There are several things like that in Fedora, which is already a good reason not to recommend it to first timers. They most likely won't know or care about nonfree codecs, they will just see a broken machine. Linux Mint understands that as a use case and has a "magic make it work" checkbox during install.
That all being said, I run Nobara and love it, but i wouldn't recommend it for new people.
Ill bet Toilet Truck and Baby Duff will be there in no time.
They would most likely still have to disable secure boot.
That would lower the barrier to entry significantly. It doesn't address the issues with the bios but someone mildly adventurous would have a much easier time going forward.
I think something like that would have to be sponsored by and maintained by a big distro though. I'm afraid if it was a community effort the amount of bikeshedding would stop it before it even began.
Linux pre installed is the only way for most people to use it I'm afraid.
Fedora does btrfs snapshots on boot also, which is such a great feature that I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't copied it for Windows.
This is definitely the case. And by the time someone is willing to experiment with their PC its so old that the experience with Linux is hampered by the older hardware.
Definitely. I can genuinely say that the autotiling in PopOS completely changed my workflow for the better.
Absolutely. If Linux was pre installed that's what people would use. Its the switching to Linux from something else that proves so complicated.
Mostly just so they know which boot device to pick.
Admittedly that's probably not necessary or the least of someone's issues.
God i wish. And most everyone here could install a new operating system in about 20 minutes. But nobody else is going to because the learning curve for a regular user to install an os is basically perpendicular. Even if they had a linux installer already on a flash drive.
Oh just boot into the bios and find the option to boot for a flash drive and then boom installed.
Which requires a user to know, What a bios is
What booting means
What boot options mean
What the model of their flash drive is
What button on their keyboard they need to press to get to the bios
What secure boot is
Where they need to go to turn off secure boot
How and where to back up their important files
What a disk partition is
How to reverse the changes made to the bios so that it doesn't boot to usb by default.
And that's assuming they know why they want a different OS, why they care and that they know about Linux in the first place.
Most people dont and never will. All you can do is install Linux for the ones you like the most and say a prayer to your favorite deity for the rest.
I haven't done any work for the military but i can say that all the legacy systems I've worked on were because the specific software they need was written only for Windows 98 and the developer or company that created it is long gone. Keeping it going is a chore but switching to literally anything else is out of the question.
I could see for military applications that having the known quantity of a working piece of software that isn't changing anymore and can be swapped as an entire unit is an advantage, especially if it doesn't touch the internet in any capacity. But eventually you run out of people who know what to do if any changes need to be made.