Linux is great for users on the extreme ends of the spectrum, with grandma who only needs email on one end and tiling WM terminal juggler on the other. Where it gets muddy is for everybody in the middle.
That’s not to say it can’t or doesn’t work for some people in the middle, but for this group it’s much more likely that there’s some kind of fly in the soup that’s preventing them from switching.
It’s where I’m at. I keep secondary/tertiary Linux boxes around and stay roughly apprised of the state of the Linux desktop but I don’t think I could ever use it as my “daily driver” unless I wrote my own desktop environment because nothing out there checks all of the right boxes.
> Linux is great for users on the extreme ends of the spectrum, with grandma who only needs email on one end and tiling WM terminal juggler on the other.
> That’s not to say it can’t or doesn’t work for some people in the middle, but for this group it’s much more likely that there’s some kind of fly in the soup that’s preventing them from switching.
Generally agree with these points with some caveats when it comes to "extremes".
I think for middle to power users, as long as their apps and workflows have a happy path on Linux, their needs are served. That happy path necessarily has to exist either by default or provisioned by employers/OEMs, and excludes anything that requires more than a button push like the terminal.
This is just based on my own experience, I know several people ranging from paralegals working on RHEL without even knowing they're running Linux, to people in VFX who are technically skilled in their niche, but certainly aren't sys admins or tiling window manager users.
Then there are the ~dozen casual gamers with Steam Decks who are served well by KDE on their handhelds, a couple moved over to Linux to play games seemingly without issue.
Using Linux is definitely easier when there’s just one thing you’re doing primarily, as is often the case in corporate settings. When things start to fall apart for me is with heavier multitasking (more than 2-3 windows) and doing a wide variety of things, as one might with their primary home machine.
Well-observed. I come back to check out the state of the Linux desktop every 2-3 years, and I always find that the latest layer/s of instrumentality and GUI are thin as frosting on a cake - as soon as you need anything that's not in the box, you're immediately in Sudo-land.