And this is a huge barrier for a lot of users, a massive roadblock. But the article talk about houndres of millions of computers, my point was just about that even if millions like you cannot switch, still in this statistics are millions that can especially non-professional that do not make audio or video, but that are going to throw away a working machine.
I feel like you might feel being personally directed by my comment, because of your respond with “YOU’re not compatible”. Maybe it was bad wording, sorry. What I ment was that it can be frustrating to see “Linux doesn’t support …” when actually it has everything needed to support this software and the burden to make it available is on the software developer. Like saying that USB-C doesn’t support iPhone 13. Lack of it still hurts the Linux side anyway, but I just don’t want misconsaptions about which side should make a port happen.
For 240 million devices I think there would be some Linux can “cut it”. And second, no? My computer is 13+ years old and I am using it with basically no lagging, developing a couple of apps. Truth is all medium-tier computers made today and in recent years have reached the point where for normal use (that is daily tasks like communication, content consumption and calculations) only limiting factor for daily driver is software optimization.
Use whatever is popular and has a cool logo. Distro is basically a software library, preinstalled programs and default settings. You can transform any distro to behave like the other one.
KDE, Gnome, XFCE…? Which is looking better for you or which one was default. Init system? Which was the default. X11/Wayland? Wayland. Go with X11 only if Wayland is having problems with your graphics card.
There are many many outdated patterns how to do things in Windows that are cemented in public knowledge. Running random executable installers from the web giving them superuser permissions is I thing the most popular one.
How to share all user settings between system installations? How to change the logo in the desktop bar? How to add a directory to an applications bar? How to change system build-in keyboard shortcut? How to reinstall just the system keeping the programs? How to make a file run on a shortcut? Those are things I use daily, that are impossible or need some hacky programs to work on anything other than Linux, I would die if I had to switch back now.
Marketing is monopolized with Google and Facebook. Manufacturers and Microsoft won’t make one-click installs happen. Tech support would be chicken and egg problem. Ugh…
But a ton of people can open a PDF and will be able to select an USB stick from menu and click next, next, next… It’s not completely different, you still use a mouse, a keyboard, you click on things, you get some feedback from it… When a new kind of mobile app arrive, I can see someone using no more than 5 apps in life having problems, but this doesn’t mean only them exists, we do not talk about switching everyone here. People change houses, how are they figuring out where is the toilet if doors have different color and are in different positions?
Also a reason why any software like Microsoft Windows or Office should be banned from public education, especially primary schools.