My neighbor asked me to help him get rid of windows 10 and install Ubuntu on his old (2013) laptop. I helped. It was easy and fast to install. Of course, you ne

My neighbor asked me to help him get rid of windows 10 and install Ubuntu on his old (2013) laptop. I helped. It was easy and fast to install. Of course, you needed to know what is an image and how to boot from a USB device, but it was easy nonetheless. Since he doesn't depend on any windows-only software, hardware or service, I didn't expect any problem. I was particularly happy the printer (an multifunction HP Deskjet 27XX series) needed no fiddle to work, neither did its scanner. The windows driver was EXTREMELY intrusive and required an HP account. Bluetooth needed a fix: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1232159/ubuntu-20-04-no-sound-out-of-bluetooth-headphones https://askubuntu.com/questions/1232159/ubuntu-20-04-no-soun... which was the first google result and very easy to fix. After that, he was impressed that by just turning on the bluetooth speaker was enough to have the audio routed through it. Then he proceeded to install software. I then started watching like someone who is following an usability test. He googled to install chrome and asked me if he should download the .rpm or .deb, I answered he needed the .deb. Firefox downloaded it but didn't automatically opened it. I really don't know why. I also don't know if simply double-clicking it in nautilus would be enough, I just typed "dpkg -i" and that was done, but it was not the best experience in usability. This needs a fix. I then told him that he should not expect to install things the old windows way: download an installer an run it. I then showed him "Ubuntu Software". Most users these days are used to something similar to that thanks to "stores" on smartphones (note that FLOSS was a pioneer with this concept). Things then went mostly downhill from there. It is not that he couldn't install what he needed, on the contrary: he did install what he needed but "Ubuntu Software" is very very buggy! Results are duplicated without clear differentiation, you couldn't tell the state of it just by looking at it, software was installed but didn't appear immediately, there was no clue when an installation finished, first time something was run took a long time without any indication what was happening... I'm glad I'm skilled to use the command line. If linux want to have a chance on the desktop, the software installing experience still has some way to go. It is better now for novices, but still partly broken. Conclusion: Much much better but still not there yet for complete novices. The good part: I don't know if windows or mac are "already there" for complete novices either.