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this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2024
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Your Fedora must be huge!
It's amazing to me in 2024 we still have fanboys saying this shit ad nauseum since 1995.
Linux is a shitty desktop environment unless you like to tinker. Apple and Windows provide a far better experience to those who want shit to just work and be compatible.
Odd. What distros have you had such poor experiences with? What sort of things do you use Linux for?
Mint has been tinker-free for me for years as my main desktop. I have had Mac and Windows laptops during that time, as well. But I rarely use them for any of my hobbies.
I use it to actually do stuff so the last thing I want is tinkering getting in the way of that. And it hasn't for years.
Now, to be fair, gaming is another story since not everything works easily.
Anyway, I doubt Mint is the only distro that doesn't require much fiddling with.
Things have come a long, long way since the 90s (I was using Mandrake at that time).
For example, the install process for Fedora and Mint are slicker than for Windows if you ask me.
I mean, my kid has been using Linux as her desktop since she was like 10 and she doesn't seem to have any problems (except ok sure, stupid Nvidia ...we went AMD with her new system). Granted she mostly just surfs and plays Minecraft.
I wouldn't hesitate to set up a non-techie with one of the mainstream, stable distros depending on what they want to use.
I don't think it is the year of the Linux desktop by any stretch but I do think the numbers will trend slightly up over the next five years as steamdeck-alikes get more popular and more progress is made on compatibility and natively written games, and as Windows enshittification continues.
I’ve personally had poor experiences with Mint, Fedora, Ubuntu, Manjaro and one or two others I’ve tried. Every single one required a few hours of tweaking in the terminal to get it even close to being functional, and I constantly found new things it wouldn’t work with (hardware, software, games, etc)
After about a week of being unable to use my computer as I’d like to (online gaming and photo editing) I went back to Windows.
Weird that so many mainstream distros would be unusable out of the box.
Nothing just works.
I run Linux, not because I think it's great, but because Windows is awful, and keeps getting worse. Furthermore it keeps abusing its majority market share to get away with increasingly scummy behaviour.
My Linux experience has been a lot more tinker free than Windows. There's a ton of distros to choose from for the uninvested, my 60 year old mum runs Linux at this point and the only difference is she stopped calling all the time for tech support.
Install Linux Mint with the GUI installer a la windows, done.
You are factually wrong unless you specify a distro. But even arch has arch install now.
Does the audio work? Including the microphone?
What about the Nvidia drivers? Wifi drivers? Printer drivers?
Maybe it works when you don't do anything with your computer, but most people aren't like that. Linux just really requires you to tinker more than other OSes. Sometimes that is a good thing, but never for a non-techy.
You will just have to come to terms with that.
I have never had to worry about wifi drivers, and my microphone has always worked out of the box with my computer.
Proprietary nvidia drivers are a bit trickier, but mostly painless.
Printers work flawlessly for me, I have a modern cheap hp printer, so I had low expectations, but my laptop running mint can print and scan with the built in applications.
I have an arch laptop for work. Out of the box, wifi worked because I needed it for the installation. I never print, strongSwan worked as easy as on windows. Arch minimal does require you to tinker for it to look nice. You are right about that. But honestly theres a package for everything and pacman is easy to use. The biggest issue I had was getting geek fonts or whatever to display in my polybar. Audio worked out of the box.
Edit: and I guess I am being a little untruthful. The regular arch install is easier than windows. I chose minimal because in my opinion vanilla kde is an eyesore and I wanted i3 as a window manager and no desktop at all. But it took me 20 minutes maybe to look up some packages to start with, type them in the given line and I was off. I was ricing for a whole week after. But it was entirely functional without looking pretty.
Everything you listed would be solved if Linux was as mainstream as Windows.
For me, I don't use Nvidia, WiFi works, old HP printer works, just need to install a package, a 1-year old Canon printer works out of the box on Ubuntu, but on Arch I need to extract the stuff from the driver .deb and place into the it into the right directories. Audio and microphone works flawlessly. This is the case on ASUS ZenBook, an underpowered ASUS Vivobook or something and a 2012 iMac, though on that one I need a modification to
/etc/default/grubto be able to control the brightness.