Gabadabs

I do not believe, at all, that linux needs to grow. We don’t need to appeal to every casual pc user, because for most of these people what they are using already works just fine for them - and if they don’t already have the drive to learn about and try linux on their own, there’s no reason to shove it in their faces.

If I’m being totally honest, my primary use-case is gaming. I only have linux installed on my device, and if a game doesn’t work, I simply play other things and hope it will eventually work.
Sometimes, with some effort, you can get windows programs to work using wine. For example, I was able to run Mod Organizer 2 to mod skyrim without issues. If that fails and your software won’t work in wine, you could either find alternative native linux software or just dual-boot. I used to do that to play VR games in windows 10 since I’ve had issues running them in linux. Another option is to run a windows Virtual Machine whenever you need whatever software you can’t get working, but there’s pretty bad performance limitations unless you can get hardware passthrough working.

I mean… that’s simply incorrect. If you read my original post, I talked about that, exactly. Twice in the last month I’ve had running updates via the “updates available” notification in Kubuntu break the system, and require chrooting into the system via a live usb to fix it. That’s without any changes or messing around with the system, on a very recent install.
When I used normal Ubuntu, there were rampant gnome shell crashes. Hardware compatibility is far from perfect, as well - case in point I’ve done clean installs of Linux Mint on computers for others in the past, only to find out that there simply aren’t working wifi drivers for the device.
Linux CAN be less maintenance, but it’s ultimately more work to actually make the jump and completely relearn how to use a computer. I’m fully aware of the capabilities on people who aren’t enthusiasts, I do tech support for my whole family all the time. My stepfather’s solution to the wifi being slow was to make more networks on the same router, it was hosting like 12 wifi networks at once. However, windows is already familiar to them. They could technically learn to use linux, but they have zero interest because if windows has an issue they’ll just call me and I’ll fix it (and that’s usually not needed because it rarely breaks on them).

I’d say it can be, if they’re running something incredibly stable that you can guarantee won’t break on them… Which involves an amount of research and effort that most people simply won’t put in as long as what they are familiar with continues to work. Windows might have it’s fair share of issues, but at least a lot of people are already familiar with it, same w/ Mac os.

Linux really isn’t ideal for anyone who isn’t already a tech enthusiast on some level. I recently did a fresh install of Kubuntu and after about a week, it prompted me that there were updates, so I clicked the notification and ran the updates, after which my BIOS could no longer detect the UEFI partition. I had to use a live usb to chroot into the system and repair it, as well as update grub, in order to fix it.
It’s fixable, but this is not something anyone who doesn’t already know what they’re doing can fix. I’ve had auto updates in the past put me on boot-loops thanks to nvidia drivers, etc.
This kind of thing needs to almost never happen for linux to be friendly for those who just want their computer to work without any technical understanding. This, honestly though, can’t happen because of the nature of distros, you can’t ever make guarantees that everything will work because every distro has slightly different packages.
Wine is getting better, but compatibility is still an issue, especially for people who rely really heavily on microsoft office or adobe products.