server 2022 vms at work due to special circumstance and its actually good out of box, I only disabled some print services and my gold image was ready. Those have been running for a year and I've only rebooted them due to patching. Very different than the windows I adminned back in the 2000s.
Every word you speak is truth.
Something in my heart feels that if instead of spreading out a huge topheavy ecosystem of near identical distros that change their hippy dippy naming structures on a regular basis and instead on GETTING F$@KING PERIPHERALS TO WORK CONSISTENTLY then it would be a mainstream option.
I think the current massive distro ecosystem is actually cointelpro by the OS big boys to cripple competition.