JubilantJaguar , 1 year ago

Exactly. I’d argue that some supposedly mainstream distros are hard to install even for the competent. Last time I checked, Debian’s funnel for newbies consisted of a 90s-era website with “instructions” in the form of a rambling block of jargon-filled text with mentions of “CD-Roms” and a vague discussion of third-party apps for burning ISOs. I mean, on Linux flashing a USB stick is matter of a single dd command with some obscure switches, but even that was nowhere to be found and I had to search forums for it. Incredible! Hard to imagine how forbidding it must all seem to the average Windows user! No Debian for them!

IIRC Ubuntu’s process was much easier but still not as easy-peasy as it could have been.

The only hope for desktop Linux is a crystal-clear, bulletproof, 1-2-3-style onboarding funnel that takes the user from “this is the distro’s website” to “I have a bootable USB”. From that point on it’s plain sailing.