Well I guess I’m a Linux user now.
It’s not lost on me that it took nearly 5 days and collectively ~30 hours to set up and get my Linux install fully operational.
But it is operational.
The last bit of this was trying to get piracy up and running again. Stellaris just released the Astral Planes update, so that was my test. I downloaded the RUNE and Fitgirl versions, both of which installed and ran correctly off the rip using Lutro.
After that I popped on an USB disc drive, popped in my old total annihilation CD and installed that and got that running.
So everything works. All the games I play worked, and all the media I played worked.
Are there some things that annoy me? Yeah. Gnome apparently doesn’t let you create desktop shortcuts unless you resort to command line. That’s ridiculous. I also no longer have 20+ years of experience to draw on and am having to relearn basic stuff like “how do I uninstall or undo what I just did when I ran a script from a tutorial I didn’t understand”.
So for now, I guess I’m along for the ride, and get to relearn how to do everything.
I wouldn’t recommend Linux to my dad or any of my friends. They can barely use windows, and I had enough trouble during my setup and install that I know they’d run into an issue eventually that I’d have to solve. Plus they barely learned how to use Windows, and Linux is NOT dumbed down enough for the average user yet.
As a final note some Linux users push harder than crack dealers I’ve met. “Just one hit of KDE man I just know you’ll love it, oh you had issues with KDE? Well try these 300 different kind of KDE’s cause I promise bro once you go KDE you never go back”.
What distribution are you using? In my experience, ease-of-use varies wildly between software and hardware configurations.
There are systems that are built for Linux support, and some system builders (like System 76 and Pop!_OS) bundle their own distros with their machines, which makes for a better experience overall.
There’s also ChromeOS, which is technically Linux (in the same way that Android is), which is typically regarded as one of the most reliable and easy to use, and recently is available to install on nearly any machine.
That said, Linux is very much different from Windows. With Windows, the GUI is baked into the system and you can do almost anything without touching the terminal. In Linux, being familiar with (or at least not afraid of) the command line is a requirement to really getting things done.
One of the biggest issues with Linux is that installing applications isn’t non-destructive to the system unless you’re using Flatpak or Nix or something. Applications being installed, upgraded, removed, etc. and not putting things back the way that they were or that other applications expect them to be is probably the biggest source of frustration.
Once we have a reliable community distribution, which uses only containerized/sandboxes apps (a la ChromeOS), I think adoption for the average user will be a lot easier. Until then, just avoid using apt whenever possible.
I started with Fedora which was a bad time all around. Even their Nobara special release for Nvidia users geared towards gaming was completely unfunctional on my rig.
I’m on Pop!OS which I like. Most things were done easily, however I have a router that does Samba shares on the LAN and it uses Samba V1 which required some extensive configuration on linux to get operable.
Yeah Samba is a pain to deal with. It’ll be nice when NFS becomes standard across Windows machines instead of just some niche feature only available in the pro version.
ASUS routers chose to make their USB share Samba V1 for some reason, as do other home NAS plug and play servers.