I get it. Working in IT and doing this stuff all the time and being surrounded by other technical people really disconnects you from the knowledge of the average user. I’ve worked in IT for over 10 years now, and I am always overestimating how much technical knowledge the average user has. Luckily I don’t have to talk to end users anymore, but even when helping friends and family with things, stuff that I think is common knowledge isn’t common among less tech-savvy people. I still struggle with this, and suspect I will for a very long time.

I’ve heard of Endeavor before as well. May give it a try, but then I feel like I would be one of the distro-hoppers I always see out there. I just crave stability.

I installed Bazzite on my personal gaming PC a few months ago, so I have done more than try it. My AMD drivers would crash on Windows when playing Helldivers about every 30 minutes. I lost count of the number of times I booted into safe mode and ran DDU to uninstall drivers. Haven’t had the issue a single time on Linux. The Bazzite image I’m using on her PC is different than mine since she currently has an NVIDIA GPU. She has an old 1080Ti because Microcenter was out of stock of all GPU’s on the day we went to buy the rest of the parts for her build. Eventually she will get a newer AMD GPU as well and we can be on the same image.

I’m used to the CLI world of Linux. I wanted something for my non-technical wife that would “just work”. I’ve heard good things online about Bazzite and how it already has everything installed (Steam, Wine, Proton, graphics drivers, all that) and I didn’t want to mess with installing any of that stuff by hand. Idk, maybe it’s my fault for expecting a distro to have basic functionally out of the box.

I think blaming me for choosing a distro based on what it says it’s supposed to do is a bit silly. Sure, I could have installed any distro and worked to install and maintain everything by hand, but that’s not what I was looking for. I don’t want to play tech support every week when something breaks and spend hours trying to fix it when my wife just wants to play a game. If you enjoy that, great, more power to you. Sorry for not choosing your favorite distro, I guess.

In this case it was installing them from flathub anyway. The applications were being installed, but the only way to launch them was through the CLI using flatpak run then the app ID. Every article I came across said to run that, then right click the app after it was open and pin it to the taskbar or whatever, but that option was greyed out.

I hate to be one of the “Linux isn’t ready” people, but I have to agree. I love Linux and have been using it for the last 15 years. I work in IT and am a Windows and Linux sysadmin. My wife wanted to build a new gaming PC and I convinced her to go with Linux since she really only wanted it for single player games. Brand new build, first time installing an OS (chose Bazzite since it was supposed to be the gaming distro that “just works”). First thing I did was install a few apps from the built in App Store and none of them would launch. Clicking “Launch” from the GUI app installer did nothing, and they didn’t show up in the application launcher either. I spent several hours trying to figure out what was wrong before giving up and opening an issue on GitHub. It was an upstream issue that they fixed with an update.

When I had these issues, the first thing my wife suggested was installing Windows because she was afraid she may run into more issues later on and it “just works”. If I had never used Linux and didn’t work in IT and decided to give it a try because all the cool people on Lemmy said it was ready for prime time, and this was the first issue I ran into, I would go back to Windows and this would sour my view of Linux for years to come.

I still love Linux and will continue to recommend moving away from Windows to my friends, but basic stuff like this makes it really hard to recommend.

Alright, I have shared my unpopular opinions on Lemmy, I’m ready for my downvotes.