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by mehrdadn 2473 days ago
> I moved all home computers to Linux a while ago and family members do not complain more that they were with Windows. It's more a thing of habit, I believe, as many are grown up with Windows.

Even literally double-clicking is pretty much always more painful for me (most pronounced on laptops) on Linux OSes than on Windows, and that's the most basic command on a GUI. Too often the mouse always ends up being too sensitive and moving when you're just trying to click, or the default delay ends up being too short, or the mouse ballistics end up being too awful and unnatural so you can't even aim the damn thing. Or like the window-close button doesn't extend to the screen border, so you have to aim the mouse like a sniper rifle at the close button just to close a window. And forget about many of the multi-finger gestures or other features of your touchpad/mouse; you're lucky if even both two-finger scrolling and edge scrolling work for your laptop.

Now I don't know about your family, but I wouldn't expect my grandma to tell me the mouse acceleration curve sucks or that there's a 3-pixel border that makes it hard to close a window, or that double-clicking turns into dragging when she's trying to click, or that the focus stealing prevention isn't working well, or the myriads of other things that Windows has clearly paid attention to and Linux is oblivious to. She'd just try clicking and get confused why it's not working until it works.

2 comments

I observed none of these problems on the distro I use (Linux Mint) so far.

I concede that Linux desktops can suck if you are unlucky. But that's the case for Windows as well (I use that daily at work). Every update something changes which forces me to go to Duckduckgo... Another example: I use two monitors at work, a more recent one with high dpi and a really old one with lower dpi. I have to to use a lower than the natural resolution on the new one to get approximately the same font size on both. Although Windows shows up the correct dpi(!) numbers for both it is not possible to scale the font to the same size. Result: the new monitor is blurry whereas the old one is crisp. At home however, I have a 4 monitor set up where one of the monitors has a different resolution as well. No problem for Linux at all.

I stand by my opinion: Both suck evenly well, but one does not spy on me...

Plenty of solutions for your problem (that don't require to use a terminal):

a) Make the mouse slower

b) Use a smaller resolution

c) Increase Window scaling factor or equivalent

d) Use accessibility features

e) Use another mouse acceleration profile

...

You entirely missed the point I was making.