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Provide out-of-box ease of use on everyday devices operated by low-skilled users.
I mean, Linux technically could, but the incentive to push for this is not nearly as high as the commercial incentives of providing this experience using Windows. So unfortunately it currently can't.
The moment you mention the Terminal, itβs a wrap for most users.
That said, Ubuntu is at a point where you could almost entirely avoid the Terminal if you wanted. Itβs just that there arenβt a lot of laptops that come with Linux as the main OS.
This is something that too many people don't understand.
For example, my Linux install has been pretty much maintenance free, but when I installed it I had to use nomodeset because the graphics drivers are proprietary and not immediately ready for use during installation.
For a low skill user, you have already lost. Even that small barrier is enough to deter your laymen.
Low skill users will use what comes installed on their machine, so installation quirks like that are not relevant for them. They don't install Windows either.
Only if you compare computers that come preinstalled with Windows, operated by users that are already familiar with Windows.
A non-technical user is completely out of their element trying to install Windows, and a computer that comes preinstalled with Linux is easier to use than a Windows PC (no driver installation necessary, no hunting for software on the internet among spam links and ads, preinstalled software for most every-day tasks).
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
Generally people are worse with computers than you think.
A computer preinstalled with Linux is definitely more likely to confuse than you imagine
To be fair, the amount of tech support and help that low-skilled users need on windows would suggest this isn't really true. A lot of these people have been using windows for decades and still have frequent issues with it.
I'm not claiming that most Linux distros are better than windows with this, but I don't think windows can be claimed to be a good OS for the tech-inept either.
Biometric login. It is available to an extent through fprint on Linux but support is not there for all hardware and it isn't a very seamless experience to setup at the moment
Get some people to write really passionately about moving off of it, apparently.
Run updates without me having to worry that "whoops, an update was fucked, and the system is not unbootable anymore. Enjoy the next 6 hours of begging on forums for someone to help you figure out what happened, before being told that the easiest solution is to just wipe your drive and do a fresh install, while you get berated by strangers for not having the entirety of the Linux kernel source code committed to memory."
Just to provide another data point: I've had bad Windows updates render my machine unbootable too.
And then you're left searching for bullshit error messages and potentially unable to fix the problem regardless of your level of expertise.
Spoken like someone who doesnβt do stable releases
Embed ads on your desktop.
Play games with kernal level anti cheat
Run professional software like fusion 360, Adobe suite and much more.
Use Wsl to get a lot of the benefits of linux
Run Microsoft Office, Adobe Suit and most other media editing programs. The biggest hurdles in getting people to use Linux
Play lots of AAA games
Specifically just anti-cheat that chooses not to support Linux at this point.
We shall see how this plays out considering steam/proton's advancement and the steam deck's popularity, too.
Avoiding snark and concentrating on first party features:
You can do these things to an extent bit not as comprehensively and robustly
I'd say large scale enterprise end user deployment and management solutions. It's one of the core businesses of Microsoft and nothing comes close to it yet unfortunately.
Mixed DPI multi-monitor support. This coupled with a severe lack of robust CAD and design tools means that it can't be my daily driver.
Hit the ground running deploying...pretty much anything.
Was running game servers on my Windows PC through Docker and they were super easy to set up. I got a new PC and decided to repurpose my old computer into an Ubuntu server to get some experience with Unix. I have only been more frustrated once in my entire life. Sure, once things are set up on Linux they are really powerful, but the barrier to entry is so absurdly high and running anything "out of the box" is literally impossible by design.
Be highly unified, which eases software distribution. With Windows, the system software at least is from a single vendor. You'll have differences in hardware and in versions of Windows, sure. But then compare that to Linux, where Wikipedia estimates a thousand different distros. Granted, a lot of those are member of families like Red Hat or Debian that can be supported relatively easily. However, others use more exotic setups like Alpine, NixOS, or Gentoo. Projects like Flatpak are working on distribution mechanisms, but they have their own issues. And even if you get it running, that doesn't mean it integrates well into the desktop itself. Wayland should improve that situation, though.
Just run stuff out-of-the-gate
Connect to WiFi properly in a Panera (ymmv, but this was my experience with 3 different Ubuntu-based distros)
Play pretty much any game (Proton has gotten us far but it's not the end-all-be-all)
Be usable without the command line at all (tried giving my GF Linux Mint, no it's not entirely usable without the command line, and I haven't found a distro that is)
*Run Nvidia flawlessly out-of-the-box
*Be backed up fully and easily (no, TimeShift is not easy, it's just easy for you after looking up documentation for a hot minute)
*Except immutable distros like Silverblue *I know Pop_OS! comes with Nvidia drivers before anyone says that, but it's the odd-one-out
Wake itself up in 2:00 in the morning just so that it can crash the graphics card. Ask me how I know.
Get credit for its strengths, mostly. That and play games with anti cheat bullshit.
ITT: people confidently asserting that Linux can't do things that it can do.
Change your audio device seemingly at random.
Convince governments to move over from Windows, because Bill is gonna be all up in their ass to protect his $$$
Being intuitive.
On Windows, features are often a few clicks away from being enabled or modified. Software that you download also does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to changing your settings to what the program needs.
On the Linux distros that I've used, way too much setup is required via copying and pasting commands into the terminal. There were times when I completely replaced my path variables instead of appending to them, and that is way harder to do on Windows than Linux. Mistakes like that often lead me to installing a distro 3 times when doing a project, whereas Windows 11 rarely has those issues.
You just grew up using Windows and are used to its design language -- that doesn't make it inherently intuitive.
If you are fucking with path variables you're already a power user. The settings for an OOTB Ubuntu or other user-friendly distro are pretty damn intuitive, and if you're dealing with anything more complex, I personally would far rather use bash or other Linux shells than Powershell.
Ads in my notifications and my lock screen.
Reinstall Candy Crush.
Number 3 is keeping me on Windows. I make mods for old games and I need Visual C++. I almost got the compiler to run under Wine but who knows how it would behave if it did run.
Play games on GeForce NOW at a higher resolution than 1080p. :-/