Let’s not kid ourselves. Anybody who thinks that Linux is as user-friendly to the average user as eg. Windows or macOS is completely out of touch with how helpless the average user is
When I was college back in 2009 I was dual booting Ubuntu and Windows Vista on a gateway laptop. I never fiddled with Ubuntu at all. The things that worked out of the box worked reliability and I never bothered fighting with things that didn’t work like the stylus.
The reason why I didn’t make the switch back then was not the OS or the drivers. It was the lack of support for the software I needed for school, like Matlab and orcad pspice. Things have improved substantially since then between first party support (Matlab started supporting Linux with R2016a) and wine/proton letting windows applications run mostly normally without their developers needing to make any changes to support the OS.
IMO the thing that’s most in the way of adoption these days is the lack of mainstream OEM support. Until the masses can easily buy a computer with Linux pre-installed and the driver niggles sorted they’re not going to switch.
The distros that tout themselves as user-friendly come with pretty much everything an average, non-power-user would need pre-installed ootb: Internet browser, file browser, media player, app store, and some sort of settings app/menu to fiddle with basic things like screen resolution, input devices, audio settings, etc.
Has your experience been different? Is there some specific distro or some specific missing/confusing feature you’re talking about?
I’m not speaking from personal experience as such because I’ve been using Linux since the late 90’s, but I do know a bunch of people who haven’t had great experiences with Linux, mainly due to eg wanting to run games – which is fairly easy nowadays thanks to Proton but it’s still not as stupid simple as just installing a game in Windows – or driver problems (esp graphics)
Gotcha, thanks for clarifying. I definitely recognize that gaming isn’t 100% perfect on Linux yet, and graphics drivers can still be a pain. I think both of those statements hold true on Windows though, and I don’t think I’d consider a gamer an “average” PC user. PC gaming is a niche hobby. A large niche maybe, but it’s not the main thing people use a PC for. So I think it’s a little unfair to point to gaming-related issues when trying to claim that Linux isn’t user-friendly.
I wouldn’t call gaming a niche hobby at all – I know plenty of people who aren’t “technically-minded” in any way but who still play games on their computers and not just on mobile devices or consoles. 54% of Europeans aged 6-64 played games according to a 2024 poll, 43% of them on a PC – that’s a huge chunk of the population.
Huh, a statement that’s not been true for at least a decade
It still haunts the OS though, especially as Windows used to be actually good back then.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Anybody who thinks that Linux is as user-friendly to the average user as eg. Windows or macOS is completely out of touch with how helpless the average user is
When I was college back in 2009 I was dual booting Ubuntu and Windows Vista on a gateway laptop. I never fiddled with Ubuntu at all. The things that worked out of the box worked reliability and I never bothered fighting with things that didn’t work like the stylus.
The reason why I didn’t make the switch back then was not the OS or the drivers. It was the lack of support for the software I needed for school, like Matlab and orcad pspice. Things have improved substantially since then between first party support (Matlab started supporting Linux with R2016a) and wine/proton letting windows applications run mostly normally without their developers needing to make any changes to support the OS.
IMO the thing that’s most in the way of adoption these days is the lack of mainstream OEM support. Until the masses can easily buy a computer with Linux pre-installed and the driver niggles sorted they’re not going to switch.
The distros that tout themselves as user-friendly come with pretty much everything an average, non-power-user would need pre-installed ootb: Internet browser, file browser, media player, app store, and some sort of settings app/menu to fiddle with basic things like screen resolution, input devices, audio settings, etc.
Has your experience been different? Is there some specific distro or some specific missing/confusing feature you’re talking about?
I’m not speaking from personal experience as such because I’ve been using Linux since the late 90’s, but I do know a bunch of people who haven’t had great experiences with Linux, mainly due to eg wanting to run games – which is fairly easy nowadays thanks to Proton but it’s still not as stupid simple as just installing a game in Windows – or driver problems (esp graphics)
Gotcha, thanks for clarifying. I definitely recognize that gaming isn’t 100% perfect on Linux yet, and graphics drivers can still be a pain. I think both of those statements hold true on Windows though, and I don’t think I’d consider a gamer an “average” PC user. PC gaming is a niche hobby. A large niche maybe, but it’s not the main thing people use a PC for. So I think it’s a little unfair to point to gaming-related issues when trying to claim that Linux isn’t user-friendly.
I wouldn’t call gaming a niche hobby at all – I know plenty of people who aren’t “technically-minded” in any way but who still play games on their computers and not just on mobile devices or consoles. 54% of Europeans aged 6-64 played games according to a 2024 poll, 43% of them on a PC – that’s a huge chunk of the population.
Same survey:
I know there’s overlap, people who play multiple devices, but even with that, 43% is smaller than the other numbers
Looks like the numbers are similar for the US: 64% of the population plays games, 45% of them using PCs: https://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2025-Essential-Facts-Booklet-05-30-25-RGB.pdf