…and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I’m mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!
…and it went very smoothly. I installed on a spare PC for now, but I could absolutely see this becoming my daily driver. I’m mostly surprised at how snappy and responsive it is, even on 10 year old hardware!
What is your definition of “basic functionality?”
Hardware, mostly. Most times I’ve tried Linux something like Wi-Fi or the touchpad was broken out of the box.
Basically, a user who only needs a web browser and maybe Libre office should not experience any friction or touch a CLI. That’s what Windows has and what Linux needs to become mainstream.
Never had touchpad troubles on Linux - as long as the device follows standard HID protocols, it’ll just work. WiFi was dicey in the 2000s; the technology was still new and every chip vendor had their own idea of how shit should work, making it difficult to get support merged for every possible device, but that really hasn’t been an issue for quite a while in my experience.
Everyone’s forgotten the olden days where you’d have to dig through a box of diskettes for all the drivers.
Just a note on windows “having” this: a significant amount of hardware (wifi adapters, nvme drives, a lot of the shit in a Surface laptop, etc) don’t have native windows support and require command line usage and/or hunting for third party drivers to even get windows installed. A user installing an OS on a machine with that sort of hardware would have a much easier time on Linux - it’s only manufacturers preinstalling windows and the needed drivers that give the impression it’s easier on windows. When the user has to wipe / reinstall their OS it’s a much more apples to apples comparison.
I’m not saying this to imply Linux doesn’t need to get better, because of course that’d be great, but I see this comparison a lot and it’s worth keeping in mind that it’s a bit of an unfair one even if it’s a reasonable standard to hold an OS to.