[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.