Yep I must say this does ring pretty true. Recently I’ve seen a few people really struggling with stuff under Windows, for example, setting up a VPN. It’s not that people are dumb at all, it’s more about the “acceptance” of Windows as an OS, resting on its legacy from days gone by, when hardware drivers used to work best with Windows. If one has never used anything else, a comparison really cannot be made to other OSs.
Today the tables have turned, especially when it comes to support of older peripherals, where I’ve seen Linux doing a far better job straight out of the box. Manufacturers just want to bring out new Windows drivers for their newest hardware only.
Linux does now come preinstalled on a few desktops and laptops, and as the author says though, if you really need to install Linux: “it all boils down to knowing how to burn an ISO image to a USB stick, rebooting your computer from it, playing with it to make sure it works, and then pressing the install button”.
Even on the gaming front, I play some quite advanced Windows-only games on my Linux desktop (thanks to Proton drivers on Steam Games). Most software installation is now even easier than Windows as it is often installed with a single click straight from the software repository. And updating applications? Well that all happens when you run update, for everything at once. It does not get much simpler than that.
My 80-year old mom also was using Linux Mint which I set up for her, and she had no idea it was actually Linux running.
See https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/13/linux_column/
#technology #linux #opensource