Desktop Linux still isn't friendly to newbies

Back in 2006, XKCD made fun of Linux's technical difficulty:

https://xkcd.com/196/

But today, after twenty years of development...eh, it's still hard to work with.

Android phones are popular of course, and Chromebooks get a lot of use in schools and similar institutional settings. But most people still run Windows on their primary PC or laptop, and it's not hard to see why.

Today I downloaded Ubuntu. Everyone knows Ubuntu, right? It's been around forever. It's an industry standard. And it's designed with newbies in mind. So if anyone's going to try "proper" Linux for the first time, Ubuntu is probably their first (and only) stop. And the latest release is LTS, so it's probably more stable than usual, right?

I downloaded the ISO and the recommended Rufus app. This is already more complicated than it needs to be. From a newbie perspective, they should only need to download one thing and they should be able to just double-click it and let it go. But whatever. I installed 26.04 LTS to a blank flash drive and gave it a 75GB persistent partition. Then I restarted my PC.

It booted back into Windows. I had to go into UEFI settings to make sure it booted to the USB first. More stuff that newbies won't want to deal with.

But then I had Ubuntu running. And it looked pretty neat! Until it crashed. Took like 4 minutes before the mouse just stopped moving.

I spent maybe an hour fiddling with the OS, and it was weirdly unstable. Boxes kept popping up to let me know there had been an error and asking if I'd like to report it. The desktop would randomly disappear as I was booted back to the login screen. I left the computer alone for awhile while it ran some updates via the settings app, and when I came back the screen was black and completely unresponsive. I had to power cycle the whole machine, and when I did that the UEFI mysteriously set itself back to Windows-friendly settings so I had to adjust them all over again.

At another point, after I clicked Ubuntu's shutdown button, it started the process and then asked me to remove the installation medium and then press Enter. So I unplugged the USB stick...and immediately got a kernel panic.

This isn't obscure hardware, by the way. This is a mid-range desktop gaming rig from 2023 that runs Windows 11 just fine. And I wasn't doing anything weird with the OS. I was just trying to run updates and browse reddit with Firefox. But apparently that was too much for Ubuntu to handle.

Maybe all these things would fix themselves with a true OS installation instead of just running a live USB, but if so, Ubuntu doesn't make that clear. It's presented as if this is what I can expect from a true installation; I clicked the "Try Ubuntu" option and now I'm here. And if this is a preview of what's to come, it's not very encouraging.

At one point I tried to install Proton VPN, which specifically lists Ubuntu GNOME as a supported platform. But while installing it on Windows just means downloading a file and double-clicking it, installing it on Ubuntu requires command line.

Do you have any idea how uncomfortable most people feel with the terminal?

It's not just that they have a CLI app and a separate GUI app. It's that even the GUI app requires CLI just to install it. And when I tried to install it by dutifully copy-pasting three separate commands, I got a mysterious error and Proton VPN never showed up at all.

All of this is manageable if you're a nerd, but it's insane if you're a newbie. Most people don't want to put up with this crap. And again, this is Ubuntu, running the latest release, which happens to be an LTS release, on modern hardware!

So yeah. Apparently we still have a lot of work to do if we ever want to knock Microsoft off its throne.