> It's kind of funny that this is often brought up as some achille's heel of linux but honestly my Windows PCs have always been larger headaches.

Same. I switched to Ubuntu a decade ago when my Windows machine started displaying the blue screen. Somehow the motherboard itself became incompatible with Windows overnight even from a clean install. Instead of junking the machine I put Ubuntu on it ... and it's still my daily driver a decade later. And though there have been issues I'd say less than I had with Windows overall.

Was that machine a laptop? In my experience, power-oriented laptops and Windows mix like oil and water.

I had a an ASUS RoG Zephyrus G15 for a little bit and its Nvidia GPU was weirdly fussy in that it had to be running ASUS-provided Nvidia drivers, because if it wasn’t it’d perform 20-30% worse while running just as hot as if it were at full performance. This was maddening because Windows Update would want to update the ASUS drivers because they were old, but this of course nerfed performance. I tried restricting this in the Windows policy manager thing, but unbeknownst to me the Nvidia driver is split up into several pieces which then resulted in the pieces getting mismatched which broke all sorts of things.

I ended up returning it and putting the money towards a custom built tower instead, which has had none of these issues.

That’s all very well, but my end of the day take is that if you want more Windows/Mac adopters, you need zero friction. So often you get these handwavey (snobby?) attitudes of “why don’t you just insert hard to do thing for average user” and in the meantime nobody is the wiser.

Also not saying that things aren’t getting better, but it’s a snail’s pace.

Windows for all its flaws is zero friction and will win from any competition.

> Windows for all its flaws is zero friction and will win from any competition.

It wins because it's less friction, not zero friction. There's a reason, other than old applications, that there are still Windows 7 installations. Many people don't want to upgrade their Windows until they upgrade their hardware because it's a hassle getting the interface back to the way you want it.

Anecdotally I'm not a programmer and I switched to Ubuntu when I bought this laptop in 2013, with about 3 or 4 years of dual booting for software purposes before I stayed on Ubuntu. I'll switch away from Ubuntu to a more user friendly distribution with my next computer because it's pushing features I really don't like, and deleting features I really do like. My wife is also not a programmer and with the upgrade to Windows 10 we had to do a bunch of searching and tinkering to make the user interface satisfactory. She's avoiding Windows 11 for as long as possible.

I was having a conversation with my mother today about changing her bank. She ultimately decided against it because she doesn't want to change her bank account number.

People are creatures of habit. Microsoft learned this when they removed the start button in 8.

Cellphone number portability was forced on that industry here in NZ, I wish bank account portability could be made a thing.

Part of the IBAN is the bank branch. So for that it won't work. The other banking numbers are bank specific anyway.

It is, but that’s a little meaningless when I haven’t been to a bank in maybe 20 years. I see stories here about banking infrastructure and suspect it might be very hard to get changes made.

The difference isn't even less friction. It's more familiar friction.

Here's the most crucial point: windows has the most thoroughly documented friction. If you ever have a problem, chances are 1,000 or more other people have had that problem, or a closely related one, and 1 or 2 of them even wrote about it somewhere. Life is way harder than it needs to be, but you are not even remotely alone.

Apple takes the opposite approach: walls instead of friction. If you can't figure it out, it's because you computer can't do it. That implies your computer shouldn't be able to do it. You would be surprised at how comfortable people are with this conclusion. It doesn't get them what they want, but it saves them time and energy by providing early and confident rejection.

Linux maximizes the ability to manage friction. There is always a way to actually resolve it with constructive effort. That's an unfamiliar strategy, and it requires some level of education that the average user refuses to accommodate, even if it will definitely save them time and effort.

> “while microsoft publicly insisted it had nothing to do with them, until it was quietly fixed in a windows update, which I'm sure had nothing to do with them”

Microsoft are often taking the blame for, and working around, other vendor’s bugs. Just because they fixed it didn’t mean they broke it.

e.g. https://twitter.com/pwnallthethings/status/13632662289708113...

This is why NixOS has been so great for me: it factors out an entire class of "me" problems.

If I decide to go down a rabbit hole that involves totally messing up my system, I can undo all of that by simply rebooting into an older generation. NixOS never diverges from "fresh install".

Now if we can just get the UX together, it will be incredible.

> Now if we can just get the UX together, it will be incredible.

The crux of the NixOS issue right here. I tried NixOS a few times, even this past weekend, and it was such a pain that I gave up each time!

I am planning to integrate Nix (the package manager) into my recent fresh OS install if I have some time this week. I want to use Nix to have, at the very least, a controllable way to install and remove toolchains of different versions in a reproducible manner; if I can swing it I am going to use it to install pretty much anything that requires any sort of configuration care (the rest I'll just use apt). I also want to integrate more tools like asdf or pyenv which help with that, but I prefer if I could do it all through one package manager like Nix. I finally separated my /home into another drive this time, so that'll be nice for future re-installs.

The fact that Nix's user experience can be so bad is the greatest evidence of its inherent usefulness. If you are able to get it working for you, it's somehow worth it.

NixOS is pain without scars.