in irony that is not lost on me, the people who spent yesterday trying to say linux was fine for the average user have now spent most of the day failing to troubleshoot issues someone had trying to install linux on an old laptop

my take was even broader: linux is generally only a good option for a work laptop if you are a cross-platform or web developer and need the extra speed and ease of installing frameworks, at which it excels

there's a lot of very good reasons for a work or personal laptop why linux likely isn't a great option, even as linux distros have gotten a lot more stable and friendly

personal:
- want to play games? (wine/proton is an incomplete workaround)
- lot of apps don't work

work:
- no legacy business apps
- no excel/word except online, 365 versions
- no excel macros
- need to develop for windows, the largest market? you need windows

there's also just a lot of corner cases that really, really fall through the cracks. i had a lawyer friend try to use openoffice instead of word and she asked me how to select multiple paragraph break characters, and there was no answer besides learn regular expression syntax.

ultimately, even as linux has gotten a lot more usable, it still requires a fair bit of technical expertise. just installing spotify and rpmfusion had me had to manually update a lot of config dependencies when updating my fedora version, which no end user should have to do.

for windows, on the rare occasions they need help, they can take it into a shop, because everyone uses windows. also, i've never had an issue with windows 10 updates in the 3 years i've owned a windows computer. on linux, it's been ~1 major issue a year.

there's also just other issues that can be extremely painful to work with on linux. while in grad school, i had to crunch data to excel for non-tech users to analyze. they would give me these spreadsheets to debug when issues arose...

these spreadsheets would be crunched reports of gigabytes of data, and often, would be 20-50mb. unfortunately, openoffice crashed for any spreadsheet >2mb, and gnumeric crashed for any spreadsheet >10mb. excel, no issues.

ultimately, you have to recognize that good software of sufficient complexity takes time and resources to make and maintain, which requires money. for foss, this means either exploiting labor (unreliable) or corporate sponsorship often as part of a corporate entrenchment strategy

a foss model can work for programming languages, frameworks, operating systems, and toolkits, but it tends to fail miserably for end-user applications (with the exception of browsers).

in order to fund development, most of these games and applications are proprietary, which naturally target the largest market (windows) while neglecting small segments of the market.

in short, although linux is great for a small segment of developers, it will never be the primary operating system for the average user (even developers) as long as the current model of funding software exists (which i doubt will change anytime soon).

anyway, please stop pretending linux is great for everyone or it's a moral imperative to get people to use it. no one's shaming open-source developers either. thanks.