Bazzite advertises itself as a distro that "just works" on Nvidia machines. He downloaded the ISO meant for his hardware (10 series Nvidia), installed it, and it... defaulted to software rendering. That is somehow his fault and not Bazzite's, because, Linux is perfect and cannot be ever criticized ig. The shit he dealt with was 100% on the Bazzite team essentially doing false advertising since they threw a hissy fit at Nvidia and said that they won't be working on implementing proper support for Nvidia hardware, despite what they advertise themselves as. Not to mention how they'll ban anyone saying anything remotely negative about their distro on their Discord since all they care about is asspats for sticking it to Microslop by making a SteamOS distro that works on any PC. He didn't RTFM because he shouldn't have, because that's what Bazzite advertised to him, and it was false advertising, but thankfully thanks to the GNU GPL, desktop Linux still exists, as if it was offered with any form of legal liability it would've gone the way of the dodo for false advertising decades ago.
Then decide on
a single distro to recommend to everyone who has absolutely zero idea on how to operate an OS.
-Mint is LTS so it won't work on the newest hardware, and it's X11 so it won't support high end monitor functionality, so the average "enthusiast gamer" with a 4090/5090 and a high refresh rate HDR monitor will have a bad time with it.
-Fedora comes with nothing but free software and takes work to get up to speed with all the necessary non-free packages, so right out of the bat, intermediary for people who have
some idea about Linux.
-recommending raw Debian/Arch to newbies is nigger behavior, so is telling them to use X and if they use ABCXYZ that they should do ZYXCBA to get things running, or recommending anything non-systemd because you froth at the mouth whenever Lennart Poettering is brought up.
-all the gayming distros available are a shitfest as they all showed up after the Steam Deck and Windows 11 released, seeing an opportunity for the "wunderwaffe effect" as I like to call it as the Linux community always seems to look for a magic solution to finally have people mass-migrate from Windows to Linux, like a disliked Windows release (happened with every single Windows release since the free desktop movement became a thing, so the "wunderwaffe effect" is as old as the Linux community itself) or a single use case issue being solved (gaming) while ignoring all the fundamental issues (lack of proper troubleshooting documentation (man pages are not meant for humans so don't even bother, Arch Wiki is the closest to a documentation meant for humans), lack of any standardization and constant ideological fights over which components to use (X11 vs Wayland, systemd vs non-systemd), the complete mess of package management where there's no one good way for having the newest versions of software distributed across all distros without needing to run root every time you want to install anything and so on)
If you don't have one, then stop evangelizing to Windows users to switch over to this and that. There's a reason everyone is hoping for Valve to make SteamOS a generic distro to finally save them from Windows, they cannot and will not trust the modern distro landscape because of how chaotic it is and they're hoping that with a company like Valve being responsible for maintaining a single distro, they'll make it so that it will "just werk" on any hardware configuration without any of these edge cases or confusing neckbeardisms that exist within Linux. Plus, by not having a single distro to recommend, you're gonna confuse people where they'd rather prefer to stay on Windows since they don't want to deal with thinking about what it is that they should use and what subset of distro specific issues they'd want to deal with, they don't want to deal with issues period and just use their shit without knowing how it works.
Again, if Linux cannot ever offer that to them,
stop, fucking, recommending it to them. You don't have to, and the truth is that you don't want the sudden influx of people who will flood forums with useless questions, having the entire Linux ecosystem shift to catering to the lowest common denominator, meaning that everything that you despise the most, systemd, Wayland, closing down the OS etc, will become more and more prevalent, and the desktop Linux will become a target of malware developers, where you'll see a true stress test of everything within the desktop Linux ecosystem as malicious actors will start looking for all sorts of novel ways to distribute malware. It is in your best interest to actually stop giving a shit about Windows and Windows users, but everyone knows that without Windows existing to compare Linux to, there wouldn't be much incentive to use Linux for many people as fueling their egos is more important to them than the pragmatic differences between the two OS ecosystems.
The best example of why desktop Linux is failing to dominate the market: it keeps hyperfixating on the default desktop experience, while ignoring everything that goes on under the hood. The #1 reason people hate Windows 11 is because the OOTB experience is miserable and annoying. When installing the OS, it keeps making you use a Microsoft account and hides the local account creator in a way where you have to know where it is. Then the default experience is full of bloatware and annoying UI. But if you give someone a debloated installation with a local account, just about every complaint they had about Win11 ceases to matter, and the truth is that under the hood, it's still WinNT and it's still rock solid.
Meanwhile on Linux it's still completely chaotic and it will never get any better due to the fact that a monolithic Unix-like kernel was never meant to be a desktop OS. Dave Cutler has a deep disdain for Unix and for a good reason. The NT kernel was designed with desktop workstations in mind, the GUI element is a core part of the kernel, it's a hybrid kernel so it delegates stuff like drives to external modules, and there are actual ACL's instead of only two modes: "you can't do shit" or "you can do everything". That's why Windows is still a more solid OS than Linux, no matter how much curry shit Nadella throws at it, Cutler's kernel design prevails. The GUI isn't a bunch of tacked on packages that keep changing and having odd incompatibilities, like the current split between X11 and Wayland and anything that didn't adapt to Wayland having extra latency and issues due to Xwayland, or just Wayland being Wayland. The drivers are not bundled with the kernel so if you change your parts to newer ones you don't have to make sure that your kernel is on the right version before doing the upgrade, or that you're using a non-LTS version of the OS so that your kernel will have the right drivers to even boot. And every time someone lists all of these core issues to remind what it is that's still dragging desktop Linux down, the response will boil down to "it's not an issue because you can just deal with it", and never will anyone develop the self-awareness needed that they're their own enemy in their attempts at popularizing desktop Linux.
Even here, distros like Bazzite miss the point of what it is that makes people like SteamOS so much in their attempt to make SteamOS for everyone. SteamOS is good because Valve develops it for a narrow subset of AMD-only machines, and they're trying to turn it into something that'll work on PC's where the majority of them will use an Nvidia GPU, target wrong issues, usually focusing on one "core issue" and acting like if they solve that they've made the perfect distro, like Bazzite doing atomic bullshittery thinking that fucking up the OS by allowing you to do anything is the #1 issue for Linux newcomers, while fucking up the Nvidia support this badly despite what they advertise and who they're targeting. Someone gets that recommended to them, they get burned, and they won't stand people telling them to choose one of the dozen other distros as that one will definitely work. It's especially true when you're talking to a layman who has little free time to tinker with their shit and just wants it to work, where dealing with Windows' annoyances will be a fair trade-off for having a working computer. And then everyone will act that there is no problem with Linux distros and all that needs to happen is for OEM's to start shipping Linux and not Windows. Except if you were to ask the people that keep pushing this narrative
which distro it should be, then it's gonna quickly become evident why there is no grand Machiavellian conspiracy being done by Microsoft to stop OEM's from shipping Linux. It's just that the deskop Linux ecosystem is so shit that shipping Windows 11 is actually a saner choice to not have customers yelling at the manufacturer that something doesn't work. Unless it's something like a ThinkPad where there are options to ship with RHEL as the target market of those machines will use that.
Desktop Linux devs keep ignoring these fundamental issues and that's why desktop Linux will never take off in the form that it exists in today. It will need to be fully subsidized by a single company that will create a single distro that is completely detached from the current ecosystem, have a mature Win32 compatibility layer as it's the only stable ABI (Proton is 80% there but it desperately needs someone to focus on productivity software) and have full backing of just about every big corporation and hardware manufacturer to ensure that it will "just werk" on any laptop and pre-built PC without any hiccups as this ecosystem is actively hostile to the user and the possibility of competing with Windows, and only then will the "Year of the Linux desktop" materialize. That's how Android, and by extent ChromeOS, became the powerhouse that it is today, it only used the Linux kernel as the I/O between software and hardware, everything else was built from scratch. But evangelists will then kvetch that it's "not true GNU+Linux" because of course they'll never be happy.
In short: if a single Linux distro can't offer everything that Windows does in terms of hardware and software support,
stop trying to convince Windows users to switch to Linux. The ones that you'd want to switch would've already done so, or they'd be able to say exactly what it is that they're missing in Linux.
By catering to the crowd that's simply mad at Win11's UI and wanting "Windows but Linux", you're only gonna hurt yourself in the long run. Being from reinforcing the decades old stereotypes, or flooding Linux with retards that should be locked up in Apple's walled garden as they're too stupid to live. DankPods is the type of idiot that should suffer, as he buys into the hype of "Win11 bad, Linux good cuz SteamOS and Steam Deck", isn't willing to think or learn anything, like "maybe I could make my Windows experience better" or "maybe I should learn how Linux actually works so that I won't suffer with it". He's the type of person that wants a "just works" product that babysits him 24/7. Valve will offer it to him, desktop Linux won't, and he should pay a premium for being an idiot that doesn't want to deal with any issues. That's the target audience for the Steam Machine.
Aaand here's the #1 reason why desktop Linux will forever remain a fringe minority in the OS market share. Toxic community that will keep pestering everyone to switch to Linux, then refuse to ever admit that their OS has an issue, instead they will gaslight the users into believing that they're the issue and insult them if they can't deal with these fringe issues the same way they can.
I stand with Wade's experience 100% as it's probably the best example of what the layman Windows user that's fed up with Windows 11 expects from desktop Linux and what the Linux issues are, and how the only people who are responsible for people hating Linux and keeping the Linux myths alive are the Linux evangelists, who only care about people ditching Windows for Linux, have zero regard for their personal needs, who will blatantly lie and gaslight to get people to switch to Linux and then insult them when they start bringing up all the usual issues, then wondering why people still see the Linux community as the most toxic, egotistical pricks imaginable.
If you truly care about Linux, you don't try and convince everyone to switch to Linux by any means necessary.
Then again, the average Linux user believes that knowing you can boot to a USB stick and install whichever OS you'd want is common knowledge, so overvaluing the tech literacy of an average Windows user is likely the biggest issue here. Disabling the weather widget on Win11 is trivial, a few mouse clicks, like doing any basic bitch tweaking on KDE simple. The average Windows user doesn't know that, and believes that they're forced to deal with annoying shit like this with no way to turn it off. This is the level of tech illiterate idiot you're dealing with whenever you're trying to get anyone annoyed with Win11 to use Linux. Now put two and two together and see why it's a bad fucking idea to have these types of idiots anywhere near Linux if you'd have to guide them step by step in the most idiot-proof directions imaginable for them to get to a live boot of Mint.
