alt Hacker NewsLinux is the opposite of fire-and-forget. Eventually a papercut always turns up that will require the terminal.
macOS also has (well, had) extreme UI stability. You could transport someone from 2003 used to Mac OS X 10.0 two decades into the future and they would be able to use macOS Ventura (and all previous versions) purely by muscle memory. Good luck doing that with Windows and Linux with their constant UI churn.
Interestingly enough, by iOS-ifying macOS, they've made it much easier to shift someone using an iPhone from Windows to macOS, because they already recognize many of the UI and UX paradigms.
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My daughter has Kinoite set up for her boyfriend's grandparents. It's immutable, so there's not much damage they can do without admin access, and she made it look much like Windows. They were already doing everything with Firefox as it was, so it wasn't a huge transition for them.
She did go back to fix things because the grandma managed to delete the printer, and she said that the downloads folder was full of exe files with sketchy names.
I'm with you on the macOS stability in the past. The thing that gets me is that Windows somehow gets a pass in this regard, but there have been some pretty big changes over the years.
When did you last evaluate a system like Ubuntu? I'd have agreed with you 10, perhaps 5 years ago. But things have changed.
> Linux is the opposite of fire-and-forget. Eventually a papercut always turns up that will require the terminal.
When I say it's been fire-and-forget, I mean that for at least two decades.
If papercuts turn up, you are running the wrong distro or secretly a power user that naturally causes problems for themselves every now and then. This won't happen with normal users on a long term stable distro.
Linux is not fire and forget for people who use technology without really understanding it, but for people who don't use technology and just need to check their mails and connect to government website to pay their taxes, it is the best.
Once it's configured for these kind of people, it's really fire and forget, and it was already that in 2016.