[mikkupikku]

I hope Linux is never suitable for windows users, who's tolerance for abuse is matched in magnitude only by their lack of taste. You have no idea just how over I am with the very premise of Linux evangelism. I will go as far as find reasons or even just flimsy pretexts to oppose and criticize any change to Linux calculated to win over Windows users, because being co-users with such people is plainly against my own interests. My lack of sympathy extends to full blow gatekeeping.

What is "Linux for normals" besides Android anyway? If that's the crap you actually want, use it. But no, that's not good enough, you want to bring the riff raff into real distros to stink up the place. I hope this never works.

[yoyohello13]

This comment is harsh, but after many years of seeing HN threads about this topic I agree. You can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves. Linux is great, I love it, but I’ve stopped trying to convince people to use it.

[CrimsonCape]

I was ready to install Linux. I installed a new 1TB ssd in my laptop. I shrunk the windows volume using Windows' Disk Management.

Then I started reading the Arch wiki on this task. It forced me to learn things like MBR vs GPT. Then it said Windows by default makes an EFI partition way too small so I have to re-create a new partition by temporarily mounting EFI, saving the files, deleting the EFI partition, and recreating a new one.

This seems like a horribly complex task and I can envision about a million unwritten things that can go wrong that the answer would be "well duh, that's obvious if you had any experience with linux disk partitioning. I myself bricked a dozen PCs."

Deleting the EFI partition, if it goes wrong, by definition my system would be bricked until I could figure things out.

Also, everything must be typed into terminal exactly with no error and one chance. (If the typo causes the command to error, phew. if the typo causes something else to happen, beware)

So yes, I have a lack of taste.

[yoyohello13]

Downloads distro famous for its manual install process, complains about how manual the install process is…

[eudamoniac]

How does someone browse this forum and get to the point of installing Arch without intimately understanding that Arch is infamously, abnormally difficult to install? Proving GPs point perhaps

[Atreiden]

If you had tried Ubuntu, KDE Neon, CachyOS, ElementsryOS, or really any other distro, this would not have been your experience.

Arch is a Manual experience designed for power users. It is not a good choice for even your average Linux user, let alone a first time Windows convert dipping their toes.

[avcloudy]

This is the issue though, Windows obscures the natural complexity of many things and picks defaults that serve to lock you into the ecosystem. You have expectations about how easy certain things should be that you are unwilling to let go of, and you dismiss the things that other systems make easy as irrelevant.

If Windows had never hidden the natural complexity of EFI, or chosen sane defaults, your experience would be better. It is absolutely insane to blame that on Arch.

[mikkupikku]

After leaving that comment I had a moment of doubt that maybe I had gone too far, but no, you've reassured me. The windows user wants to stink up a power user distro to make it a fisher-price toy. Disgusting.

[CrimsonCape]

You are right. I went with ultramarine linux and am perfectly satisfied.