She doesn't, that was where we started. She knows (thinks) she has to use it, but the things she is doing can all be done on Linux, and she is only ever complaining about the computer. RStudio Cloud works just as well on Linux.
What do you call it when someone has a thing they do every day for many years, in spite of the obvious drawbacks, knowing that there are well-trodden alternatives, and without ever having seriously considered trying the other options?
If it's not "real addiction," then it's definitely another word which I'd associate with unhealthy behavior.
I've been a computer people forever. I bought a $500 machine that is perfectly good, and there's no reason for me to send it back just because Windows seems to have an issue. It's less than 3 years old from the manufacturer, refurbished. There should be no problem, and without Windows there is no problem.
But we get people with replies like this:
> get her the best windows laptop you can afford, make sure it's secured properly with updates and such and that it "just works"
$500 is plenty. Why should I spend more than that on a laptop? (Hell, they gave me back $75 just to try applying the thermal grease myself, if I can save that kind of money by being resourceful, I'm gonna do it, and I'm gonna show as many people as I can that they can do it too.)
By the way, I should have definitely laughed at GNU/Neckbeard. That one is going in my pocket for later... LOLOL
Can I have gripes about the quirks and how some things could be better? Sure. Is it worth throwing the baby with the bathwater and learning something entirely new? Highly unlikely.
This is exactly how I felt after about 20 years of using Linux since the age of 14. Windows 7? 8? 10? 11? No thanks, I don't want to learn it, I've already had 3.11, 95, 98, 2000, XP, I enjoyed it throughout my childhood, (and then I became a man and put away childish things.)
That's plenty of time for me to consider whether I really want to leave Windows or not, and I don't regret switching to Debian, it does basically everything I need. 20 years later, I've had lots of time to think about it, and I'm definitely still a Linux user. (And a Mac user... anything but Windows really.)
Most Average Joes that haven't had this Linux baptism through fire from an early ages definitely won't see eye to eye with you on the greatness of Linux.
They just want their known shit to work out of the box. They don't want to format USB sticks with ISOs ("I can't find any 'Linux', is Ubuntu 'a Linux'? What is an ISO?), format and portion their disks, install and learn a new OS, figure out which command line commands enable HW video acceleration in Chrome, figure out why their screen is tearing, figure out why the webcam now doesn't work, etc.
That's why Linux PC market share is still insignificant in 2022.
At that time, the main bragging right was at lan parties – I wasn't getting any tearing, in fact if I ran Quake 3 in Windows, there was a noticeable lag while the (whatever it was) was (doing something in the background) that was definitely not present on Linux.
Baptism through fire is a good way to put it. Back in my day, we had one-way cable modems and you still had to dial in for your upstream! It was on the ISA bus, have you ever seen an IRQ? trailing off...
This is exactly what a GNU/Neckbeard would say.
Addiction to an OS? Come on. It's not crack cocaine and it's not tik-tok. It's a tool that let's people do work and fun.
I'm a huge Linux nerd myself but computing for most people is best when it involves the least amount of friction and zero learning curve.
I tried migrating people to linux and it rarely went well:
"Oh yea, now we can't read your external HDD because that's NTFS and Linux kernel doesn't have drivers for that yet, we can add them manually", "Oh yeah, that tearing you see is because you need to enable tear-free in the config file, haha, don't worry, it will be smooth like Windows when we finally switch to Wayland"; "Oh yeah, your laptop's fans now scream when watching YouTube because Chrome doesn't have GPU acceleration by default enabled and your laptop has an Nvidia chip who's drivers don't play well with linux but don't worry, that's not Linux's fault, that's Google's and Nvidia's fault haha. The fix is quite simple you see, we just go in Chrome config flags and then to the Arch wiki and modify these command line inputs to ..."