Honestly, Linux is not hard. If you're any sort of a power user, and especially if you're doing any programming, you're really doing yourself a disservice if you don't know at least some linux.
I can't imagine being a Windows-only dev. The *nix/*bsd commandline tools are just so insanely powerful.
A normie user can do just as fine on modern Linux as Windows because they don't do anything interesting. A Windows power user is going to go "where is all my stuff" and have to relearn the wheel, but will eventually realize it's a better wheel.
The place where it still really suffers is still device drivers. Generic stuff like mass storage, CDC, Ethernet are pretty decent these days but GPU is convoluted and god help you if you have some non-consumer specialty device. Printers, flip a coin.
Yeah, my computer-illiterate parents have been using Linux Mint for 12 years. I turned on autoupdates and Timeshift backups... It just works, and switching from XP was a lot easier than figuring out Windows 8. All they care about is that it has a web browser (Firefox), email (Thunderbird), and can print out tide charts from an old program that doesn't work under newer Windows.
I find AMD for GPU and Brother for network printer work out of the box.
Honestly, Linux is not hard. If you're any sort of a power user, and especially if you're doing any programming, you're really doing yourself a disservice if you don't know at least some linux.
I can't imagine being a Windows-only dev. The *nix/*bsd commandline tools are just so insanely powerful.
It can't get much easier than installing Ubuntu.
It depends.
A normie user can do just as fine on modern Linux as Windows because they don't do anything interesting. A Windows power user is going to go "where is all my stuff" and have to relearn the wheel, but will eventually realize it's a better wheel.
The place where it still really suffers is still device drivers. Generic stuff like mass storage, CDC, Ethernet are pretty decent these days but GPU is convoluted and god help you if you have some non-consumer specialty device. Printers, flip a coin.
Yeah, my computer-illiterate parents have been using Linux Mint for 12 years. I turned on autoupdates and Timeshift backups... It just works, and switching from XP was a lot easier than figuring out Windows 8. All they care about is that it has a web browser (Firefox), email (Thunderbird), and can print out tide charts from an old program that doesn't work under newer Windows.
I find AMD for GPU and Brother for network printer work out of the box.