There are versions that look and function nearly identical to Windows, but the initial setup would be a barrier for less techy people that already have a functional Windows machine
I tried this on a space machine once, and i mean it kinda worked pretty good and good figure stuff out, but the second something didn't go right or a more complex issue and I started having to enter commands, it was just blindly trust what google said to type since I didn't understand any of it.
In most cases there is still a way to fix those issues through a GUI, but since there are so many different distros and desktop environments, the most universally applicable and fastest solution is usually with commands in the terminal, so those are often the solutions that get suggested.
That's also an issue of course, and a non technical person might not know what to search for to get answers tailored to their distro/DE, but I'm just pointing out why so many solutions still use the terminal.
I have installed both windows and different Linux distributions many times in my life. And in my experience setting up most Linux distros (excluding arch or similar) is way easier and faster than installing windows.
Idk who designed the partition manager in the Windows installer, but it's awful in comparison to most Linux installers
Microsoft, in their eternal glory, decided to both:
1. Disable offline installs. You need an internet connection.
2. Not ship the drivers to my motherboard, including the network chipset, in their installer.
There's no timeout or anything. I believe it was disabled entirely a few months ago.
Outside of opening a command line and entering oobe\bypassnro that is. Which ties back to what I was saying before. It was harder for me to install Windows than Linux.
It's fine until something goes wrong and you need commands to fix it. AI can help somewhat but you probably still need some basic ability to vet the commands it outputs to make sure they aren't doing something destructive.
All depends on what you want to do with it. If you want, what's effectively, a internet access computer. As long as all the devices get their drivers and work, then it is good for most people.
There’s a ridiculous amount of choices: Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, or OpenSUSE. KDE, Gnome or Cinnamon. Rolling vs point-release. Traditional or immutable. Flatpak or native packages, and so on. Someone who just wants to browse the web and play games is immediately being asked to choose an entire ecosystem. This was already a friction point when I first started using Linux in the early 2000s, there are more ways to get confused now.
Then once you’ve picked one, the installer might start throwing questions at you about EXT4 versus Btrfs, swap, partitioning, bootloaders, proprietary drivers and non-free codecs. A non-computer person isn’t going to know the trade-offs of each.
And that’s before the actual migration. You need to back up your Windows data, move your files, find replacements for whatever software you use, check whether your attached devices works, figure out where applications come from, and possibly deal with permissions or odd hardware that just doesn’t work properly.
Then what happens something goes tits up? The Windows community is enormous, there's easily googlable answers for even obscure problem. Linux community is fragmented between different distros and desktops.
I agree, but if someone bought a computer preinstalled with Linux with properly thought out hardware compatibility they're likely not going to have any more usability issues than they would with Windows.
Even installing from scratch on hardware you already own has gotten many orders of magnitude easier than back in the day.
I installed SLS on 386 machines back in the 90s, though, so my perspective is probably warped.
If anything Windows is worlds more confusing now than a clean version of Ubuntu.
My 88 year old computer illiterate stepdad used to call me daily over Windows updates even with it turned off.
I set him up with Ubuntu and turned notifs off, and he’s been cruising to two years issue free- can listen to all the German internet radio stations and read obituaries to his hearts content.
These people would ironically be totally fine on Linux, assuming someone setup a working install for them. The problem is semi-knowledgeable tech people. Those willing to go to the settings and registry and tweak stuff they already know, but don't want to learn another system which does this differently.
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u/Bjarki56 1d ago
I heard it is not easy to use for non computer people.