People online complain that Linux is hard to install for new users. But who are these people and why do they levy these complaints? The biggest barrier for the new Linux user isn't the installer; i...
I actually think there’s some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don’t always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it’s not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don’t have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that’s not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it’s just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than ‘lol buy an AMD GPU’, so the odds are pretty good that I’m not the only person in history that that has happened for. I’ve never had problems like this on windows, I’ve never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don’t have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.
I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it’s not just ‘press button, receive OS’ like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it’s not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.
I’m curious what OSs and what issues you had. If you want, make a post in a Linux community and reply with the link here. I’d be keen to see where I’m at in helping others with Linux drivers since I just had some issues I resolved. I want to move my grandpa’s computer to Linux when Win10 runs out so it could be a practice opportunity.
I’ve tried PopOS 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and 25.04.
PopOS mostly worked but almost none of my games worked, they acted like they weren’t being hardware accelerated by my GPU when they launched at all, and every time I tried to update the driver the install process hard-locked my system and when I rebooted it it came back up with no video driver at all. I was finally able to get one driver version to work, after doing about 10-15 install/reboot/unfuck cycles (the 555-server closed source driver.) I tried a couple versions of the open source drivers and they didn’t work either. I also had this weird issue with (I think it was) pipewire where my sound would cut out at random and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle between speakers and headset repeatedly. I noticed this especially when joining a voice channel in discord, but it would just happen out of the blue too.
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS installed fine but whenever it boots the monitor goes into standby with a no-signal notice. The system seems to be running, ctrl+alt+del reboots it, but I can’t even us ctrl+F2-6 to get a curses terminal where theoretically the video drivers shouldn’t matter at all? When I tried to install 25.04 (on the assumption that it would have a newer video driver) I booted on the USB key and even the installer didn’t work, same issue: monitor goes no-signal.
In case it matters, my specs are:
Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core
Gigabyte Vision OC 12 RTX3060 w/12GB VRAM
32GB DDR4-3200 RAM
Multiple SSDs, some SATA, some NVMe in M.2 slots, but I’ve only ever installed linux on my BPX Pro 1TB NVMe drive that’s ~4-5 years old.
I actually think there’s some chance that linux has a lot of parts that were developed individually and thrown together and they don’t always work great together. I think linux still has markedly worse driver support (especially for nvidia GPUs apparently) than windows, and that in terms of just working out of the box on a wide range of hardware and use cases that windows has it beat and it’s not even that much of a contest. Yeah it can work, but it also seems to not work at least some of the time and then you don’t have repair shops, tech support, etc you can call to figure out why. The best you can hope for is to trawl through old reddit threads and hope the answer is contained within, that it applies to your distro, and that the commands and files it tells you to run and edit are in the same places with the same name, which is frankly by no means as guaranteed for linux as it is for windows. When I tell someone to go into their windows/system32 folder and find foo.dll then 99 times out of 100 there is a file called foo.dll in the windows/system32 folder that does exactly what I think it does. Linux is too varied. And that’s not a bad thing for most use cases, but it very much is for the widespread adoption use case.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate windows and would love to switch to linux full time, it’s just not working for me with some pretty bog-standard hardware on two different distros now with no indication as to even how I might go about fixing it other than ‘lol buy an AMD GPU’, so the odds are pretty good that I’m not the only person in history that that has happened for. I’ve never had problems like this on windows, I’ve never installed windows on normal hardware and had it just fail to work for no explicable reason, etc. I did IT for more than 20 years on both windows and linux computers and while I don’t have statistics I can tell you that anecdotally linux was generally more stable and had fewer problems once it was running, but that was also on servers doing (often-headless) server things, not desktops playing games or doing stuff with sound or multimedia or running general software and shit.
I think that until most people can figure out how to install linux - and I would say probably 80% of them, minimum, lack the time, patience, or technical knowledge to do so because it’s not just ‘press button, receive OS’ like windows is - and have it just work the vast majority of the time then it’s not ready for widespread adoption. Preinstalling on known hardware is a different matter and could probably work for many cases until something goes wrong though.
I’m curious what OSs and what issues you had. If you want, make a post in a Linux community and reply with the link here. I’d be keen to see where I’m at in helping others with Linux drivers since I just had some issues I resolved. I want to move my grandpa’s computer to Linux when Win10 runs out so it could be a practice opportunity.
I’ve tried PopOS 22.04 and Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and 25.04.
PopOS mostly worked but almost none of my games worked, they acted like they weren’t being hardware accelerated by my GPU when they launched at all, and every time I tried to update the driver the install process hard-locked my system and when I rebooted it it came back up with no video driver at all. I was finally able to get one driver version to work, after doing about 10-15 install/reboot/unfuck cycles (the 555-server closed source driver.) I tried a couple versions of the open source drivers and they didn’t work either. I also had this weird issue with (I think it was) pipewire where my sound would cut out at random and the only way to get it back was to go into the sound control panel and toggle between speakers and headset repeatedly. I noticed this especially when joining a voice channel in discord, but it would just happen out of the blue too.
Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS installed fine but whenever it boots the monitor goes into standby with a no-signal notice. The system seems to be running, ctrl+alt+del reboots it, but I can’t even us ctrl+F2-6 to get a curses terminal where theoretically the video drivers shouldn’t matter at all? When I tried to install 25.04 (on the assumption that it would have a newer video driver) I booted on the USB key and even the installer didn’t work, same issue: monitor goes no-signal.
In case it matters, my specs are: Ryzen 7 3800X 3.9GHz 8-core Gigabyte Vision OC 12 RTX3060 w/12GB VRAM 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM Multiple SSDs, some SATA, some NVMe in M.2 slots, but I’ve only ever installed linux on my BPX Pro 1TB NVMe drive that’s ~4-5 years old.