this post was submitted on 03 May 2025
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This is a good a start as any to market Linux to the common end-user. It's not about the software being better; it's about the software offering the user some advantage, like not needing to buy new hardware.
Linux is, far from perfect still. It has a metric ton of "foot guns" that cannot be pointed anywhere away from the feet; the user MUST move their feet away to avoid these "foot guns". It has a lot of pain points and still lacks polish in some ways. Most things mostly just work; but may the gods and goddesses help you if something for some reason does not work, or does not work as expected for any reason. Coaxing it to work exactly as expected might seem impossible for average users.
Then there's the issue of Linux having only volunteer support in most cases. Getting help from an overworked and under-interested FLOSS developer is like pulling teeth; even when they're literally the only person on the planet who can solve your problem
That being said; Linux is free and mostly usable. 9/10 times it does work and can save you a lot of hassle and headache if all your computing needs are basic and predictable.
for instance, fresh install of debian 12 (using cinnamon, but gnome3 would have the same problem since the issue is in gnome-calculator), try to open calculator - it freezes. why? because some .. we'll say, extremely inexperienced developer put a blocking call to a bunch of banks for their latest exchange rates so that you could convert money right in the application!
not only is this not a mission critical feature for a simple calculator, but there is no way in hell that an error to a live service should block the main thread for the application if it's waiting on a response (successful or otherwise). why would this exist? how has this not been rolled all the way back until said feature isn't there? wild.
One of the interesting conundrums of Linux at large is there are so many flavors of it. If you generically search for 'how to ... In Linux' you'll probably get things for Ubuntu, maybe Mint or RedHat, but good luck with the 2000 other distros that you see on a list.
Conversely if you do the same for Windows or Mac it's just a matter of a few recent versions, and half the time fixes would be applicable to any given one of them.