I use Debian for my personal desktop, and I fully understand where you are coming from, I keep a terminal window open 24x7 for various tasks that cannot be easily done via GUI. But have you tried Linux Mint? I have had excellent luck using it for people like your mother (or my wife lol) and been able to get the desktop system fully operational without ever touching a command line. Non-free wifi drivers and all. The folks at Mint have done an excellent job of making not only a beautiful looking and good performance desktop, but also one that does the hard stuff automatically for those that are not techs.
Yep, indeed the terrible experience with my WiFi drivers was on Linux Mint 20, just a couple of weeks ago. It took me the entire day to figure it out. In the end, I had to disable secure boot in my UEFI to make it work; figuring out how that's done was another task in its own right. I'm positive that my mother wouldn't be able to do either if those.
But it gets better. My motherboard stopped working last week; the hardware wasn't exactly new anymore and it just stopped working. So I swapped the hardware. Windows 10 (dual boot) didn't even raise an eyebrow, it just continued to work as before. Linux Mint on the other hand refused to even boot the display manager, instead throwing some weird interrupt handler errors. I tried to reinstall it, but even the live boot USB had the same issue. I tried again with vanilla Ubuntu and it worked right away; no WiFi issues either. That is, after I re-installed it TWICE because the first time around I didn't erase my /home partition, foolishly believing that the settings from the Mint installation MIGHT carry over to Ubuntu, since they're essentially the same under the hood. Oh boy was that a bad idea.
I really like Mint, especially Cinnamon. It looks nice, behaves well and doesn't get in your way (I use it at work 100% of the time). But it seems to despise my hardware at home. Now I'm stuck with Ubuntu and their super weird Unity desktop and it makes me cringe - but at least it works.
That sums up what I wanted to say: Linux is nice when it works, but the desktops often don't. And for the average end user, this is a death sentence - game over.
Wow you did have a bad experience. I actually do remember running into the secure boot and the wifi drivers issue on a system once, I guess we get to blame the secure boot people for that, just as many others have done, they have chosen to only fully support Windows, which causes Linux and other OSs problems sometimes. Secure boot DOES work, but not if you have to use proprietary driver modules in the kernel, because apparently secure boot can't authenticate them.
I am with you on the Unity desktop, can't stand it. And while you can install different desktop environments, installing one other than the distro default often gets you right in the same boat of having to edit stuff manually to get it working.
I did a similar thing with my /home when I switched from PopOS to Debian, it didn't cause me any major issues, does seem like I remember having to tell it that partition was my /home though, it tried by default to use something else.
I can't say I have had similar experience with Windows, every single time I have booted a windows install on different hardware, I have had mega issues. Most of the time it wouldn't even boot.
Maybe I was just unlucky, who knows. It's interesting that the same (!!) WiFi card works with Ubuntu (while secure boot is on) while it doesn't work with Mint. Either way - those are the reasons why I can't recommend Linux to the typical end user. For a developer - sure, go ahead, by all means.
That is interesting, I just assumed I couldn't use secure boot with the card I was working with. I did notice on my wife's laptop, Mint wanted to load a proprietary driver for her Wifi card, but I told it no because the open source driver was already loaded and working fine.
I definitely agree that for most end users, Linux can be a problem. When it "just works" it's great, but when something breaks, you have to get under the hood to fix it.
That being said, I feel Windows is not as much better in that regard. 90% of my income for my part time computer repair business is end users who call me because Windows isn't working right on their computer and they can't figure out how to fix it. Only difference in the repair process is that most repairs in Windows are from the GUI, I generally only use CLI for information gathering.
And Windows breaks a LOT more often, usually due to updates. Once I have a stable Linux based system setup for a customer, I usually don't get called back unless they want to add something new. Windows on the other hand, I get 30 voicemails every six months when Microsoft releases their updates and stuff that was fine stops working.
I use Debian for my personal desktop, and I fully understand where you are coming from, I keep a terminal window open 24x7 for various tasks that cannot be easily done via GUI. But have you tried Linux Mint? I have had excellent luck using it for people like your mother (or my wife lol) and been able to get the desktop system fully operational without ever touching a command line. Non-free wifi drivers and all. The folks at Mint have done an excellent job of making not only a beautiful looking and good performance desktop, but also one that does the hard stuff automatically for those that are not techs.
Yep, indeed the terrible experience with my WiFi drivers was on Linux Mint 20, just a couple of weeks ago. It took me the entire day to figure it out. In the end, I had to disable secure boot in my UEFI to make it work; figuring out how that's done was another task in its own right. I'm positive that my mother wouldn't be able to do either if those.
But it gets better. My motherboard stopped working last week; the hardware wasn't exactly new anymore and it just stopped working. So I swapped the hardware. Windows 10 (dual boot) didn't even raise an eyebrow, it just continued to work as before. Linux Mint on the other hand refused to even boot the display manager, instead throwing some weird interrupt handler errors. I tried to reinstall it, but even the live boot USB had the same issue. I tried again with vanilla Ubuntu and it worked right away; no WiFi issues either. That is, after I re-installed it TWICE because the first time around I didn't erase my /home partition, foolishly believing that the settings from the Mint installation MIGHT carry over to Ubuntu, since they're essentially the same under the hood. Oh boy was that a bad idea.
I really like Mint, especially Cinnamon. It looks nice, behaves well and doesn't get in your way (I use it at work 100% of the time). But it seems to despise my hardware at home. Now I'm stuck with Ubuntu and their super weird Unity desktop and it makes me cringe - but at least it works.
That sums up what I wanted to say: Linux is nice when it works, but the desktops often don't. And for the average end user, this is a death sentence - game over.
Wow you did have a bad experience. I actually do remember running into the secure boot and the wifi drivers issue on a system once, I guess we get to blame the secure boot people for that, just as many others have done, they have chosen to only fully support Windows, which causes Linux and other OSs problems sometimes. Secure boot DOES work, but not if you have to use proprietary driver modules in the kernel, because apparently secure boot can't authenticate them.
I am with you on the Unity desktop, can't stand it. And while you can install different desktop environments, installing one other than the distro default often gets you right in the same boat of having to edit stuff manually to get it working.
I did a similar thing with my /home when I switched from PopOS to Debian, it didn't cause me any major issues, does seem like I remember having to tell it that partition was my /home though, it tried by default to use something else.
I can't say I have had similar experience with Windows, every single time I have booted a windows install on different hardware, I have had mega issues. Most of the time it wouldn't even boot.
Maybe I was just unlucky, who knows. It's interesting that the same (!!) WiFi card works with Ubuntu (while secure boot is on) while it doesn't work with Mint. Either way - those are the reasons why I can't recommend Linux to the typical end user. For a developer - sure, go ahead, by all means.
That is interesting, I just assumed I couldn't use secure boot with the card I was working with. I did notice on my wife's laptop, Mint wanted to load a proprietary driver for her Wifi card, but I told it no because the open source driver was already loaded and working fine.
I definitely agree that for most end users, Linux can be a problem. When it "just works" it's great, but when something breaks, you have to get under the hood to fix it.
That being said, I feel Windows is not as much better in that regard. 90% of my income for my part time computer repair business is end users who call me because Windows isn't working right on their computer and they can't figure out how to fix it. Only difference in the repair process is that most repairs in Windows are from the GUI, I generally only use CLI for information gathering.
And Windows breaks a LOT more often, usually due to updates. Once I have a stable Linux based system setup for a customer, I usually don't get called back unless they want to add something new. Windows on the other hand, I get 30 voicemails every six months when Microsoft releases their updates and stuff that was fine stops working.
youre right, windows OS are not worth for web dev / mobile dev. someone using windows coz adobe and games if for video/music editing Mac is choice