Linux

Using it since I was 12

People have been using X since that age so anything different is going to be jarring. Just the smallest roadblocks can put people off of stuff. Why bother learning something new when the old thing works?

This is like asking why manual or automatic is frustrating. You mostly use the thing you have grown up with and that's it, particularly when you got bills to pay and there isn't much free time unfortunately. If you put it into perspective, a massive amount of users already hold Linux in their hands and everyday life: Android. Nah let's get back to computers.

IT class back in college taught a wee bit of Linux. I was one of the few who were interested and did what the teacher said, the rest played Hearthstone. Linux Mint is what intrigued me since high school. A wonderful OS that brings life to laptops too slow for Windows 7. But I'm still the cozy and unbothered person who sticks to Windows on their main machine. I just want to relax after a good days work and play Forza Horizon 5. However I do enjoy my Linux laptops that won't run red hot just because of Windows Update, Defender, telemetry and other garbage. My love&hate about Linux is that there are so many distros to choose from. There were times when x is better than y and it was(still is) the devils circle: distro hopping. Today I'm cool with Ubuntu derivatives like Mint and Pop, along with Fedora and Suse, since a decade of having at least one Linux PC I still don't find joy in advanced stuff like Arch. Anyway use the thing you are comfy with and don't let anyone judge you, live your life. <3

Try OpenSUSE, GUI for software, system, settings etc. And boot to previous snapshots if you break something

I put Linux Mint on my grandmothers old computer because the hardware was preventing it from upgrading from Windows 7 without massive slowdown. Back when she was using windows (albeit windows 7) she would call me every week with a new issue. Since installing mint she very rarely has issues and whatever issues she does run into can usually be solved very easily over the phone. I would say that Linux is what you make it. If you want to copy and paste commands from sketchy guides, things are going to break. But if you just use it like my grandmother does, browsing the web and writing emails, nothing can really go wrong

Because I like to play videogames.

That's it. That's all that keeps me back. I can't play Destiny 2 on linux and I'm an addict with a need.

There are a lot of factors I think.

Some are pretty legitimate, like the lack of Adobe or Autodesk support on Linux, which means a lot of people just 100% cannot participate in their industry using Linux. It's borderline illegal to use Linux if you're a mechanical or civil engineer; Solidworks and MATLAB are pretty much regulatory requirements; you'd probably lose your engineering license if you turned in a drawing made in FreeCAD. In the art space, tell a publishers you drew something in Inkscape and watch their personality leak out their ears. Everyone hates Adobe, but glory to Adobe.

There are also legitimate culture shocks; there's this LTT video where they had iJustine on, and Linus and Justine swapped platforms, he on a Mac, she on a PC, and they were given basic tasks like "install Slack. Take a screenshot. Paste that screenshot in a Word Processing document. Save it as a PDF. Send that PDF to James in a Slack message. Uninstall Slack." Justine immediately started looking around the back of the monitor for USB ports, rapidly found that a fresh install of vanilla Windows doesn't (or didn't at the time) come with a word processor that could save documents as a PDF, Linus immediately went to the web browser instead of the app store...They did similar stunts with their Linux challenge later on, though I'd kinda argue about the tasks they were set to do (such as "sign" a document, which Linus started to do cryptologically but didn't have any keys enrolled because who the fuck does, and Luke just...copy/pasted an image of his handwriting?) But anyway. Linux is different than Windows to use, and even a VERY windows-like DE like Cinnamon is going to have differences that will feel foreign. I remember tripping over "shortcuts" being "links or launchers depending on what you want to do."

There's also the fact that Microsoft has done a world class job at making the average normie hate and fear the command line interface. Because universally, when you see a cmd prompt appear in Windows, it is a bad thing. That hate gets transferred to Linux, where we do routinely use the terminal because while it can be a little arcane, with a little bit of learning you can do some powerful stuff. But, because people have been so conditioned to hate the CLI by Microsoft, you get exchanges like this:

"Hey I'm trying out Pop!_OS because you nerds keep saying it's good, and my laptop can connect to the internet with ethernet but not Wi-Fi, what's up with that?" "Well let's see, could you open a terminal and type sudo lshw -C network, and then copy-paste what it says here for me to look at?" "NO!!!11!! NEVAR!!!! How DARE you suggest I use a computer by doing anything other than pointing at little pictures?! The indignity! It's current year!!"

Finally, before I hit the character limit for this post, there's just a reputation around Linux. I've had this happen more than once, someone will ask to use my computer to look something up on the internet. "Sure." They find the Firefox icon on the quicklaunch bar just fine, it pops open, they're doing fine, then they notice the color scheme and icons are a little different and they ask "uhh, what version of Windows is this?" And I say "It's Linux Mint." And they lift their hands off the keyboard with the same gesture as if I just told them my cute furry pet in their lap is actually a tarantula. They have it in their head that Linux is deliberately hard to use because it's for computer nerds--they think all Linux is Suckless--and because they're not computer nerds, they can't use Linux. So the second they know it's Linux, they "can't" use it.

Watch my dad use a any computer if you want to see frustration.

Because people like to do stuff using a graphical UI but since that varies drastically from one distro to another all the instructions and support is reliant on doing stuff from the command line. That almost was solved by Ubuntu becoming ubiquitous but then they lost the plot.

College for computers where I got exposed to Linux, used to all about windows but it changed so much over the years, I just can't do windows anymore.

I've been running Mint for years, I had a box on 17 until it went end of life. My plex media server or samba server that thing giving me issues, I believe some version of Lubuntu or something that went end of life, I managed to upgrade the OS in place without wiping it but the operating system has done change ways it handles static IP addresses, the box has 3 nic ports and I haven't put much effort into figuring it out.

Many (most?) Windows users find Windows to be frustrating. I find Gentoo to be extremely frustrating a lot of times. Frustration doesn't really drive people away from tools that are necessary to them.

Simple tasks can take you way more time than needed. For example, I have an old laptop under Bunsenlabs (based on Debian with Openbox). The other day, I wanted to connect a secondary monitor. I wasn't expected the nightmare I had to setup this thing. The layout was totally off with a dead space between the two screens where the cursor disappeared and ArandR was very rough to use. I ended up editing txt file if I remember correctly.

I absolutely love Linux but this kind of thing happen quite regularly to be honest.

It is hard to adapt Windows habits to Linux for some cases. E.g. you sometimes use Adobe Photocrap for editing photos. Reasonable that ppl want to use what they know, so they will try to use it with WINE and obviously will fail. „Linux sucks, it cant run the properitary shit subscription software, going back to Windows!“ if someone really depends on such software then yes stay the fuck with Windows. For most other tasks there is a solution available. And for the fear of terminal: I bet most users never ever have to see or use it once since there are GUI tools available for such crucial tasks like updating. Mint does a great job in terms of windows like experience for beginners but also is a full fledged GNU/Linux distro. But yeah if you want to change to Linux it is not just the desktop that changes, it is a whole philosophy that opens up a new world if you are curious.

Contrary to what is often claimed Linux may in fact be better for people with realtively simple needs. I basically use Linux to run a browser and Steam and don't run into many problems on a day to day basis.

I think the issue is that while Linux is capable of a lot when you can take full advantage of it, each task requires way more knowledge or a good tutorial and no complications.

For me, I love working with Linux and have been doing it on and off for decades, but it doesn't tend to remain my daily because of the extra steps and limitations.

I think if I had a more full working knowledge of Linux and I knew Python or had a stronger grasp of other languages, I'd be a lot more able to fill those gaps. But without that, it there are all these barriers to productivity that aren't there otherwise. Instead of doing the thing I'm trying to do, i end up spending the night messing around with some depreciated program or struggling with a weird use case and it simply requires way more of my time to get there.

Considering that I have a lot more experience with Linux than the average person and still run into this regularly, I'd say it's a big barrier to wider adoption.

Honestly the solution is probably more on the end of getting together to make some of these issues less complicated than on the end of expecting everyone to become a well versed Linux enthusiast. With such a high learning curve, unless you're using it for something it's particularly good at doing easily, you kind of have to want to get into Linux for its own sake in order to learn enough to make it easier to use. And even then, it's a struggle sometimes.

Most of the time the frustrating thing is it's users. If you look for help about something that is obviously badly designed somehow... You get gatekeeping or "you're using it wrong" responses.

I use Ubuntu as my main operating system in my Desktop, but I always end up feeling very limited.

I used to use Ubuntu for a long time and had a similar experience where there were constantly annoying issues. I have since distrohopped around and ended up with fedora, which even though it is a more cutting edge distro, the experience has been a lot smoother and more stable, even compared to windows.

Maybe Linux is not good for beginners working full time?

I mean any OS takes time until you get fully into it and I would say Linux does take maybe a little more effort simply because there are more options in terms of pretty much everything. First, you need to be familiar with the concept of having different distros and be familiar with the differences between distros. Then you need to actually figure out how to install a new OS, which can be tricky to most people who are not that familiar with IT.

Another thing is that an experience with an OS can depend largely based on what hardware you are using. That's why apple strictly controls the hardware on which their OS can run on. Microsoft has also started restricting this slightly. Linux goes the complete opposite direction by trying to allow running linux on any possible system.

I only touch windows when I absolutely have to, and luckily that is getting rarer over time