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Comment by jama211 | Hacker News Reader

“Linux is so easy and great, my mouse didn’t even work and I have it unplugged to this day, and I can’t even play minecraft!” - I use every OS and have arch on my gaming pc (dual booted I’ll admit), but this is both one of the worst articles advocating for desktop Linux and one of the best at the same time, because it shows the harsh truth a lot of people experience and us Linux users don’t even want to admit exists.

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I used to concede that yeah, Linux is more hassle than the average person is going to feel like dealing with, but at this point, Windows is so damn bad that you could grab literally any Linux distro and have an easier time with it, and even better, it won't delete all your stuff in the middle of the night due to a forced update either.

I actually don’t agree with that. If you don’t want to fully commit (which would help users transition) good effing luck getting an average user through the dual boot process, no distributed ever made that smooth or understandable. Even I have bricked my windows boot record by mistake and I’ve done it 100 times. But for the sake of argument let’s say they go full beans, my most recent install of Linux involved a manual ini file fix because sleep was totally broken, and learning to backport the graphics driver to an older version because the recommended pascal driver forces the wrong resolution on my main screen. This is just stuff that doesn’t happen with windows, which I installed without a hitch the same hardware.

In my opinion, in the best case scenario Linux is equal to windows in usability, but in every other scenario it just isn’t. Yes, windows is shit these days. But the average person would rather be annoyed at copilot than deal with driver issues.

I agree. Yet another "Linux is great! The only issues I had were A, B, C, D, E...".

I also use every OS and Windows 11 is still the most hassle free and reliable (at least if you install the IoT version using Rufus). I still have to use X because Wayland has a couple of remaining issues. Also most distros inexplicably use Gnome despite KDE being significantly better. Why?

KDE 5 wasn't much better than GNOME 3, it's the main reason behind GNOME default I think. It's only til KDE 6 they got back up on their feet and solved the most egregious design issues, many more still linger.

GNOME/Red Hat for a long time is the only one even trying to figure out a solution for some of the longstanding issues like application distribution and sandboxing. Those rant articles about GNOME unfortunately went nowhere since the other desktops were all stuck. KDE Discover eventually supported Flatpak which was advocated by GNOME for years, SteamOS using Flatpak ended up being the decisive push.

GNOME having better enterprise support can be another factor.

I find Gnome way more visually appealing as well. Saying this as a KDE developer, too.

"Windows is great… you only need to… install the IoT version using Rufus"

Oh and tweak 24 settings with these powershell scripts, and better run them after every update to ensure they weren't changed back on purpose. Otherwise, totally hassle free.

Nope. I tweaked one setting via the GUI (to get the taskbar back to the left where it rightfully belongs). Literally everything else I've left as-is. The IoT edition doesn't come with any bloatware and Rufus does a couple of other tweaks automatically.

But you should, if you have any self-respect.</privacy>

I don't think there are any privacy related settings to tweak. The IoT version doesn't have any of the bloat. It's pretty much like Windows 7 but with a slicker interface.

Telemetry still needs to be turned off.

Also there are silly things that windows does, like hide file extensions.

Now you’re pulling at straws

LTSC IoT version has the bullshit stripped out so it's a viable OS. Also, it's not sold to regular people, only companies can buy it for some reason.

I prefer Gnome. There's hardly any visual clutter, and it can be controlled primarily by keyboard (which I prefer). Every other environment, even MacOS, just has so much noise.

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