I've been using MacOSX as my primary desktop since the days of Rhapsody. But I always had Linux virtual machines running on occasions. A dwindling number of machines at home were running Linux, most notably a couple of Raspberry Pi and a Synology Diskstation. And when I installed Linux, I usually went for Ubuntu, which did a good job polishing the user experience. The build ring for Tao3D includes a number of virtual machines running several major distros for testing purpose, but it's been quite inactive for a while, and repairing it is on my short-term to-do list.
Working for Red Hat, I thought I had to use Fedora as my primary desktop. And the experience has been a bit underwhelming so far, unfortunately. In just three days, I managed to render a Mac Book Pro unbootable in OSX, had several different issues with skippy or laggy mouse cursors and even non-responsive keyboards, had a driver crash attempting to access my home Wi-Fi, found out the hard way that NFS performance is just horrible, and had to use Google for trivial things way too often.
I complained several times on this blog about what I perceived as a degradation of OSX software quality since 10.6, but this experience with Linux puts all this in some serious perspective.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:40AM
It is the same reason people recommended Macs back in the day, and Chromebooks and iPads today, they are seen as easy to use. For many people, that is the first and only concern they have. Hence why many basic steps companies could take to secure IoT devices aren't taken but the GUIs sure are shiny.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @12:57AM
Chromebooks run Linux.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 24 2016, @01:25AM
Even though I grant that, what does that have to do with my point? I was answering why people recommend Mint, which is its ease of use compared to setting up most distros, including its forefathers, Ubuntu and Debian.