I wish the Linux community would get their thumbs out their arses and make some kind of easy to use normie distro
Ubuntu, Mint, Pop_OS, Zorin. Used Zorin to play the old switcheroo on my parents and they barely noticed. In fact, the only time I was "required" to enter the terminal was to add the repos for LibreWolf so they have a decent privacy-focused browser. And that's only because I wanted to be lazy and copy/paste that task. Everything regular people might want is in the GUI. And, let's be honest, power users on Windows are dropping into command line / powershell anyway.
that let's me do gaming easily
Lutris is fantastic for a "just work, damnit" gaming shell. Surprisingly it's even easier and better at running Windows 98 era stuff on modern graphics hardware than Windows 10 is. Half an hour of reading is all you need: wine prefixes, runners, etc. No one is born knowing it, but give it a shot and it will pay dividends. Switching up between playing Sacrifice (2000) and Mad Max (2015). My wife is playing Baldur's Gate 3 (ulg, 2023). Wrapped up playing some Touhou games (Lutris has a retroarch wrapper) a while ago. All within the same UI.
Current complaints about Linux:
(a big one) Support is shit. Always been shit. Lots of really old no-longer-useful advice floating around out there. And if you don't know a magic word to search for, you might never find it. If you're having printer issues, for example, you're just going to have to know to add "CUPS" to your searches. We do have a woefully slow c/linux so getting some activity here from like-minded people would be good.
"Not invented here" anti-pattern, probably more accurately stated as "Not invented by a woke marxist." Commies and SJWs are working hard to strip away old stuff that works and replace it with new stuff that doesn't but is woke (Wayland over Xorg, systemd over initd, and more). But if you just want to use your machine and not mess around in the internals, the defaults are all very sensible and usable.
Thanks for the tip on Lutris. 100% going to be trying that out at some point. I might have to grab a cheap SSD or something, or use an external HDD and try to dual boot a bit on my actual gaming PC.
I'd been considering 86box with Windows 98 to run old games. I'm going to give this a shot first.
Ubuntu, Mint, Pop_OS, Zorin. Used Zorin to play the old switcheroo on my parents and they barely noticed. In fact, the only time I was "required" to enter the terminal was to add the repos for LibreWolf so they have a decent privacy-focused browser. And that's only because I wanted to be lazy and copy/paste that task. Everything regular people might want is in the GUI. And, let's be honest, power users on Windows are dropping into command line / powershell anyway.
Lutris is fantastic for a "just work, damnit" gaming shell. Surprisingly it's even easier and better at running Windows 98 era stuff on modern graphics hardware than Windows 10 is. Half an hour of reading is all you need: wine prefixes, runners, etc. No one is born knowing it, but give it a shot and it will pay dividends. Switching up between playing Sacrifice (2000) and Mad Max (2015). My wife is playing Baldur's Gate 3 (ulg, 2023). Wrapped up playing some Touhou games (Lutris has a retroarch wrapper) a while ago. All within the same UI.
Current complaints about Linux:
(a big one) Support is shit. Always been shit. Lots of really old no-longer-useful advice floating around out there. And if you don't know a magic word to search for, you might never find it. If you're having printer issues, for example, you're just going to have to know to add "CUPS" to your searches. We do have a woefully slow c/linux so getting some activity here from like-minded people would be good.
"Not invented here" anti-pattern, probably more accurately stated as "Not invented by a woke marxist." Commies and SJWs are working hard to strip away old stuff that works and replace it with new stuff that doesn't but is woke (Wayland over Xorg, systemd over initd, and more). But if you just want to use your machine and not mess around in the internals, the defaults are all very sensible and usable.
Thanks for the tip on Lutris. 100% going to be trying that out at some point. I might have to grab a cheap SSD or something, or use an external HDD and try to dual boot a bit on my actual gaming PC.
I'd been considering 86box with Windows 98 to run old games. I'm going to give this a shot first.