Recently been playing around with Mint. For the most part it’s user friendly. Where it falls apart is it’s not intuitive, it took me hours of googling to try to figure out how to add windows specific drivers (because the manufacturer didn’t create Linux drivers) for a Bluetooth mouse so I could program the mouse buttons. There were community created drivers on GitHub but no direct way to get them, I would have had to download and configure several support files before I could even try to install. I eventually gave up and just bought another mouse.
Most people would have given up in the first 5min and tossed their PC out and kept the mouse.
It’s not that Linux doesn’t work, it’s that it takes work to get it to work.
If Linux worked in the sense of clear step by step instructions and the developers/legacy users didn’t expect everyone to be experts or expect everyone to spend hours trying to figure out world peace just to perform a mundane task, then it would probably replace windows pretty quickly.
To an extent that’s an anathema to how software tutorials on linux are designed: Developers don’t know which distro a given user may be using, have no idea what sort of edge cases a random person may find themselves within, and as such are reliant on the only universal component to unite them all - the terminal.
Installing a windows driver on Linux Mint is a definite edge case - there’s no chance that the Mint developers had that in mind as expected user behavior. In addition, there’s no way they could have determined the originated issue and suggested a solution in a nice GUI prompt, because unlike Microsoft, there is no telemetry involved that could be utilized to determine an appropriate package like that community made driver automatically.
Recently been playing around with Mint. For the most part it’s user friendly. Where it falls apart is it’s not intuitive, it took me hours of googling to try to figure out how to add windows specific drivers (because the manufacturer didn’t create Linux drivers) for a Bluetooth mouse so I could program the mouse buttons. There were community created drivers on GitHub but no direct way to get them, I would have had to download and configure several support files before I could even try to install. I eventually gave up and just bought another mouse.
Most people would have given up in the first 5min and tossed their PC out and kept the mouse.
It’s not that Linux doesn’t work, it’s that it takes work to get it to work.
If Linux worked in the sense of clear step by step instructions and the developers/legacy users didn’t expect everyone to be experts or expect everyone to spend hours trying to figure out world peace just to perform a mundane task, then it would probably replace windows pretty quickly.
To an extent that’s an anathema to how software tutorials on linux are designed: Developers don’t know which distro a given user may be using, have no idea what sort of edge cases a random person may find themselves within, and as such are reliant on the only universal component to unite them all - the terminal.
Installing a windows driver on Linux Mint is a definite edge case - there’s no chance that the Mint developers had that in mind as expected user behavior. In addition, there’s no way they could have determined the originated issue and suggested a solution in a nice GUI prompt, because unlike Microsoft, there is no telemetry involved that could be utilized to determine an appropriate package like that community made driver automatically.
So yeah - a bit unfair to those making tutorials.