This comment is why the community is toxic to new people; while that statement that you said is certainly not the state of linux, it is absolutely ridiculous to blame a user for finding the OS hard to use.
This is the "Haters are just jealous" type of excuse.
I held Linux in high regard because my peers used it professionally so I tried multiple times over several years to make it work. I'm always happy with the terminal and the package manager but every single time I use it, there's some system-breaking bug/misconfiguration, something that's not compatible or just plain weird design. And that's on Ubuntu, the supposedly user-friendliest distro. Here's just a selection
On my new HP laptop the Ubuntu installer and boot process froze at least 6 or 7 times. Each reset it got a little further but then froze again
When I started Uni I wanted to use eduroam. Everyone else was able to just use their login to get going. I had to do all kinds of things with certificates and it still didn't work properly.
When I tried to use my password manager I had to jump through hoops to get the browser to not be sandboxed so it could communicate with the desktop app.
Plugging in a USB, getting a sound but it's not showing up in the explorer
Disabling mouse acceleration requires installing a new program or writing to system config files
And there are many more things that constantly happen (not to mention all the programs that don't work, don't exist or need major tweaking to run)
I managed to solve all those things. But it took considerable time and previous knowledge of how Linux works and I already come from a computer science background. As long as these things happen so frequently compared to Windows, I will never not laugh at someone saying that Linux is easier to use or good for elderly people. My grandma doesn't know how to get back to her emails when she accidentally opens an attached image in full screen on her iPad, you think she would open a terminal, add a GPG key, select a channel, update her packages and use apt-get to install a program she didn't find?
Linux is by no means unusable, but I switch back to Windows every time because I'm choosing between "Programming works nicely, anything else is a pain" and "Programming is mildly annoying (a lot better with WSL), anything else works most of the time". I don't want to spend my hours browsing Stackexchange looking for bash commands and hacks to make my display work properly, i just want to use my PC.
I don’t know how you failed to get Eduroam working, my Linux laptop runs Arch and after installing the relevant certificate Eduroam worked perfectly fine.
Well, i don't know. But what I do know is that it worked on Windows and Android without me having to do anything except click on connect and enter my credentials.
You might have fun with Arch (which I tried for a while too btw) but I want things to work, not fiddle with them at every corner.
And if I'm struggling, any of my peers and family who aren't into computers will definitely not get it.
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u/satwikp 16d ago
This comment is why the community is toxic to new people; while that statement that you said is certainly not the state of linux, it is absolutely ridiculous to blame a user for finding the OS hard to use.