Linux

I've been daily driving Pop on my laptop and my biggest frustrations currently are lack of working drivers for the fingerprint reader and speakers, and the Proton VPN client is crap compared to Windows.

I simply know where the settings are on Windows. I can find almost all stuff in the settings, I can fiddle with the registry and I can do narrow searches if I do need to look something up. I also understand how and where programs on Windows save their files. On Linux I have only very little experience.

I think it's just general fear of the command line. I've had a friend who always owned a mac, and started using it for his programming course. While assisting him in trying to compile some programs or use something like git from the mac's zsh terminal, I can tell it's a stressful event for him, even though all I told him to enter were simple commands like ls, mkdir, g++ etc.

I have a machine that runs fedora with no trouble at all. I never needed to debug anything, multimonitors and sound outputs all work. But every once in a while, something happens which can only be solved through the command line, because linux simply does not have a settings utility as extensive as windows control panel. It's fine for me, but telling that friend to bring up the terminal and enter a cryptic line will probably freak him out.

I think this is a clash on workflows. I'm a windows user turned to linux. All I knew about was Windows and there was frustration during the transition. Now I'm at home in linux. Recently I had to use Windows for work. I wanted the gnome edge scrolling feature for my touchpad on windows. Couldn't figure it out even after hours and days of effort. The package management options was okay but sub par when you compare with linux. I hated the windows terminal. It always felt slow on my laptop. But was okay on workstation. I tried to mimick many other linux behaviour, like krunner and the windows alternatives ended up slowing down the system further and I was left unsatisfied. I've now returned to linux and run a windows vm in gnome boxes whenever I need something in windows world. We need to accept that linux and windows are like apples and oranges. We can't make them taste and feel the same. We could hope for software releases for both platforms from developers and vendors. But the experience would always remain different. In the end we the end user has to compromise.

Edit: Op I think I went a bit off topic keeping other comments in mind. All I can offer you is the frustration is inevitable if you want to do edge cases. Stick to gui options. Try to understand commands before jumping to cli. Use a container or vm to do the inevitable trial and error learning. Try to pick up on how best to phrase your problem so that your search engine can give you the relevant articles and not spam.

When I got into Linux I read every physical book I could. Physical books on a subject tend to be written to have chapters that cover whole material. When you try and learn from multipe ebooks you randomly found online you end up cherry picking bits and pieces and never actually read every chapter, so you miss fundamentals.

Maybe you would benefit by reading a PAPER copy of a book about Linux and the especially command line. Linux is a very command line oriented system so maybe trying to tackle some of the struggles head on will help you unlock apt any other tools.

People get used to things they understand so they don't want to learn. Frustration builds as you get older, so I am glad I started a long time ago, and I have a lot of respect for people who are willing to learn constantly and are patient. I learn(ed) from trial and error, I like poking the bear and being able to see what works/doesn't and why. The responses I got regarding lack of linux usage is that people don't like spending time troubleshooting, or they get super jaded and just want something that works then and there, just so they don't think too much about it. But now the irony is that windows will piss them off so much they will have no choice but to learn the distro they choose. It's like vim, at first it seems strange, but once you learn it you will never look back. Learning is done as long as there is curiosity and need involved.

Basic commands would be good! So hard to find sometimes.

Maybe immutable OS, like Fedora Silverblue or Kinoite a try?

The idea is that it's very hard to break the system, because apps are containerized, so they don't 'touch' the system, and updates take effect only on reboots.

If update is broken, it won't apply. And you can always rollback to previous state, if you don't like something.

You don't need to install stuff from the terminal, and you can install them from a GUI 'store'.

Computers in general are very complex systems, I think it’s easy to say the majority of users understand very little about them even though they use it often. I think you might be in that group.

Install Opensuse Leap.