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Comment by eldaisfish | Hacker News Reader

i really dislike this line of reasoning. Windows has a much larger installed base so finding support and solutions are pretty easy. Whether that is a video, a blog or a forum, you can always find someone with the same problem.

No, windows nagging you to register is not in the same ballpark as your audio not working or your video resolution changing with multiple monitors. No, windows updates adding or removing features are not equivalent to the problems linux has, many of which are showstoppers.

You're trying to be snarky and this is one reason why so many regular Joes are reluctant to adopt linux. you never know when you will need the terminal and when you will encounter an unhelpful response like this.

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So serious. I find the linux community indeed very resourceful. And the ones for windows, after you have clicked thousands of banners away, that tell you the workaround for avoiding the registering after a long text of nothing, i find them resourceful too.

My point was, that it is always difficult to enter a new domain. So it is a shared pain.

My limited point here is that linux has a lot of problems that are showstoppers. You sometimes cannot do what you want to do.

The average person cares about about usability first. Visually, linux is excellent and very useable. The problem is, should things go wrong, the level of technical skill needed to use community resources is relatively high.

> Visually, linux is excellent and very useable.

On a superficial level maybe. But generally it’s still very unpolished, inconsistent and has poor UX design. Of course it’s matter of taste.

Not sure why your comment is being downvoted though? I find it hard to imagine how could anyone disagree with it from the perspective of an “average” computer user.

> But generally it’s still very unpolished, inconsistent and has poor UX design.

Came here to say that. If you stick to the 2 or 3 desktop apps that they offer and do everything else in a terminal, then no worries. But the minute you try to get things done, beyond just the terminal - it comes apart.

>I find the linux community indeed very resourceful

I do to. As a “power user”, however it feels that for people who don’t know how/fear/don’t want to use the command line and don’t know how to read documentation accomplishing even basic stuff on Linux would be a struggle.

The old joke goes, though, that you have to prompt-engineer the Linux community to get a useful response, e.g., "Linux sucks because I can't do X" instead of "How do I do X?"

I don't disagree with you but have you ever had to google a windows issue in recent history? You get 90 links of 'Microsoft experts' that ask you to run "sfc /scannow" or "chdsk". None of them having a clue what they are talking about.

I think it is usually easier to fix windows if you have 'audio not working' but windows 10+ has started to have a lot of non trivial issues and there are no simple google fixes. I have had serious problems as an IT worker with EVERY large windows update in the last 3 years.

On the other side of things, I have seen linux desktop issues that are a nightmare to figure out, including audio not working after a recent update.

> You get 90 links of 'Microsoft experts' that ask you to run "sfc /scannow" or "chdsk".

adding the word "reddit" to the search usually improves the results significantly

I tried searching for workarounds of network shares causing explorer freezes when no connection can be made.

The only "solution" I found was sfc /scannow

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