I look forward to see where developments can go from here, but Zorin is pretty good for a solid amount of games... Maybe not most.
This is a perfect example of a frustrating problem with Linux on the desktop. There is always a perfect distro that my aunt can just use and that never breaks. The problem is that once it was Mandrake, then Ubuntu, then Manjaro, then Pop_OS!, and many others. Most of them fade into obscurity after a couple of years, to be replaced by $shiny_distro that this time will be perfect for non-technical users, I promise! And a year later, there will be another one and everyone will start raving about it and dismiss $shiny_distro for being broken.
This does not work. To work with a general audience, a distro needs to look nice, behave well, be good at marketing, and last long enough to establish a presence. Maybe ZorinOS is good, I have no clue. But I never heard of it (and I am following what’s happening in tech in general), and i have no clue whether it will be around next year. So I’ll stay on Tumbleweed, and I still don’t have a really good solution for normal people who might want to use Linux.
Like you, I find the "hopping" nature of Linux enthusiasts to be exhausting. it's almost always nearly the same fucking bits at the end of the day. Great, you know how to use the package manager? Everything you like about NewShinyDistro's defaults can probably be hadon the distro you're on already.
Christ maybe the better approach is my other idea - customnixos.org. You always get nixos, but you get to pre-pick the desktop environment, theme, background, etc, and then it slips you an iso with those options set.
Frustration, mostly. I really like Linux and I think it should be more accessible, but the community keep shooting themselves in their metaphorical feet.
> Lol maybe even do it for every major distribution. Nvubuntu, fedoria, etc. And then we can be done with this? Idk.
That would help. NVidia drivers are a major pain point even for more experienced users, and yet are critical for something that can be used for gaming.
> Great, you know how to use the package manager? Everything you like about NewShinyDistro's defaults can probably be hadon the distro you're on already.
I know that, and I am very happy with Tumbleweed, but that’s not really something we can say to the general public.
> Christ maybe the better approach is my other idea - customnixos.org. You always get nixos, but you get to pre-pick the desktop environment, theme, background, etc, and then it slips you an iso with those options set.
A huge part would still be missing: the integration of all these pieces and setup so that they look like something that works and not a Rube Goldberg OS. Something that at least Ubuntu is doing, for all their faults.
Look at game controllers for example. That’s another major pain point for gaming on Linux. You can use all of them (the various generations of xBox and PlayStation gamepads that work over Bluetooth, not sure about the Switch ones) with quite a bit of fiddling. OTOH, on a Mac, iPhone or iPad you just pair them and they work, and can then be used with whatever game you want. No fiddling with the package manager, no config file wrangling. This integration work is important for an OS we want everyone to use.
I will never stop being annoyed at conversations around distros. Ever.
Yeah, let's imagine how they react to their entire system being broken and some rumblings of "well maybe if you change time". Yeah, sure, okay, I'm sure a user that can't install a package will be able to handle that. /s
Maybe it's simply because I AM a distro maintainer, that I just roll my eyes at all of this. What's pre-installed is so trivial it's almost nothing to me when I think about why I chose my distro. How fast can they react to security reports? Are they abreast of developments in the Linux ecosystem and adjusting and experimenting with defaults? Really truly? Because even in (my distro) where I can tell you the names of owners of specific areas, there's still some gaps we could cover better.
The curse of knowing too much. Or maybe my empathy meter is way off tonight. Idk.
Fuck. No.
I'm sorry but if the way we handle accessibility of Linux to non-Lijux-aware folks is to just push them to the latest flavor that has the most shit crammed in, well, I'm not sure what we expect the outcome to be.