Linux

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Windows, is in fact, Firefox/Windows, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Firefox plus Windows. Windows is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Firefox system made useful by the Firefox browser, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS.

Many computer users run a modified version of the Firefox system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of Firefox which is widely used today is often called Windows, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the Firefox system, developed by Mozilla.

There really is a Windows, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Windows is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Windows is normally used in combination with the Firefox operating system: the whole system is basically Firefox with Windows added, or Firefox/Windows. All the so-called Windows distributions are really distributions of Firefox/Windows!

Firefox OS says hello from the grave!

I posted this xkcd a couple of weeks ago, it's always relevant!

When I was at Qualcomm we had an experimental, internally developed mobile OS that embraced the ubiquity of the browser and the power of apps written for the browser. The code name was b2f, which stood for "boot to Firefox"

Moving from Windows as an intermediate user was the worst. I hated Linux for like a year. I knew just enough quirks about Windows to get 95% of what I wanted, 95% of the time, and on Linux I had to start from scratch.

Now of course I love I made the switch, as my Linux proficiency let me customize the heck out of everything, but damn, that first year...

Yeah my grandma uses it without any problems. I would never recommend it to my sister or mom but i know my grandma is completely happy with her basically chromebook.

Speaking of a chromebook experience, installing ChromeOS Flex on my wife's slow, outdated Surface Pro made it sleek and fast again. Can you suggest a Linux distro that would be similar on old laptops?

I can’t believe Microsoft is doing EEE on malware

VS Code is an electron app, mostly likely coded by some flavour of Javascript developers, so I doubt it was ever planned to go in the same direction as Visual Studio. VS Code follows a design very close to what Sublime made popular.

Today's 40 year olds graduated in the high school class of 2002...there are people from that era that can't copy/paste? For real?

I think you're overfitting to the average here with your expectations. Especially basing that on the experience level of people who would sign up for help learning how to use Windows products. And even then, the ones learning about copy/paste for the first time will likely make more noise about it then those waiting to see if you'll teach them something new or any that ended up in your training because their work made them or something.

While the majority might lack familiarity, the 40 - 80 age range includes tons of people that have been working with computers (windows or otherwise) since before Windows was even a thing, including many who worked on Windows and/or developed applications for it. Experience will range from not knowing what windows is, knowing it's the OS but not knowing what an OS is, to understanding what goes on in the kernel at a high level of detail.

There's a lot of people on Windows just because of inertia and Linux can handle a lot of the use cases. It makes perfect sense to me that someone, once they've seen that things aren't so scary and different on the other side of the fence, would wonder out loud about why they thought their inertia was so strong.

Your skepticism is more baffling to me than that.

my grandmother is in her 80s and uses linux dailt cuz all she uses is a web browser. She has no idea what an operating system is but she knows the word windows. She just thought windows was the browser.

Libreoffice has an option for a ribbon user interface. It makes it nearly identical to Microsoft's stuff that I grew up on.

Mass

Usually the reaction you'll get trying to convince someone to use an operating system when they don't know or care what an operating system is

I'd like to interject for a moment, what you're referring to as Linux is actually gnu/linux/churbleyimyam