linuxmemes

You're just more familiar with windows. You likely grew up with it and depending on your age were taught it in school. You're biggest gripe seems to be having to touch the terminal to install things, but to me, I think it's weird to use a browser to install things. This is where that esoteric knowledge comes in.. you know which download button is the real one that won't download a virus.

I would agree a few years ago, but saying that it's generally not usable for users is (in my opinion) wrong. If you're only going to use a browser, and watch some videos, Linux is fine. If you're a gamer and only use Steam, Linux is fine. Linux was also fine for me when installing Lutris to run other Windows games like Trackmania. For both those cases, I didn't even have to touch the command line. If you're a programmer, Linux is probably fine, because you have more knowledge on how command lines work anyways.

If you have any kind of advanced use case that doesn't have a well established solution, and you have to research (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot), that's probably not fine for a normal user. But more and more tools do have established solutions that work out of the box, so I'd say it's getting more fine.

Whether Windows, Mac or Linux is better is a question of use case and other factors in my opinion. You only used Windows your whole life and don't want to get used to a new thing? Then don't. You love the Apple ecosystem and want to pay the premium? Do so. But I feel like outright saying Linux isn't for regular use has become false in the recent years, as there are quite a few use cases by now that can use Linux without problems.

I would argue that adding a software to start at boot is either a software installation process, or a management policy process. No regular Windows user has ever asked me how to start a software automatically at boot/login (and as the "IT guy" I had a LOT of friends and people asking me all sort of things). Also, you are talking about "being in the same place for 25 years". This is not an interface issue, is an habit issue. In the past 25 years how to start things at boot has changed from init.d scripts to systemd (yeah yeah, let's not start about systemd now, I don't care), but one new "skill" to learn in 25 years is not a big deal. You learnt how to do it in win98 and never had to learn a new thing. I've learnt how to do it in init.d, and had to slightly change once. And I could probably still use init.d, but I went with the flow.

Show me how to mount drive so that it will be available for ALL the apps I install, without touching terminal in Linux

Hum, all of them I've been using in the past 10-15 years, under Gnome and Cinnamon. Unless I misunderstood your point, it's been a feature for a long time. I don't like the terminal, I have to look up the options for commands all the time because I forget them all the time. Even symlinks now I can create from the file explorer (yes, ln -sf is quicker, but I never remember if it's target then name or the other way around).

The problem I see with linux is fragmentation, the internal culture wars, so every (major) distro is slightly different. On the other hand, at least there is differentiation, and you can use the best distro for the job at hand. I wouldn't use Linux Mint for a server (yes, you COULD, but it's not its native use case), but my dad has been using it happily for the past 10 years (and Redhat and Ubuntu before that) with minimal supervision.

I've seen people entering the workforce without knowing how to use Windows (either IT illiterate or coming from MacOS), so it would be the same to them learning a Gnome menu or Windows menu (sorry, I've never used KDE, it's a long story, but I guess the same would apply).

For enterprise is cost of support and ecosystem. There are (or at least there were) less tools to manage a Linux desktop fleet than a Windows one. And I suppose (but really speculating at this point) that a Linux engineer with those skills costs more than a Windows one (as they are more scarce).

Ok Linus