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I am an experienced Linux user and I sometimes find myself wondering how much more I will put up with. Oh, sorry, did you not like that unexpected UI change? Fsck off, some GNOME developer decided to do it and you are not allowed to change it unless you install some random "extension" from some random developer on Reddit. Oh, sorry, did you spend a day getting Pulseaudio to work as well as ALSA had worked? Great news, Pulseaudio was replaced with PipeWire, which is "functionally compatible" but only for the specific configuration a handful of developers happened to have on their systems, so get ready to spend another day trying to get audio working. Oh, you had a ZaphodHeads configuration working with Xorg for a few years? Cool story bro, now we use Wayland, and it is definitely the same as X11 in all the ways we care about, but that does not include anything like Zaphod, because we're busy with other stuff and anyway who cares about multihead systems?

I suppose that is what I get for using Fedora, which was supposedly Red Hat's "desktop strategy" but was never even remotely ready for a typical desktop user...

  > Oh, sorry, did you not like that unexpected UI change? Fsck off, some GNOME developer decided to do it and you are not allowed to change it unless you install some random "extension" from some random developer on Reddit.

  > Oh, sorry, did you spend a day getting Pulseaudio to work as well as ALSA had worked? Great news, Pulseaudio was replaced with PipeWire, which is "functionally compatible" but only for the specific configuration a handful of developers happened to have on their systems, so get ready to spend another day trying to get audio working. 

  > Oh, you had a ZaphodHeads configuration working with Xorg for a few years? Cool story bro, now we use Wayland, and it is definitely the same as X11 in all the ways we care about, but that does not include anything like Zaphod, because we're busy with other stuff and anyway who cares about multihead systems?

Damn, now that you put it like that...

Yeah, I've been through all of these and suppose I just never thought about it.

(Well, not the "Zaphod" thing, not familiar with what that is, but the general X11/Wayland debacle).

Agree about GNOME - I'm very happy with the relatively unopinonated KDE now.

Older audio systems still work, I just swapped to PipeWire this week in 10 mins and had no issues. Try the current release.

Xorg has been on maintenance for years, Wayland isn't a flawless replacement yet but with the irreparable flaws in X and it's security risks I'm personally glad to jump ship now.

This is what you get for using an user hostile distro though, if you don't want changes forced down your throat you shouldn't be using either Fedora or Windows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0506yDSgU7M

Linus Tech Tips wanted to try Linux and see how user friendly it was. Somehow the PopOS steam package decided to uninstall the whole DE. Say what you want about the warnings he ignored,why is this even possible on a PopOS type system? Linus has pointed out that without understanding the terminology and packages, you would have no idea what the error message means. I think user friendly distros are much better but have quite a ways to go.

Also as Linus points out, even picking the right distro is tough if you don't already know a lot of the Linux terminology.

  >  Somehow the PopOS steam package decided to uninstall the whole DE.

Jesus, not a great look.

  > Also as Linus points out, even picking the right distro is tough if you don't already know a lot of the Linux terminology.

Good point

Then the typical user goes into the shopping mal during the weekend, sees a nice gadget in sales, does an impulsive buy.

Back at home they wonder why it doesn't work at all.

After 30 years, unless one is deep into Linux technical knowledge and "search before buy", that impulsive buy is going to end in tears.

Even with "search before buy" the adventure can turn out bad, because the device that apparently has Linux support, actually only works in specific serial numbers with the right firmware in place.

I don't have much experience trying to use external hardware with Linux because I don't tinker much outside of software.

Only mouse/keyboard/monitor, and then a few MIDI devices.

But that's valid -- I could see this being a problem with anything new/exotic, and it did bite me in the ass when trying to use a brand-new GPU on most recent LTS release.

I switched from Windows to Mint 20.x recently. There are many paper cuts. Some particularly annoying examples:

* It freezes hard when it runs out of RAM, while Windows stays somewhat usable in that situation. The OOM killer takes 10 mins to kick in, if it does so at all. The situation is probably made worse by the default 1GB swap partition size (why so small? I would have expected at 16 GB to match the RAM size).

* hibernate doesn't work out of the box. `pm-hibernate` exits printing no error message (code 128). After installing `uswsusp` it'll call `s2disk`, which works. I still need to figure out which config files to add so hibernate shows up in the power manager and shutdown menu.

* When using the graphical updater, the boot partition will fill up, preventing further kernel updates. `apt-get autoremove` fixes that.

The kernel OOM killer just isn't designed for desktop at all, it seems like. Back when I didn't have a ridiculous amount of RAM, I used this instead and was happy with it:

https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

The boot thing you mention always seemed a very odd default to me. It doesn't happen to me any more on my work ubuntu machine, but maybe I configured something to fix that and forgot about it.

> What distros do you feel have a poor experience for new Linux users?

I've had blocking problems with these 3: ElementaryOS, Ubuntu, OpenSuse. The problems include:

- Crash reports every 10 minutes - Segmentation fault error or something when opening the notifications section - Bricking my USB stick - Poor rendering in remote desktop - OS crashing unexpectedly and not starting at all afterwards - Noticeably poor performance for all apps (going full-screen for browser videos happens in 1 second and you see it freeze, in windows it's instant) - Desktop freezing if I press keys too fast (opening and closing the Ubuntu Dash menu quickly). Forced to restart the machine - Visual glitches during every boot - I don't remember now, but the list goes on

What versions did you use out of curiosity?

Maybe my experience has been partially luck due to compatible hardware. I had some pretty bad experiences 10 years ago (install the OS, and the wifi driver doesn't work/wasn't installed, now can't get online to download it LMAO).

In the past 3 years I've had 2 issues:

  1. I bought a laptop that had an NVIDIA RTX 2060 when they had only been out for a while. The LTS version of Ubuntu + Pop_OS didn't have the kernel updates with compatibility, so I had to upgrade kernel from the boot menu.

  2. I connected two external monitors, one through HDMI and one through DisplayPort <-> USB <-> HDMI. I wanted to have one monitor vertical and one horizontal, I could not get it to work with a mix of vertical and horizontal layouts with 3 screens -- only with 2 screens.

This would have been Pop_OS! 20.04 and Ubuntu 20.04.

See here for writeup on the NVIDIA thing:

https://github.com/pop-os/pop/issues/1199#issuecomment-68322...

Can you recall which ones you hit on OpenSUSE? I'm using it now and I'd like to watch out for them.

My USB got bricked on openSuse, and I got the segmentation fault error randomly. I was using the KDE edition.

You've already lost a new user with those opinionated recommendations with words they don't understand. Not to mention a different site or person will recommend different distros.

I was also getting into linux at about the same time. I used ubuntu 8.10, and had a horrible time getting my Broadcom wireless card working.

I think the onboarding is still very difficult for new users (installing, getting packages installed, etc.). The GUI ways of doing package installation aren't as reliable as they could be. As soon as you run into trouble and look for help online you're advised to open a terminal emulator.

I think the ecosystem has come a long way certainly. Technical expertise is a spectrum, and we've certainly lowered the barrier, but you still need to be well above the bar to get up and running, and then operating productively every day.

  > I used ubuntu 8.10, and had a horrible time getting my Broadcom wireless card working.

Ah yes, fair. I also had this problem back then:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29202511

  > As soon as you run into trouble and look for help online you're advised to open a terminal emulator.

Also fair

(Though it's hard to say -- if your average computer user who only uses the browser and things like Office tools, would be doing enough stuff to run into issues. Possibly, but I like to hope that pre-installed Firefox and LibreOffice/OpenOffice would be enough)

  > I think the ecosystem has come a long way certainly. Technical expertise is a spectrum, and we've certainly lowered the barrier, but you still need to be well above the bar to get up and running, and then operating productively every day.

I didn't think about the fact you need to actually burn the ISO and reinstall your OS.

Goes to show how much technical bias I have, as it didn't even register.

IMO (again, opinion), if you can get it installed, and you're using everyday software, I do genuinely believe a non-technical person could use certain distros.

But yeah, have to install it first.

Linus Tech Tips, right now, is doing a series on switching fully to Linux and their WAN show from last week also talk about it.

For the average consumer, Linux can be a very, very bad time, in a way Windows doesn’t seem to be.

It can be very hard to imagine what kind of difficulties an average user has; but their videos give a small window into “no, it really isn’t ‘just that easy’ for everybody”.

Commandline is hard.

If you're still looking for a TWM for Windows 11, I ended up developing my own this year which has been received fairly well by people who have migrated from Linux and macOS to Windows: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi