>the ltt video was an obsolute joke because they made little to no effort to learn anything about Linux and operated it like they do windows. of course it was such a bad experience.
If you need to grow a neckbeard to operate the computer, that is a terrible operating system.
Linux is, and perhaps always will be, an engineering OS. It's much better for development and IT than Windows, and Windows is worse than Linux for development or IT, precisely because the trade off of designing for normal people vs. designing for techies.
The funny part comes out in the rare instances that Linux beats Windows in normal person terms: KDE is way better than Windows's DE, and Dolphin (the file manager made for free by like five Dutch guys) makes Explorer look like a joke. (That's because Microsoft doesn't prioritize those normal end user facets, ironically.)
But, in general, as a techie (neckbeard haver?) who prioritizes techie things more than non-techie consumer things, you'll be way happier by learning Linux (especially truly learning it -- we're talkin' Arch). Then, as frosting, you have the abstract, philosophical stuff like "I'm not slaved to a callous all-devouring corporation", "I'm using free software wow" etc.
No one makes this distinction because the conversation is de facto shifted over into the reductive premise that "Linux is worse than Windows" vs. the somewhat fantastical premise that you can dump enough GUIs on Linux to make it as good as Windows for normal end users. But we're in a thread titled "GNOME 44", so I guess that tracks. :D
>its desire to neckbeardify its users is its undoing.
Uh, no, because Linux isn't currently, nor was it ever in the past, successful or appealing because of how much it caters to normal users.
It's been successful and appealing based on how much it caters to techies (my earlier post).
That Steam decided to support gaming on Linux is why its market share among Steam users has fluctuated around 1% and why Linus Tech Tips did an exploration video about it, but if you're already measuring Linux's success based on how many "non-neckbeards" use it, it's already undone, and it was always undone (and, if anything, arguably getting slightly less undone, as its ease of use for and popularity among normal people has grown significantly over the last 10 years). :p
Except Linus wasn't trying to run steam.exe on Linux, but instead trying to install the official (borked) Linux Steam package shipped with his Pop_OS ISO, which happened to completely nuke the desktop environment and display server, landing him in a tty.
And of course the Pop_OS team was quick to blame Linus for being an idiot and not knowing he should first open a terminal and go `sudo apt-update && sudo apt-upgrade` before installing anything, instead of expecting packages shipped with the OS to just work(TM) and not nuke your system.
Linus was warned, that something wrong is going to happen and whether he really, really wants to proceed. He did. Without even reading what apt is complaining about.
The bug in Windows updater that wiped out users profile dirs with all documents inside didn't warn in a similar way. Yet, we are not harping about it all the time. We all understand that it was a bug, just like that borked steam package.
The number of new OSX users with OSes that had slowed down to a crawl, because the users came from Windows and thought closing the Window closed the app, I have seen…
If you need to grow a neckbeard to operate the computer, that is a terrible operating system.