Originally Posted by
MG23
I believe that translates into 'less likely to screw up your computer with a random update than Windows 10 is'.
Again, for the overwhelming majority this is not what they experience. The overwhelming majority upgraded using the free upgrade (not a fresh install) which just loaded and installed in 1-3 hours (depending on particular machine hardware and available internet speed). They then found it just worked. Over the succeeding years they've had updates, and while some of these may have taken a while they were warned that it would happen and offered the choice of postponing it, and once installed it (again) just worked.
Certainly in my case the 8(ish) assorted PCs and laptops we have in this house did the update/install without missing a beat, and installing their various updates since has been the same - the machine just gets on with it without any drama. After the W10 upgrade all the existing applications were available for use afterwards (a big improvement over previous upgrades One of the laptops hadn't been used for a year or so and was rather behind on its W7 updates, so the W10 install decided to do the "full install" rather than the "upgrade". This took a bit longer, but the result was identical to the others.
I'm not saying the claimed problems didn't happen - I'm just saying that in everything I've observed (my own and those of friends and colleagues) they must be a lot rarer that some like to suggest.
So I'm thoroughly puzzled by all the people who report that they had zillions of problems getting Linux to work.
I'm not. In my experience even the so-called "non-geek" distros often require "under the hood" knowledge to either install or keep running. And there is still the issue that it can often take months of searching to find drivers for new hardware because the equipment OEMs see no business case for writing and maintaining drivers for such a small userbase. And when you find it that driver is often one written by some random enthusiast - often from a russian, chinese, korean or similar. You may be happy to install random code of unknown origin on your machines, but I'm not!
PDR