Just last week I wrote a blog post about installing eOS on my SO's parents PC. They are not technical at all yet they have had (close to) no problem with switching from Windows to Linux thanks to eOS.
I have the exact opposite experience - the microphone doesn't work, everything is incredibly slow, my SO is buying a Windows 10 licence this christmas. It's a shame, the user was just fine with Cinnamon on Debian 5 years ago, but that machine and software is no longer good enough.
"Linux" and "everything is incredibly slow" should not belong in the same sentence. Did you try installing an up-to-date Debian? Not sure if Debian packages Pantheon desktop already, but there are plenty of workable alternatives.
For the microphone not working, you'd have to check what's going on in Pulseaudio and ALSA - both of these can be problematic at times.
> Slowness is usually a side effect of not having correct graphics drivers for 3d acceleration / composition.
This is generally fixed by installing "non-free" firmware. Some distros may also work better than others, e.g. some hardware is better supported in Fedora than Debian or its derivatives.
This was an Intel Atom chipset with a GPU commonly found on smartphone SoCs, so there were no drivers that one could install on a mainline Linux distribution. It's really a shame that all the Android drivers are Android specific. The machine wasn't bought with Linux in mind, so the exotic hardware not working isn't really that big of a surprise. The reason Linux was installed was because the OEM Windows 10 that came with it was designed for a different market and it also eventually borked itself - complained about updates yet wasn't capable of updating itself. I got tired of trying to debug it remotely and installed linux. Hopefully with a retail license of Windows 10, we'll be able to install a pure non-crappified Windows 10 version and let it be. And the retail license will allow us to transfer it to whatever the next hardware will be.
There really is no difference between hardware support on Debian and Fedora given that the kernels remain the same - this isn't the case most of the time of course as Debian maintains stability whilst Fedora is very close to upstream most of the time.
> This was an Intel Atom chipset with a GPU commonly found on smartphone SoCs
IIRC, there was such a chipset with a PowerVR GPU. In that case, you'd pretty much be SOL. You'd have to run Windows 10 and hope that a from-scratch install of W10 can pick up the proper drivers from the "updates" channel - which I wouldn't be sure about. Most other hardware is far better behaved.
I'm new to Linux (switched from macOS) and I ended up on Debian Gnome after testing many including Elementary. I don't know why but somehow the same DE works better on Debian (as long as I select non-free and testing) than on the other distros that I tested. At least in my case.
Just FYI, if you have to buy Windows, you can get a working license key from eBay for <$5 (I've used three different keys from different sellers with no issues).
for a time they gave away windows 10 for free for anyone with 8. all those people who upgraded all have the same serial so there are probably millions of computers with it. this simply associates yer VM/computer with that serial and goes and activates. So its definitely not the most legal thing in the world, but its not like you are going to get caught since you are using the same serial number as millions of other folks.
That sounds like a bummer, everything was working just fine pretty much out-of-the-box, INCLUDING printer, scanner and WIFI, which are/were notoriously frustrating to set up on a Linux machine.