I've been using Manjaro Linux as my daily driver for 2 years and I can't complain at all about it. It absolutely just works. Installing software is easier than any other OS and Manjaro's default desktop environment, XFCE, does a Windows-style UI better than Windows 10 does IMO and with more features, like being able to middle-click taskbar items to close them just like Chrome tabs - a feature I used to have to hack Windows to enable. Even when I've had to write small scripts for XFCE to add features, I don't feel like I'm hacking because everything I'm doing is supported.

Of course I keep a few separate Windows PCs around to do things that Windows can only do (when I need to do them, which hasn't happened for quite some time now) like SQL Server Management Studio, Visual Studio and some games/video streaming services.

Also, I keep a Mac around to do Mac things like debugging an iOS app or helping some junior developers who only know how to use a Mac.

I would second this. I finally got rid of my MacBook Pro after all kinds of hardware problems and moved to Linux as my daily driver. I made a point of buying a new laptop that was built by a System76 type company in Europe to avoid any weird hardware compatibility issues and it really does work perfectly for me. I’m using Pop_OS 20.04 for what it’s worth.

Linux "just works" if you're a developer who posts on Hackernews. It doesn't work if you're my parents or older sister.

My parents (who are both pensioners) switched over from Macs to Thinkpads with Linux.

The only help I gave them was recommending compatible hardware. They've been using them full-time for the last year, and have been really happy with them.

Even Steam games seem to work reasonably well, which I was impressed by.

My parents and older sister say otherwise, if we're posting anecdotal evidence.

Ok, so are you seriously suggesting if we did a random sampling of 60+ aged people in Europe and the US (who use computers) we would find Linux being used by the majority of them? Because if you are I would suggest you're living in a fantasy-land. I would be surprised if 5% of computer-using 60+ year olds use Linux.

Yes, I used an anecdote, but it's an anecdote that shows a massive grain of reality. I mean, I work for a tech company full of 30-somethings and 20-somethings and only one of the engineers in a group of about 320 that I know and work with requested a Linux laptop versus Mac or Windows. If this is the case with young engineers, it's absolutely going to be even worse (for Linux) when looking at non technical older people.

> Ok, so are you seriously suggesting if we did a random sampling of 60+ aged people in Europe and the US (who use computers) we would find Linux being used by the majority of them?

No, because that's not even close to what you brought up.

> I would be surprised if 5% of computer-using 60+ year olds use Linux.

How many of those were even given the choice? I'd suspect 0%. That's the issue. The immense monoculture in multitude of places reinforces that monoculture.

I recently had an issue with my Linux Mint desktop where a power outage somehow introduced a hard disk error that was not easy to resolve (unless one knows exactly what to look for in the logs and knows the correct `fsck` incantation from memory). Linux is definitely still worth it, but the "just works" factor is just significantly less than MacOS.

If that had happened to you on Windows instead of doing an fsck you might have had to re-install from scratch. And I've had OS/X helpfully suggest to 'initialize a harddrive' with some perfectly good data and a borked boot block on it.

Fixing that took a lot more magic than just an fsck, no matter what the incantations. Once you have trouble at that level any OS will be tricky to get going again because a lot of the underlying assumptions have failed.

> If that had happened to you on Windows instead of doing an fsck you might have had to re-install from scratch.

Ha, yeah, that's true. I've had better luck with MacOS. I did have a total drive failure once, but the hardware had gone bad.

Windows has a fsck equivalent called chkdsk, and as far as I recall it's available from command-line only safe mode, or whatever that thing is called from the boot menu.