In all fairness, I’ve had some really dicey problems on Linux. I think the most difficult problem I’ve encountered was when I bought a USB soundcard which only worked in legacy mode, but using Wireshark and the USB audio class specification I managed to track down the bug in Linux’ usb-audio module, so now I’m technically a kernel contributor :)

For me the difference is that when I get a problem on Linux, it usually tries to provide me with the information I need to figure out what goes wrong, and due to its open nature it tries to make it easy to fix things. Also the majority of the time, Linux is working flawlessly. Windows on the other hand, is plagued by bugs and annoyances that show up on a weekly, if not daily, basis. And when issues happen, they come with little information and are often impossible to fix yourself since the OS is locked down.

The problem I’ve had with bad themes (e.g. black on black text/icons) seem to stem from apps using system/fallback colours, e.g. not defining it’s own list background because it assumes it’s always going to be white. But I can’t say if it happens more often with Gtk or Qt… Most recently it happened both with GIMP (Gtk) and FreeCAD (Qt)

Glad you enjoyed it!

As for the choice of distribution, the installation of Bazzite was actually far from trouble free. The precise issue and its solution escapes my mind at the moment, but it refused to boot at first, and I had to spend more hours than I had hoped for before it was up and running. But after that it seems to be stable, the only question the kid has sent me was “can it break my computer if I switch Project Zomboid to the beta branch?” so I assume everything is working well now :D (There was a warning about switching to beta, saying that you should make a backup because things could break, and he wasn’t sure what they meant)

So fun watching someone try Linux as their first OS, none of the “Linux is difficult because I learned how to use Windows” or “Linux is bad because it’s not exactly like Windows” comments :D Roblox stopped working when the devs intentionally blocked Wine, but he just shrugged and said he didn’t play it that much anyway.

It’s a little heart breaking hearing him often ask which parts he could buy to get more FPS, because he’d need to replace half the computer to get a newer CPU and DDR4 RAM, since I suspect the DDR3 could be the current bottleneck. But other than that he’s very happy with the computer.

Glad to hear it’s working well for her. I used Xubuntu myself in the past but switched to Fedora KDE on a whim :). When my wife wanted to ditch Windows I thought Xubuntu would be a good choice for her, but honestly I was surprised with how many different problems and errors we ran into while installing it on her computers. Granted it’s more stable now, but during the first couple of months I occasionally had to spend hours trying to get pretty basic stuff working, when it required more advanced Linux knowledge to fix.

I think I tried to compile Gentoo about 20 years ago for some reason… Took many hours, and I don’t remember even getting it running. Later I tried dual booting Ubuntu, but ended up using Windows all the time since that’s where my games were. Started using Linux only (Xubuntu) some time around 2010.

I’m using Fedora KDE on my own PC, and it has been soft-bricked by updates multiple times, or by doing seemingly trivial things like choosing a theme from the built-in store. Seems quite unstable to me so it’s not something I would recommend to someone without the ability to repair their OS from a terminal.

Mint was my first thought as well. Haven’t used it myself but in the past I’ve heard that it’s supposed to be very user friendly and stable, though I’m not really up to date on Linux distros so I wanted to check if this was still was true (which is seems to be) and if there were any new options.

Do you know how mature it is as a desktop OS? I saw the official FAQ does recommend against using it as such. I tried it on a HTPC a few years ago but at that point it didn’t seem very usable outside of Steam’s full screen UI.

I’ve been using Fedora KDE on my own PC for a few years, but I’ve had some pretty severe breakages when updating. Though I suppose most of them happened because I had Cuda SDK installed, or monitor ICC profiles, but early on I also had Plasma crash on login while testing different themes. I’ll look more into Bazzite though!