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...
Didn’t watch the video… but the premise “The biggest barrier for the new Linux user isn’t the installer” is exactly why Microsoft is, sadly, dominating the end-user (not servers) market.
What Microsoft managed to do with OEMs is NOT to have an installer at all! People buy (or get, via their work) a computer and… use it. There is not installation step for the vast majority of people.
I’m not saying that’s good, only that strategy wise, if the single metric is adoption rate, no installer is a winning strategy.
Most people who go out and buy a computer doesn’t understand what an OS is. If Linux was standard when you bought a PC, it would be the dominating OS. I mean, you could switch the OS to Linux on the computers and I think most people wouldn’t realise when they buy it lol
Indeed, so my argument is that sure a “better” installer might change a small fraction of the marketshare, say 1%, but it’s not enough to change significantly, say 10% or even reach parity.
An interesting example is the Steam Deck coming with Linux installed. Sure there are few people who do (by choice) install Windows alongside Linux but AFAIK the vast majority do not. That’s IMHO particularly interesting on a topic, gaming, where Windows has been traditionally the #1 reason people picked a specific OS.
I think they would. I tried Linux again for the first time in 10+ years and kept running into issues like my sound would randomly die or change to headset, when I tried to update the video driver it hard- locked the system, etc. I just installed Ubuntu the other day and whenever it boots the monitor just goes into standby with no signal. It’s been nothing but trouble, and I have pretty normal hardware. Most people aren’t going to know or care how to deal with those problems. As far as Linux has come, it’s still not ready for widespread adoption by most people on the ‘it just works’ front.
TBH do you actually think that there’s some chance that nobody is testing these releases and this is happening to a massive number of people?
I’ve installed linux countless times on a SHITLOAD of computers and never faced any of these problems, realistically, you’re very unlucky, and these sorts of things happen with windows all the time too.
I’m not saying your issues don’t matter, but unless you have statistics that back you up, you can’t say “it just works” to either OS.
I’ve had more of an “It just works” experience with linux literally hundreds of times.
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.
Same issue though. If manufacturers actually had linux preinstalled, they would ensure compatibility. This isn’t a windows/Linux problem, this is a manufacturer/default os problem.
I am amazed by what you say though. I’ve had 0 hardware problems installing Linux on many different machines in the past 5 years. All the incompatibility issues of old are gone by my perspective
Even then those who have to installers don’t really have a good experience with distros of wide market share (narrowing to Linux distros only), especially with whatever fresh hell Calamares is. (It doesn’t even support LVM or just installation with specified mounts points if you already set up your partition layout!)
Seriously, I’ve had better experience with the installer Ubuntu Server uses.
It does “support” LVM, but with a wacky/hacky workaround and that’s a real shame !
Also, there is some talking on github on how they will probably completely drop LVM in the near futur… That’s not what someone should expect from a Linux installer!
Also, there is some talking on github on how they will probably completely drop LVM in the near futur… That’s not what someone should expect from a Linux installer!
It’s a shitshow. Looking at their repo’s issues list has lots of noise, but the worst of them is that the LVM issue has been open for over a year now. Sure, open source, anyone’s free to work on it by why would distros use such a feature incomplete installer?
I don’t think that’s true. Administration tools could build on top of it, like snapshotting, which even if it does not work the best that way, it will work. and that can just run in the background, automatically, just like it does with snapper on btrfs now on some systems.
Linux definitively does dominate the end user market. You just mean the end user desktop/laptop market.
I agree though that preinstallation is the biggest deal. The fact that people have to install Linux at all is the problem. The installer itself is already 100x better than the Windows one, but that’s not enough.
Not to mention it means manufacturers ensure all the hardware is compatible, drivers etc are installed and working, which is why windows users feel it works better.
Didn’t watch the video… but the premise “The biggest barrier for the new Linux user isn’t the installer” is exactly why Microsoft is, sadly, dominating the end-user (not servers) market.
What Microsoft managed to do with OEMs is NOT to have an installer at all! People buy (or get, via their work) a computer and… use it. There is not installation step for the vast majority of people.
I’m not saying that’s good, only that strategy wise, if the single metric is adoption rate, no installer is a winning strategy.
I looked for a reasonable Linux laptop for my wife and either it was European (large shipping costs) or ridiculously marked up.
She just went with a windows laptop 🤷♀️
I bet the local Linux User Group would know. Seems too late for that purchase but worth checking for the next one.
Most people who go out and buy a computer doesn’t understand what an OS is. If Linux was standard when you bought a PC, it would be the dominating OS. I mean, you could switch the OS to Linux on the computers and I think most people wouldn’t realise when they buy it lol
Indeed, so my argument is that sure a “better” installer might change a small fraction of the marketshare, say 1%, but it’s not enough to change significantly, say 10% or even reach parity.
An interesting example is the Steam Deck coming with Linux installed. Sure there are few people who do (by choice) install Windows alongside Linux but AFAIK the vast majority do not. That’s IMHO particularly interesting on a topic, gaming, where Windows has been traditionally the #1 reason people picked a specific OS.
Doing dual install is advanced. No nontechnical user should consider it.
I think they would. I tried Linux again for the first time in 10+ years and kept running into issues like my sound would randomly die or change to headset, when I tried to update the video driver it hard- locked the system, etc. I just installed Ubuntu the other day and whenever it boots the monitor just goes into standby with no signal. It’s been nothing but trouble, and I have pretty normal hardware. Most people aren’t going to know or care how to deal with those problems. As far as Linux has come, it’s still not ready for widespread adoption by most people on the ‘it just works’ front.
TBH do you actually think that there’s some chance that nobody is testing these releases and this is happening to a massive number of people?
I’ve installed linux countless times on a SHITLOAD of computers and never faced any of these problems, realistically, you’re very unlucky, and these sorts of things happen with windows all the time too.
I’m not saying your issues don’t matter, but unless you have statistics that back you up, you can’t say “it just works” to either OS.
I’ve had more of an “It just works” experience with linux literally hundreds of times.
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.
Same issue though. If manufacturers actually had linux preinstalled, they would ensure compatibility. This isn’t a windows/Linux problem, this is a manufacturer/default os problem.
I am amazed by what you say though. I’ve had 0 hardware problems installing Linux on many different machines in the past 5 years. All the incompatibility issues of old are gone by my perspective
Even then those who have to installers don’t really have a good experience with distros of wide market share (narrowing to Linux distros only), especially with whatever fresh hell Calamares is. (It doesn’t even support LVM or just installation with specified mounts points if you already set up your partition layout!)
Seriously, I’ve had better experience with the installer Ubuntu Server uses.
It does “support” LVM, but with a wacky/hacky workaround and that’s a real shame !
Also, there is some talking on github on how they will probably completely drop LVM in the near futur… That’s not what someone should expect from a Linux installer!
It’s a shitshow. Looking at their repo’s issues list has lots of noise, but the worst of them is that the LVM issue has been open for over a year now. Sure, open source, anyone’s free to work on it by why would distros use such a feature incomplete installer?
well now I understand why is suse transitioning to a different installer instead of improving it
Using LVM is advanced. No nontechnical user should consider.
Not really an “Average Windows/MacOS user will run into” issue but most power users would run into it
I don’t think that’s true. Administration tools could build on top of it, like snapshotting, which even if it does not work the best that way, it will work. and that can just run in the background, automatically, just like it does with snapper on btrfs now on some systems.
Linux definitively does dominate the end user market. You just mean the end user desktop/laptop market.
I agree though that preinstallation is the biggest deal. The fact that people have to install Linux at all is the problem. The installer itself is already 100x better than the Windows one, but that’s not enough.
Not to mention it means manufacturers ensure all the hardware is compatible, drivers etc are installed and working, which is why windows users feel it works better.
If you mean unrootable Googled Android then I don’t consider that Linux. If you mean something else please clarify.
its corporate locked down linux, but its linux alright.
So… Linux the kernel but without the freedom?
almost yeah.
its google we are talking about after all.
It’s the Linux kernel. Android is inarguably a flavour of Linux.