Unpopular Opinion

Both: installing apps outside of their respective stores is an adventure in terminal instead of a GUI double-click. Secure boot issues. Constant prompt for password instead of a simple PIN or other form of identity verification.

Well that is actually not true. What do you want to install? Of course if you are a power user and want some special script for whatever reason yeah I can see you being forced to use the terminal, other than that there's often a DEB you can install via GUI with double klick, there are flatpaks you can install via GUI and double click and also AppImages. You can come pretty damn far with that to be honest.

In other news, apples not yet ready to replace oranges.

I switched over a year ago and have had zero issues. The lemmings will surely stick with and defend w11, while the people that are tired of being spied on for their data to be better advertised to will move to Linux and realize how bad it was on windows and not believe they didn't switch sooner.

Overall, can’t recommend this to a normal user.

How do you know you are not an abnormal user?

I don't think this is an unpopular opinion in general. (If you ignore the Lemmy Linux echo chamber).

I’ve been running Fedora on a desktop for many years, and recently I finally got tired of the updates not working. Sure, it’s nice to have GUI, but if you end up using the terminal anyway to actually get stuff done, can you really say the GUI is helping a new users.

Many years before that, I also experimented with a bunch of different distributions to see if there’s anything I can recommend to a new user. Manjaro was pretty close, but you end up using the terminal anyway, because you’ll eventually run into some weirds stuff that requires terminal intervention.

Mint was slightly better, because you didn’t need the terminal quite as often and installing proprietary drivers through the GUI was easy and it actually worked. That’s why, at the time, Mint was the only distro I could recommend to just about anyone. Most people would still need some help installing the distro, but once it’s up and running Mint is likely to give you fewer headaches than other distributions.

All the other distros I’ve tried absolutely needed some terminal time every now and then. If the user needs a smoother experience with less time tweaking and hacking, Windows would be my first recommendation. However, it’s all a matter of priorities. How much do you value your free time or privacy. Are you interested technology at all. Those sorts of questions determine if Linux is a viable candidate.

A lot of these issues can probably be solved in one of two ways:

1. Buy a computer from a company that sells Linux computers. Hardware issues should be nonexistent, and sometimes there's even a customized DE that smoothes out package installation.

2. Have a friend help you get up and running. I've given out a few Mint machines lately, and I always boot it up and preconfigure some stuff before I hand it over.

Generally, I think most modern distros are well within the capability of anyone brave and savvy enough to flash a USB drive and boot their computer from it. If they don't have that level of technical skill, that's okay, but then I'd say pick from the two options above.

I think we're about 95% there. I think Linux needs to be streamlined a bit. I know that's a personal list and some Linux cracks might not even get what I mean, as it's so natural to them, but I'd like to see better guidance on 1. the installation 2. about updating and 3. about the permission system.

1. There are so many distributions that the general "pick what suits you most" or the "hey, just pick XY and go!" are no good answers. When someone is ready to switch away from Windows, the burden of choice is a real factor. I know often people say, just get Ubuntu and that's it. But you still have people actively recommended Mint, popOS etc to new people, as if it fixes all their issue. But what's suggested, just depends on what is the new hype, instead of focusing on one.

Also for a newby it is totally not clear what kernel is and which I need. I still don't understand why there are so many and which I need for that OS I installed. I recently tried to get Linux on a surface tablet and I couldn't figure out how to make touch work properly. I installed Ubuntu surface, then switched to wayland, then tried KDE and a different UI, I think it was x11 or something like that and while touch works, it now randomly stops working for no reason and no way to find the process that froze. Then you find threads that say you did everything wrong and no one uses what you do, but I just did read a new thread about it. No it's all wrong, start with Z.

This is totally unintuitive. Make a Ubuntu mainstream pleb version and force every Linux user to only recommend this one version. Period. There needs to be a consent on where to direct people to. It's nice to have options but 99,9% of the people switching away from Windows don't need it. Also make it so people really don't need to know how kernel and different UIs work, I don't need that for windows either, unless we talk about major version changes. Which already feel different and people already have issues switching from win10 to win11.

Also you always got to read endless lists of installation processes, because every distribution works differently. Then you want to use a console command, but it doesn't work, because the underlying library is missing, so it throws unknown errors. That's where people quite, as it's piling up issues instead of resolving them.

2. updating feels still a bit strange. This needs to be as easy as windows. Zero clicks at best and one at most. I still had programs that needed multiple dependencies and multiple individual installations for things to work. It's practical that Linux isn't as bloated as windows, many Linux fans love that, but it sucks when you come from Windows and things simply don't work. I don't remember the last time I needed to find a windows driver other than a GPU driver and even those have automatic updates now, including my mainboard and other chip drivers. Not so on Linux. It's really nothing windows user want to deal with anymore. For gaming for example, if I want to use CUDA or raytracing or FSR options for a game, this should work out of the box.

3. The permission system needs to be as intuitive and easy as windows. Yes windows sometimes suck, especially if you don't run it under an admin account and yes sometimes you simply don't get the permission for a folder for no real reason, but that's about it. Linux it feels twice as complicated. Maybe speaks for it's security but it's also a huge weight, causing all sorts of frustration where a ton of people simply say quits and move back to windows.

Overall it's still too much of a nerd thing. If all you do is install Firefox, you might get by, but as soon as you try to do much else, you get hammered with options and therefore possible frustration.

Hopefully steam OS will solve this as gamer will recommended this one OS and not one of the thousands of different Linux versions. Because from the outside it doesn't feel like a different color, it feels like "maybe I should have picked Linux version Y, instead of X, and save myself a lot of frustration." And you do this once or maybe never and are done trying. There's a reason why Linux has so few users still. It's not simple resentment of windows users.

The first Linux that makes gaming a non issue, as all DRM and anti cheat work, will get my attention and even then, I know there'll be frustration, by setting something up outside the norm, because I will likely need to tinker with some hidden config and read obscure online threads to fix that one issue I would never have on windows. Download an extra missing config file. And this doesn't even keep in mind, that if you dare to ask someone about your specific Linux issue, you get replies like "get good".

I really like what Linux tries to do, but I think the users all brush off the very rough edges, to make themselves feel superior. If you watch some Linux subreddit or Lemmy, you can smell the superiority and every discussion I had about linux in real life with Linux fans, always was like "oh I don't have this issue under Linux" but then they hide all the issues they have and the thousands of hours the spend on fixing a specific issue. But at least they can say they don't touch the evil windows, and so shouldn't you.

One person's experience on one computer with two distros isn't particularly objective.

The app store or software center on most Linux distros are bad. I think Linux developers underestimate the importance of this part of the OS. For new users, the app store is one of the big 3 aspects of an OS: launcher, settings, app store.

Gnome settings app is easy to use, but missing a lot of controls.

The app store (software center) is just not helpful for exploring apps, and updates are always problematic.

Most people don't install anything beyond office tools (and even those are switching to various cloud systems).

Also, I know it ~~is~~ was a thing, but I never had driver issues (ok, one wifi card in like 2005), I think drivers aren't really an issue anymore, maybe some proprietary stuff (fingerprint readers?).
(As a funny side note, I have a wired laptop I can't get good Win drivers, but works perfectly out of the box with at least a few distros (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian).)

I manage 3 computers for my family, all run Linux for 10+ years. And I upgrade them frequently (with my old components most of the time :)). As I don't live with any of them I don't really want issues that would prevent their use. And beyond some bigger updates (versions or largely change from X11 to Wayland) over the years there is like an issue every few years. And now they all run Tumbleweed, so so no versions (set to upade monthly for their convenience).

Oh, and the og reason for Linux was because there were always constant issues with Windows. Im not gonna install XPs every few months.

Tbf I did try out Linux Mint after using Windows basically my entire life and the only issue I ran into was that setting up the desktop was a bit fucky through the inbuilt UI settings (notably panels freaking out).

Other than that, it was fine.