And that's why Linux will stay in the server for majority of people, not on their desktop.
"You just need to enable something with some parameters and you're all set!"
Seriously?
The past week we have had two major Linux discussions and in each thread there is a semi flame war that starts because some had to voice yet another "this is why Linux is so hard for nan to use", as if it was a novel or constructive observation. It's not.
Yes, if it is a reply to a problem where someone "Tried linux and it was slow, so didn't use". If system configuration debugging were in their taste, they would have done so. So it's the "Just configure parameters <x>" which is the pointless rehashing.
If it is too complicated for a HN reader it is going to be too complicated for 99% of people in the world. Get off your high horse.
The minute windows update would automatically load the Nvidia driver in the background, the screen would go fully black with no going around.
Searching online, the combination was unsupported by Nvidia and there was nothing you could do.
Linux with nouveau worked flawlessly. No kernel parameter, just boot using a live usb and everything works.
Yes, sometimes you can hit a weird hardware issue and need to revert a firmware blob or add a kernel parameter to disable something. These are rare occurrences, not the norm.
Every platform has its quirks. It's just not true that windows or macos is perfect, you are simply used to all the weird quirks.
Seriously.
Ubuntu is great, but it would be nice if there was some Ubuntu+ addon subscription service where I could pay to make the bullshit go away. I've got other stuff to do than still trying to get peripherals to work, in 2023.
There should be official compatibility list for laptops of all price ranges and whoever buys something not from the list needs to deal with issues themselves.
"just use linux instead of windows!"
at the same time as
"you can't expect linux to work on everything! do your research!"
So which one is it? Is Linux an OS that you can just replace Windows with straight away, or is it not? Most people don't care about the underlying reasoning why their printer doesn't work on linux - they just know it would have worked on windows fine.
Even something as simple as setting up a sound card with recent drivers required going to weird, slow-loading taiwanese websites with no english text to get the current drivers right from the manufacturer of the sound chip.
Even worse, with XP you had no GPU accelerated desktop at all. Sure, lower latency, but the PC noticeably struggled even moving windows if something happened in the background.
And if you do so, Linux works just fine as well. But you were comparing Windows XP to people trying to install linux on old, specialty hardware bought for use with Windows, so we’ll have to keep the same circumstances as well.
I know how to enable something with parameters.
if others don't - that's fine. They can learn or they can deal with other operating systems.
I really don't care.
I don't think that this sort of attitude will result in an environment that's encouraging for more people to use Linux distros. A better approach might be going straight into suggesting whatever information helped you in the past.
For example, the Arch Wiki typically has useful information on many topics: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nouveau
When dealing with other distros, there can be more specific sites too, like: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1032357/how-to-switch-from-n...
Not all of those are always up to date, though, so some digging around might be needed. Many will just give up or not even try, if they're faced with a dismissive attitude. Dialogue around what is the most helpful, accurate and up to date guide would be better!
Linux crowd, seems have not made their mind on what they want to reach as a product for end user. Or even do they want to have end user, not another cool kid to hang on with in IRC and dig inside OS. Some say - I wanna Linux be used by everyone! Other say - works for me and I don't care on the rest [of the loosers who cannot read hex dumps, ha ha ha]. Somehow the success of Chromebooks being ignored and not learnt from.
Thus, without clear goal, mission, product vision and focused team of product managers it's kept being amorphous [as I see it]. Definitely something to learn from WSL project made by Microsoft. They found the need - they did it. You may even see it as cathedral vs bazaar issue.
The only distant focused effort I'm aware about is Canonical/Ubuntu here ( I'm not sure on RH/Suse efforts ) - they are working on MDM with Intune, they have at least some telemetry ( not totally blind on real user cases ), they have Pro edition and even cooperated to be the first WSL distro, naturally paying back in brand awareness, common approaches and so on.
Make your mind, Linux.
You can either have a system where somebody else is deciding on your behalf how your system is going to be configured, or you can have a system where it's up to you to opt-in to the stuff you want. You can't have both.