[lordleft]

I love Linux and use it daily, but this paragraph gave me pause:

"I’ve spent dozens of hours combing through Reddit threads, analyzing old Stack Overflow solutions, and, in times of true desperation, asking AI chatbots like Mistral’s Le Chat and Anthropic’s Claude for help deciphering error messages. Luckily, the Linux community is also very supportive. If you’re willing to ask for help, or at least do a little troubleshooting, you’ll be able to work out any problems that come your way."

There are many people -- like my Mom or Dad, for example -- who will never find this appealing and are likely to dig themselves into deeper holes trying to fix system issues on the command line. That's why Steve Jobs was on the money when he talked about a computer that was as intuitive as an appliance -- it has to "just work" for most normies. While I'm as frustrated with Windows as the next person, I'd probably just hand the average person a Mac mini instead of popping a linux distro on their machine if they needed a new computer (though if all they are doing is just browsing the web and reading emails, a ubuntu install is probably fine).

[BeetleB]

I recently started using MacOS for work after decades of Windows/Linux.

I definitely had to, and continue to, search online for help. Sure, perhaps MacOS is more intuitive than Linux, but not by much.

[godelski]

I find a major difference is that Linux support is harder to understand but OSX support is harder to get.

I've found support.apple.com and discussions.apple.com to be incredibly wanting. This isn't helped in the slightest by the fact that OSX changes tools, even in major versions. If anyone is doubting the "harder to get" claim then I encourage you to search (you can use LLMs) to figure out how to print the SSID you're connected to from the CLI. Such a task is really really simple. I can tell you a bunch of ways to do this on linux with tools like `iw`, `iwconfig`, `nmcli`, or `iwgetid` but I can no longer tell you how to do this on OSX. The linux answer is hard because the tool might change based on your distro or you can install a tool. That requires more understanding. But on OSX, this category of problems don't exist.

If you want the old answer you can see here. None of those work, even with sudo, nor does wtallis's answer, despite this working on an earlier version of Sequoia (FWIW, I'm now on 15.7.3): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41633547

[MarkusWandel]

Opposite experience here. My aging mom had been on Windows XP for years and years, and then someone gave her a cast-off laptop running Windows 10.

That was such a culture shock. Endless pop-ups to do this and subscribe to that and so on. And it has gotten worse since then of course.

Instead I set her up on a nice mature Linux desktop - Mate - and that was fine. Chrome, Thunderbird and not much else. And solid reliable and nobody reaching in from the cloud with the latest attempts to monetize something or push AI onto you or whatever. You turn on (unsuspend) the computer and it's the same computer it was yesterday, working just the same.

[cosmic_cheese]

There are plenty of folks with some (or lots of) technical capability who’d rather not have to deal with these things, too.

I’m in favor of Linux becoming more dominant as a desktop operating system but there is still plenty of work to be done in making it suitable for mass adoption. Denying that only slows the timeline on Linux’s ascendance.

[pjjpo]

I was happy to see them give this clear headline

> Linux isn’t especially complicated on a daily basis, but you have to be willing to solve your own problems

That being said, given the huge uptick in Linux articles lately, I can only believe Canonical is funding something here. It's just too sudden of a surge.

I'll probably still game on Linux, but who knows if that will last after a few more "freeze on resume" situations. These just don't happen on Windows and most Linux sentiment seems to be coming from anti-Onedrive feelings, which is fair, but the popups are easy to click through. Random Linux instability, not so.

[1970-01-01]

I now say that these Linux success stories are just like saying you've been married for a year and everything is going fine. It's great that you made it to the first big milestone, but that doesn't mean there aren't legitimate reasons Linux is a bottom contender for user OS. A long, scarring evening of frustration and pain is very likely coming down the road. Will The Verge publish stories about these problems, too? No, they won't!

https://xkcd.com/349/

[Linux-Fan]

I wonder if this is due to Linux being harder to work on or because it is possible to fix some errors which would be catastrophic on other OSes?

Back when I used Windows a lot (Windwos XP times...) I also had the "long, scarring evening of frustation" rather often. It was usually solved by a reinstall.

In recent times, the “standard” seems to be smartphones (I use Android). The logic of smartphones it: It works or it dosen't and if it doesn't there is nothing you can do about it. Like ... not supporting some docking station because its network interface is called usb0 rather than eth0 ... no bypass, no solution, buy another docking station.

Of course this is faster than debugging the issue and maybe fixing it for good or maybe waste the evening on it.

Effectively Linux giving you the option to do something about errors doesn't mean the workarounds from other OSes like “reinstall”, “buy a new one”, “use a friend's system because it doesn't work here” are still readily available?

[pjjpo]

I don't upvote often and you got it. This is a great explanation of what seems to be going on.

[ghastmaster]

There is a difference between someone like my grandmother who I've had on Ubuntu for years, and this user and people like me who are trying to do more advanced operations. My grandmother doesn't need to research for hours to open her internet browser.

[mkozlows]

It gave me pause in the sense that it doesn't feel true.

I mean, yes, I've had to look things up to see how to do things in Linux. I've also had to do that on MacOS. (Just the other day, I couldn't remember what the Task Manager-equivalent on MacOS was, and nothing I typed into the launcher was coming up with an appropriate app, so I had to ask the robot what it was named.)

But dozens of hours? Maybe back in the Red Hat 4.2 days, but not now. Some of that is obviously just that I have a lot of knowledge about things, but even so.

[queenkjuul]

Some advanced uses from Windows that are very easy can be very difficult on Linux still. PipeWire, for example, while more stable overall, has made getting my audio routing all correct (e.g. for streaming) much more difficult than it is on Windows. Once it's set up it's just as stable but it took me longer to set up.

I could see that among other things totaling dozens of hours for a Linux beginner. Power management on laptops is still a common sticking point; i probably spent more than a dozen hours on that alone before giving up and going back to Windows on my laptop. And I've been using Linux for 20 years.

[tcfhgj]

Reminds me of C++ (templates) or Latex vs Rust or Typst error messages - good errors are possible

[godelski]

As for Microsoft, I've never found it to "just work". I've daily driven Windows machines because work has given them to me but I always try to get a Mac instead. Windows just breaks constantly and with silly things like using Windows Hello breaks Outlook and can cause it to go into a log{in,out} loop.

For OSX, I mostly agree but think "just works" is a bit too strong of a statement too. There are definitely fewer errors but they aren't non-existent. These seem to have dramatically increased with OSX 26 as well as the fact that the UX has significantly changed and in ways that contradict how things worked before. I get frequent calls from my parents. We'll set aside how often I'm searching how to do things and my absolute hatred for how little support there actually is online (good fucking god how utterly useless are support.apple.com and discussions.apple.com?!?!)[0]

I've also handed them linux computers. Truth is that they can't tell the difference. But it also depends on what type of user your parents are. Mine just browse the internet so they already know to use Firefox and they're good to go. Probably the most confusing thing for them would be to navigate the app store (I have no expectation for them to use the CLI) and understand what apps they need because the names are different from what they're used to. I think people under-appreciate how big of an impact this type of lock-in actually is. Search is still a pretty difficult problem and frankly older people don't even understand very basic search. (My mom still types in www.google.com every time she wants to search. Yes, I've showed her she can just type her query into the url bar...). That said, they also switched to DDG on their own accord (I did not tell them).

[0] On linux 95 times out of 100 I can find what I'm looking for with a search. But that's biased by years of experience and knowing what to search. Though I can use the same patterns as I would with linux, swapping out the tool for the OSX version and I will not get good results. If you want to see an example try searching for how to print out your network SSID from the CLI. You can even ask an LLM! In fact, I no longer know how to do this, even with sudo. I specifically mean "no longer" because I used to be able to... And let's be honest, what fucking reason is there to prevent one from seeing the SSID in the CLI? It's not private information. I can see it from the GUI no problem!

[mhitza]

If you want a Linux for the average Joe, then you have immutable distros, (such as Fedora Kinoite) which are going to better suited also for old people, and those that don't need to fiddle with their experience.

> ubuntu install is probably fine

Ubuntu and Gnome should be avoided even as suggestions. Ubuntu has become less reliable than Fedora in my experience. And Gnome does Gnome things that are incompatible of the average users requirement from a desktop encironment.