The other day, I needed a Linux machine for work. I grabbed another
NUC and put Arch on it. A vastly different experience: much more akin
to installing 7th Edition than Windows or macOS. Oh! And I missed a
step, so I had to pull some shenanigans to fix that.
Gentoo is even more arcane, but that's essentially an "I want to do everything myself" distribution. I suppose my point is that there exist a full range of distributions, from the truly masochistic Linux From Scratch to the most hands-off/static ChromeOS Flex. I don't believe that any other "OS" has such a wide range of offerings. This is obviously both a wonderful feature and a confusing nightmare, depending on your audience.
Lest it be thought that all is sweetness and light in Linux-land, there were years of fairly intense competition involved in getting installers to the point that you can start with a downloaded image, burn it to a USB, boot it, run it, and (optionally) make it persist over a reboot, all with very minimal need to understand or care about the many, many things going on under the hood.
More recently, installation has become more-or-less settled technology (and so things like Arch have arisen that specialise away from that experience), and there’s increasing competition around the end-user experience. Distributions like ChromeOS or
https://elementary.io/ or (from the BSD world!)
https://hellosystem.github.io/, are attempting to provide a more seamless user experience than the standard GNOME-or-KDE duopoly that has until recently focused on being competitive with decades old Windows/macOS.
Perhaps that’s something OpenSIMH could take from this history: a focus on painless installation and a decent UI!
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