"I’ve spent dozens of hours combing through Reddit threads, analyzing old Stack Overflow solutions, and, in times of true desperation, asking AI chatbots like Mistral’s Le Chat and Anthropic’s Claude for help deciphering error messages. Luckily, the Linux community is also very supportive. If you’re willing to ask for help, or at least do a little troubleshooting, you’ll be able to work out any problems that come your way."

There are many people -- like my Mom or Dad, for example -- who will never find this appealing and are likely to dig themselves into deeper holes trying to fix system issues on the command line. That's why Steve Jobs was on the money when he talked about a computer that was as intuitive as an appliance -- it has to "just work" for most normies. While I'm as frustrated with Windows as the next person, I'd probably just hand the average person a Mac mini instead of popping a linux distro on their machine if they needed a new computer (though if all they are doing is just browsing the web and reading emails, a ubuntu install is probably fine).

> Linux won't stop you if you try to use a command that deletes every file on your PC ("sudo rm -rf /").

It will definitely stop you from running that command because of "--preserve-root" that is enabled by default, if you want to break your system you have to opt out of it. Just don't try to put an asterisk after, pathname expansion will be a different case ("rm -rf /*").

In other words, you've found a new hobby along with your new operating system.

And that's OK --- but not everyone is looking for a hobby.

I went with Fedora Kinoite, and everything worked perfectly fine. I did choose an AMD GPU for this experiment, going with a 7800 XT.

Later that summer I decided to rebase (not reinstall, rebasing in fedora atomic is neat) to Bazzite, a more gaming focused version with some convience features, but that's about it.

Everything I want to do on my computer works fine, I don't feel hamstrung by it and really enjoy using it. The only game I regularly play that doesn't work is Battlefield 6, which I had a small Windows drive for, but I stopped playing that after the hype died down. The Finals, Arc Raiders, CS2, Hunt Showdown, Guild Wars 2, all run great.

I'm a developer, so I'm techy enough how to look up what I don't know, but I would never recommend this to someone who struggles with technology.

Kernel antic heat is frustrating but usually its games where I feel like I won't lose anything if I don't play it.

While I see that recommending a different distro seems like more change and more fiddling about, Bazzite is something to try out for sure. As long as you don't have a very complicated usecase, it really does get out of your way and remove a lot of the foot-guns you find on linux.

I really think it's ideal for a gamer usecase, and it's also great for a parent/casual user who does most of their work inside a browser anyway. As a programmer with a big distro-hopping past, I've switched to Bluefin/Bazzite on all my personal computers and things work well. I'm glad to have something that works well out of the box and glad to not think about the OS.

That aside, the Windows API is one of the most godawful, miserable pieces of code I've ever had to work with. I've been up to my neck in WinRT writing Bluetooth drivers and holy fuck I wouldn't wish this misery on anyone. I don't know how any developer or engineer ever gets anything done on Windows.

Last job let me use Linux where it mattered most, and new job doesn't care so long as the work is done. I don't think I'll accept a job anywhere that requires Windows in the future. There is just plain and simple no feasible way to do my work on Windows anymore.