I can understand being frustrated, but you have to understand that your particular experience is not the norm. I'd be pretty confident saying that less than 1% of people will back out of an install half way through it or have that much of an issue installing (unless it's Arch). So it's not something that really needs to be fixed before people can start using Linux.

I didn't even have that many problems setting up a dual boot with Windows in 2006 when I was a total newbie to Linux, and I had to figure out how partitioning and swap files worked.

Just ask for help in a respectful manner on your distros forum and someone will very likely be happy to assist you.

Honestly, just try something else. If you're trying to do gaming, I'd recommend Garuda Dragonized from personal experience. It's Arch based, but comes packaged with everything you'd need for gaming, and a utility to install a bunch of extra stuff you might want, like launchers, controller drivers, etc. I think it even comes with the Nvidia drivers that you'll need to install manually for most other distros.

I my opinion it's really ugly out of the box sadly, with a horrible "gamer" look. It's KDE though, so it's really easy to customize.

I didn't realize that was how her name was spelled! That is fucking hilarious 😂

For games, just use your package manager to install Steam, then install Proton from there. (IIRC it's automatic for just the standard release version.) Steam games should mostly just work without you needing to do anything. Other games, you want to use something like Heroic or Lutris (I recommend the former) to manage them and launch them with Proton without manually doing it all every time.

If you expand on what your issues were, I'm sure plenty of people would be happy to help. Again, it should be pretty trivial, so I'm not sure what went wrong.

Bit of an odd question, but did you try booting it from a USB on that machine and see if it worked alright for a few days with what you wanted it to do? Typically if it works fine from the bootable usb, it shouldn’t really have any issues installing unless your drive is copy protected or something, especially if it’s Mint like you mentioned below, also I’d recommend poking their forums if you haven’t yet, somebody might be able to shed more light on what’s wrong with specific errors and behaviours

Well, I've worked with Linux before, and it wasn't a generally smooth experience, so I went in with "it's a different environment" in mind. But the series of events that unfolded was absurd. I was so ready and hyped to install some software that I remember from back in the day and try to emulate at least one game, but no luck. If I want to do it, I'm gonna need to dedicate some time and more effort than expected to setting up. I've been procrastinating because I don't want to deal with these bugs.

Yes, that is FreeBSD's current logo.

Is this bsd's logo ?

Ahh, but what OS does Joi use?

I don't know what distro you're installing or what the hell you're doing, but most of the time it's trivial. From my experience, the Linux installation is much simpler and easier than Windows.

It is different though, so if you bash your head against it expecting Windows then you're obviously going to have a bad time. You need to start with the understanding that it's a different thing and you'll have to learn it, just like you did Windows when you first started with that. You weren't instantly an expert. You just forgot what it was like to be a noob who doesn't know what they're doing.

I don't think it can work if it's open source probably. There's always ways around anti-cheat. It's only a matter of finding it. Making it open source makes it trivial.

With that said, kernel level anti-cheat doesn't really seem to slow anyone down much. I've heard that the games with them still have plenty of hackers. Why try to solve a problem with such a big weapon if it isn't going to work anyway? Best case, it potentially adds some really deep vulnerabilities to your system, and maybe slightly slows down hackers.

Before I read the further comments I was going to say Easy Anti-cheat does work fine. Lol. You may want to write out the full name first to avoid confusion in the future.

Truth is windows has plenty of bugs too, the main difference is that it comes pre installed so you don't have to deal with the install bugs, and you're already acclimated to all its quirks so you don't notice them as much.

As for Mint, it gets recommended a lot because it's stable and looks a lot like windows, but it's old and slow to update to modern standards, you can always go for a more bleeding edge distribution like fedora.

SteamOS proves that Linux doesn't need technical expertise to operate.

All Linux OSs need to aim for SteamOS's UX, imo, if they want to see greater adoption.

Unless the point is to keep normies from migrating to it, which is just bass ackwards.

Can you run a virtual machine on Linux just for Adobe?

I spent 4 hours today trying to remove previous employers' emails from the setup window for OneDrive - the one where you choose which email to sign in with and configure OneDrive.

I deleted credentials, erased mentions in the registry, updated my Outlook from classic to new, uninstalled the app about 10 times, enabled/disabled the hidden administrator account, moved the cache folders out from their normal locations, deleted my Outlook accounts, unlinked my PC, deleted OneDrive folders, tried completely resetting OneDrive only to get an error saying that I couldn't - even after using a command that should have forced the program to reset. Nothing worked.

This is legitimately breaking my brain.

In contrast, I recently set up KeePass and Syncthing. How fucking easy that was, both on my Windows PC and phone.

If Linux promises a better modern OS experience than Windows 11, then I will ADORE switching to Ubuntu or Mint when I order my new Framework.

Right, and I accept that from any other part of the OS that isn't the very first step when trying to use it.

The way I see it..

If you order pieces from people who are mostly doing carpentry as a passion and make furniture. Sure it's frustrating and you have to put in work. But you can't compare it to buying stuff from IKEA and telling everyone those carpenters need to do more of that.

It was Mint, which is why I found it odd. I've also used Ubuntu years ago, but that wasn't plug-n-play either from what I remember. I spent too much time getting my sound and video cards running, and then spent twice that time getting Compiz to work so I could have all the cool effects. 😅

What flavor of Linux were you trying to install? My experience on endeavoros has been pretty plug and play. I imagine it would be similar on mint, Ubuntu, fedora, Debian. If it was Linux from scratch, yeah that's likely going to be frustrating.

Let's not reach for the "this guy doesn't want to learn" excuse because that's you shifting the blame on me, and instead focus on the "this experience has been more frustrating than it needs to be as a first step in adopting an OS and growing the user base". If I didn't want to learn, I wouldn't have bothered to look how to fix the USB after simply cancelling the installation. In what world is that normal? That bug has been around for ages. Also, your installer fatally errors out without a clear cause. Not only was it frustrating, but my time and effort were also wasted. So please, at least take the time to understand what I mean...

If you don't understand or want to learn, then linux isn't for you. You may ask a computer savvy friend to teach you.

It's a non-trivial thing and it requires some skills that many people aren't really trained for.

I've tried installing Linux on two computers four times last month, but I haven't been able to for one reason or another. I've already spent an hour debugging simply because I cancelled the installation once at the wrong time (ie. any time after hitting start) and had to go in there and rename shit (??????). If the community really wants us to switch, it needs to iron out all this garbage at the front door. I can only imagine the frustration of getting everything else up and running. Fuck these headaches. I've had a better UX installing Windows, which I did about 10 times last year without a hitch.

Valve will figure it out for us and then offer it for any game published on Steam.

Dunno what state their own services are in currently for games like TF2, CS2 and Deadlock.

How are things with compatibility layers?