I feel like I need to share my own experience here. I’m pretty much a life-long noob and Windows user, who always bought something like a Gateway pre-built desktop.
Time having gone by, and my deep concern over my privacy coming to the fore, I’ve tried to embrace Linux, and I’ve been told many times that “Oh it’s so easy, try Ubuntu or Mint, you won’t miss Windows at all for what you do on your laptop, which is basically just email, web and maybe some time-passing gaming”
Since I simply don’t trust Windows, I’ve given it a go.
Well, easy to install is true for sure. I’ve not had any issues installing Ubuntu or Mint.
Aside: I also did a Linux experiment some time ago trying to set up a samba server (failed) and then a NextCloud server(failed) so I ended up using Windows Server 2016. The point of this segue is that I've also tried Puppy, CentOS, Fedora and Ubuntu server, so I'm probably less noob than the average noob, but still noob.
I’ve even run Ubuntu Studio and Kali off a Live USB without any initial fuss. I’ve given Linux a few weeks of effort, both in the Terminal, and most recently in the Desktop environment, which is all I wanted for my laptop. I nice OS that’s similar functionally to Windows, but FOSS.
For a couple days, I thought Mint was the answer. Ubuntu had decided to black screen on me when I tried to shrink the screen resolution. Since there aren’t any scaling options, the only choice to see larger text is to increase the whole screen res. Well that broke the whole OS and I didn’t know what to do. So…I deleted it and put Mint in it’s place, and initially it was great.
But it didn’t last. I had problems with keeping my bluetooth mouse connected. Blueberry, which comes with Mint, would not recognize my mouse every time I shut down the computer, so I’d have to repair my mouse every time. That was needlessly obnoxious. So I got in the terminal, got rid of blueberry and installed blueman. Which worked perfectly for like…three or four shutdowns. But after that, it just lost it. I couldn’t repair my mouse. Couldn’t figure it out in the terminal.
I hope you get where I’m going with this.
Linux is simply not ready to be a replacement for Windows. When things you take for granted like keeping a mouse paired, or being able to dim the screen don’t work it’s hard to overcome that. I’m willing to sacrifice the fact that some games won’t play, or that taking a snip is many more mouse clicks in LInux…or that Mint actually takes LONGER to boot than Windows 10…I’m fine with all that. Because that’s not crippling, and if I get to protect my privacy, it’s worth it.
But a mouse not pairing…or a screen not dimming (it’s really bright!) is just…unworkable. And when I talk to other LInux users, much of the time it’s like "Why don’t you try SteamOS, or…just fill in the blank with some other work-around that seems to me is just a denial of the inevitable truth. That without a strong and fundamental understanding of the Terminal, repos and how to use them and the core bits of Linux, it’s just not going to work well enough to replace Windows for life long Windows users like me who are used to things just working.
Then of course, when you say “Windows just works” to a hard-core Linux user, you get “hur-dur remember ME and driver this and driver that?” and I’m like…no. I’ve never had these issues with Windows that I hear all these other power users complain about…because I’ve always just bought pre-builts and surfed the web, did email and some light gaming. My life experience has been one of Windows always working.
My reason for wanting to switch has nothing to do with functionality. I really like Windows 10 (and as such, the Cinnamon desktop was an easy transition, so I liked that too) I like that I can just type the name of the app I want to launch, and it launches. I like that once I pair my mouse, it’s always paired. I like that I can dim my screen. And I’m sure there are dozens of other things I like about Windows that I take for granted.
But in any case, I feel like I’m a good representative of the general person who wants to switch to Linux, tries…but fails because Ubuntu or Mint…just aren’t ready to be that Windows replacement. Not because the desktop environment is the problem (it’s not). But because when something breaks, it becomes a monster hill to climb to fix it, and even fixing doesn’t always permanently fix it. Then it stays unfixed because you tried every help guide you can google, none of it works, and now you just have a broken experience.
So in any case, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that if I want to learn Linux, I need to start at the command line, and work my way up to the desktop, not the other way round. And that’s a truth that I would like to have known before I tried Linux at all. It might have been less frustrating.