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With great power comes great responsibility.

If you want raw power, you can buy a car with 500 horsepower. But you handle all of that power, you'll need traction control and maybe stability control, and anti-lock brakes for when you need to stop it. But all of that limits the amount of power you have available, limits your control. Now, a race car driver would look at these driver assist tools and say "I'm sick of people expecting race cars to work like their Jetta and then running into problems that us professional race car drivers don't run into". When you complain that the tires spin or you are having a hard time working the clutch and steering wheel without power assist, they might even tell you "these problems sound more like inexperience with driving race cars than anything else".

And they'd be 100% right. But I'm trying to get to the grocery store, not win the Daytona 500. I want a car with power steering and an automatic gearbox and anti-lock brakes and traction control and an airbag. You may say "computers were designed for power and Linux gives you maximum power!" like the other guy commenting did but I don't want that because when it inevitably breaks (because I'm inexperienced), I don't want to be stuck on the side of the road reading manpages and stack exchange posts with no answers and trying to navigate mailing lists. I have a job to do.

(Seriously, did saying "sounds like you're just inexperienced with Linux" sound good in your head? Because it certainly didn't sound good reading it.)

I don't think your analogy is very compelling; if a regular person untrained in driving race cars bought a new race car, crashed it on the way to the grocery store, and then blamed the car rather than their lack of experience driving race cars, I'd definitely find it a bit silly.

Now imagine every race car driver on the Internet was saying "you should be driving a race car, your Nissan is just a toy".

It's strange that you think that's what's happening here; if anything, the comment that the grandparent was objecting to was saying not to use a race car if you don't know how to.

Plenty of people this this comment section are saying that though, and you get it in every thread about Mac vs PC. When you've got basically the entire Internet telling you "Linux is a valid choice!" and then someone says "Linux isn't broken you're just not good enough to use it"... well, that's not really going to drive Linux user adoption, is it?

It's a "you're holding it wrong" moment. It's a completely ridiculous argument.

The issue I have with your characterization is the forced equivalence of "plenty of people in this comment section" and "basically the entire Internet" part of it. Don't get me wrong, there is definitely a segment of Linux users that vocally claim their choice is the superior one, but you could say the same thing for Mac and Windows. Given that there's no way to measure the number of Linux (or Mac or Windows) users who aren't commenting, it's a little presumptive to just assert that all Linux users are telling you your choice is wrong.

As an aside, I can't speak for other Linux users, but my goal is most certainly not to "drive Linux user adoption". If someone is interesting in learning to use Linux or wants advice about which distro to use, I would happily help them, but I actively try not to convert people who haven't expressed that interest. The reason I chimed in here is that I disagreed with the sentiment that Linux is a terrible choice. It's certainly not the right choice for most people, but there's a difference between being being niche and being bad.

The thing is, you really don't need to "be stuck on the side of the road reading manpages" these days and what drives me crazy is the outdated evaluation of Linux, it's like saying, "but viruses and blue screen of death" about Windows in 2016.

Does it require some adjustment? Sure, just like any new OS. If you're going to try it, I think it's fair to require you to learn its ways. If you don't want to do that, why not stick with your old OS?

Mac requires adjustment too, has many problems, (ie WiFi drops, file system, temps etc.), however I feel the reason people are willing to adjust is because they paid solid money for it and so want to get the most out of their purchase. Because Linux is "free", there's no such incentive and thus it is judged much more harshly.

Hardware selection is another problem, with Mac you get custom tailored hardware, but with Linux, most people just purchase any random junk PC and expect it to work great, not really fair is it?

> Seriously, did saying "sounds like you're just inexperienced with Linux" sound good in your head? Because it certainly didn't sound good reading it

I am sorry if it sounded harsh, but constantly reading about novice problems I haven't had in a decade also doesn't "sound good reading".

>> I am sorry if it sounded harsh, but constantly reading about novice problems I haven't had in a decade also doesn't "sound good reading".

It's not a novice problem. I know what a fsck is and I know you're not supposed to unmount filesystems improperly. But you shouldn't be presented with an error that you can't recover without a rescue USB because your system lost power.

And the video configuration issues are just weird. Monitors plug and play perfectly but all of a sudden it got so screwed up, I had to poke around quite a bit to get things back to normal. Frustrating the heck out of me because I'm used to something that just worked.

I am not saying this didn't happen to you, but it looks like a fluke or a distro specific bug, since I specifically had power outages while running my Arch home server and haven't had to recover from USB.

Usually this happens when the system crashes/otherwise terminates during system upgrades. Kinda hard to boot if /sbin/init is a link to an empty file.

Well sure, but that is true on every system, hence Windows warns "Do not turn off your PC".

Actually Windows can and does use NTFS transactions (TxF) in the Installer and Updater code, so the probability of non-recoverable damage should be lower (which is also my experience; power off a Linux machine during updates and you are pretty much guaranteed to have many packages with empty files, partial file trees and so on; power off a Windows machine and it probably is still fine, but sometimes you get weird issues where it can't properly reinstall/deinstall some updates to try again).

> not really fair is it?

It's not fair. It's very very unfair because even in the PC world, hardware vendors write their own drivers for Windows, or release documentation only under NDA, while Linux is often dependent on reverse engineering by random contributors. And of course the latter can't begin until the hardware is actually available, delaying support.

Unfortunately, that still leaves hardware broken on a large fraction of systems, with only a handful of vendors explicitly designing systems for Linux. It's better than it used to be, but not great.

Seconding that. I have a hard time understanding why professionals would look down on an OS that gives the user pretty much all the power, which, let's remember was the seminal idea of personal computing. Interestingly, Linux comments are about 5% of the thread, which is also roughly the market share.

I 'm kind of more confused at everyone's seeming aversion to learning. Friends ask me why I go through the trouble of running Windows and Linux side by side with virtualization, or why I'm bothering to write my own blog site in python when Wordpress exists; why are you going the long way?

The answer is always "Because I'm learning cool new shit and enjoying myself".

Sure, but time is a finite resource.

You know when the last time I even thought about my OS was? Probably 8 yrs ago. I'd much rather fiddle with the stuff I'm building than with the stuff I just need to work in order for me to build what I'm building.

So I have no aversion to learning, but I want to focus my time learning the stuff I want/need to learn. And if there's an OS that runs well enough I don't need to think about it then that's fantastic.

Sure, but you had to learn something about this OS when it was new for you so that now you don't have to think about it. When you switch to Linux, there's maybe a week of adjustment to learn how are things around town, which is really the same for Windows and macOS.

The argument is that if you're going to try Linux, it's only fair to give it a fair shot at adjustment, rather than complaining that it doesn't work like you old OS, because guess what - it's not supposed to.

Not even as a side project or something though, running on some old hardware you were never going to use again? I guess this whole thread is about working environments and precisely not what we play around with in our spare time though.

To be honest, I hadn't really given much thought to my OS for even longer before I decided to go looking myself, I'm glad I picked that fight though. Granted, 8 years ago I was 15, digging in to the guts of an OS for the first time is very different from focusing your time to build what needs building :)

> These problems sound more like inexperience in using Linux to me than anything else. ... unless you somehow broke a whole lot of other stuff by deleting dependencies without really understanding what you were doing.

That's the problem right here. There's a vanishingly small percentage of people who can afford a laptop who are also willing and able to spend the time to gain "experience in using Linux". Sure it's much easier than it used to be, but it used to be a completely unmitigated disaster (I remember things like having to teach myself enough C to fix a wireless driver that didn't want to compile under a newer gcc version) so that's not saying much.