This. Linux has a ton of flaws. But Windows makes me pull my hair out when trying to do anything at all, or even just looking at the font rendering. MacOS has not been cutting it for me at all either. There's simply not enough control: things initially look pretty on the surface, but immediately break or have no flexibility when you look below.

A couple of examples that come to mind:

1. Key combinations. They're completely inconsistent across the software I use and frequently can't (easily?) be changed. Sometimes commands are cmd+key, sometimes they're ctrl+key. To delete the previous word (something I do hundreds of times a day), some kind of strange incantation seems to be required. The one that works in iTerm deletes the whole line in most other programs, so I accidentally delete work dozens of times a day.

2. Missing window manager features, even basic ones. I can't do focus-follows-mouse, I can't double-tap to click and drag, etc etc. Stuff that's obvious and present on basically every other system.

3. The keyboard (mid-2014 model) is much worse on this MacBook than my Dell XPS.

4. The story for terminal-based and open source software simply isn't as good as it is on Linux. Homebrew is great, but it's limited and can't compete with the convenience of the many binary packages on most distros. Software that's supposed to integrate deeply with the system in some way is a bit of a pain as well.

These won't be problems for everyone, but for what I consider basic power user features, neither Windows nor MacOS are up to par with Linux. But stability and hardware support in Linux is as good (in my experience) as at least Windows. I've had the same install on a rolling release distribution for 6 years without issues. I don't know the last time I found hardware that wasn't supported on Linux.

"My wife's Windows machine kept slowing down. I wanted to put an SSD in it but we didn't have the ability to do a reinstall on a new drive. So we put an SSD, more RAM, and Xubuntu on it. She's been smooth sailing for 6 months."

That probably has more to do with the hardware upgrade rather than the OS

I recently bought an OEM Windows 10 system for personal use and the hard drive crashed. At first I ran into the "can't reinstall on a new drive" issue but I was able to work around that with a third party app that allowed me to install a fresh iso on a USB hard drive. And then to use another app that allowed me to clone the USB install into a new (internal) SSD.

I also tried Ubuntu on the same system but (among other niggling problems) i couldn't get the ATI graphics drivers to work.

Are you sure that you bought a modern system? ATI hasn't existed since 2006 and I believe AMD stopped using the brand name almost a decade ago; it's all AMD now. Also AMD GPUs have had really good FOSS support in the mainline kernel since the late 00's. Unless you were trying to get fglrx to work, in which case that was a huge mistake.

Thanks, sorry I meant AMD of course, Radeon RX 590 to be precise. Yes there was a driver available on AMD's site but I couldn't get it to work. Certainly my fault somehow, but at the end of the day it was much easier to just install Windows 10.

The RX 590 should be good to go with the kernel driver since last December: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=RX-590-L...

What that practically means is that any linux distro with a kernel at least that new should support your card without needing to download anything from AMD's website. (Generally speaking, downloading drivers from the manufacturer's website is a windows-ism. There are some exceptions, like Nvidia, but a machine well configured for linux use should aim to use hardware supported by FOSS drivers (such as your AMD card.))

Probably not, Xubuntu is one of those least resource intensive and stable distros (on LTS) and it's one of the desktops that uses least amount of RAM.

yes and no.

It got a hardware upgrade.

But i couldn't do the hardware upgrade without re-purchasing another Windows license since her install was an OEM install and they don't provide install disks.

Secondly - Windows slows down over time. Horribly. Linux does not.

Third - You don't really have to run an AV in Linux, thus chewing up resources.

I set up a Linux computer for a family member a good 3 years back on an old computer. When that died, they switched over to Windows because I didn't have time to come over and install their new laptop.

About a year later, they're now asking me to come over and reinstall Linux on the new computer. Setting up Linux is the hard part -- if they don't need to worry about that, their comparison is that they had a Linux computer that just worked, and now they have a computer that keeps asking them about some thing called One Drive, and updates at inconvenient times, and that forces them to use some kind of weird photo software instead of just letting them organize their files into folders.

If you have a non-technical person you're trying to support, often the easiest thing is to set up a small system that does exactly what they want and nothing else. Linux makes that easier than Windows, at the (small) cost of forcing you to actually take some time and set up the computer correctly from the start.

It feels weird, because when I started using Linux this wasn't the case at all -- but Linux is nowadays my go-to solution any time I want to set up a computer for a tech-newbie. A big part of that is you can set up a system once and trust that it will continue to work the same without missing out on security updates. You can still set up a Ubuntu system with Unity if you want to.

That's a massive advantage, because it means I don't need to re-teach people how to do things every time Microsoft or Apple "innovates" their interface.