Not a hot take, I keep saying the same thing in different threads. I was not able to switch to Linux for years before I understood that I have problems with Gnome not with Linux itself, tried KDE and given I was migrating from Windows it clicked immediately.
After you gain some experience, DE becomes mostly irrelevant, but it is crucial for starting off in an unfamiliar environment.
I think Matrix suffers from some issues with large communities, for instance Graphene OS has already had to abandon 2-3 of their main group chats due to same bug and last time I checked (2-3 months ago) there has even been talks of switching to Discord. That is, just in case, a community of some of the most diehard privacy nerds btw
I’ve already given a similar answer somewhere in this thread, but my point is, yes, it works well for advanced users (stack overflow enjoyers) and total beginners (Where do I click to get to Facebook?), while average users are in the middle, and are simultaneously require more features than beginners, but do not have the means to solve them.
Yeah, that’s the thing. Two categories of users can properly enjoy Linux (in my opinion):
While average users are the ones to suffer. They are technically picky enough to require more advanced features than “click to open Google”, but not nerdy enough to spend hours reading stack overflow to make something they need work.
Most average users will be actively displeased that their settings menu is now different and confusing, office tools have slightly different UI, and some specialized software is missing.
Average user does not spend hours learning GIMP, they blame Linux for not having Photoshop and quit. Sad but true
Am I the only one who never promotes Linux?
I’m currently holding an opinion that everyone who can enjoy Linux will eventually try it on their own.
I think, despite what many people say, an average user still has a very rough time using it, and in my opinion you need some level of nerdiness in order to overcome adaptation pains, and such people already use internet in a nerdy way and will try out Linux on their own eventually.
My copied answer to other user in this thread:
I’m in US. My ISP Xfinity provides their own router and has decided their users are too stupid to use router settings so they purged port forwarding settings from the router firmware altogether. Now you have to use their mobile application which doesn’t allow you to make port forwarding rules for a specific IP (because again, they think their user is an idiot that can’t figure out IP numbers), instead it just gives you a list of devices and you have to select one to create a port forwarding rule. Wired devices are not on that list.
I’m in US. My ISP Xfinity decided their users are too stupid to use router settings so they purged port forwarding settings from the router panel altogether. Now you have to use their mobile application which doesn’t allow you to make port forwarding rules for a specific IP (because again, they think their user is an idiot that can’t figure out IP numbers), instead it just gives you a list of devices and you have to select one to create a port forwarding rule. Wired devices are not on that list.
I’ve recently had so many random freezes of the system, hangs on shutdown, panics on shutdown, freezes in system updates, that hard reset became a thing I did several times a day. Yet there were no systemd logs, nothing in dmesg, literally zero information on what happened.
I was skeptical in blaming Nvidia because at this point it became a Linux chiche, but then I started to switch to integrated graphics (disabling dGPU) and all of the problems miraculously went away.