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Comment by idrios | Hacker News Reader

It's not at a point yet where I can recommend it to non-technical people but it's getting close.

I can play almost any steam game that I can find on it, but usually need to manually enable proton-experimental. Some Unity games have weird bugs and there are some other games I still can't figure out how to run at all.

I've run into weird errors due to incompatibility between Nvidia GPUs & their drivers with my OS. Haven't encountered the issue in 4 years but having your graphics driver break means you need to fix your crazy issue with only a terminal (hope you have another computer for googling).

My dad was becoming more pro-privacy so I got him Linux Mint, and something broke that put him in GRUB and it frustrated him so he asked me to change it back.

But Linux seems to be getting better as fast as Windows is getting worse so I still recommend trying it to anyone remotely interested

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> My dad was becoming more pro-privacy so I got him Linux Mint, and something broke that put him in GRUB and it frustrated him so he asked me to change it back.

This is exactly why I don't recommend Mint or any Ubuntu-based, or even any normal (ie, mutable) Linux distros, for newbies. I learnt this the hard way thanks to my mum, who experienced the same breakage twice - once on Xubuntu, and again on Zorin. Since then, I switched her to an immutable distro (Aurora) over an year ago, and it's been flawless so far. Updates are automatic and never interrupt her, and she's been thru two major OS upgrades with no issues (for image-based atomic distros, a major OS upgrade is treated like just another update and makes little difference to the end user). And unlike regular distros, image-based atomic distros don't have to worry about any potential dependency issues or package conflicts occurring - the update will either apply or won't, there's no partial/failed state.

Therefore for non-technical newbies, I would highly recommend an immutable distro such as Aurora[1] or Bazzite (for gamers)[2], because you never again have to worry about updates. And in the rare event that an update breaks something, rollback is as simple as choosing the previous image from the boot menu, and that's it - no technical steps or knowledge required. This sort of stability and ease-of-restore is far beyond what Windows or macOS offers, which makes Linux a no-brainier.

[1] https://getaurora.dev/en

[2] https://bazzite.gg/

> My dad was becoming more pro-privacy so I got him Linux Mint, and something broke that put him in GRUB and it frustrated him so he asked me to change it back.

I think Windows actually has issues like blue screens that prevent entering the operating system. Why do people have a higher tolerance for Windows? What are your thoughts on this? Could you please share some?

Did a Windows update clobber GRUB? My dad had that problem a couple of times. Since he switched to having Linux and Windows on different drives and using the BIOS boot order to switch between them, there have been no more issues.

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