Post #3095330

My son installed Linux last week and I’ve been close to a help desk for close to 20 years so I feel comfortable commenting on the experience vs windows. I walked him through how things worked once, and gave him some suggestions for software. Like heroic launcher for non stream games. Then he installed it himself. Everything just worked when he logged in. So install, choosing a distro is overwhelming but otherwise easier than windows 20 years ago. Post install, he saw lutris was cool for one of his games. It didn’t work (shocker). I reminded him to use heroic, walked him through, epics login sucks, but after fighting through that it just worked and he saw a bunch of other games he could just play. The one problem he’s had is X crashes when he jumps back and forth between discord and games 50 times a second. So I showed him how to switch to wayland and it’s rock solid but his mouse software doesn’t change acceleration anymore and one of his games (roblocks) treats shift as a button press instead of a modifier like it should. This is also a problem for Wayland. X is a disaster. Wayland is an awesome display server but its input is a shit show for legacy software and software built around MS Windows quirks and this is a problem. But let’s be honest, if he’d started in Wayland, his mouse would have a broken non essential feature and a weird game would have a bug. Is that really worse than windows at any point? Probably not. Since then, he’s not had any other problems that I know about. So are there problems. 100% Is it worse than windows? That’s pretty debatable IMHO. I think the biggest problem linux actually has is that it’s not Windows. People have spent their entire education and careers and personal lives using Windows. They have a lifetime of tacit knowledge on how to fix and avoid its weird quirks. They’ve had help desks, friends, family, and mentors guiding them. Leaving that behind and trying something they’ve been told is hard their whole life is hard. But maybe not because UX is broken, but because it’s just a hard thing to do. So we need to be patient, listen, deescalate their frustration, and welcome them to a cool new way of using their devices.