And no amount of seethe and cope will change that.
When we’re talking desktop usage, the average user is dumb. The average user is a guy who works 8-10 hours a day, arrives tired at home and just wants to use their expensive piece of entertainment hardware(their PC) to chill, game and talk to friends.
They want to boot it up and just use it. They want games to just run, they want software to just work, they want their system to have options that are intuitive and make sense. If something breaks, they want a nice error message that tells them why, and a simple way to fix that.
Linux got none of that.
- Wanna run a game? First you need to learn what proton is, and which version runs your game best because sometimes a newer version runs it worse than the previous. Or maybe you need a buggy community maintained alternative. And that’s if the game is on steam. Other launchers? other headaches.
- Softwares everyone is used to may or may not exist on Linux. If they don’t now you need to spend your few free hours for the next week finding an alternative and learning how it works.
- Something broke? You’re lucky if you get an error message. Most linux devs seem to think all users know how their open-source software works behind the scenes, after all who hasn’t read through all their code beforehand? (Tip: People barely know where to report when something breaks, let alone figure out what broke it)
And while you can’t really do anything about software not existing for Linux(other than ask the companies behind them to change that), nor can valve or anyone release a perfect proton that just works every time for everything, the final part still is a major headache.
Linux devs dont seem to grasp the idea of the average user. There’s this inherited way of thinking that assumes everyone got free time and basic knowledge of all things Linux before they do something.
The average user barely knows how to turn on a computer and install a program. The average user doesn’t know what an “Operational System” is and will never do because not everyone has the free time and affinity for the topic.
I had issues with installing and using programs or files from different mounted disks once. Apparently there are multiple wrong ways to mount a disk, at least using Linux Mint(and their “Disk” app doesn’t help much). I commented about it in a discord server and got told to “go back to Windows then” because I didn’t want to read a long, Arch-Linux wiki page about fstab to begin to understand why my disk isn’t disking.
I didn’t want to read because I’ve other things to do. I do video editing, 3D renders and blogging for a living. I read and write articles, edit videos, setup scenes in blender, modify 3D models, etc all day. In my free time, I don’t want to do even more work just to be able to install a program from another disk, which should be an easy, simple task.
But Linux has, over the years, turned into a cult. Pointing out issues is blasphemy. Complaining something doesn’t work as it is expected is a sin. The penguin god is never wrong. Everything should be in rust.
Only recently, as new users migrate over from windows, has this cult behavior been exposed and started to die off, but it’s nowhere near over yet.
So if you’re a layman user, who just want to use your PC? Linux has definitely gotten better, like a lot better, but it’s nowhere useable if you don’t have the free time, knowhow and patience. It will break, it won’t make sense and if you can’t find a post from 2005 solving that exact issue, you may need to deal with toxic cult-like people.
