Every time a new version of Windows drops there are legions of Windows users who say this is the final straw, they're keeping their old version until the updates stop then they'll use Linux. And every time that doesn't happen, they just keep going back to Microsoft like it's some sort of domestic violence situation. Their standards forever dropping, getting slow boiled like an apocryphal frog. I've seen this repeating over and over for the past 20 years at least.
At this point I don't even have sympathy for Windows users. They choose their lot.
And yet their standards still haven’t dropped low enough for Linux to be an acceptable replacement. I don’t think that’s a knock on the Windows user, but an indication that Linux desktop (and its replacement applications) still isn’t user-friendly enough for most people.
It can never be user-friendly enough if how windows does things is the yardstick. Windows users bemoan about how terrible Macs are all the time just because things are done differently, and they don't even try to figure it out. If it doesn't work like windows it's not good enough.
If you install a distro that uses KDE Plasma, you're already most of the way there. Not just because of it's design similarities to Windows but it's the desktop environment that's been getting the most financial support lately and has seen the most rapid improvement.
I personally prefer it at this point. Dolphin blows away explorer, window management is more slick and more flexible out of the box and it also happens to be deeply customizable.
If Linux isn't uploading their FDE keys to Microsoft servers by default, Windows users will get scared and start crying. Needless to say, their tastes and desires should never be entertained.
The ASUS laptop I bought has a litany of issues: blue screens, audio dying, won't wake from sleep. MSFT, Nvidia and ASUS all blame each other.
I have a feeling modern Linux on this machine wouldn't be worse than what it shipped with. The days of fighting for 3 days with audio or printer drivers after an install are mostly behind us.
I hope Linux is never suitable for windows users, who's tolerance for abuse is matched in magnitude only by their lack of taste. You have no idea just how over I am with the very premise of Linux evangelism. I will go as far as find reasons or even just flimsy pretexts to oppose and criticize any change to Linux calculated to win over Windows users, because being co-users with such people is plainly against my own interests. My lack of sympathy extends to full blow gatekeeping.
What is "Linux for normals" besides Android anyway? If that's the crap you actually want, use it. But no, that's not good enough, you want to bring the riff raff into real distros to stink up the place. I hope this never works.
This comment is harsh, but after many years of seeing HN threads about this topic I agree. You can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves. Linux is great, I love it, but I’ve stopped trying to convince people to use it.
I was ready to install Linux. I installed a new 1TB ssd in my laptop. I shrunk the windows volume using Windows' Disk Management.
Then I started reading the Arch wiki on this task. It forced me to learn things like MBR vs GPT. Then it said Windows by default makes an EFI partition way too small so I have to re-create a new partition by temporarily mounting EFI, saving the files, deleting the EFI partition, and recreating a new one.
This seems like a horribly complex task and I can envision about a million unwritten things that can go wrong that the answer would be "well duh, that's obvious if you had any experience with linux disk partitioning. I myself bricked a dozen PCs."
Deleting the EFI partition, if it goes wrong, by definition my system would be bricked until I could figure things out.
Also, everything must be typed into terminal exactly with no error and one chance. (If the typo causes the command to error, phew. if the typo causes something else to happen, beware)
This is the issue though, Windows obscures the natural complexity of many things and picks defaults that serve to lock you into the ecosystem. You have expectations about how easy certain things should be that you are unwilling to let go of, and you dismiss the things that other systems make easy as irrelevant.
If Windows had never hidden the natural complexity of EFI, or chosen sane defaults, your experience would be better. It is absolutely insane to blame that on Arch.
If you had tried Ubuntu, KDE Neon, CachyOS, ElementsryOS, or really any other distro, this would not have been your experience.
Arch is a Manual experience designed for power users. It is not a good choice for even your average Linux user, let alone a first time Windows convert dipping their toes.
How does someone browse this forum and get to the point of installing Arch without intimately understanding that Arch is infamously, abnormally difficult to install? Proving GPs point perhaps
After leaving that comment I had a moment of doubt that maybe I had gone too far, but no, you've reassured me. The windows user wants to stink up a power user distro to make it a fisher-price toy. Disgusting.
At this point I don't even have sympathy for Windows users. They choose their lot.