So not only are less technical users not confused, but you will never return only to see a system upgrade stuck on some useless interactive prompt from a deb package.
A user-friendly OS should require almost 0 system administration except emergencies. Windows is that OS and Linux is not. Android is closest Linux ever got and it is pretty good. I say that as a person who deals with my own cloud stuff (Nextcloud / Jellyfin media servers) and as one of the maintainers of our embedded distro at my day job.
They should work out of the box for a consumer computer system with minimal configuration and updates shouldn't break functionality. Windows provides this Linux doesn't.
Windows OS design, the overall mentality of the developers designing software for Windows also reinforces this pattern. A consumer system should keep working without asking user unnecessary questions. They have to be designed to be somewhat future proof so breaking binary and configuration compatibility is minimal. With Linux systems (or any bazaar-style OS) this is impossible.
Have you asked for a refund?
Nixos works fine, thanks!
> On Windows upgrades from 24H1 to 24H2 are relatively painless and can easily rolled back.
Nixos does this, but I can't remember the last time I used it. Maybe early on, about 9 years ago.
> Nixos works fine, thanks!
me: "Linux is not suitable for non-technical users of my family to keep up-to-date with minimal effort and I don't want them to be dependent on me to solve smaller problems".
you: Let me suggest a distro that goes against many binary conventions and uses a specialty functional programming language to configure itself that not even all Linux users bother to learn.
You just showed how detached you are.
Why would non-technical users care about binary conventions? Wasn't the whole point that you'd set it up for them and they couldn't break it?
That's what nixos does. You refuse to use the right tool for the job and moan that the hammer isn't driving the screw correctly.
Non-techies care about whether their systems continue to work with minimal effort and they are assured that the system is secure and I care about providing almost no support to them but still having functional IT at home (working printer, NAS, file sharing).
With Nixos it is more difficult to guarantee that the programs (drivers, third party stuff) keep working since you have to play the guarantor/sysadmin role. Breaking binary compatibility with existing apps opens up problems with drivers and other third parties that conform to rougly LFHS. Even when you compile from source which for me should never happen with consumer OSes.
Because they literally cannot. Linux package managers like to ask deeply technical questions. Even on Ubuntu dpkg will occasionally ask about configuration file changes and expect you to make decisions like keeping the existing one, replacing the config file with the new one or editing it. Windows never asks such questions. Its configs are relatively stable and usually Windows uses more formally defined forms like registry or XML files. They are much easier to write migration scripts for than human readable text files on Linux.
As far as I know even packages like `unattended-upgrades` from Ubuntu doesn't perform things like kernel upgrades which requires `apt dist-upgrade`. They are required for keeping good security. And forget about upgrading an actual version like from 24.04 to 24.10. On Windows upgrades from 24H1 to 24H2 are relatively painless and can easily rolled back. My Ubuntu running colleagues had to rescue their distros at least twice since a version upgrade went wrong.