Ah the time old classic. Go into the registry and change these 3 keys that seeming have zero relation to the problem at hand and restart your machine TWICE then its fixed.

Out of the box most popular distros require less tweaking and hammering into shape than a windows 11 install and that is a very important "feature"

After I replaced my last windows install a few years ago... Checking windows 11 on a friend's PC a few weeks ago was a nightmare. I considered myself a power user back in the day and I really struggled. So now I do have perspective from the other end and it fits the picture - windows is also jank it is just familiar jank for most people.

There is another point too. The trend with Linux is up and improving slowly over decades. And for windows it seems to be the reverse and faster.

I don’t think it’s a question that Linux has more jank. I recently installed a fedora spin on a laptop that came with regular Fedora installed originally and the WiFi didn’t work. That’s some janky stuff right there.

> Linux may break more often, but you can almost always fix it with a quick google search.

And that’s where the problem is: a quick google search. Laughably trivial for technical users. Non-trivial for the majority of the population.

I love Linux and it is completely viable as a desktop operating system, but it’s far from ready for mainstream without better support.

For a rough analogy, I’d compare it to an old car before electronics. An old car is easy to work on and reliable if you do the maintenance. But an old car wouldn’t be reliable for somebody who doesn’t do any work on a car and outsources the maintenance.

Linux excels when things go right. The failure modes are substantially worse and far more likely to occur. It doesn’t matter if they’re rare. They’re not rare enough. And there isn’t support when things go wrong.

For example: It’s difficult to make the macOS UI fail to start through configuration. You never need to directly touch configuration. (And you can’t modify or delete macOS system files.)

With Linux, some normal problems just have to be solved in the terminal. This allows you to put the system into a configuration where the GUI does not start.

Have also been using Bazzite since march on my home desktop and you are spot on. I think the main reason for average person linux being difficult these days are laptops with weird hardware configurations.

I use MacOS at work and although it is miles better than windows, if I had a choice, I would also use Linux for work.

One can call Windows support? And get help?

This is the saddest part - they actually think computers suck that much and don't know their lives could be a lot easier.

I am suse user for 20+ years with a big break in between. To me it fits the best. Ubuntu I gave up on a while ago and came back to find things so much nicer.

They have a slightly different take on immutable than redhat but it also works well (rollback and all). Also the tumbleweed rolling is quite stable for a bleeding edge rolling release distro. Using it on a few boxes for the last few years and also installing it for other PC noobs and they seem fine with it.

I remember SUSE not being harder to use then any other desktop distribution. But it has a lot, and I mean a lot of knobs to turn if you want to. But you don't have to.

Suse is easy to use, just not mainstream.

Yes. It was as easy to use as Windows was like 30 years ago. It's still easy to use.

The only difficult part about Linux is the fact that people can't learn, so absolutely anything being different from Windows is a roadblock to the average person (I still remember the societal meltdown when MS changed the interface in their Office apps, or Windows 8...)

A subscription-only OS would effectively kill Windows, but MS have made enough pretty weird decisions to cripple the product I wouldn't put it past them.

They also "can't" screengrab your credit card numbers or upload all your private data to their cloud for inspection, or steal your email password and download all your mail to a Microsoft server, or send fake emails about full OneDrive to trick you into subscribing.

"Can't" only applies when someone is willing to stop them, and nobody is. Microsoft can do pretty much anything they want and there's basically nothing you can do about it.

I'm not sure if I would have started using Linux but for buying an n800, so thanks for that.

We never did get around to our funeral for Nokia, sadly.

I guarantee you, in a large enough organisation, there will be exactly one approved pencil supplier. That's how corporate purchasing works.

There's a lot of cases where this actually makes sense for compliance, support, and service level agreements between your org and the vendor's among many other cases. It just gets annoying when you absolutely cannot buy coffee beans from shop B on the team consumables budget because we have an exclusive contract with shop A.

In a governmental organisation, you might even need a public bidding process for any supplier contract big enough to cover printers and their ink/toner, as well as a support contract if something breaks.