Ubuntu? Its a can’t make up its mind what it is trying to be while always becoming a crashy mess. When it first came out I remember trying it and immediately broke it.

The last time I installed it recently it had issues out of the box.

I find this complaint very strange. It’s a dot. It helps people find what they installed.

But if this person doesn’t need it, how would they ever see it? Most power users I know never even look in the menu, so they would never know there is a dot in the first place.

Strange complaint.

When they say WhatsApp I gotta think that would be the same for any third party conversation app right? I would never use whatsapp, and I would hope any security minded person wouldnt either. But I do rely on an opensource sms launcher and signal. I would assume the framework would make it mess with those too.

This sucks. Horribly sucks. I can’t stand apple products, they cant do anything. I know that even having google play on my android device means I am fucked anyways, but this is a new low from google.

Feels weird to buy a google pixel, only to be able to expect it is the best way to not have google on it. (grapheneos or similar).

Inst this simply KDEs activities?

Two desktops and three laptops, they all work great. My biggest ongoing issue, and it is fair to say it is a problem, is VR. I have not tried recently, but that is one area that was smooth to set up in windows and I havent had luck in Linux.

when introducing new people to Linux it’s best to acknowledge there may be some tinkering and adaptation needed to get things working as they should.

Depends on what “should” means. My printer for example will not work with windows. It works fine with linux. So… that really is a printer driver issue. No matter which one it works with.

As for the OS out of the box, everything works on a fresh install of either - although linux is far more loaded with ready to go software, and windows requires you to add it. And any of the software you add to either can cause breakages, that is computing.

I noticed over the years that Linux works fairly well for people who did not start with windows first. Both have learning curves, but habits are habits.

I am going to take my linux laptop for an example: 2 years. No tinkering. There is nothing to do, it just works.

My other laptop (windows): damn thing need tinkering all the time: turn off this, regedit that, just to get the nagware and crap out. Won’t allow remote desktop with the license, needs drivers to be updated, software that came with it is bloatware garbage.

Okular can be set to do that, but it doesnt have a scroll bar, which you might not like. Firefox can do that as well, but I concede that browser PDF viewers are not ideal.

Yes mounting is different, but that is not a Linux issue. Same as when you boot into windows, but an EXT formatted drive will not appear AND it will never mount. Windows helpful choice is “unknown” and offer to format. These are just OS differences, not breakages.

Cinnamon might be part of your problem with shortcuts…

Yeah SMB shares can be tricky. I have issues with them in Windows as well, not linux specifically.

I am not saying linux is perfect. All computers rely on a person being able to deal with them. I just find it much more stable then windows ever was. You add bottles and Lutris into the mix, and now it is a third party software issue: just like plenty of software in windows as well.

I agree that computers can have issues. But none of these are linux only. Windows does all this stupid shit too. My printer wont work with windows, only linux (how the hell this can be true is beyond me). Bluetooth drops in windows, works fine in linux. The latest nvidia update on windows broke all games making it black screen until I used some regedit fixes. A windows update broke my firmware on a video card for a while, almost got RMA’d. I could go on, talk about Jankiness. I don’t use windows as my main computer due to it being so all over the place. I say this as a MSDN dev and windows server and azure dev and support person. I remote entirely from Linux, I need to have an OS that works.

My point is windows does this shit too.

But: That is your issues are a long list that seems to have a repeating theme: OpenSuse.

You don’t need to edit FSTAB to add a drive, there is a gui for that, for whatever that’s worth.

I have not had any of these issues on the 5 or so linux computers I use daily. I have had a few upgrades in Arch cause me to update grub or roll back, but that is about it.

Over the last two years I have found Fedora KDE has been amazingly easy to use and update.

I still can’t find a horizontal page scrolling PDF app.

That one has me curious: what is that? (I mean by definition - scroll - that can’t be a thing, lol) But I am sure it is, got examples?

There might be a reason they are unpopular.

Stuff breaks? What breaks? I don’t have stuff that breaks. Windows has been far more breaky to me over the last decade than Linux has ever been. What have you been doing? This may have been true 20 years ago, but not today.

AI? Look, I helped a friend fix a new install. It wasn’t Linux fault, it was a setting in the bios that needed to be changed. But the AI had them trying all sorts of things that were unrelated, and was never going to help. Use with a grain of salt. You shouldn’t really need to do much if you can get through the install anyways.

I am really curious what “system breaking problems” you have? My latest laptop over the last 2+ years has been so uneventful and boring. Never used a command line on it, but don’t forget when you see people share command line fixes, it is because it is the easiest way to directly share information. Not the only way to do something. My desktop has had a few hiccups over the last 5, but that is what I get for running Arch on it.