It just reliably works for me and family that are not Linux people. Sure, other distros have specialized uses, but many are just lots of meaningless work.
I am a tech lead and have >10y experience, so I can handle Linux perfectly fine. Does not prove my opinion right though. I just think most distros is a waste of time to use and configure. My OS is not something I want to fix or actively maintain, like ever. I just want to do stuff and play games. Mint lets me do that, without having to fix stuff.
I have tried lots of distros and every single one is more work, except maybe Ubuntu. Most users don’t want to maintain their OS, most Linux users at the moment? Maybe.
Yes, always being at the forefront of all software through Arch or another rolling distro is cool, it also means that you might be using less reliable software. Fedora is great in many respects, it is just less flexible. Yes, ostree is cool.
Its just that those things is for those who WANT to tinker with their OS. In the future more of the great stuff will be implemented in Linux Mint, but til then, why bother? (Unless you find joy in it)
We should stop recommending other distros to regular people.
TL;DR People just want an OS that works, not another project. Lets stop recommending all kinds of distros, just go for Mint.
Also, I am trying to create a discussion here, not 100% my opinion.
This is the part that kills linux, and has for many years. The power users assume everyone knows how to linux. So if something goes wrong, your linux from says “oh yeah, just run the bash script and sudo the nana.”
And I’m like “…”
Not even sure half the time if he’s intentionally gaslighting me, or if he genuinely is so lost in his own bubble that he has no clue that I have no clue what those words are.
Then he’s like “here, just copy this into terminal.”
And that gives an error. And he’s like “then fix the error”, and I’m like "I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT THE ERROR MEANS!!!
I have no idea if it’s still true, but in my days using windows, the error popups at least told you what was wrong, and it was intuitive how to fix it.
If it says “audio card not found”. So windows has this one center where all the hardware is. Generally you poke around in there until something works.
And thats the difference between most people, and linux users. When windows fucks up, most windows users don’t know what they’re doing, but they know where to do it. So they go into the hardware section and just fuck around until SOMETHING works.
Whereas linux users get the error code, and know exactly whats causing it, and how to fix it. But if you’re trying linux, and DON’T know those things, you just get an error you don’t understand. You google it, and you get 10 different possible issues that maybe are what you’re dealing with. But the problem is, on windows if you fuck around, you’re not likely to break anything. On linux if you fuck around, you could make everything so much worse.
And thats when you get linux users, telling brand new windows users “Yeah! Start with CachyOS. Its arch, but easier!”
Which again, I can’t tell if those linux users are gaslighting, or clueless.
And this is the best case scenario, a user who reads. My mother once wanted to try Linux, so I gave her Mint. She hit a roadblock when she couldn’t view Amazon Prime videos due to DRM issues. Firefox prompted her to enable DRM but she just didn’t look at the prompt. Instead she searched around and said Reddit users said to get an extension (?).
Linux users underestimate how much skill it takes
The few times Mint has given me problems, I appreciated that it didn’t seem like the system was fighting me the whole time I was fixing it, which was a breath of fresh air from Windows. But yeah the linux community has a superiority complex that is toxic and wards off new users.
In my experience, most people on windows don’t go into settings and mess around on their own. They ask for help or live with it. The amount actually investigating and fixing problems is low even on iOS.
I will have to disagree. I think what you find intuitive and obvious largely comes down to what you’re used to.
I have very limited experience with Windows, although I did have Windows 3.0 PC in the 1990’s. Windows at that time was basically just a graphical shell on top of DOS. As an OS my system was running DR-DOS, which was basically a DOS compatible CP/M. Rest on my 40 years of computing history has been mostly with either CP/M or Unix-like systems.
With this background I find Windows systems (yes, modern ones included) to be incredibly unintuitive and difficult to maintain. I don’t understand their logic and I find it annoying having to navigate through endless amount of dialogue boxes to accomplish a simple task that would require one command on any Linux.
My point here is that while Linux users perhaps indeed are in their own bubble, so seems very much to be the case with Windows users too. There is no basis for thinking that Windows is somehow inherently easier for everybody. It is not. It’s just what large amount of people are used to, and exrapolating from their own experience (not at all unlike Linux users) they assume that the same perceived easiness must be true for everyone.