"Linux is more or less a wild garden of different solutions"

Exactly my experience. I use Windows at work (lots of .Net) and Linux on side projects (Python mostly). When I get into a bind on Windows, the solution is typically a Google search and couple clicks away. On Linux, I find the Google search results often return a plethora of similar solutions each branching with every distro and major version change. This means I'm often sorting through similar (but not exact) issues on forums and trying them out one by one and then cleaning up a mess of packages when it doesn't work out.