Last night I took an old laptop off the shelf to experiment with Linux gaming. I installed draugr, rebooted, and no operating system found. Fine, it’s an old machine without UEFI, let’s try pop os. Installed, rebooted, no os found. Boot from the USB, turns out the installer didn’t set my drive as active, this was probably the problem with draugr too. Fix it, boot, connect to wifi. It successfully got a DHCP address, right gateway, right DNS, no internet. Can’t traverse the default gateway for some reason.

Now, I’ve been using Linux on servers since 1999. I can probably fix this too. But 2 show stopper issues affecting basic bare minimum functionality within 5 minutes of a fresh install makes me wonder what comes next, and wonder if I should bother continuing because I know win 10 would work on this hardware out of the box and I could do what I want to do instead of futzing around to get to that point. This is why Linux will continue to fail on the desktop. I’m a professional and I don’t want to deal with this. How would a noob feel about it?