[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Yeah, I feel your pain. I hate Windows more and more every day, but whenever I try to use a Linux Desktop for anything serious I find I hate that even more. Some day Microsoft will achieve a level of awfulness that makes Linux Desktop's awfulness the more tolerable alternative for me, but it won't be today.

Maybe if I get really really lucky Haiku will be usable for my use cases by then, but that doesn't look very likely.

[qsort]

I just can't bring myself to use Windows anymore, but I agree that Linux Desktop just isn't there. I'm mostly on Macs these days, but I still have a Dell laptop running Fedora 35.

Every other day something breaks. We're spanning the entire range here, from petty stuff like Firefox missing fonts, to straight up the kernel not booting. And obviously everyting in between, like apparently the only way to receive Exchange mail is to pay for a Thunderbird add-on. Or setting up the VPN requiring arcane SELinux magic.

I honestly don't see how one can recommend desktop linux to someone without at least a minimal knowledge of how the OS works and some decent terminal-fu.

As sad as it is your parent is right. Non-technical users should just get a chromebook.

[flyinghamster]

I'd never recommend Fedora, non-LTS Ubuntu, or Debian Unstable for a Linux newcomer. Any time you run a development release, you risk breaking something whenever you update.

I've been happy running Cinnamon on Ubuntu LTS releases, and I like what I see playing with KDE as well. I've never had a kernel fail to boot (other than by hardware failure), and AppArmor is, IMO, far better at staying out of the way than SELinux. I can't help on the Exchange stuff, I've never had to deal with that.

It would be a little easier to just run Mint instead (Cinnamon being native there), but on Ubuntu you can just "apt install cinnamon-desktop-environment" and then choose Cinnamon the next time you log in.

[vetinari]

Exchange access outside Outlook and Apple's Mail.app is PITA anywhere. Part of why you need to pay for Thunderbird add-on is that Microsoft asks for license fees. Nobody is going to pay that for you (and for Apple, it is hidden in the overall package price).

What SELinux magic you had to do for VPN? All VPNs that I've set up were fine with just clickety-click in the GUI.

[edgyquant]

Well you are running Fedora which is a bleeding edge distro aimed at Linux devs and is a testing ground for red hat. You’d have a lot less problems on Ubuntu.

[vetinari]

Not really; I've never had any problems with Fedora. It is actually pretty polished distro.

[edgyquant]

I didn’t have many problems either except in regards to my nvidia graphics card. I’ve used Ubuntu for about a year (coming from Fedora for 3) and Ubuntu is more stable in that regard.

[mike_ivanov]

I hear this a lot. What I don't understand is why my own experience is so different. I don't find Linux desktop awful at all. On the contrary, I find it to be the best (by far) experience as compared to both Windows and MacOS. It's so much more convenient. MacOS is kind of OK, but Windows is nearly unusable.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Probably a lot of it is just that we use personal computers differently and have different expectations of them.

[vetinari]

What I've seen it is not just expectations, but also experience/inertia.

When somebody is used to (for example) Windows, he then approaches any problem the Windows way. But the Windows way may be not the optimal one on any other system. But since it was optimal on Windows and the person doesn't know anything else, then he will see suboptimal results anywhere else.

It is not just Windows -> Linux; the same problems will be experienced with Windows -> macOS. Even Microsoft had the same problem, when they redesigned Windows elements and the uproar it caused.

[prionassembly]

The key to enjoying Desktop Linux is giving up on the desktop environments that try to ape the Windows/Mac stuff and just biting the bullet to a tiling WM. It's a steeper onramp (e.g. you somehow have to know you need rofi to have an alt-tab window switcher) but it leads you to something different and better.

[handrous]

More generally, I only find desktop Linux tolerable when I start from very little and build up to what I want, rather than starting with a full DE—even the heavier "kitchen sink" XFCE variants are too heavy to start with.

There was a period of maybe three years in the late '00s when Ubuntu was really killing it with their defaults & configs under Gnome2 and it really was quite nice, but before and after that, I've found going minimal and all hand-installed to be the only way not to constantly be angry at my machine and experiencing all kinds of mysterious brokenness.

In fact, accepting that what you can productively and pleasantly do with desktop Linux is a different (though overlapping) set of things than what's productive and pleasant under Windows or MacOS, and not trying to do those other things at all, is the path to contentment under desktop Linux, I think. At least until it gets a lot better, which, with all the Wayland shake-ups, seems really far off, if it ever happens. I think it's more likely Google's replacement will get actually-seriously-no-bullshit-quite-good for desktop use, before Linux does.

For the most part, though, I just stay on MacOS these days. All the time I lost to Linux during my decade or so of using it as my main OS on desktops and laptops taught me a lot, so wasn't completely wasted, but I just can't be bothered anymore. I just want to start up the machine and get stuff done. MacOS gives me plenty of glitches, I don't need even more, plus a ton more crashes and weird behavior. And I do want my computer to just do a bunch of nice stuff for me automatically, without constantly (instead, merely often) breaking or glitching or requiring me to set all that up.