I mostly agree with you, though one of the few good things about Electron taking over the desktop means that an increasing number of programs are getting direct ports to Linux. A guy can dream at least.

> And I'm not interested in re-teaching her every bit of software, and she's not interested in relearning every bit of software.

I don't see Windows as having much of an edge there. Lots of things seem to change on Windows just for change's sake. I get so tired of the churn on Windows versions and finding how to disable the new crummy features. If you want to avoid relearning all the time, something simple like XFCE is going to be way better.

And Linux won't arbitrarily irrevocably brick your computer because of an automatic update. In my opinion, having your computer bricked because of an automatic update is a very large change to adapt to.

I feel the need to constantly reiterate this; if someone who works on Windows Update reads this, please consider a different career, because you are categorically terrible at your job. There are plenty of jobs out there that don't involve software engineering.

> And Linux won't arbitrarily irrevocably brick your computer because of an automatic update.

To the average user, it absolutely will. Unless they happen to run on particularly well-supported hardware, the days of console tinkering aren't gone, even on major distros.

What's fixable to the average Linux user and what's fixable to the average person (whose job is not to run Linux) are two very, very different things.

If you run a modern distro with a modern filesystem, you can at the very least have automatic snapshots that actually work, and you can restore to a previous state if an update breaks things. The same cannot be said for Windows.

I'm not sure what you're referring to, but I would not give anybody good odds of booting from a snapshot on Ubuntu/ZFS.

I would expect that booting from an older kernel would work, possibly in recovery mode.

I have booted from snapshots on Ubuntu with ZFS plenty of times and it has worked fine. I've also used Snapper with btrfs and restored from backup and it's worked fine. I've also booted from snapshots in NixOS and it has worked fine. I actually cannot think of a time where any of those examples didn't work fine.

Windows system restore has never worked for me.

Setting up any of that is well outside the reasonable expectations of the average user.

I think (in general) the number of machines being bricked because of an update is about a rounding error from 0.

The biggest brick event in recent times was Shockwave, not Windows. Personally I've never seen a bricked machine, not at home, not at work, not at family.

Of course my anecdata is meaningless as is your annecdata. Ymmv.

I say this in particular because the automatic update to Windows 11 bricked my mom’s computer, or at least it required me to nuke the machine and reinstall everything from scratch. You can look at the linked post from a few levels up if you want details.

This is the second time this has happened to my family from Windows, on different computers.

> I don't see Windows as having much of an edge there.

But they specifically said it is not about OS, but about programs on this OS. There is Windows-based software that looks the same as 2 decades ago.