What’s a distro? What’s a kernel vs an OS? Even the language is different and that is no small thing unless the subject at hand is either your job or your hobby.
Since I’m in IT and use Windows, and windows works fine at home, I don’t really know why I would use Linux. Originally my motivation was to speed up my computers, but that is no longer an issue so my motivation evaporated, especially when I started encountering problems with Open Office.
And getting my wife to use it was like pulling teeth.
Until I find a compelling reason to switch from what I am currently doing, I’ve decided to move on.
I used to be a certified RedHat admin. It expired over a decade ago.
I use Linux on a few servers, but our main software is Windows only, running on Windows servers. We have Windows desktops and all our employees are familiar with them.
I’ve played around with Linux over the years on desktops. Sometimes I could get it to load and sometimes not. Generally, I just couldn’t set aside the time to figure it out. When I got it to work, even as an admin, I had to hunt and peck around quite a bit just to do anything. Not insurmountable, but most users don’t want that kind of change at the same time they have to change the look and feel of every piece of software.
What I think would really be helpful, at least from a desktop perspective, is for the whole Linux desktop community to agree on a single standard desktop, and the closer to Windows look and feel the better. Offer every distro with this same desktop so that new users can always have the same look and feel no matter what distro they try.
The biggest complaint about Win 8 (at least from my perspective) is the changing interface. It’s a huge training and support challenge. At least if Linux had some sort of agreed-upon standard desktop, there would be a real impetus to use the Win 8 migration as a chance to migrate to Linux since you have to retrain everyone anyway.
In business, time is money. I’ve not come across a version of Linux yet that was worth the time to adopt for my users.
Also, and maybe this has changed, but it seems like mice in Linux never worked like Windows as far as moving around the screen. Every user I had test Linux complained about it. This seems like a small issue, but it’s actually a major obstacle to adoption. Perhaps that’s something that can be configured - I haven’t puttered around with Linux in a couple of years.
Sorry, distro is short for distribution. There are many distributions of Linux. You tried Ubuntu. I use PCLinuxOS. Others are Linux Mint, Fedora, CentOS, etc. They are all unique in how they look and what programs come pre-installed with the download. The beauty is they are all free, and with the LiveCD and LiveUSB options, they are very easy to test on your computer without having to install them first.