This seems wildly out of touch. Yes, things are getting better and more user friendly, but its definitely not "best for most people".
Until i can give a laptop with linux to my neighbour without also needing to also provide support, its not there yet.
Edit: removed unintended agism. Technical ability is not linked to age, i should know better.
$(date +"%Y") Is the Year of the Linux Desktop
This, and other lies I tell myself...
A lot of these points seem a bit wrong, and are simply talking points
That being said, if there was GOOD android integration baked in, and Android App store baked in, it would actually make a huge difference I think. Because thats the competition..
Waydroid still has some major issues unfortunately.
This would bring in lots of high quality apps (including ones missing like Whatsapp or Messenger), and ultimately do what Steam for Linux did for Linux Gaming.
The year of the Linux desktop is here!
Having used Mint on my laptop for the last few months, I can say I have had to do far less technical meddling with the OS to get it to work correctly than I did with Windows 11. I have also been able to totally resolve all issues encountered (1 issue) which I didn't have the time or expertise to do with my Windows OS. It's refreshing not having to work with a system that feels like a broken mess I'm too incompetent to fix.
As a dual booter such a dumb take. Mac and Windows are much easier for the masses. Have to debug stuff with Linux is not something the average wants to do or even can do. Not to mention the biggest problem, software compatibility. Also the last part gave me a chuckle. "Elderly people who are not familiar with advanced technology and prefer clean and simple computer usage." Are you fucking kidding me? Mac is the way to go for old people IMO.
I put my boomers on Fedora with GNOME a couple years ago and there hasn't been any issues with that. Especially now that a lot of stuff that used to be desktop apps has moved to the browser, it's more viable than ever.
I have set up a Linux computer for my dad just this week. As the others are saying the biggest hurdle is support. Mostly the part where reliable automated update mechanisms don't exist. The system I created has a WM & a panel and it's even simpler than chrome OS, but here is no way my dad could deal with a message, where apt would ask him, if he wanted to update to the maintainer's grub version. Making an update script is very easy, but whether you use Debian stable, Ubuntu or Arch eventually some kind of intervention is going to be required beyond just typing sudo passwords..
Though truth to be told Windows has a lot of garbage problems (perhaps even more than L) as well, it's just people have gotten used to them after 20 years of NT on desktop. On Linux at least most common problems can be solved without reinstalling the OS, on Windows the rot feels like a built in planned obsolescence sometimes, because there are many that just update their PCs instead of ever reinstalling Windows.
When a Linux desktop environment breaks, it breaks hard. I’ve lost whole days of work debugging stupid nonsense like where I couldn’t get past the login screen without switching from GDM to LightDM, or not being able to open settings in Gnome until I realized that it was a proprietary display driver issue, or had a previously working secondary display just switch to rendering a distorted image. And these are things that would happen after installing routine updates that the OS prompted! The investigations and fixes were just filled with deep dives into configuration files and all sorts of CLI shenanigans. Searching for solutions brought up inapplicable suggestions from 6 distro versions ago.
Windows and MacOS certainly have their issues but they’ve never broken like that for me. I still use Linux on my work machine but anecdotally speaking I don’t think it’ll ever be daily-driver ready for “most people.”
I love my Mint laptop and I find it plausible that someone who just does “the basics” could get by with a usability-focused distro.
In my experience, the problem is that not a lot of people really are just sticking to basics on their PC anymore. The truly “just browsing and email” users just use their phone. Someone with a PC is doing something—gaming, photo editing/digital art, audio production, long form writing—where they have a proprietary app they like. Either that, or they’re using it for work and have a company controlled, fully Office 365’d PC.
Linux got usable enough for basic users, but basic users left PCs behind.
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