I have set up a Linux computer for my dad just this week. As the others are saying the biggest hurdle is support. Mostly the part where reliable automated update mechanisms don’t exist. The system I created has a WM & a panel and it’s even simpler than chrome OS, but here is no way my dad could deal with a message, where apt would ask him, if he wanted to update to the maintainer’s grub version. Making an update script is very easy, but whether you use Debian stable, Ubuntu or Arch eventually some kind of intervention is going to be required beyond just typing sudo passwords…
Though truth to be told Windows has a lot of garbage problems (perhaps even more than L) as well, it’s just people have gotten used to them after 20 years of NT on desktop. On Linux at least most common problems can be solved without reinstalling the OS, on Windows the rot feels like a built in planned obsolescence sometimes, because there are many that just update their PCs instead of ever reinstalling Windows.
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I have set up a Linux computer for my dad just this week. As the others are saying the biggest hurdle is support. Mostly the part where reliable automated update mechanisms don’t exist. The system I created has a WM & a panel and it’s even simpler than chrome OS, but here is no way my dad could deal with a message, where apt would ask him, if he wanted to update to the maintainer’s grub version. Making an update script is very easy, but whether you use Debian stable, Ubuntu or Arch eventually some kind of intervention is going to be required beyond just typing sudo passwords…
Though truth to be told Windows has a lot of garbage problems (perhaps even more than L) as well, it’s just people have gotten used to them after 20 years of NT on desktop. On Linux at least most common problems can be solved without reinstalling the OS, on Windows the rot feels like a built in planned obsolescence sometimes, because there are many that just update their PCs instead of ever reinstalling Windows.