𝙲𝚑𝚊𝚒𝚛𝚖𝚊𝚗 𝙼𝚎𝚘𝚠

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: August 16th, 2023

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  • The average user just gets frustrated and tries to boot back into Windows. I’ve seen it first hand. Linux is basically all the same in their head so why bother distrohopping because if one is broken they’re likely all broken. They consider distros to be much more like the different Android variations, even though those are much more similar to one another than Linux distros are.

    Average users just expect things to work. They don’t want to tinker or do long setups or navigate 600 different distros, they just want a clear good option and for it to work. It’s part of why Windows has this huge inertia behind it; there’s always one upgrade path, setup is basically automatic and in the vast majority of cases any issues are handled either automatically or don’t show up in the first place (in large part due to manufacturers providing support for their model PC/Laptop, not because Microsoft is amazing at support). And because the majority of their friends and family also use Windows, there’s usually someone around who can fix what is truly broken.

    I genuinely think a user on a hypothetical Dell or HP or Lenovo laptop with Linux preinstalled would have a much better time on average than anyone trying to install it themselves.


  • Linus didn’t shit on Linux as a whole, come on. Last time he tried Pop was over a year ago, he figured something might’ve changed in the meantime. And he did research what could be causing the issues (and found a fix for L4D2), and did also mention that overall the system was intuitive, installing it was fairly simple and he enjoyed not having his data being sold. He also said that all his devices were plug-and-play, no driver downloading shenanigans required. But of course he is going to highlight the issues he runs into, it’s kind of the point of the video to show that not all experiences with Linux are seamless, and you can get radically different results depending on your chosen distro.


  • That’s definitely not what he did though. He did research on the internet, going through various websites and articles listing options, and asked ChatGPT. That’s imo more than what the average user does (or is even willing to do).

    He then picked the distro that he saw was being recommended most to him. He installed it with default options, which ended up being Cosmic. Which is improving fast these days, but it’s still a bit unstable. But the install process won’t tell you that.

    Pretending that these users are “bad users” or that highlighting these issues that regular users run into is disingenuous or somehow irresponsible is just unfairly dismissing a valid perspective.

    The whole “Linux just works”-shtick just isn’t always true. And the sooner the community learns to accept that and works to help these users with their issues, rather than stomping their foot angrily whenever someone shows up highlighting problems. I’m pretty experienced myself with a job in software development, but even I needed to reinstall Bazzite 2 times when installing it for my sister because I somehow messed up something when mounting the hard drives, getting Bazzite stuck in an unrecoverable bootloop (none of the recovery options suggested online worked either). I hate Windows as much as the next guy, but I’ve never been able to manage that on a Windows install (once running Bazzite ran fine btw, just the setup was frustrating).