Most people pick the operating system that best runs the software they need.

Not only that but a huge portion of people will simply not swap away from the OS they know under any circumstances.

Windows 12 could require all users to get punched in the face to log in and most people would say, "Yeah, it sucks but it's better than spending $1,800 on a Mac. Plus my video games..."

Windows and linux don't overlap much in use cases. I think macos and linux are more interchangeable

What are the Windows use cases that Linux doesn’t do?

General web browsing type tasks are solid, text editing/note taking works. Videos and audio (including Spotify) work. Steam and games generally work (even most windows games through Proton).

What else does ones daughter need for school? She’s not video editing or creating music (two use cases where you may need windows or OSX; art is more or less covered through blender/Inkscape/krita)

Mint or Manjaro are easy to install and setup and come with good defaults that should be pretty easy to navigate for someone new to Linux.

> She’s not video editing or creating music

In my experience, kids do these things all the time for school projects.

Gaming; general office stuff ; peripherals

Dunno what you mean by peripherals, at least ones that don't work on Linux, but the other two categories work just fine. Gaming has come a long way thanks to Valve and their work on Proton.

I'm guessing you're not someone who would describe themselves as a "gamer"?

EDIT: (I don't mean this in a mean way, just to say that people who care a lot about being able to play specific games probably still won't be satisfied without a Windows box).

I play plenty of games and have a Steam library of ~400 or so games. I haven't had a Windows install in a few years. The only issues I've had with Windows games on Linux, using Proton on Steam, is that it doesn't work in Wayland (but every game I've tried works fine under X, of course I do check ProtonDB.com before buying games that don't have official Linux support).

Oh nice, I clearly need to read up on Proton, there’re some Windows-only games I’ve been missing.

Would you say it’d satisfy for twitch shooters?

I personally don’t play many, but generally you won’t see any performance difference. Do check ProtonDB to see if the ones you have in mind work as expected. Typically games that are rated platinum work as well as on Windows, Gold typically works well but some people had some issues (Check the comments, sometimes the issues are unrelated things like the launcher not working but the game works fine) while anything else expect headaches. Some multiplayer shooters have issues with anti cheat for example.

Yeah, I don't either, mostly just curious since that seems like it'd be the most demanding category. I've actually mostly been missing Battle Brothers which is... not latency sensitive. And it looks like ProtonDB gives it a platinum! Thanks for the pointer to that.

Sadly looks like a lot of the top 10 are in "Borked" status, though.

> Sadly looks like a lot of the top 10 are in "Borked" status, though.

50% of them, but 2 of the 5 broken games are known to be buggy in general (New Worlds anyway, PUBG was years ago, no idea how it fares nowadays so maybe I'm wrong) so dunno how much of that is Proton's fault. The two gold ones seem hit or miss: many people report they work, but some people have issues.

Still, a lot of AAA games work perfectly (eg Sekiro) and many games I play even have native Linux versions (Crusader Kings 3 being the main one, I'm hoping with the steam deck more devs will release Linux versions but maybe that's too optimistic) and most of the indie games I play work well, so for me, I've been pretty happy and haven't looked back.

Linux Mint looks and feels exactly like Windows 7

There are lots of hardware configs that don't fully work, or are very unstable, under Linux.

I feel like running linux is like voting for a 3rd party candidate in the US. FWIW linux is great I just can't convert all the people who aren't developers to linux without an unnecessarily steep learning curve.