Linux

Well, why should the average end-user use Linux, actually? If your answer is privacy, taking control back or something in that general line, you're essentially advocating for a technological solution on the individual level as a solution to what essentially are and always have been political and ideological problems. Expecting that to work out is wishful thinking at best. I have growing suspicions, though, that it's more like a different ideological layer, and in that regard quite akin to making the climate catastrophe about choices of individual consumers (of which they often have very few, actually).

Most of the time the frustrating thing is it's users. If you look for help about something that is obviously badly designed somehow... You get gatekeeping or "you're using it wrong" responses.

I think the issue is that while Linux is capable of a lot when you can take full advantage of it, each task requires way more knowledge or a good tutorial and no complications.

For me, I love working with Linux and have been doing it on and off for decades, but it doesn't tend to remain my daily because of the extra steps and limitations.

I think if I had a more full working knowledge of Linux and I knew Python or had a stronger grasp of other languages, I'd be a lot more able to fill those gaps. But without that, it there are all these barriers to productivity that aren't there otherwise. Instead of doing the thing I'm trying to do, i end up spending the night messing around with some depreciated program or struggling with a weird use case and it simply requires way more of my time to get there.

Considering that I have a lot more experience with Linux than the average person and still run into this regularly, I'd say it's a big barrier to wider adoption.

Honestly the solution is probably more on the end of getting together to make some of these issues less complicated than on the end of expecting everyone to become a well versed Linux enthusiast. With such a high learning curve, unless you're using it for something it's particularly good at doing easily, you kind of have to want to get into Linux for its own sake in order to learn enough to make it easier to use. And even then, it's a struggle sometimes.

There is some software that it will plain just not run. I moved over to fedora from Windows and was loving it for about 6 months, but I needed CAD software for work that I could just not get to work, no matter what tinkering I did.

You are doing something wrong. I stopped distrohopping ~13 years ago and never had to reinstall OS after that. If I get error messages, they are helpful enough to figure out the root of the problem (unlike that in Windows, where everything under the hood is hidden from user). For me Windows and macOS are frustrating, not Linux.

Maybe Linux is not good enough for you, maybe you are not good enough for Linux. Anyway, don't constrain yourself, use software that you are comfortable with.

I only touch windows when I absolutely have to, and luckily that is getting rarer over time

It’s not plug and play

Maybe give an immutable OS, like Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite a try?

The idea is that it's very hard to break the system, because apps are containerized, so they don't 'touch' the system, and updates take effect only on reboots.

If update is broken, it won't apply. And you can always rollback to previous state, if you don't like something.

You don't need to install stuff from the terminal, and you can install them from a GUI 'store'.

Basic features wouldn’t work properly if not at all.

I just installed Debian 12 on my Surface Go 2. The camera isn’t working, touch is broken, casting screen not working, on screen keyboard isn’t working.

Mind you I’m a full stack developer and i have a linux server at home so I have decent technical knowledge and a little bit of time.

It's not that Linux is hard, it's that people are used to other stuff and have very little interest in learning something new for no good reason.

Unless you really convince someone that there is a good reason to put in the work, how little it may be, to get used to something new, they won't do it and complain.

I have used Linux for around 10 years. My daily driver has changed a couple times but I always go back to Mint. I think its better than Ubuntu personally. Its what I always recommend and I've been a sys admin for 5 years and dealt with production environments across all the core distros.

All that said it really depends on what programs you are using. Some have alternatives sure but sometimes that's not enough. Sometimes you will have a program that just pins you to Windows until you don't need it anymore.

You should list out what things you use that you need. Take some recommendations on their alternatives or how to set them up in Linux and see if it sounds like it'd work for you.

Is a different paradigm. The way you do almost anything is different from windows, from updating drivers to downloading programs. It's frustrating in the same way driving in the wrong side of the road can be frustrating, or going a whole day using only your non dominant hand.

I've tried to convince a couple people over the last few years to convert, and their issues always baffle me, until my brother tried for a week and I finally understood. It's just unlearned everything they've been doing for years, to do things a different way.

I hope that snaps, flatpaks, AppImages, etc., will make a big difference in terms of adoption and ease of use. As @[email protected] said, if complications arise while trying to install or use software, then you're basically screwed unless you have a really good tutorial or deep knowledge. I've been using various Linux distros as daily drivers for the past ~10 years, and in that time, I still haven't figured out why there's such a big emphasis on compiling software. Your average Windows user has probably never even heard of compilation let alone been required to compile software in order to use it. For better or worse, the emphasis in Windows is on shipping binaries that the user can simply double-click to run. And if we want to reduce frustration for new Linux users, we can't expect them to know how to compile software. Snaps, flatpaks, and AppImages definitely move us in the right direction even if there's a lot of internal debate about which of those is best.

It's also nice to see big flagship projects like Gnome finally really taking off in terms of quality. Of course, the Gnome desktop environment won't appeal to everyone aesthetically, and it's generally much more resource-intensive than Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE, LXQt, etc.; but distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Pop!_OS, etc., look really great and work really well out of the box for most people. Same with Linux Mint. And I personally don't care for KDE, but it's another DE that's pretty solid.