this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
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Times have really changed, especially in the past five years. Even completely tech-agnostic people use GNU/Linux in my family. Reason is "Because it just works." no more Windows installing things that you hate. No more advertisements in the start menu or file manager. No more screenshots every five seconds. No more Windows slowing down the computer gradually. A relative's computer was unusable because of Windows, because it has slowed down the computer so much that the start menu took 10 seconds to open. All she did was her net banking, text editing and some very light photo editing. Ever since switching to GNU/Linux, her computer works again normally. And all of the tech questions about weird things like programmes randomly not starting have disappeared.
Also, nowadays you really never have to touch the command line. You can use an App-Store-like experience to install your programmes, just like you would on a phone. It also handles all updates automatically. This alone makes it such a better, "normie" operating system than Windows. Hit "update all", and it updates all of your packages for the system, the kernel itself, drivers, the apps themselves, literally everything. Because try explaining grandma, she needs to update the system, then the drivers, then every single application separately. Now you can tell Grandma instead: "Press this button and wait for 20 minutes."
The difference is night and day. Old computers work normally again. You don't need such overkill configurations like most Windows computers have to just run your text editing on net banking. By now it is objectively better.
If you're new, just use one of the many pre-configured options. No need to tinker with your system if you don't want to. Just install one of the literally hundreds "just works" distros that package everything for you.
Lastly, I'm going to say it is no exaggeration if I say installing GNU/Linux has solved literally every single issue people in my family had with computers. Because now it just works. No bloat, no nonsense. Just a computer.
Edit: typo.
Yes, I totally agree in that specific use case it is really great. As written in a different comment, my mom has been running Linux Mint for 9 years with absolutely no problem, because she doesn't use it for other things than email and browsing. She never had to touch the terminal and everything just works.
On the other hand I have a friend who was sick of Windows and I convinced him to start using linux and of course nvidia didn't work out of the box. Then there are some compatibility issues with x11 and certain nvidia gpus and with wayland for other gpus - I didn't know this before installing. So after installing and leaving I basically left him with a laggy mess. So we had to figure out how to fix that. He also have very few ram and during the install we only setup 1gb og swap - which was what the setup recommended. Then after I went home we had to figure out how to increase his swap size. Again this was my bad.
But what I am trying to say is that as a normal person going blind into linux, they would experience the same hurdles and not knowing where to start looking for solutions. So I really don't think it is ready for mainstream use - unless we as friends and relatives are willing to act as tech support for whoever wants to transision.
The lesson I personally learned is: for normies, don't configure. They don't need it, and they don't want it. They want something that just works. And if you stick with the "just works" distros and don't try to configure them, you'll be golden and they'll be happy.
Yeah, we installed Kubuntu and it still needs configuring.
How so?
Because off all the reasons I just wrote in the previous comment.
Got it.