I am surprised people on hackernews still don't seem to understand that, on the whole, happy Linux users are a self-selecting group based on their own skills, understanding and tolerances.

I'm not saying that people don't have good experiences with Linux desktops. I'm saying that those experiences are still nowhere near universal, especially when you start to involve people who aren't really power users. The most common desktop environments are still wildly inconsistent at best and frequently an accessibility nightmare at worst. Trying to work out whether a given piece of hardware will be well supported (or supported at all!) is difficult. Resolving package manager conflicts, handling non-free firmwares, building and managing kernel modules, these things are _not trivial_. That's before we've even addressed the software that people are often forced to give up. I use a Linux desktop frequently and there are papercuts _everywhere_.

I'm really not sure where this prevailing mentality that you can just install Linux and ride off into the sunset comes from.

Yes.. but are we really saying that people can install Windows and ride off into the sunset?

IME there are always people who "get stuck" with their computer or end up in "nuke from orbit" situations.

> When was the last time you used Linux

Yesterday and it was terrible.

> Never have I faced any issue that can't easily be solved. (If at all there were issues)

Good luck viewing hdr content.

What was so terrible about it?

Off the top of my mind; mouse & trackpad, sound stack, bluetooth stack, hd/4k content streaming, no hdr at all, using multiple displays with different dpis... I tried every recommended driver&setting for mouse&trackpad. They are all terrible compared to Macos. The whole story of using multiple displays with xrandr, xinerama etc. is a joke. Agreed; you get a better experience with Wayland regarding that but then you lose the ability to do screenshare for the most part (without doing hacky stuff instead of doing work).

> Never have I faced any issue that can't easily be solved.

Which doesn't mean others didn't have issues, huh? Also some people might have not specific knowledge to solve the issues.

FreeBSD is also an option. MS desktop is almost unusable, bloated slow and clunky. (I have an MS boot) I imagine people are just used to it, it really is terrible

So true. If anything, something broken on Windows puts you in a worse position.