Yeah Samba is a pain to deal with. It’ll be nice when NFS becomes standard across Windows machines instead of just some niche feature only available in the pro version.

What distribution are you using? In my experience, ease-of-use varies wildly between software and hardware configurations.

There are systems that are built for Linux support, and some system builders (like System 76 and Pop!_OS) bundle their own distros with their machines, which makes for a better experience overall.

There’s also ChromeOS, which is technically Linux (in the same way that Android is), which is typically regarded as one of the most reliable and easy to use, and recently is available to install on nearly any machine.

That said, Linux is very much different from Windows. With Windows, the GUI is baked into the system and you can do almost anything without touching the terminal. In Linux, being familiar with (or at least not afraid of) the command line is a requirement to really getting things done.

One of the biggest issues with Linux is that installing applications isn’t non-destructive to the system unless you’re using Flatpak or Nix or something. Applications being installed, upgraded, removed, etc. and not putting things back the way that they were or that other applications expect them to be is probably the biggest source of frustration.

Once we have a reliable community distribution, which uses only containerized/sandboxes apps (a la ChromeOS), I think adoption for the average user will be a lot easier. Until then, just avoid using apt whenever possible.

I do worry about how the community will handle when that eventually becomes a problem, or how the community might keep it from becoming a problem in the first place. Low-quality posts are inevitable with a sufficiently large user base.