I previously stated:

> Ah, the eternal cycle of: Microsoft does something bad, then people move to Linux, then they get dragged by Linux's rough new user experience, then they leave Linux, then things are fine for a while, then people mock Linux users for being paranoid, then Microsoft does something bad...

here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28971110

Looks like we're going for another whirl around the cycle! Wheee!

gavinray

I upvoted you but I disagree with

  "Then they get dragged through Linux's rough new user experience."

What distros do you feel have a poor experience for new Linux users?

Arch, Gentoo, etc -- yeah those are terrible recommendations for "I want to use Linux for the first time."

The first Linux distro I installed, I was 14 and had grown up on Windows XP + Vista. I went with Linux Mint and it felt like Windows (the UX).

And that was a decade ago. Things were so much worse + more difficult on Linux then too.

You have distros now like ElementaryOS that are made to mimic OSx, which is about as "I dunno computers" as you can get.

And Ubuntu or any derivative like PopOS are also friendly and great first experiences.

This is all opinion of course.

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EDIT: For context/bias: posted this from Windows 11 Insider

Switched to Windows ~1 year ago, and mostly regret it. I had (what I consider) a better experience on Ubuntu/Pop with Regolith as a tiling WM. YMMV, etc.

CodesInChaos

I switched from Windows to Mint 20.x recently. There are many paper cuts. Some particularly annoying examples:

* It freezes hard when it runs out of RAM, while Windows stays somewhat usable in that situation. The OOM killer takes 10 mins to kick in, if it does so at all. The situation is probably made worse by the default 1GB swap partition size (why so small? I would have expected at 16 GB to match the RAM size).

* hibernate doesn't work out of the box. `pm-hibernate` exits printing no error message (code 128). After installing `uswsusp` it'll call `s2disk`, which works. I still need to figure out which config files to add so hibernate shows up in the power manager and shutdown menu.

* When using the graphical updater, the boot partition will fill up, preventing further kernel updates. `apt-get autoremove` fixes that.

thingification

The kernel OOM killer just isn't designed for desktop at all, it seems like. Back when I didn't have a ridiculous amount of RAM, I used this instead and was happy with it:

https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom

The boot thing you mention always seemed a very odd default to me. It doesn't happen to me any more on my work ubuntu machine, but maybe I configured something to fix that and forgot about it.