The best marketing campaign for Windows is finally deciding on a distro only to be presented with a bunch of bullshit options (gnome, cinnamon, xfe, kde, mate, etc) the average person is expected to somehow understand the difference between or care about if they did. And no, someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing is not going to feel comfortable picking at random.
Then the 95% odds that trying to dual boot without the correct incantations fucks up being able to boot into Windows, which somehow after 20 years still hasn’t been fixed.
And I say this as someone who’s been using it personally and professionally for 20 years. The year of the Linux desktop will come when people are met where they are, not where you want them to be. If the simplest standard things require sifting through forum posts from 2006 for hours on end, you’ve already lost.
Well my Linux journey was even more adventurous then this.
First time I tried Linux was around late 90s. The included driver for my ati on board gpu did create some artifacts and it was suggested to use the default svga one.
The second time was in the early 2000s. There I was playing around with wine until it crashed one day and wiped my whole hard drive (sadly this was before I had a cd writing device, so lots of data gone :().
The third time, I can't really remember, but I wasn't really amazed (must be late 2000s).
The fourth time (must be around 2010-ish, I dunno), I finally made it for a few years after getting a 64 bit computer with more then 4 GB of RAM. Was using Windows XP (32 bit) and decided that instead of using Windows 7, I might try Ubuntu. Worked well, until it didn't. For some reason, Linux was having problems with the chipset on my mainboard (a nvidia one) and the dvd drive wasn't working. There were regular patches for the kernel (which didn't get included in the kernel for some reason, so I had to compile my own kernel). When that stopped working, I put my dvd drive into a Windows machine and it started working again (even on the linux machine) until it stopped working again.
That was when I switched to Windows 7 (64 bit) and I am now on Windows 10, sadly with a HTC Vive Pro 2 headset which seems to be unsupported on Linux. :(
I'm amazed at your experience, not sure what distros you've been using.
I've been using Linux for over 20 years. Can't remember when I had to do anything other than choose my keyboard layout, region and enter the WiFi password. 20 mins later, all installed and working.
Dual boot I agree can be awful, because for me, Windows has hosed the other operating system more than once on some update. Can't put them on the same disk together safely, but seems OK so far on separate disks.
It’s not so much my experience, but an understanding of why people unlike us face hurdles to even trying out Linux to make the switch.
If you go on distowatch, look at the download pages for the top ten distros. Some are better than others, but most present a dizzying array of options and terminology that assume the person reading is already familiar with Linux and those options.
It would be trivial to add in some “If you don’t know what you’re doing pick this one” to a given flavour to at least give somewhere to begin. Ubuntu at least got that part right at one point in time, but the community largely still has the soft-gatekeeping stance of “if you don’t know what you’re doing this isn’t for you”.
Surely after 20 years you’ve given up on the year of Linux on the desktop.
I’ve only used it for ~15 years but long ago came to the conclusion that I really don’t care about broader adoption. Why should I? It is good if people find their way to Linux. But it isn’t a product, they can come to it and accept it as it is, or fix it for themselves. But there’s no real benefit to increasing marketshare for its own sake.
> Then the 95% odds that trying to dual boot without the correct incantations fucks up being able to boot into Windows
This is fixed now with most desktop systems using UEFI. The bootloader will always show a "UEFI setup" option, and that in turn lets you pick alternate boot choices.
This isn't really true from my experience. Windows 10 will update the BIOS of the computer without your consent. This can result in the BIOS getting reconfigured in such a way that the system no longer boots unless you happen to know how to reconfigure it
Then the 95% odds that trying to dual boot without the correct incantations fucks up being able to boot into Windows, which somehow after 20 years still hasn’t been fixed.
And I say this as someone who’s been using it personally and professionally for 20 years. The year of the Linux desktop will come when people are met where they are, not where you want them to be. If the simplest standard things require sifting through forum posts from 2006 for hours on end, you’ve already lost.