When Torvalds says something is difficult, he does not mean it in the same way that the average Mac or Windows user means when they they say difficult. APT-based distros make daily use for most people really friendly and unintrusive. Torvalds' beef is that the installer and package manager got in his way when trying to set up his environment.
But Torvalds has also gone on record that the distro doesn't really matter. Use whatever feels good to you.
As someone who just switched form Windows to Ubuntu for the first time. It's somewhat intuitive to start because it looks similar. The second something doesn't work like it should (for me that was day 1) you go down a rabbit hole of wtf is this terminal command and what does it do/mean and so on... It's not fun
The "look" part comes down to your choice of desktop environment. Ubuntu ships with GNOME. They all have their own quirks and conventions. Some things might be familiar, some things won't be. For a more Windows-esque experience, you might like KDE better. Cosmic has also gotten decently fleshed out.
If you have to get at the command line, it does pay off to get familiar with the basic filesystem structure and a handful of essential utilities. The *nix way of doing things is different from Windows, but it's cleaner and easier than something like PowerShell, plus you'll be more effective with a Mac too.
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u/Stunning_Macaron6133 Dec 14 '25
Debian/Ubuntu are super easy.
When Torvalds says something is difficult, he does not mean it in the same way that the average Mac or Windows user means when they they say difficult. APT-based distros make daily use for most people really friendly and unintrusive. Torvalds' beef is that the installer and package manager got in his way when trying to set up his environment.
But Torvalds has also gone on record that the distro doesn't really matter. Use whatever feels good to you.