A lot of the apps that I love don't exist on windows. Unix vs windows is like a very large and well stocked toolbox versus a set of nail clippers and a bent hairpin.
At some point in the next year or two, I plan to re-dogfood Linux desktop with i3 or Sway, as I effectively work in a tiled arrangement and it's far more stable than GNOME.
I don't really use Windows, but when I do, I'm pretty much in a web browser or WSL. I don't have much interest in the rest of it anymore, especially with the ruination Microsoft is committing.
While I've done a lot of Windows programming and PowerShell and whatnot, I'm a UNIX native, I'm old, and I'm sticking with some variant of it until EOL.
About this point, I switched to Ubuntu in 2009 after I realized that all the apps I was using in Windows XP were open source and available on Linux too. Some of them were actually Linux native and were much faster there, example: Gimp.
I had tons of apps on Windows, and all alternatives on Linux are better to me (IntelliJ vs. Visual Studio, VS Code the same, CodeLion). I had a MacOS stint in the middle of the transition, so maybe that's a difference.
But still: I'm not you, you are not me, and that's okay. I'm just proof that it is probably subjective, and not objective, what you describe.
And regarding the desktop OS experience: couldn't disagree more. But, as already said, probably taste :)
E-Mail me at [email protected], if you like.
¹ our (sub-orga-wide) UX crew uses MacOS, almost all Devs use Linux, and both of them use Figma
When I switched to a Mac, it wasn't that MacOS got vastly better. It was that Windows has been getting dramatically worse.
I that being said, Resolve and Blender on Linux can nicely serve subsets of the creative community. We just need more.
There are a lot of compromises:
- The Linux desktop is far flakier and far less elegant than Windows and especially macOS. KDE's a little less flakey than GNOME, I suppose.
- A lot of the apps you love don't exist on Linux.
- The Linux replacements for the apps you love are way less functional.
- Keyboard shortcuts are chaotic unless you spend a lot of time deep diving on how to configure them coherently across applications.
- Odd behaviors with snap/flatpak apps, but those will get worked out with time.
Pluses:
- The underlying Linux OS is rock stable with compatible hardware.
- You can customize your desktop pretty much infinitely, if that's your thing.
- Everything is free.
- Logging is, compared to macOS and Windows, excellent.
- If you're a developer, everything is more compatible on Linux.
Anyways, after a year, I went crawling back to my Mac. I still have a Linux desktop SSD in the PC, ready to go, but I rarely pop in anymore.
That said, if you live the terminals plus browser lifestyle, you won't miss much switching to Linux desktop.
Edit: for context, I used UNIX and Linux way before I ever used Windows or DOS. I have, in the past, done deep dives on Windows, Windows kernel, Windows and .net programming, etc. I just prefer *NIX.