Linux

In all fairness, I've had some really dicey problems on Linux. I think the most difficult problem I've encountered was when I bought a USB soundcard which only worked in legacy mode, but using Wireshark and the USB audio class specification I managed to track down the bug in Linux' usb-audio module, so now I'm technically a kernel contributor :)

For me the difference is that when I get a problem on Linux, it usually tries to provide me with the information I need to figure out what goes wrong, and due to its open nature it tries to make it easy to fix things. Also the majority of the time, Linux is working flawlessly. Windows on the other hand, is plagued by bugs and annoyances that show up on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And when issues happen, they come with little information and are often impossible to fix yourself since the OS is locked down.

Actually, there is one thing that is an annoyance that I haven't been able to resolve. I use dvorak as my main layout.

Sometimes games get the keyboard right and keys are remapped to qwerty layout (and typing still uses dvorak). This case works better than on windows, since playing a game there either required the game itself to recognize keyboard layouts (best case), or remapping the controls (annoying case), or switching to qwerty (frustrating for typing because I'm stronger with dvorak now).

But sometimes instead it does the opposite and remaps the qwerty bindings to dvorak. As in, even if I swap layouts, wasd are all over the keyboard instead of all together. I need to exit the game, swap layouts to qwerty on the desktop, then relaunch for controls to work properly (and then I can sometimes swap back to dvorak in game and they continue to work). Often, the next time I launch the game, I'll forget to switch it but it will just work this time.

And sometimes it behaves like windows did where I can swap the layout in game and keys change as you'd expect.

I have no idea why it's inconsistent between these three options or where the "preserve key location despite the layout" feature is even coming from. Anyone have any idea about this?

His complaint was it was different.

This is the absolute core of everyone's reluctance... and 99% of (domestic) stuff is browser based...

Cause of death: Linux Mint allergy.

Lucky he was using linux when nobody really creates viruses for linux. But it's best to teach people not to click on everything before they do get viruses

don’t forget the original comment though: unable to upgrade without reinstall, and glibc incompatibility

i’m not saying that changes the latter comment, but it’s certainly far from the experience for every single person every single time… windows is like macdonalds: it’s the same horrible thing every time but it’s consistent

Exactly! For the majority of people it is easier yet many people will fight you to the death that the opposite is true

For my my father I only have to make sure it looks not so different after each major upgrade. I have to be careful when there are new things, but apart from that he can do everything for himself except these major upgrades and backups.

So, he is happy with Fedora and Gnome classic.

Glad to hear it's working well for her. I used Xubuntu myself in the past but switched to Fedora KDE on a whim :). When my wife wanted to ditch Windows I thought Xubuntu would be a good choice for her, but honestly I was surprised with how many different problems and errors we ran into while installing it on her computers. Granted it's more stable now, but during the first couple of months I occasionally had to spend hours trying to get pretty basic stuff working, when it required more advanced Linux knowledge to fix.

Glad you enjoyed it!

As for the choice of distribution, the installation of Bazzite was actually far from trouble free. The precise issue and its solution escapes my mind at the moment, but it refused to boot at first, and I had to spend more hours than I had hoped for before it was up and running. But after that it seems to be stable, the only question the kid has sent me was "can it break my computer if I switch Project Zomboid to the beta branch?" so I assume everything is working well now :D (There was a warning about switching to beta, saying that you should make a backup because things could break, and he wasn't sure what they meant)

As an early Linux adopter who tried everything under the Sun, I can only say that Mint is absolutely awesome.

What does "spun up the live" mean? Is this a USB install?

So fun watching someone try Linux as their first OS, none of the "Linux is difficult because I learned how to use Windows" or "Linux is bad because it's not exactly like Windows" comments :D Roblox stopped working when the devs intentionally blocked Wine, but he just shrugged and said he didn't play it that much anyway.

It's a little heart breaking hearing him often ask which parts he could buy to get more FPS, because he'd need to replace half the computer to get a newer CPU and DDR4 RAM, since I suspect the DDR3 could be the current bottleneck. But other than that he's very happy with the computer.

True but have you tried windows? The registry editor is just one example of the top tier bullshit that the windows apologists will gloss over. To them it's normal to have to open what I'm sure started as a tool Microsoft only saw themselves using just to fix basic problems that shouldn't have occurred in the first place