A few years ago my wife and I built a computer out of old parts for her friend’s then 10 years old son. Last month we were visiting them, and I heard the wife’s friend say something funny that I thought I’d share with you.
They live on the other side of the city, this was the kid’s first computer, and his mom doesn’t have much computer experience either, so our goal was to build something that was easy to use and hard to break from the beginning. Originally I choose ElementaryOS since it seemed to fit the bill, but after a year or two it turned out that it couldn’t be upgraded to a new major version without a full reinstall so it got stuck with an older version. We didn’t visit that often, and the kid’s games still worked so it wasn’t a major issue until Factorio broke due to glibc incompatibility.
When his birthday was coming up last month we bought him a SSD to make the computer a little bit zippier without a major upgrade, and I thought I’d give him a brand new Linux experience too, so I asked for advice here and in the end chose Bazzite. While I was helping the kid with the installation, I overheard his mom saying in the other room:
This Linux thing… We’ve never had any problems with it, he just clicks something to install it and it works. Unlike normal computers, where you always have to do things and fix them.
Perhaps not the most eloquent, but I consider it a very good review.
I upgraded my gpu this weekend. Shut down, switched the psu off, swapped the old one out and new one in, booted into bios no issue (to check if I has left pcie on auto or needed to update it), then booted into the desktop (fedora cinnamon). Bam, after login only saw wallpaper, no mouse cursor or other UI.
Well, at least it’s kinda working. Time to figure out what’s going on. Terminal works. There’s some errors in the log but nothing to do with amdgpu or firmware failed to upload or anything. Software render just shows up as black screen. Reset my cinnamon session and boot back to the same thing. Fuck.
Then I try moving my mouse way over to the right and it shows up! Oh right. I have my TV plugged in for streaming to it sometimes and it ended up defaulted to the primary display, so my main desktop was only showing up there (and it was off). Right click, display properties, swap my monitor to primary, disable the TV until I turn it on.
This is about the magnitude of the average problem I need to deal with on Linux. Something isn’t working like I want it to, half the time it’s actually working but I misunderstood something or the default doesn’t match my intent and I need to adjust settings and then it’s perfect or close enough.
Or the other problem I had yesterday, tried monster hunter world for the first time and it wouldn’t launch. Played satisfactory for a bit instead (new gpu is noticeably smoother yay), then did a quick search, found that a specific version of proton works, switched to that version and it played. That’s the first game that has had such trouble for me.
Actually, there is one thing that is an annoyance that I haven’t been able to resolve. I use dvorak as my main layout.
Sometimes games get the keyboard right and keys are remapped to qwerty layout (and typing still uses dvorak). This case works better than on windows, since playing a game there either required the game itself to recognize keyboard layouts (best case), or remapping the controls (annoying case), or switching to qwerty (frustrating for typing because I’m stronger with dvorak now).
But sometimes instead it does the opposite and remaps the qwerty bindings to dvorak. As in, even if I swap layouts, wasd are all over the keyboard instead of all together. I need to exit the game, swap layouts to qwerty on the desktop, then relaunch for controls to work properly (and then I can sometimes swap back to dvorak in game and they continue to work). Often, the next time I launch the game, I’ll forget to switch it but it will just work this time.
And sometimes it behaves like windows did where I can swap the layout in game and keys change as you’d expect.
I have no idea why it’s inconsistent between these three options or where the “preserve key location despite the layout” feature is even coming from. Anyone have any idea about this?
Best reviews are like that, people who don’t know shit, when theres a massive nerd following for said thing going wow that’s amazing.
I love this, because it’s exactly the opposite of the received “wisdom” you’d get from many corners of the Internet. As long as you aren’t mucking around the internals of a Linux install, it’s going to be stable, and it will be adequate for common computing tasks. Arguably, even better than adequate.
Exactly! For the majority of people it is easier yet many people will fight you to the death that the opposite is true
The best example of fighting the good fight as far as OSes. Good on you. Linux these days is for sure way better than commercial oses in most ways. Windows is more supported and macos is more obsessively polished on the surface. Otherwise they got nothing going for them
My 73 year old mother never had a computer before when she asked me for one, so she could talk online with her friends.
I installed Xubuntu and it has been working wonderfully for her. She just browses the web, types some poems using Libre Office and plays solitaire.
I just have to do a system update every year or so.
She’s now 87.
Glad to hear it’s working well for her. I used Xubuntu myself in the past but switched to Fedora KDE on a whim :). When my wife wanted to ditch Windows I thought Xubuntu would be a good choice for her, but honestly I was surprised with how many different problems and errors we ran into while installing it on her computers. Granted it’s more stable now, but during the first couple of months I occasionally had to spend hours trying to get pretty basic stuff working, when it required more advanced Linux knowledge to fix.
I remember you asking about what distro to pick, what a wonderful follow-up post. Thank you so much for sharing this.
Glad you enjoyed it!
As for the choice of distribution, the installation of Bazzite was actually far from trouble free. The precise issue and its solution escapes my mind at the moment, but it refused to boot at first, and I had to spend more hours than I had hoped for before it was up and running. But after that it seems to be stable, the only question the kid has sent me was “can it break my computer if I switch Project Zomboid to the beta branch?” so I assume everything is working well now :D (There was a warning about switching to beta, saying that you should make a backup because things could break, and he wasn’t sure what they meant)
Sorry to hear you had trouble with the installation. Since we have such a vast variety of hardware, you will always find a person having trouble with a specific distro I believe. That’s why having so many to choose from is awesome - but also a bit daunting at the start. Glad it’s working now, hope it stays that way.
So Linux can be a pain in the Ass to set up done things, but I’d light years ahead of what it was in the late 90’s
True but have you tried windows? The registry editor is just one example of the top tier bullshit that the windows apologists will gloss over. To them it’s normal to have to open what I’m sure started as a tool Microsoft only saw themselves using just to fix basic problems that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place
Of course I’ve used windows. From 3.1 to 11.
I’m in Linux now. Been using that A long time as well
Additionally very very few people even know what a registry editor in windows is
Because what they want windows to do doesn’t need them to understand it. That’s the point.
They click a couple buttons, windows crashes behind the scenes then loads again , all without the user seeing it now.
Back in the day the bsod would show up but they got rid of it.
Now dos (both ibm and Ms ) that was a fun thing to play with. .
You’re right that most people don’t use the RE. That was a bad example I guess.
The point of my question is this though: as pointed out in the original post, maintaining windows is no easy lift. To the point that your average user knows and hates the constant windows update process, and needs an “IT guy” in their life to help them overcome the hurdles which will arise. The idea that windows just works is a fallacy. Also same with Mac (or linux), but honestly? To a large degree linux can be that way for most users most of the time. Probably even more so than macs as long as it’s a good setup to begin with (the right distro, the software installed the user needs). Most people just need a browser. And it’s not without challenges just to keep even that running on windows. I’m aware of zero linux distros which force updates and even if you seek them out and install them, they aren’t very disruptive 99% of the time.