I’m neck-deep in Linux and am responsible for getting developers at work up and running with it in servers, WSL and in 3 cases desktops.
I would suggest you’re just blind to the new user experience at this point. You’re focusing on a lot of stuff that works out of the box on most hardware these days. (but were kagey a year ago)
Bookworm on a late model laptop installs with 0 work. Onboard Nvidia is fine, sound is fine, steam is fine. Printer is fine.
No terminals required, Gui’s and Settings are fine.
Scaling (even fracitonal) is fine on KDE for the past few months.
You know who has had scaling issues for a decade? Windows.
Drag that notepad from your 4k screen over to your 1080 screen in windows an watch it blow up 6x, if you accidentally let go before it resizes it on the 1080, the top bar is off the screen. We’ve been dealing with that forever.
Servers are fine. VM’s are fine.
What non expert level things are you expecting a newb to open a terminal and do?
IMHO, The majority of the issues at this point are apps only supporting X when trying to run under wayland.
I tell them it’s not windows and some things are going to be different. I’d offer up some widgets, maybe *the linux equivalent of rainmeter.
They can also trade out for one of the windows copycat distros If it was that important to them that it look and work just like windows.
Likewise if somebody in Windows 11 wanted to see the time but didn’t want to see the date in their tray like win95, there’s no GUI option for that.
Now if somebody really wanted to die on that hill, of course it can be changed in Linux, which is a clear advantage over Windows, But you’re going to have to get your hands dirty to do custom work.
As far as I can remember Windows 11 only shows the time on default installations and there are GUI options to change the shown format on the taskbar.
“Some things are going to be different” basically means that they would have to learn to deal with manual config changes and command line stuff.
I personally don’t expect the “end-user readyness” of Linux Distros to ever be a serious competition to OSes developed by huge teams driven by trillion dollar companies like Apple and Microsoft. Basically all Linux Distributions I’d consider “end-user ready” and polished are themselves developed by huge companies - like Android, ChromeOS, SteamOS.
I think the biggest issue Linux has on the desktop is the sheer amount of choice for practically everything. The ecosystem is so fractured.
So the choice is actually not between Windows, Mac and Linux, but between Windows, Mac and about thirty Linix distributions where not even experienced Linux Desktop users can agree on which they should suggest to the general public.
Which distro should I suggest to my neighbor? And are you sure other “Linux experts” would agree with your answer?
Negative. Date and Time or nothing, I’m on it at the moment. I use OSX, Windows, Debian, Android, and NixOS daily for different things.
basically means that they would have to learn
No, they don’t need it, it’s not even a changeable option on windows, mouse over it, get the date move on with life. If you can’t survive without customizing every element on your computer, no OS will suit you
end-user readyness
While I disagree, that’s an opinion, and it’s your opinion, and you’re welcome to it.
sheer amount of choice for practically everything. The ecosystem is so fractured.
This line of thinking has a fault. You’re punishing choice and options because they’re alien. Every time someone is unhappy with the way people are doing things, they make their own because they can. The very fractures you’re upset about are the same fractures that bring you https://linuxfx.org/ a distro with the time/date in the tray by default.
where not even experienced Linux Desktop users can agree on which they should suggest to the general public.
What kind of jeans should you buy? What kind of socks should you wear? Hell you can’t even get a consensus on Windows VS Mac or IOS vs Android from pros.
Which distro should I suggest to my neighbor?
Currently, Debian is pretty solid. It lacks LTS, but for the home user, that’s not the end of the world. It’s good about updates and there aren’t any big kerfuffles about their package manager. I would reccomend, coming from windows to give KDE a shot on it. It’s fairly close to the windows look and feel, they just need to go into settings and tell it that single click on the file explorer needs to select and not open. If they’re coming from Mac, Gnome is going to feel a little more homey.
If they must have a windows clone, check out linuxfx, there’s less community support there, but it will be very close to what they’re used to.
If neither of those suit them Fedora is the next standout.
When people talk about Ubuntu, Mint, POP, or any of the other 30 flavors, they’re just great-grandchildren of Debian or Fedora. They try to make games easier or add their own flare to default installs. The vast majority of the fractures came about because old-school Debian didn’t do non-free, so you had to fight for video drivers and MP3. Ubuntu was first and did great until Cannocial started getting money-hungry. Then they started with snaps. Just as Ubuntu came from the discontent with Debian, Mint and Pop came from the discontent with Ubuntu. Now that Debian gave on non-free and most of the non-free’s now support free, Debian is fine and few people will say it’s not ok. Of course the pop users will say use pop, like the mac users say use mac.
Truth is, it mostly doesn’t matter what you use. With the exception of Arch, NixOS and Ubuntu, they’re all close to being the same OS with minor customizations. They’re mostly pulling from the same couple of repos even if they do it through upstream.
I rechecked the windows taskbar stuff and you are right there is no setting for that, the only way to change it would be to chnage the region date format which would change it everywhere not only in the taskbar
This line of thinking has a fault. You’re punishing choice and options because they’re alien.
I don’t really have an issue with choice but people use computers to do specific tasks and what’s important are solid defaults with the option to (in a simple manner) change some stuff later.
What kind of jeans should you buy? What kind of socks should you wear?
The ones that fit. I don’t really have hugh demands for my socks. And I think that’s a good example how regular people think about computers. They buy something and expect it to “just work” and not get in the way. Imagine entering a store asking for socks and instead of “they are over there” they start to ask you so many questions you never thought about and really aren’t interested in. I don’t want to answer questions about which yarn I like, and if I want different socks for left and right or the same ones. The exact ratio between length and width, etc. I don’t care. Most people don’t. Just give me “the black ones”.
That doesn’t mean there should only be one color and type of socks. If you are a sock enthusiast go for it. But that’s exactly what happens with most Linux distros when you install them. Some ugly terminal user interface ask you about which package managers, desktop environments, while switching back and forth between fast running console log output and ugly TUI questions and everybody watching thinks you sre trying to enter the matrix.
Most people don’t care. Just give me the stuff that work in 95% of the cases and has the best support or most stable, or whatever, so basically “black socks”.
I’m neck-deep in Linux and am responsible for getting developers at work up and running with it in servers, WSL and in 3 cases desktops.
I would suggest you’re just blind to the new user experience at this point. You’re focusing on a lot of stuff that works out of the box on most hardware these days. (but were kagey a year ago)
Bookworm on a late model laptop installs with 0 work. Onboard Nvidia is fine, sound is fine, steam is fine. Printer is fine.
No terminals required, Gui’s and Settings are fine.
Scaling (even fracitonal) is fine on KDE for the past few months.
You know who has had scaling issues for a decade? Windows.
Drag that notepad from your 4k screen over to your 1080 screen in windows an watch it blow up 6x, if you accidentally let go before it resizes it on the 1080, the top bar is off the screen. We’ve been dealing with that forever.
Servers are fine. VM’s are fine.
What non expert level things are you expecting a newb to open a terminal and do?
IMHO, The majority of the issues at this point are apps only supporting X when trying to run under wayland.
A question I got last week over the phone: “How do I show the day of the week next to the date in the desktop on Linux?” - what would you tell them?
I tell them it’s not windows and some things are going to be different. I’d offer up some widgets, maybe *the linux equivalent of rainmeter.
They can also trade out for one of the windows copycat distros If it was that important to them that it look and work just like windows.
Likewise if somebody in Windows 11 wanted to see the time but didn’t want to see the date in their tray like win95, there’s no GUI option for that.
Now if somebody really wanted to die on that hill, of course it can be changed in Linux, which is a clear advantage over Windows, But you’re going to have to get your hands dirty to do custom work.
As far as I can remember Windows 11 only shows the time on default installations and there are GUI options to change the shown format on the taskbar.
“Some things are going to be different” basically means that they would have to learn to deal with manual config changes and command line stuff.
I personally don’t expect the “end-user readyness” of Linux Distros to ever be a serious competition to OSes developed by huge teams driven by trillion dollar companies like Apple and Microsoft. Basically all Linux Distributions I’d consider “end-user ready” and polished are themselves developed by huge companies - like Android, ChromeOS, SteamOS.
I think the biggest issue Linux has on the desktop is the sheer amount of choice for practically everything. The ecosystem is so fractured.
So the choice is actually not between Windows, Mac and Linux, but between Windows, Mac and about thirty Linix distributions where not even experienced Linux Desktop users can agree on which they should suggest to the general public.
Which distro should I suggest to my neighbor? And are you sure other “Linux experts” would agree with your answer?
Negative. Date and Time or nothing, I’m on it at the moment. I use OSX, Windows, Debian, Android, and NixOS daily for different things.
No, they don’t need it, it’s not even a changeable option on windows, mouse over it, get the date move on with life. If you can’t survive without customizing every element on your computer, no OS will suit you
While I disagree, that’s an opinion, and it’s your opinion, and you’re welcome to it.
This line of thinking has a fault. You’re punishing choice and options because they’re alien. Every time someone is unhappy with the way people are doing things, they make their own because they can. The very fractures you’re upset about are the same fractures that bring you https://linuxfx.org/ a distro with the time/date in the tray by default.
What kind of jeans should you buy? What kind of socks should you wear? Hell you can’t even get a consensus on Windows VS Mac or IOS vs Android from pros.
If they must have a windows clone, check out linuxfx, there’s less community support there, but it will be very close to what they’re used to.
If neither of those suit them Fedora is the next standout.
When people talk about Ubuntu, Mint, POP, or any of the other 30 flavors, they’re just great-grandchildren of Debian or Fedora. They try to make games easier or add their own flare to default installs. The vast majority of the fractures came about because old-school Debian didn’t do non-free, so you had to fight for video drivers and MP3. Ubuntu was first and did great until Cannocial started getting money-hungry. Then they started with snaps. Just as Ubuntu came from the discontent with Debian, Mint and Pop came from the discontent with Ubuntu. Now that Debian gave on non-free and most of the non-free’s now support free, Debian is fine and few people will say it’s not ok. Of course the pop users will say use pop, like the mac users say use mac.
Truth is, it mostly doesn’t matter what you use. With the exception of Arch, NixOS and Ubuntu, they’re all close to being the same OS with minor customizations. They’re mostly pulling from the same couple of repos even if they do it through upstream.
I rechecked the windows taskbar stuff and you are right there is no setting for that, the only way to change it would be to chnage the region date format which would change it everywhere not only in the taskbar
I don’t really have an issue with choice but people use computers to do specific tasks and what’s important are solid defaults with the option to (in a simple manner) change some stuff later.
The ones that fit. I don’t really have hugh demands for my socks. And I think that’s a good example how regular people think about computers. They buy something and expect it to “just work” and not get in the way. Imagine entering a store asking for socks and instead of “they are over there” they start to ask you so many questions you never thought about and really aren’t interested in. I don’t want to answer questions about which yarn I like, and if I want different socks for left and right or the same ones. The exact ratio between length and width, etc. I don’t care. Most people don’t. Just give me “the black ones”.
That doesn’t mean there should only be one color and type of socks. If you are a sock enthusiast go for it. But that’s exactly what happens with most Linux distros when you install them. Some ugly terminal user interface ask you about which package managers, desktop environments, while switching back and forth between fast running console log output and ugly TUI questions and everybody watching thinks you sre trying to enter the matrix.
Most people don’t care. Just give me the stuff that work in 95% of the cases and has the best support or most stable, or whatever, so basically “black socks”.