You're viewing a single thread.
Linux is not ready for most people
The last time i used it was 30 minutes ago
That depends on your definition of "ready", and of "most people".
My mom, for instance, could pretty much do all her stuff on a Linux machine, and as soon as her current laptop with Win11 gets a tad too old and she starts complaining that everything is so slow, I'll switch her over to Linux.
All she does is edit her photos, read emails and does online banking and some web-only games (like boardgamearena). She needs an image editor (she still uses Picasa, so Shotwell could be a valid alternative), an email program (she already uses Thunderbird), text processor (she already uses LibreOffice).
My mom is similar. She uses a Mac Mini.
She still has lots of problems, but almost none of them are due to the computer, they're mostly due to her complete lack of knowledge about anything computer.
Like, she uses gmail, gmail told her she was near her limit on mail storage, so she started trying to delete things on her hard drive, which is something like 5TB and 95% empty. Even once I explained to her that it was gmail that was full, not her computer, she just started deleting thousands of old messages. That's fine, but it's not the random old messages that are the problem, it's the ones with attachments. She deleted something like 5 years of old mail and it didn't make a dent in the problem because the ones she happened to delete weren't the ones with the 30 MB video attachment featuring a puppy doing something funny. I've shown her multiple times how to find the big and old messages so she can delete them. I've asked her to take notes, but it's pointless. She understands every step as I show it to her, it all makes sense as I'm doing it. But, when she tries to do it herself she gets tripped up immediately and is completely lost.
Basically, no matter how easy to use the OS is, she's going to have problems and I'm going to need to provide tech support. She'll probably stick with MacOS, but if she ever had to switch to Linux or Windows, I'd definitely push her to Linux because it would be easier for me to provide tech support remotely that way.
Oh, boy. Go on. Try that experiment. A regular person will encounter problems you could never imagine would be a problem in the first place. Say what you will about Windows but it at least has ~30 years of experience dealing with regular people. Switching my mom to Linux because "all she does is browse the internet anyway" is exactly how I became part of the "Linux isn't ready" crowd.
I have had problems with those tasks
The screen completely freezing, requiring me to restart the computer and lose everything i have not saved; putting the computer on sleep sometimes wouldnt let me open it unless i held the power button to shut it down and then restarted; connecting the certain wifi networks doesnt work
These arent enough to stop me from using linux, but other people probably wouldnt ignore them so easily
I've had similar experiences with Windows.
Recently the fingerprint reader on my work laptop (which is running Win11) just completely stopped working until after a reboot.
Putting my laptop to "sleep mode" didn't work either, it would constantly wake up within seconds of me putting it to sleep. Wifi stopped functioning for no discernable reason. (I still haven't found the reason)Ive seen people search more for reason not to switch to something new compared to reasons for switching
Windows 11 sleep mode is causing all kinds of issues for me too on one laptop. Especially WiFi.
It shuts down WiFi to save power and never wakes it up regardless of what power save settings say. I'm also using a cellular WiFi and have to disable one of the modes in the netadapter for that to even work, but the driver keeps resetting the choices made in the device manager and such. Complete garbage.
It's my daughters brand new laptop for school. She needs to open the lid and use the pc for browser applications. My youngest doesn't have her own laptop, so I gave a beaten up 20 year old laptop and installed Mint, because windows 10 couldn't even boot properly with only 4 gb of ram. She does the same thing. Open the lid, use the browser. It always works.
This is not a special case. This is not me being to dumb to use it or too smart and demanding. I think it's perfectly reasonable for anyone to expect a laptop to function as intended when opening the lid and using the browser. Windows just doesn't do that.
Just a couple of days ago libreoffice decided to ignore my dark application theme but still honor my dark icon theme so I had white icons on white background making it basically unusable. Took all of 30 seconds to fix but imagine it happening to my 65 year old mom.
That's because the computer most people actually need is a tablet.