I believe you and your parent are talking about different categories of users.
>> but it's never going to be mainstream
My mom uses Ubuntu (but, in all fairness, I installed it for her)
Which is only fair, Windows comes preinstalled also.
My mom uses Windows. In all fairness, it was pre-installed by HP.
I don't know any non-technical consumers who installed Windows themselves in the last 15 years.
I work in IT, exactly 0 of my users could pull off a Windows install and if they could they could they also probably would be able to install Centos or Ubuntu. Both have wizards that make it just as easy as Windows.
I have to disagree on this one. Installing a mainstream Linux distro is really easy these days, far easier than installing Windows. With Windows, you have to go hunting around for device drivers for anything that's not included on the stock Windows install disc, you have to reboot lots of times during the install, it takes a long time, and that's just for the bare-bones OS: installing extra software means running around and downloading stuff (or using install discs--how quaint), running lots of "installers" and rebooting many more times. With Linux, I can have a fully-functional system, complete with lots of software, within 20-30 minutes and just one reboot.
Saying that installing Linux is "just as easy as Windows" is like saying "moving a mountain of dirt with a bulldozer or earthmover is just as easy as doing it by hand with a shovel".
Re:.NET on Linux – bye, Windows 10
by anonbanker on Monday October 17, 2016 @08:24PM
(#12731034)
My Year of the Linux Desktop was 1999, when Win98 OSR2 died and I had to pick between my Red Hat Linux 5 CD, or waiting a week and a half to get another windows disc. Took about 3 hours to get online over PPP (their configuration manager didn't work, but all the docs were included!), and I was installing Enlightenment 0.14 before the end of the night.
UEFI is painless on every distribution but vanilla Arch/Gentoo/Debian installs. Anyone using (k/x/l)ubuntu probably didn't even notice UEFI just works.
I've been using Linux desktops almost exclusively for more than a decade. Both my PC laptops have UEFI enabled and both installed Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora) off a USB stick with no tweaking, so, it may be too complex for you, but most developers I know don't share the same personal issues.