That just isn’t important. The point is that the average non-techy person would be overwhelmed by the average Linux install. Regardless of distro.
That’s Linux’s biggest cross to bear
That’s Linux’s biggest cross to bear
Pre-installed Linux laptops is great - and is clearly the way to get someone less techy on-the-way. But, for most, if they're sick of Windows and they want to move (dual boot their machine) then god help them.
Linux is much better than it was, for sure, and I think the community is much better at answering questions than it was - it's less patronising than it used to be (like this guy [1]) - but I when I think of most people who I know who use Windows (non techy users), and whether I think they could survive in a Linux environment - I have to say no, still, which is a shame.
I have to wonder what hardware and distros you're using, as the most dominant vendors (Intel, Realtek) work out of the box on the major distros. Or are you recalling experiences from 15 years ago with ndiswrapper and older Broadcom devices still?
The difficulty of dual boot is to do with something being already there. Already Ubuntu etc. have installers that will do repartitioning for you intelligently. Windows by comparison will just pave over whats there if you let it do the happy path and if you want to set up dual boot, requires as much knowledge about resizing partitions.
amdgpu
i2c
bluetooth autosuspend
wifi connectivity issues
resume after suspend sometimes crashing
usbc-pd sometimes not charging
There are so many warnings in journalctl / dmesg, since getting the laptop one month ago, I'm nonstop searching for solutions.
The only reason I'm doing this is to learn the inner workings of the current state of how things are done in Linux.
Non-technical folks might be able to click their way through the installation but in the process every anti-privacy setting you can think of will be turned on by default because you have to really go out of your way and click dark-pattern-enabled links to opt into a few settings that help protect your limited privacy when using Windows.
In some cases you have to either disconnect your internet or purposely fail logging into a MS cloud account multiple times before you're allowed to login to your personal computer with a local account.
Did it... get a lot better recently? Last time I installed Windows on a laptop I had "fun" getting it the drivers so it could use the Wi-Fi card so it could pull the rest of itself down.
The last but one Linux Mint install I did didn’t even recognise the mouse and keyboard I had plugged in, haha! (The installer recognised them, but not the OS post install!) It turned out I needed a slightly different flavour of mint, but yeah, the average user might even throw in the towel at that point.
No.
"My OS makes it easier to do X" is generally an illusion because you learned what arcane nonsense your OS requires in order to do that ten years ago and now it takes two seconds, but the other OS requires you to learn some different arcane nonsense which would also take two seconds if you already knew what it was.
He literally tried to imply incompetence. That is a personal attack. When the entire point of this thread was to empathise with non-techy people installing and setting up a Linux distro. It's not about me, I'm able to resolve issues that come up with the myriad operating-systems I've used in the four decades of using and programming computers.
Instead this commenter got into one of those "my operating system is better than your operating system" childish positions and trying to question my competence rather than deal with the point.
Really, I was trying to state that Linux (all distros) still have some ways to go before the average human would be comfortable with it - especially once you fall off the happy path. The things that make Linux strong for the power user (myriad choices for everything, open-source, CLI driven) are not at all what normal humans want - they don't want a million options, they don't want to run scripts, they couldn't care less about the open-sourciness (other than it's free), etc. The motivations and incentives are different.
And for sure, Windows and OSX have their own problems, but mostly you stay on the happy path because they always have the drivers made for them, which means it's rare that a device or something doesn't work. And if something does go wrong then there's usually either the vendor (who sold them the device) or a single place on the internet to go to find out how to resolve.
This whole thread from my original comment down shows exactly how far away from the average user the Linux community still is. The default answer when someone has problems is "well, stop being so shit, be better - it's your fault". Or, "I've never had that issue, you're an idiot".
Of course those are sweeping generalisations, and I've made the point elsewhere that the Linux community has made great strides - but if we're ever going to have the year of the Linux desktop (I mean real Windows-denting momentum, not just the odd Linux laptop) then more needs to be done, and some of the shitty attitudes need to change.
Sent from my Linux Distro.
> Really, I was trying to state that Linux (all distros) still have some ways to go before the average human would be comfortable with it - especially once you fall off the happy path.
This is just not true. Average humans buy preinstalled. If it's preinstalled, it doesn't matter whether it's Windows or Linux.
Sent from my Librem 5.