If you want to do anything beyond using linux as a web browser, then nothing is simple.
Windows and mac also have web browsers, but in addition to that they can also do a lot of other things easily.
You don’t have to open a single terminal window if you don’t want to, nowadays. Hardware compatibility is mostly excellent, outside some specific vendors that keep giving trouble (fucking Nvidia, go fuck yourself). I’m not sure what’s inherently complicated about the modern Linux experience otherwise, outside having to figure out what’s a distribution. Most have app stores with bunch of stuff available OOTB, excellent software, etc.
Now, I’d have agreed with you 10 years ago. Just installing Ubuntu on a laptop meant dealing with shit power savings and non functional sleep unless you were ready to tweak obscure config files and install stuff manually. Wifi support was a nightmare.
Unless you’re speaking about software availability, which is not something you can really blame the OS for. Unless vendors make their software available natively, of course trying to mess with compatibility layers like Wine will always be complicated. I still can’t fully get rid of Windows because of media creation software mostly - music/audio DAWs are slowly coming over to Linux, but most commercial plugins obviously aren’t following. The rest is pretty smooth sailing though. I haven’t had a single fluke with my PopOS partition in years, while I’ve already had to repair my Windows partition twice in the same period - once for a borked update, and the second it just broke itself after a power outage.
If you want to do anything beyond using linux as a web browser, then nothing is simple. Windows and mac also have web browsers, but in addition to that they can also do a lot of other things easily.
You don’t have to open a single terminal window if you don’t want to, nowadays. Hardware compatibility is mostly excellent, outside some specific vendors that keep giving trouble (fucking Nvidia, go fuck yourself). I’m not sure what’s inherently complicated about the modern Linux experience otherwise, outside having to figure out what’s a distribution. Most have app stores with bunch of stuff available OOTB, excellent software, etc.
Now, I’d have agreed with you 10 years ago. Just installing Ubuntu on a laptop meant dealing with shit power savings and non functional sleep unless you were ready to tweak obscure config files and install stuff manually. Wifi support was a nightmare.
Unless you’re speaking about software availability, which is not something you can really blame the OS for. Unless vendors make their software available natively, of course trying to mess with compatibility layers like Wine will always be complicated. I still can’t fully get rid of Windows because of media creation software mostly - music/audio DAWs are slowly coming over to Linux, but most commercial plugins obviously aren’t following. The rest is pretty smooth sailing though. I haven’t had a single fluke with my PopOS partition in years, while I’ve already had to repair my Windows partition twice in the same period - once for a borked update, and the second it just broke itself after a power outage.