[lostcolony]

Doesn't surprise me really. Despite the advances of some of the more popular distros, Linux still appeals to the power user, not to the casual user. I was reminded of that just recently when I was having to do some googling, sudo apt-get some libraries, and chmod some stuff, just to use a piece of fairly popular software, on Mint, one of the more approachable distros. I was struck by the thought "...I would never, ever want to have to walk (elderly neighbor who has asked me for tech support help in the past) through this".

[_delirium]

Have you tried Windows recently? I haven't taken the plunge to move my relatives to Linux yet, but my experiences supporting relatives trying to use some mixture of Vista, Win7, and Win8 are extremely bad. I feel there was a period when many "normal" people did figure out Windows 95/98/XP and it could be taken as a default graphical computer interface. But the experience they gained has bitrotted as Microsoft has changed things around, and the current situation is a mess.

[pistle]

All my relatives use Win7 or Win8 and the Win8 ones are the happiest, love OneDrive, etc. etc. My sister then switched their phones over to Lumia 1020s because of Win8 and bought a Yoga 2 Pro. Her comment: "Wait. So what's all the fuss about? I love how this stuff all just works together and it's pretty much exactly like Win7."

I guess I should just be proud of the genius that is my sister who figured it all out on her own. I think I've answered 2-3 questions about Win Phone and one, my favorite, about their old printer.

Her: "What do we have to do to get it to work?" Me: "Have you plugged it in yet?" Her: "Daaaamn. It just worked."

[sanderjd]

Interesting. My anecdotes are different. Windows 7 and Win Phone made sense, while Windows 8 was a nightmare. I guess YMMV.

[m_mueller]

It's not even just users I support, I have difficulties with win8 myself. As an example every time I open up a metro windows, there is a big dialog at the right side saying 'swipe left to start (begin swiping from outside the screen) - I can't get rid of it with my touchpad or keyboard or anything. Could be because the VM doesn't send in these gestures, but heck, how could they just assume that everyone is able to do these kinds of gestures? - even for accessibility reasons this is terrible, an area where MS has been pretty good in the past.

[jqm]

I actually installed Mint on a few PC's back when windows8 first came out.

One was for a grandma in her 70's. It just worked. Of course... she basically uses it for facebook so there was no chmoding to be done. This was nearly 2 years ago and she hasn't complained once.

[vacri]

I'll take "fix things on my own machine" above "try and figure out if today's random shareware is safe to download from this site". I googled just as much in my windows days as I do now in my linux days, but it was for different things.

"...I would never, ever want to have to walk (elderly neighbor who has asked me for tech support help in the past) through this".

Having worked in support, there's nothing magical about Windows that makes tech naifs work well with it. Windows still needs experienced people to fix it for you.

Out of curiosity, what was the software you had to chmod for? Was it the kind of software that a tech naif would be interested in?

[lostcolony]

I totally don't recall, I -do- recall making the observation that "This isn't some tech tool; why is this so hard!?" as I bitched at a colleague.

Yeah, I know there's nothing magical about Windows; I think a large part of it is that most of the basic user functionality 'just works', without additional knowledge. If you understand the difference between click, double click, right click, and click and drag, and the idea of a folder system, you can figure out how to do everything you need in Windows with some minimal experimentation.

With Linux, that's oftentimes not enough. It's not even clear -when- it's not going to be enough, and what other knowledge you're going to need.

I guess it basically boils down to, in Windows, the kinds of things I ended up supporting were generally regressive in nature, "this thing used to work and now it doesn't" or "My computer is running slow now", etc, and between an antivirus and system restore, you have a pretty good nuke it from orbit option.

Linux, it's both regressive (every Linux admin has pain stories where they botched a command in the terminal and destroyed their system), and progressive "how do I make it do X?" issues. Which can be extremely painful (I still don't have a good remote desktop setup between my work and home Mint VMs. Is it because I picked the wrong windowing managers, the wrong RDP client/servers, etc? Who can say! I got tired of trying to deal with it after a couple of hours).

Now, if the person is, yeah, just using the machine for Facebook and email, Linux is probably a better option. But for the types of tasks needed in an administrative bureaucracy, I can why Windows would be easier.

[m_mueller]

I think Desktop Linux works well at the two extremes: kiosk PCs and very limited E-Mail/Browser/Solitaire machines on the one end, and the OS for the highly proficient users (e.g. 'hackers', academics) on the other end. In between there's either Windows or Mac, depending on the situation. I've even had some success bringing non-literates to a Mac+Windows-VM combo - everything other than MS Office tends to be a few notches easier understandable on the Mac and these users can now do more than before - for the windows-only-software they have a transparent VM that they don't even notice much.

[pippy]

The painful thing about this is it's trivial to fix this.