Recently some friends and I discussed the likelihood of Linux being used by

Day-to-Day Linux - Endless Support?

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Style Pass

2024-11-30 00:00:34

Recently some friends and I discussed the likelihood of Linux being used by "regular" (non-technical) people. It's low, but it could be higher with a small push to entry.

I think the first two options are highly unlikely, and the third is just unlikely: a lot of technical people like to do things because they can, but don't want to commit to providing free support forever. Valid concern - or is it?

Fedora, with its frequent feature updates, has been my daily driver for more than a year at this point: all issues I have had (not really that many) have been a resut of going well beyond the "normal" use of, I think, the majority of people in 2024. That normal use is mainly web browsing and text editing. Probably not even the latter now.

It is easily conceivable that for a lot of users who would be typically only performing browser-based tasks (checking email and social media, watching YouTube videos) a simple, stable, auto-updating (but not in an annoying way) Linux distribution would be more than sufficient. For the "technical" friend: set (up) and forget.

Not so long ago, my aunt got a new Windows Home machine and had to go through the arduous process of creating a Microsoft account just to set up the computer (a process that still needed assistance), leaving her with yet another account to remember. Letting her set a password without needing to worry if that was also for an email account or might cause some files to (re/dis)appear at some point in the future, and then just getting on with her browsing would have been so much easier*.