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Linux or Landfill? End of Windows 10 Leaves PC Charities with Tough Choice
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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2025
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I understand that people need to be a bit more tech savvy to use Linux over windows but I reckon that KDE for example is really similar to windows (but actually much much better) and with the ai chatbots we currently have available I reckon any non-tech users would be able solve most of the issues with the chatbot’s help
I'm tech savvy, been in IT for nearly 40 years. Wrote my first program in Fortran on punched cards.
Linux is no easy switchover. It's problematic, regardless of the distro (I've tried many over the years).
My latest difficulty - went to install Debian and it hung multiple times trying to install wifi drivers.
Mint can't use my Logitech mouse until I researched it and discovered someone wrote an app to enable it. The most popular mouse on the planet doesn't work out of the box.
Typical user would be stumped by these problems.
I can go on for days about "Year of the Linux Desktop" (which I first heard in 2000). Can Linux work as a desktop? Definitely. And it can be pretty damn good, too, if your use-case aligns with it's capabilities. But if you're an end-user type, what do you do a year in and realize you need a specific app that just doesn't exist in Linux?
Is it a direct replacement for Windows? No. Because Windows has always been about general use - it trades performance for the ability to do a lot of varied things, it includes capabilities that not everyone needs.
Linux is the opposite, it's about performance for specific things. If you want a specific capability, it has to be added. This is the challenge these different distros attempt to meet: the question for all of them is which capabilities to include "out of the box" (see my mouse example - Debian handles it just fine).
This is also the power of Linux, and why it's so great for specific use-cases. Things like Proxmox, TrueNAS, etc, really benefit from this minimalism. No wasted cycles on a BITS service or all the other components Windows runs "just in case".
Only tech savvy for installing an OS, other than that Linux is a better experience for less tech savvy users. My wife struggled with Windows and how things don't make sense (it was also slow) so I setup nixOS with GNOME, no more complaints
Does your wife install packages with NixOS? This is one of the few distros I tried (and now main) that I genuinely cannot recommend to anyone not willing to spend days learning the lang & concepts.
No, she is very bad with tech. I have added everything she needs for her web, email, spreadsheet, zoom call use. NixOS is super easy for an average person who can edit a text file though. You go to this site https://search.nixos.org/packages , search what you want, it gives you the code to paste into your config, and run a rebuild...or options for a temp install. Seems painless.
Good point.. I tend to give family members Flatpak-based distros like Fedora for the nice app store experience, but I guess if you can get past the scaryness of test editing and rebuilding with a console, NixOS does come with the benefit of having waaaay more packages and much easier rollback. My poor father trying to run nvidia drivers on Fedora Kinoite, who has to rebuild the kernel for every package install...
For somebody that can install software from a store fedora or Zorin or Mint would be solid suggestions.
For your dad you could try OpenSUSE, it has nvidia hosted repos for Nvidia with the GUI package updater, but I think bazzite has an nVidia spin doesn't it?