I come from a Windows and Mac environment and I now happily use Linux Mint. It has a similar aesthetic and is really easy to use. I think not recommending newbies Arch would be a good start.
- All of the basics should just work well out of the box with minimal tweaking. Yes even NVIDIA stuff.
- The software center needs a massive overhaul. It feels like an afterthought by people who would rather use a command line.
Im not sure the software center being half baked is even the real problem.
One of the nice things about Windows is that you dont need a central, curated, repository for software. You can google the thing you want and just download an msi/exe of the latest stable version and, 99.9% of the time, leading back to your first point, it will just work.
What? That is easiest one of the worst parts of windows. It’s just that people are used to this dumb endeavour
Why do you think its bad? From a secruity standpoint its obviously not great, but its undeniably more convenient than running a curl command to pull in a third party .repo file, yum update and yum install to get something that isnt easily available in my base repos.
Nothing more convenient then a central “app store”. apt search, apt install is all I need. But I undersntd that people don’t like it, that don’t know it.
What’s convenient about googling for software, downloading ominous files and clicking through an install wizard and most likely installing some adware and unwanted search bars? It’s crazy people see it like that.
Even the other posters in this thread are talking about flatpak and appimage. I’ll never understand that way of thought.
To be honest, one part is what everyone mentioned here. Not being preinstalled and all that.
The other part is that unfortunately at least according to my own expirence as a Linux noob a few years ago some Linux communities can be very toxic. If you’re asking questions of how to do X and someone comes along and is all “why do you even want to do X if you could also do Y? Which is something entirely different but also does something vaguely similar”
That’s one if the things.
And then other curiosities. I cannot for example for the life of me get my main monitor to work under Linux with any new Kernel version. My Laptop just refuses to output to it or the second monitor attached via Display port daisychaining. On the older version it works, on the newer it’s broken. I have tried troubleshooting this problem for over half a year and it’s still broken. And that’s out of the Box on Ubuntu LTS…
So i don’t really understand this question. There are major roadblocks. With Wayland which is default for Ubuntu now those roadblock jist became bigger. Screensharing in multiple Apps including slack is outright broken unless you use the shitty webapp. The main player Office 365 largely doesn’t work at all on Linux. All these things that should work for a Desktop operating System don’t work out of the Box as they should.
That’s why people aren’t using it and companies aren’t preinstalling it.
Preinstalled.
Like, were nerds and we fuck with our computers n stuff. But most people are lucky to know what a power cord is.
Honestly if Linux with a good DE like KDE or Cinnamon was already on their PC at boot they would figure it out. Most people just use a web browser anyways.
I have my dad on Mint for years. Setup browser and email program and told him to click on that little shield and do updates when it’s there. You can set the shield icon to only appear in case of updates. I sometimes have to update between versions. I think he is still on 21.0 and now 21.2 is out already.
I think that is not a question Linux users can answer. I feel so out of touch with what the average joe needs and wants in an OS. Ask them.
The installation process and the fear of frying your computer can actually be a no-no for some users. (Not that it actually happened or can happen but some people are just really scared of doing this type of thing) Like the Linux experiment said : we need to have more accessible Linux hardware like we have Windows Laptops and desktops.
Fortunately we have some and are getting more options with the framework laptops, and there are some other hardware manufacturers who have Linux compatibility as a priority
It’s still software support. Yes, there are many great alternatives, but not being able to use apps like everyone and not being aplble to keep the apps you have is just too complicated for many
I recently changed and could only do it because of ChatGPT. There are a lot of things that work different in Linux, like package managers, the file system in general, the focus on terminal, stuff that works different with different distros. For almost all questions, ChatGPT helped me within seconds. This is even more true, when I kinda don’t know, what my question actually is. Then it helps to give me some good buzzwords to Google for. If I would have done this with just reddit and forums and stack or something, I’d get so much non-helping, gatekeeping, belittling answers - if any.
