A few years ago my wife and I built a computer out of old parts for her friend’s then 10 years old son. Last month we were visiting them, and I heard the wife’s friend say something funny that I thought I’d share with you.
They live on the other side of the city, this was the kid’s first computer, and his mom doesn’t have much computer experience either, so our goal was to build something that was easy to use and hard to break from the beginning. Originally I choose ElementaryOS since it seemed to fit the bill, but after a year or two it turned out that it couldn’t be upgraded to a new major version without a full reinstall so it got stuck with an older version. We didn’t visit that often, and the kid’s games still worked so it wasn’t a major issue until Factorio broke due to glibc incompatibility.
When his birthday was coming up last month we bought him a SSD to make the computer a little bit zippier without a major upgrade, and I thought I’d give him a brand new Linux experience too, so I asked for advice here and in the end chose Bazzite. While I was helping the kid with the installation, I overheard his mom saying in the other room:
This Linux thing… We’ve never had any problems with it, he just clicks something to install it and it works. Unlike normal computers, where you always have to do things and fix them.
Perhaps not the most eloquent, but I consider it a very good review.
garuda gaming edition great for gaming and pretty user friendly i use it dual booted w/ gentoo never had a issue with it
I upgraded my gpu this weekend. Shut down, switched the psu off, swapped the old one out and new one in, booted into bios no issue (to check if I has left pcie on auto or needed to update it), then booted into the desktop (fedora cinnamon). Bam, after login only saw wallpaper, no mouse cursor or other UI.
Well, at least it’s kinda working. Time to figure out what’s going on. Terminal works. There’s some errors in the log but nothing to do with amdgpu or firmware failed to upload or anything. Software render just shows up as black screen. Reset my cinnamon session and boot back to the same thing. Fuck.
Then I try moving my mouse way over to the right and it shows up! Oh right. I have my TV plugged in for streaming to it sometimes and it ended up defaulted to the primary display, so my main desktop was only showing up there (and it was off). Right click, display properties, swap my monitor to primary, disable the TV until I turn it on.
This is about the magnitude of the average problem I need to deal with on Linux. Something isn’t working like I want it to, half the time it’s actually working but I misunderstood something or the default doesn’t match my intent and I need to adjust settings and then it’s perfect or close enough.
Or the other problem I had yesterday, tried monster hunter world for the first time and it wouldn’t launch. Played satisfactory for a bit instead (new gpu is noticeably smoother yay), then did a quick search, found that a specific version of proton works, switched to that version and it played. That’s the first game that has had such trouble for me.
In all fairness, I’ve had some really dicey problems on Linux. I think the most difficult problem I’ve encountered was when I bought a USB soundcard which only worked in legacy mode, but using Wireshark and the USB audio class specification I managed to track down the bug in Linux’ usb-audio module, so now I’m technically a kernel contributor :)
For me the difference is that when I get a problem on Linux, it usually tries to provide me with the information I need to figure out what goes wrong, and due to its open nature it tries to make it easy to fix things. Also the majority of the time, Linux is working flawlessly. Windows on the other hand, is plagued by bugs and annoyances that show up on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And when issues happen, they come with little information and are often impossible to fix yourself since the OS is locked down.
Actually, there is one thing that is an annoyance that I haven’t been able to resolve. I use dvorak as my main layout.
Sometimes games get the keyboard right and keys are remapped to qwerty layout (and typing still uses dvorak). This case works better than on windows, since playing a game there either required the game itself to recognize keyboard layouts (best case), or remapping the controls (annoying case), or switching to qwerty (frustrating for typing because I’m stronger with dvorak now).
But sometimes instead it does the opposite and remaps the qwerty bindings to dvorak. As in, even if I swap layouts, wasd are all over the keyboard instead of all together. I need to exit the game, swap layouts to qwerty on the desktop, then relaunch for controls to work properly (and then I can sometimes swap back to dvorak in game and they continue to work). Often, the next time I launch the game, I’ll forget to switch it but it will just work this time.
And sometimes it behaves like windows did where I can swap the layout in game and keys change as you’d expect.
I have no idea why it’s inconsistent between these three options or where the “preserve key location despite the layout” feature is even coming from. Anyone have any idea about this?
Hey, long-time Dvorak user here, almost as long as a Linux user.
When I start playing a new game, I usally just go with defaults. Some games (like all Valve games) do a good job of using keyscan codes for bindings and mapping them to the layout. If that’s not the case the game is likely to be incorretly using the keyscan codes, or just using the OS’s key events. If that’s the case, I will just force qwerty with
setxkbmap usand restart the game. After a few hours, I try to rebind keys for dvorak. Persoally, I like to change keyboardings to use Tribe’s ESDF layout instead of WASD anyway.If you are using wayland for your display,
setxkbmapis great since most games run in Xwayland mode, so native apps will still be in Dvorak.I don’t really need to type much in games anyway now, so I don’t mind keeping with qwerty bindings. I play Starcraft 2 this way.
The worst experience I can recall is Natural Selection 2, which its game engine refused to bind non-alphanumeric keys like ‘,’ 😵💫… But that was playing with Windows, would probably work with Linux if the game was still alive.
Is that method different from using the hot keys to swap layouts? Like can I tell it to always use that mapping for that game or do I need to remember to run it each time I play the game and then set it back after I’m done (or automate that)?
There are dozens of us! But yeah, same.
Best reviews are like that, people who don’t know shit, when theres a massive nerd following for said thing going wow that’s amazing.
My ex father in law would always always ALWAYS install random ass flash games / random sketchy software and bork their windows PC.
He was always complaining about popups and his antivirus was always flagging a threat etc… they’d spend tons of money annually to have their computer fixed and he’d go right back to the same behavior.Anyway… I installed a dual boot setup with his windows and Linux mint.
He bitched and complained about it… but he never had any actual issues. His complaint was it was different. He ran mint until he died like 5 years later.
Honestly, if my exFIL can run Linux… anyone can.
His complaint was it was different.
This is the absolute core of everyone’s reluctance… and 99% of (domestic) stuff is browser based…
Cause of death: Linux Mint allergy.
Lucky he was using linux when nobody really creates viruses for linux. But it’s best to teach people not to click on everything before they do get viruses
I love this, because it’s exactly the opposite of the received “wisdom” you’d get from many corners of the Internet. As long as you aren’t mucking around the internals of a Linux install, it’s going to be stable, and it will be adequate for common computing tasks. Arguably, even better than adequate.
don’t forget the original comment though: unable to upgrade without reinstall, and glibc incompatibility
i’m not saying that changes the latter comment, but it’s certainly far from the experience for every single person every single time… windows is like macdonalds: it’s the same horrible thing every time but it’s consistent
You mean consistent like: “Ah, you still on windows ‘add version here’? Too bad, user experience/security/consistency/modern standards are our top priority so you have to have windows ‘add version here +1’ to be able to run our awesome app xyz”… Much better, right?
With Windows if you don’t have a tpm you have to get a whole new computer lol
Exactly! For the majority of people it is easier yet many people will fight you to the death that the opposite is true
The vocal people saying it’s harder have a lot of experience with Windows, and know how to work around all of its deficiencies after being a power user dealing with it for 15+ years
With that mindset and not wanting to start over, Windows is easier
For casual users or someone who’s willing to learn, Linux is easier
I disagree. If you’re starting from nothing, and you buy a pre-installed, linux is easier by far. The general populace does not install windows themselves either so let’s not compare that aspect.
I think you agreed with me?
I said the people who say Linux is so hard are the people that have learned so much about Windows that it’s ingrained in them. So when they try to switch, they get frustrated that it isn’t exactly the same
My 73 year old mother never had a computer before when she asked me for one, so she could talk online with her friends.
I installed Xubuntu and it has been working wonderfully for her. She just browses the web, types some poems using Libre Office and plays solitaire.
I just have to do a system update every year or so.
She’s now 87.
For my my father I only have to make sure it looks not so different after each major upgrade. I have to be careful when there are new things, but apart from that he can do everything for himself except these major upgrades and backups.
So, he is happy with Fedora and Gnome classic.
Pretty much the requirement for my wife. She really struggled with inconsistency of Windows and how slow it responded. Move to Linux, and she runs it fine with no more complaints, she just wants it identical after a version upgrade or if there is a reinstall ever needed. So for her I went with NixOS and have her config files stored for later.
Glad to hear it’s working well for her. I used Xubuntu myself in the past but switched to Fedora KDE on a whim :). When my wife wanted to ditch Windows I thought Xubuntu would be a good choice for her, but honestly I was surprised with how many different problems and errors we ran into while installing it on her computers. Granted it’s more stable now, but during the first couple of months I occasionally had to spend hours trying to get pretty basic stuff working, when it required more advanced Linux knowledge to fix.
The best example of fighting the good fight as far as OSes. Good on you. Linux these days is for sure way better than commercial oses in most ways. Windows is more supported and macos is more obsessively polished on the surface. Otherwise they got nothing going for them
The year of the Linux Desktop is closer than we think. Too bad the art of just owning a PC is sort of dying, thanks to GPUs costing just as much as the rest of the parts put together.
I’ve been trying to get my stepmom to switch over to Mint on her old Dell AIO. I already spun up the live on it to see if it was compatible and it ran flawlessly. She’s just afraid to make the jump and I respect that.
Its good to see the younger generations just growing up with Linux readily available and easier than ever to install.
What does “spun up the live” mean? Is this a USB install?
Yeah, the usb live environment. Sorry, I just have a certain older way I say things. When PCs used to have CD drives, we used to say we’d “spin up” something like a game or software. If I was gonna play something like Tonic Trouble, which was a CD game, I would “spin up” Tonic Trouble to play it.
More like an USB live iso. This allows to boot up a system directly from USB without installation !
This is mostly used as rescue technique, to chroot (=login) into your old system and try either to backup your data or fix issues !
Wasn’t aware it could be used as testing ground for hardware compatibility ! Good to know !
In some cases you can fully set it up to always run from the USB Stick and you can get your PC to go
I remember you asking about what distro to pick, what a wonderful follow-up post. Thank you so much for sharing this.
Glad you enjoyed it!
As for the choice of distribution, the installation of Bazzite was actually far from trouble free. The precise issue and its solution escapes my mind at the moment, but it refused to boot at first, and I had to spend more hours than I had hoped for before it was up and running. But after that it seems to be stable, the only question the kid has sent me was “can it break my computer if I switch Project Zomboid to the beta branch?” so I assume everything is working well now :D (There was a warning about switching to beta, saying that you should make a backup because things could break, and he wasn’t sure what they meant)
Sorry to hear you had trouble with the installation. Since we have such a vast variety of hardware, you will always find a person having trouble with a specific distro I believe. That’s why having so many to choose from is awesome - but also a bit daunting at the start. Glad it’s working now, hope it stays that way.
A few years ago, I installed mint 21.1 on my mum’s old NUC; a 2013 model; was running Win7.
I said, it doesn’t meet the minimum for Win10, so it was either buy something new or try Linux.
Just got back from visiting them, I updated it to 21.3, still running fine. It still does everything they need.
Mum even said, “it always just works”. A great endorsement, as a non-technical user mum needs a no fuss distro, mint works so well in this regard.
As an early Linux adopter who tried everything under the Sun, I can only say that Mint is absolutely awesome.
Thanks for sharing, this made me smile. Also it warms my heart to hear how you are making tech accessible to this kid.
Many of us take it for granted but I remember how my dad used to go over to family friends in his free-time to help with computer stuff. I feel like I was too young to learn but it did set an example for me.
So fun watching someone try Linux as their first OS, none of the “Linux is difficult because I learned how to use Windows” or “Linux is bad because it’s not exactly like Windows” comments :D Roblox stopped working when the devs intentionally blocked Wine, but he just shrugged and said he didn’t play it that much anyway.
It’s a little heart breaking hearing him often ask which parts he could buy to get more FPS, because he’d need to replace half the computer to get a newer CPU and DDR4 RAM, since I suspect the DDR3 could be the current bottleneck. But other than that he’s very happy with the computer.
You can still play Roblox with Sober. Just sometimes it doesn’t work (like during bigger events).
I mean… Why would you play Roblox when you can play Project Zomboid? 😁🤗 good call little guy !
So Linux can be a pain in the Ass to set up done things, but I’d light years ahead of what it was in the late 90’s
True but have you tried windows? The registry editor is just one example of the top tier bullshit that the windows apologists will gloss over. To them it’s normal to have to open what I’m sure started as a tool Microsoft only saw themselves using just to fix basic problems that shouldn’t have occurred in the first place
Of course I’ve used windows. From 3.1 to 11.
I’m in Linux now. Been using that A long time as well
Additionally very very few people even know what a registry editor in windows is
Because what they want windows to do doesn’t need them to understand it. That’s the point.
They click a couple buttons, windows crashes behind the scenes then loads again , all without the user seeing it now.
Back in the day the bsod would show up but they got rid of it.
Now dos (both ibm and Ms ) that was a fun thing to play with. .
You’re right that most people don’t use the RE. That was a bad example I guess.
The point of my question is this though: as pointed out in the original post, maintaining windows is no easy lift. To the point that your average user knows and hates the constant windows update process, and needs an “IT guy” in their life to help them overcome the hurdles which will arise. The idea that windows just works is a fallacy. Also same with Mac (or linux), but honestly? To a large degree linux can be that way for most users most of the time. Probably even more so than macs as long as it’s a good setup to begin with (the right distro, the software installed the user needs). Most people just need a browser. And it’s not without challenges just to keep even that running on windows. I’m aware of zero linux distros which force updates and even if you seek them out and install them, they aren’t very disruptive 99% of the time.
yeah., I think end of the day. its really about personal preference. I prefer linux because I am done with corporations controlling and ruining my life
Kudos! Glad to hear things are working out.
