[ErroneousBosh]

> It was the first time I can say that installing a linux OS was easier and friendlier than Windows.

It's been that way for about 20 years. Where have you been?

[al_borland]

Installing maybe… getting all the hardware to actually work was a completely different story. Broken WiFi was the norm. Bad display drivers that only worked in 640x480 or 800x600. Not to mention consulting website before installing to see how well your laptop was supported and what you could expect to never work.

So years ago you also generally had to understand partitioning and filesystem formats, which most people are clueless about.

Sure, they were learning opportunities, but most people weren’t trying to learn anything. They just wanted to get on MySpace, download free music, chat with friends.

[xmcp123]

I still have a wifi issue that forces me to pin to a specific wifi network. If I do not, it somehow cascades into a GPU driver failure that breaks everything.

My last laptop used an audio amplifier that made the speakers not work for ~2 years, that required patching the kernel to fix. It's only recently a vanilla version of the kernel works.

We aren't completely out of the woods yet.

[ErroneousBosh]

It sounds like you may have been using very strange or not-working-properly devices.

No-one really needed to care about partitioning.

[al_borland]

I was using a Thinkpad mostly, which were usually considered some of the best options. Some of the bigger issues may have been 25 years ago, not 20.

I remember spending a lot of time partitioning stuff in those early days, especially if trying to dual boot.

[ErroneousBosh]

Thinkpads are normally pretty okay for that sort of thing although they went through a phase of using really weird WLAN cards.

[kraquepype]

20 years ago I was running linux as a desktop for fun.

It certainly was not as easy to setup as Windows.

[ErroneousBosh]

I've never successfully managed to install Windows on anything. It's got such limited driver support, nothing works out of the box.