Most people don’t give much thought to their operating system, but with Windows 10 support ending in October 2025, many will start searching for alternatives...
It's not ready for everyday users when you disable basic multimedia codecs. I know it's a US patent issue but still, you can't expect newcomers and everyday users to just "install a browser via flatpak instead" or "just get your mesa and ffmpeg from this third party repo"
I love that Linux exists, but I really don't appreciate the bullshit PR speak about how regular users can switch from Windows with little-to-no friction. The second something doesn't work as expected, even a minor thing, they'll be at a complete loss about how to even investigate the issue, let alone correct it. Windows competency doesn't transfer to Linux for even the most basic under-the-hood stuff. The less honest you are about that, the fewer people will try Linux a second time, and the more people will write off the entire endeavour as being the domain of computer experts/enthusiasts.
The second something doesn’t work as expected, even a minor thing, they’ll be at a complete loss about how to even investigate the issue, let alone correct it.
In the majority of cases, this is no different from Windows users on Windows.
Little do they known that both Clone Hero and YARG are native, the old crummy PC ports run fine on Wine (Even the WTDE mod) and RPCS3 works fantastic for Rock Band
Most people don’t give much thought to their operating system, but with Windows 10 support ending in October 2025, many will start searching for alternatives...
I predict most of them are going to waste a ton of money and buy a Window 11 device. Or waste a shit-ton of money and buy a Apple device. Or just say "fuck it" and keep Windows 10 (that's what my mom will surely do. I stopped caring, as my dad still wants to use his even older Windows 8 shitbox and my mom 100% agrees to this).
Well, that's what I said. Old shitboxes and such. May be old, but would run like a charm with Linux. But is a shitbox because the installed OS (WIndows in this case) is completely obsolete.
People actually do this shit? Bruh. Why jump through hoops installing Windows 11 when installing Linux (the ones with graphical installer) is much easier and much less of a hassle? smh
Latest Tumbleweed snapshot has a Mesa bug that causes 50% chance of black screen after login. A few weeks before that Plymouth was broken causing >1 minute boot times. To solve these issues users need to learn how to rollback updates from command line, so it's certainly not a good replacement for Windows.
I know it's rolling release distro but you can't claim "it's rolling release so bugs are expected and it's your fault for using it" and "it's betest and stablest system ever, everyone should use it" at the same time.
Funnily enough I had more bugs on Tumbleweed than on Arch. Admittedly, most of them were probably not on Tumbleweed, but it seems like there are just much more people caring about Arch. Otherwise I can't explain why it gets so much better support
Most of the list is either websites or websites on steroids (Electron), it's more than sufficient for "everyday users", but it doesn't really say anything new about the state of the Linux desktop, it's been like this for a few years in that aspect, but it has progressed a lot as of recent on many other aspects which are worth making a notice about.
On the other hand I think it's important to mention those things we don't have or can't ever (or who knows when) have, because the companies behind those products don't care at all for the platform, or care about in a negative way, several of those are used by "everyday users" and I'm sure it can be a deal breaker for them.
I guess it's a decent campaign to cater to those looking at their options with the incoming end of Windows support at least
Zero-setup snapshotting, GUIs for system settings, more sophisticated repo management, less custom-patching of software, more utilitarian than minimalist.
I switched to Tumbleweed from Ubuntu but was wary of the rolling release idea. I went in thinking "Well yeah, they need a file system like BTRFS to back out of bad updates." And this was the case for me when Zoom stopped working after an update during a month when I really needed Zoom to be working. But, somehow, BTRFS has turned into a personal requirement for me everywhere. Things went wrong on Ubuntu too, wouldn't it have been nice to be able to easily roll back the change that did it?
So, I still find it irritating how often little things change with Tumbleweed, but I love having BTRFS in the background making sure I can back out of any major issues.