My dad has been using the ("proudly antifascist") antiX I installed on his beloved, ancient Compaq netbook for more than a year, and it seems to make total sense to him.
this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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My mother, who is the stereotypical boomer that doesn't get technology, got upset with all the privacy invasion of Microsoft, and has been running Linux for over a decade
For what? Recipe keeping?
If she is immune to branding then marry that one! She's rare.
I have friends who says "I still run Windows because I don't want to do any tinkering," but don't realize they'd do less tinkering if they switched haha. It's not 2015 anymore.
"Windows doesn't require any tinkering, just run this to make a local account, decline 100 requests to use OneDrive and Office 365, get these debloaters, uninstall all these things, and make sure you always tell Windows to not restart your computer while you're using it every time it updates. And when it does update, you'll need to run the debloaters again."
I mean, you don't really have to do these stuff. I doubt the comment's author's friend cares about debloating and privacy.
Yes, in the same way that you don't typically need to tinker with Linux
In the end they're not so different, except Windows intentionally does anti-consumer things that make people want to tinker.
No joke my linux laptop hardest part was the initial install. Steam made gaming seemless. No ms account login, no asking for ai, no drivers. Just install and boom im playing my games. Its so nice.
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It's wild. "I don't want to have to tinker," then go on to talk about the 10 different debloating softwares they need to run every time it updates.
$sudo apt install realtek-firmware-nonfree
"NOOOOOO SO USER UNFRIENDLY!!!"
"On windows all i have to do is go to regedit, then HKEY/SOFTWARE/Microsoft/Windows/classes/someObscureSetting, then select DWORD and change the value to 0x0011111, then save and reboot. SO EASY AND USER FRIENDLY!! Thanks microslop!!!"
Lol right? I used Windows for decades, and edited the registry a countless number of times. Never did I have any clue what the fuck any of it was doing. Not once.
With Linux, I gain permanent knowledge any time I need to use a command I found online.
skill issue
Absolutely this. I was spending 2-3 hours a week making my Win11 box stable.
Once a month I had to redo all the sound drivers, as with each reboot sound would get quieter and quieter until I was running a lottery of which program wouldn't be affected any given day and suddenly have it's volume loud enough to shake the house.
I upgraded CPU/MB after the MB failed, MS cancelled my Win11 licence. I realized I still was spending stupid amounts of time keeping things working, and I am very against all the AI being shoved into every Windows book and cranny.
The first week of ditching Win11, I was tinkering everything because New Shiny, but now things were working I'm not even sure I've spent 3 hours in the last two months tinkering.
How is it that people have unstable Windows installs?? Mine is consistently an unwavering pile of shit.
never have to tinker more in my life than on windows. its even worse with the batshit things Claude will do. On Linux shit just works
Yeah, back then when I made my move from Windows to Linux I mostly did so because I wanted something complicated to tinker with, but I had to go to Gentoo to find a Linux distro that was more complicated then Windows. And that was nearly 20 years ago!
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Meanwhile I have a riced setup with programmer dvorak keyboard layout and shortcut heavy interaction which makes my computer almost unusable to normies.
Yeah Linux's biggest problem now is "oups, your application / driver isn't available"
Not user friendlyness.
What drivers are you missing?
Back then the LEGO mindstoms stuff was a problem. And my Logitech remote.
Not sure if that changed. Growed tired of dual boot, and went windows. The thing is, just one app or game you can't use can screw up everything.
Unsupported LEGO mindstorm stuff seems to be a problem of the past https://www.ev3dev.org/ but even in the past, it was probably more a config problem.
Never the less, you don't lower your overall efficiency because one out of a hundred apps do not work correctly. You don't even need to dual boot. You can just fire up QEMU with a Windows VM and use this app and shut it off afterwards. That also makes snapshot handling way easier.
What I admit is, if you want to play a game, you can only use virtualization if you have a spare GPU you can pass through for hardware acceleration. Otherwise playing in a VM doesn't make any sense. But on the same time I also have to say, WINE improved so so god damn much over the last 5 years. I am trying to get games to run with WINE since like 2005 or something and it was always painful and nothing from this side of the century worked....
But now, even with the proton wrapper, everything just works tbh. I have a lot of games, different games, new games, old games, multiplayer games with anti cheat etc....
Everything works on my machine. Now even my non-tech-friends are jumping this wagon, I now a handful of those people running Linux only for at least a year now and all of them are happy with it. I'm not saying that they couldn't be happier, but they also sometimes overesitmate their Windows know-how, because in the end, most of their frustration comes from the fact, that they don't know how to do certain things, but they actually didn't know before either.
They would fake read some stuff, download 3 things, randomly click on a lot of stuff, change some settings they don't remember and when they fucked the poor rectangular prism enough, they called me to unfuck it and get done whatever they wanted in the first place. It wasn't too different from what they are able to achieve now on their Linux machine. But I have one or two people, that gaslight themselves into believing that they knew more about the Windows Machine, didn't fuck it up on a regular basis and did not need to call me in to fix it.
I don't know why they talk themselves into this fictional scenario, I don't care, they are still on Linux, everything they want works and they already started customizing KDE to their liking.
I never had trouble, so others never had trouble and are lying...
That's kind of a shity and condescending attitude to have.
And the official ev3 app never worked. Ev3dev never had the same convenience.
It's like saying you don't nedd Photoshop because gimp exist.
And yeah, i grow tired of having to spend time on getting stuff to run that on windows is just "install and run" because the manufacturer / developer actually made sure it would work on windows.
No what I'm saying is that I literally help a couple people in my area jump to Linux and none of them have any trouble they didn't already have before and in general they have less trouble. Everything works, there is literally nothing someone wants to get done what he or she can't. We even got Cheat Engine up and running for this one guy because he really really wanted to use cheat tables instead of GameConquerer. And we have done it, it works and he can bow do it himself. But those are rare edge cases, most of the people and systems I kinda look over are happy and work fine.
I mean to be fair, there was one attempt which failed because he was using some high end audio hardware which indeed just wasn't supported for Linux, there were alternatives, but he already had his equipment so he went into the path of Win11 and debloating & running all those famous removal scripts but again, its an edge case and the only failed attempt
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I suggested a friend to try out Bazzite (KDE desktop). He told me it felt like he was playing on a console because everything works from the get go. He didn't have to tweak or install anything.
Is it doable in Bazzite for a non-technical person coming from Windows to install software outside of flakpak?
It's built on an immutable Fedora, right?
Edit: for example: can you install rpm files or software from a Fedora repository via GUI?
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Nice it's always great to hear the work millions of people put into the Linux ecosystem is paying off.
This is the kind of story we should forward to Linus Torvalds, the Linux mailing sublists and other volunteers so they see how their work gets recognized ^^
The different file system was the biggest adaptive hurdle for me. Just the default knowledge of how windows worked from the MS-DOS era took a bit to adapt to. I think knowing Windows actually made it harder to switch compared to someone who wouldn't know much more than opening the internet browser.
But for gaming: more than anything navigating all the compatability files being used by WINE and Steam can be a nightmare.
AMD drivers are so smooth on Linux!
The GPU is actually NVIDIA! But planning an upgrade to an AMD card soon.
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I do some IT at work and I don't wanna bother with ITing my own system, so I installed Linux on it. It's doing everything I want to, and wine does the rest. I love it.
Excellent. That means it’s working as intended.
The best user interface is one that you don’t even notice. The seamless layer between you and your tool (or game in this instance).
The "doesn't come preinstalled" part is still huge, combined with the "doesn't have first-party device manufacturer support".
If you buy a PC with Windows preinstalled, that doesn't only mean that you don't have to install Windows, but also the whole set of hardware in there will work just fine under Windows. They don't put a fingerprint reader in there that doesn't have a Windows driver, or a GPU with bad Windows driver support.
And yes, most hardware natively works pretty well under Windows, but the manufacturer taking care that they only select components that work fine under Windows is a big part of why there isn't a hardware lottery under Windows.
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Yeah - my wife has occupied for hundreds of hours the SteamDeck and really doesn't care that it's Linux. Her games do work. And after Microsoft switched off Win10, I moved her to Mint and she really had no issues at all with that. Everything she does still works the same. We just saved a few hundred Euros by being able to keep using the Laptop
Compared to when I started with Linux 21 years ago, we are absolutely spoiled with games that work well today.
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I almost broached the topic with my mother (60s) the other day about moving to Linux. She's got a computer that sucks, and my other brother got windows 11 on there so it's exceptionally slow. I was helping her with some documents and printing and whatnot so I started asking a couple of the questions you would ask, like what she uses the pc for. She uses this tax software and "needs" it installed (as opposed to the browser version) so I didn't continue down that road but I'm pretty sure it'd blow her mind how much better this thing would run with mint. And other than that tax software, it'd be nearly identical for her, open a browser and go to the thing.
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I mean, if you have Windows like DE’s it’s really not THAT hard for a Windows user to use Linux. The issue is when you have Gnome and others installed.
But yes I agree with you. I definitely think we’ve come a long way from having to use the terminal for everything.
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Man do I feel that PS, I think the worst part of gaming on Linux (which is massive credit to how well it works) is not knowing whether a bug is just... the game, or is somehow Linux/Proton/Drivers. I hate not knowing if it's worth stopping to look into a fix or not.
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it is a shame some of my apps and games just dont work flawlessly with WINE.
If you're explicitly using WINE to open games in 2026, then you're doing it wrong. Launch the games through Steam and enable Proton in the compatibility settings.
That, or get a more lightweight launcher like Faugus, and select Proton (GE or Cachy flavors might work slightly better for some games)
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