It's really not. I suggest you sit down over the next couple of weeks of your life and tot up the time spend on trivial issues that shouldn't exist. That Visual Studio hang or crash that kills your entire debug rig that took you an hour to get a test case up for, that windows update notification that pops up, that windows defender notification that tells you it has nothing to report, that hour wondering why outlook has suddenly stopped talking to exchange etc.

Windows is a mess and the 16 pages of privacy settings to disable on Windows 10 aren't great either, but if there's one OS that demands the most time troubleshooting and dealing with issues, I'd struggle to claim it isn't Linux.

As a Linux user since 2001, I would have agreed with you up until 2008-2010 when Ubuntu really started making strides. If you haven't tried Ubuntu in the past decade, you really should. Other than one motherboard with some wacky onboard NIC, I have had zero problems that took more than a casual google to solve. This is across literally dozens of installs for friends, family, neighbours, etc.

I won't do other people's installs anymore as the support adds up, such as Powerpoint presentations not opening properly in LibreOffice, but the systems just work. Most people spend their entire time in a web browser anyway, so there isn't much to go wrong.

Note that I praise Ubuntu as a desktop even though I personally use CentOS as my desktop. It is Ubuntu that brought Linux to the masses.

My experience has been quite different. I've never done an install of Unbuntu even in the last few years where everything worked out of a box, whereas Windows always has. Just as one example I did an install on a new Intel NUC about a few months ago where the wifi worked on 16.04 but not on 16.10. Soon after I installed it on a laptop where the wifi worked but not the ethernet.

I think this part of your comment is key:

> I have had zero problems that took more than a casual google to solve

The problems I have on install are (almost) always solvable in an hour or so of Googling and messing around in the terminal or in config files. That includes the two examples I gave earlier - I've got those working now. But that's an hour for us, people who do this stuff every day. A random person who isn't so good with computers and decides to try Linux really needs everything to work.

Even this:

> Most people spend their entire time in a web browser anyway, so there isn't much to go wrong.

isn't always a safe bet. I installed Ubuntu for someone who basically just wanted to check emails, write documents, and watch some on-demand TV. The on-demand TV site didn't work because it needed the HAL layer in Flash and that'd been removed entirely from Ubuntu. Luckily someone has kindly hosted a repo with the required files[1]. But a random newbie is never going to get that working. Yes, the site requiring Flash like that is a bit out of date. But it still works on Windows and Mac.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~mjblenner/+archive/ubuntu/ppa-hal

There's hundred of thousands of "testimonials" over which OS is best online. The fact is that Windows remains the best compromise between capability and cost for a lot of people.

I truly think backwards compatibility is THE reason Windows is still a thing. Linux has a non-stable kernel ABI by design, and Apple loves breaking older stuff with little to no notice.

Mind you, XCode and Mail.app aren't that much better, heh. Though I agree with your overarching point.

The less said about Xcode the better ;)

Haven't had any Mail.app problems yet but I run an empty inbox.

Xcode 9 is a major improvement. They rewrote the editor which is now blazing fast and introduced (and open sourced as part of LLVM!) a new refactoring engine capable of refactoring C, C++, Objective C and Swift.

Also, they are currently in the process of rewriting the build system, with a preview shipping with Xcode 9.

Excellent. I'll play with that and see how it feels now.

'Nothing works' is not an exaggeration? This is purely irrational, not to mention I don't experience any of those issues you mention, nor other ones that take more than a tiny fraction of my development time (eg shutting down and rebooting while drinking coffee if updates are needed). Sorry Windows doesn't work for you, but it works well for me and my clients (and my bank account and their satisfaction levels).