Casey Muratori(@cmuratori) tweeted his several failed attempts to install linux on his local machine. Before he finally got the fedora 40 installed, he struggled with debian stable and then the freshly released Ubuntu 24.04, both installations ended up with total failures.
I am a linux distro hopper myself, for the last few years, I have tried Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Debian, then Arch and fedora, and back to Ubuntu again. I think I have witnessed a fair amount of linux’s installation quirkiness.
But one thing is true though, Linux installation process nowadays is pretty straightforward, to the point of a bit boring. Even Archlinux has a pretty easy to use default installer now, albeit without gui.
Casey admitted his last linux experience dated back to 10 years ago. Back then I guess the shared narative is that desktop linux is hard to use and harder to maintain. Once this idea settled in your mind, it’s hard to shake it off, so that when you use an “unstable” OS as daily drive, you kind of… wishing something would go wrong.
I suspect if you put someone as experienced with Linux as Casey with Windows to install Windows, and if his last Windows experience was with XP or Vista, things wouldn’t go so great either. With older machines without TPM 2.0 support, you cann’t even install it, “What do you mean I need to connect to my wifi and login my Microsoft account?”.
The conclusion for both groups of people would be the same: “XX sucks, go back to XX”. Depending on whether you are coming from Linux to Windows or Windows to Linux, you need to replace the “XX” accordingly.
I think at this moment there will be a guy sitting at starbucks, holding a M3 macbook air smiling at me, with only 8gb of ram.