I've known for a while but Linux really isn't newbie friendly. I've tried several times over the years. Most recently I tried Mint and within a week or two the GUI software update stopped working. I switched to Ubuntu because I have a little familiarity and quickly realized the only way to stay updated is apt. Firefox will work for a while and then have days where almost every tab is crashing constantly. Sometimes you can get a page to work with reload or two, other times not. So I installed chrome under protest as a backup. Mostly it doesn't crash although sometimes it does the same thing as Firefox (but usually not at the same time). Those are really my only complaints at all.

I will say, though, that gaming has come a long way, especially with Steam. I don't think SteamVR is there yet, but otherwise I haven't found anything that wouldn't run (but I play AAA on PS so I'm not really pushing it hard). I thought I was giving up gaming when I moved to Linux, but not at all.

I left a big partition free in the expectation of dual-booting windows, but I really haven't had any reason to at all.

[–] The_v@lemmy.world 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I have been attempting to use Linux for 20 years now. It has found its niche used for me over the years. For example when my kids were toddlers they had a old machine that defaulted to PBSkids. Before that I used it to run a gaming server.

Currently I have a old laptop that I dual boot with win 10 and whatever Linux distro I feel like trying at the moment.

The win 10 on the laptop barely meets the minimum hardware requirements and takes 10 minutes to load.

I have tried a few different distros and always had a few issues with the setup. All sorts of different ones - screen orientation, WiFi connection, printer hell, keyboard layout etc. Takes me days to fix the bugs or give up.

Mint takes 2 minutes to load and so far is working seamlessly. It's apt manager is the easiest I have used in a Linux distro. It found my network printer automatically. It runs smoother than windows 7 did on my laptop.

With Microsoft ending win 10 for the shitty win 11, I imagine many people are looking for alternatives. If Mint continues to work to make setup and usage easy, it will gain market share rapidly. It's not all the way there yet, but it's a hell of a lot better than before.

[–] MagicShel@programming.dev 4 points 3 weeks ago

Completely agree. It's getting very close for consumer grade. I just fall in the niche of Linux-novice-prosumer. But fixing problems is how we learn more.

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