Non techies have two settings. Either everything is a virus or nothing is a virus.

My dad is in his 70s, but he is thankfully rather aware of these kinds of things. He forwards me messages or calls me to ask "is this legitimate?"

He's aware of computer viruses, but I think he's really on the lookout for scams, which is an interesting and effective approach.

I absolutely lost it the first time he called me a nerd for using Arch and straight up started doing Fedora elitism lmao

haha I thought exactly the same thing lol He's linuxplained why his distro is better. That's the spirit.

I mean, there are definitely wrong ways to run Linux, like a single root user with no password, but your point is well taken. If Linux fanboys would keep the subjective gatekeeping to themselves the new user experience would be much more pleasant.

He's learning

Yes, it's just for OP to say "I use Arch".

The kid's name? Little Bobby Tables.

The fact that they're gaming on it means they'll know how to use it later

When I was that age I didn't think much about the system I was using, it doesn't really appeal to kids but they'll still be learning

As a terminal fan, my main reasons for preferring them over a gui (for some tasks) are:

1. It's faster to type than to navigate menus
2. If I don't know where something is and can't guess it instantly, it's usually faster to search for it in a man page than randomly digging through gui menus
3. You can combine commands with each other with pipes or $()
4. You can search through your command history to find previous commands
5. You can write scripts and aliases to automate common tasks
6. The terminal requires less context switching. Typing ten commands is less mentally taxing than opening ten different guis

The barrier for entry is higher with terminals but unless you need visual feedback (e.g. because you're editing an image) it's easier and faster for both common and rare tasks.

I actually remember reddit posts complaining they hit the same bug as he did, some days prior and also some days later lol

the os should do as i say, that includes breaking it if i please. the problem are people writing into the terminal "i understand that i uninstall half my os with this command but want to do it anyway" and then wonder why half their os gets uninstalled.

They all use it if they want to pass school, so you are out of luck.

Blaming Linus for breaking Linux is what's wrong with the Linux community. You guys are so blind to the obvious glaring issues with Linux Desktop that any time something goes wrong, it must have been the user who did something stupid.

Sure, you CAN get it working the first time without issues, but the amount of times I tried Linux Desktop without any issues is 0. Every single time I installed Linux, I had some kind of breaking issue. I have tried multiple times between 2007 and 2021 and I'll likely try again soon, but don't kid yourself that people "play dumb" or something. Linux is as stable as the user makes it, and with instable, fragile, incompetent users (like most new users) come a fragile OS that cannot be relied upon.

I'm 100% sure if I try to install Ubuntu Desktop right now on my desktop, I'll again encounter some BS thing that just doesn't work like it should. Maybe the audio won't work, or bluetooth just drops out constantly, or it randomly freezes, or YT videos don't play at any decent framerate. Maybe everything works fine, but in 4 days some random thing doesn't. And once some thing doesn't work, you'll have to waddle through a sea of sudo commands that you have no clue what they're doing and you either fix the issue or break something else.

Note that I specifically mention Linux Desktop every time. Linux as a Server is great.