> Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.

They don't. They switched over to iPad 10-ish years ago. Most normies I know use phones and/or tablets full-time for their personal computing. Laptops and desktops are either work machines, for games, or for work without wages (studies, excel, other things which are inconvenient or impossible on a phone).

Grandma is on Linux Mint since she still wants to do her banking on a computer and not an iPad. She'd be on Windows 11 if I weren't her tech support, since then she'd have bought whatever idiot at the local shop would have recommended, wasting a lot of money, and probably still have thrown her arms up in despair after a while due to the shit user experience. If the local shop had machines with Mint preinstalled, I'd imagine that would have gone well, if a lot slower than it would have with my help.

No Windows casual out there has ever even installed Windows, never mind another OS, on their computer, even if they theoretically want to. They can't have what they don't know about, and that barrier is probably never going to go away.

>Ask yourself why your parents still use windows and you'll have your response.

Because if they switch to Linux, I'll be on the hook for tech support. If they stay on windows, then it's mainly my brother's problem.

BTW Windows doesn't seem easy or make much sense to them at all either. Linux wouldn't be any harder for them aside from getting support from random places, or buying random bits of junk with no research expecting them to kinda work.

Until recently (<10 years ago) Windows and native Windows apps (like Office) were the norm in most companies. Almost all employees knew how to use Windows. Re-training all was difficult. Now, with mostly web-apps for most non-IT employees it is a realistic change, but I am still not sure corporations will want to run without Active Directory and Crowdstrike.

What a bubble you exist in. I'm self-employed and my entire suite of software is either windows or apple only and I have 'been a pc' for nearly thirty years and have pc hardware that fulfills all my requirements and can't run apple software.

I'm eyeing up a shift to apple when my current hardware fails me, but it's impossible for me to just go Linux.

Linux is not a single alternative. It's hundreds if you start digging, and even if you whittle it down to noob-friendly not-completely-idiotic choices, something the proverbial noob are probably incapable of or unwilling to do, there are still like, 5+ decent options to pick from. Asking the proveribal noob to pick from Mint, Ubuntu, Pop, Bazzite, Suse, Debian, Fedora, or any other option is a big ask. There's a lot to take in, especially for someone who just want their computer to work and not dick about with silly bullshit.

It's good that there are options, but most people aren't interested in having a dozen decent choices. They want one, solid, good choice, or at least obvious and clear reasons to pick the different options, and they certainly don't have time to try out everything between heaven and earth, especially for something that needs to Just™ Work™.

How do I download linux

The point still stands though. It's no longer a DVD, but it's still a Windows program.[1] She still needs to be able to run turbotax2025.exe and have it work without issue.

To be fair, it probably works. I doubt it's doing anything weird, so Wine should work, given a distro which will just take exes and pass them to Wine. But if it doesn't, TurboTax can't help her, where as they would have been able to help her if it was a true Windows install.

[1] https://turbotax.intuit.com/personal-taxes/cd-download/insta...