Do you know how many grey beards have waited their entire lives to have a girl ask them what Linux is. You've made a lot of irc mods jealous tonight. Stack overflow responses are going to get super spicy for a couple days
Unfortunately gaming is about the least Linux friendly hobby there is. For most tasks you can find software that will make it relatively painless to wean people off Windows but many games, especially new ones, dont work out of the box on Linux. Most of the time, theyre going to have to fiddle with things to get games to work, if they can work and youre going to have to justify to them why they should do that.
I knew about Linux when I was 10, and Linux was only like 2 years old at the time. How does someone be online in any capacity these days and not know about Linux? Linux users are everywhere and they never stop talking about Linux!
I'm currently on some pirated LTSC Windows 10 but I'll probably move back to Linux next. It just bothers me how much more effort simple tasks take on Linux, and how a lot of the options emulate the inferior Mac look. Whenever I see the red yellow green buttons on a window it makes me gag thinking about all the money that terrible company has scammed people for.
It is normal your friend doesn't understand what you are talking about since what you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.
Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project.
There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux 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. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!