I'd be lying if I said I didn't do a little of that in my younger years, but I've calmed down a lot. These days I generally advise caution when someone tells me they want to switch to Linux.

I personally don't actually think any one variant of Linux is that much harder to use than Windows or Mac. I think the difficulty comes from two things:

One, I think people forget how much learning is involved in those OS's as well. If you've ever tried to teach an elderly grandparent how to use "the computer" then you know first hand how much of this specialised knowledge you can take for granted. Simple things like knowing where to look to change mouse sensitivity as an example, are really challenging to any new user of any OS.

Two, there isn't just one variant of Linux. It's biggest strength is also it's greatest weakness here. It's amazing that you have so many choices for your desktop environment, but that comes with the major drawback of users needing to understand what a desktop environment is, and why Googling "how to change mouse sensitivity in Linux" is probably not going to return anything useful. You have so much choice in Linux for every little thing. Down to a level of granularity that most Windows or Mac users wouldn't even realise they're not getting a choice in. Alsa vs pulseaudio, xorg vs wayland, not to mention the plethora of package managers. Hell even drivers for your video card: proprietary vs open source. And yes, some of those examples boil down to the old way vs the new way, but ALL of this is added complexity, which results in a steeper learning curve for a new user.

So yeah, Linux is hard to use. The learning curve is a cliff, and anyone who thinks it's perfect is kidding themselves! ESPECIALLY for the user who just wants to play a few games, and maybe do some browsing. We'll never get the year of the Linux desktop with this mentality!

I do also try to warn new users about this. It is a whole new ballgame, and it will take some effort to get up to the same level of comfort you have in Windows. It really is best to not just jump in to the deep end, and fully wipe your system on day 1.

Start with a VM, then dual boot, and once you've stopped booting into WIndows in frustration, then you're ready to commit.

One thing I promise though, it is 100% worth the effort

I dual boot and still use Windows 10. And everything I've seen from Windows 11 just seems like trash to me. My mother got a new laptop about a year ago and I came along to help her set it up. With her previous laptop, I opted to not do the free update to Windows 10 because people were complaining about it at the time (and I was still on Windows 7), so she ended up stuck with Windows 8.1 for years. So this time I did opt for the free update to Windows 11 and it feels like a huge mistake so far.

Her machine is now slow and struggles to get things up and running. And every single fucking time she tries to use it, it decides to run virus scans and download and install updates all at the same time. And these updates often seem to take an entire day. The last update took two days where she could barely do anything on her laptop because it was slowing things up so much.

And that all makes the frustration add up when you come across the other fucking stupid things they've done. So now when you right click on the desktop there's a few seconds where Windows needs to get its shit together to show you the new useless menu that's been slapped on top of the old useful menu. Then you need to click 'show more options' for the actual useful menu. Then another few seconds for Windows to get its shit together to load that menu.

And I don't want to load a bunch of stuff like classic shell or winaero tweaker because she's old and just wants to play hidden object games and solitaire. So I'm going to have to come running every time something happens that she doesn't understand. So I prefer leaving it vanilla.

But fuck Windows 11. It's absolute fucking garbage based on my experience so far. I was going to hold out for the inevitable Windows 12 because Microsoft seem to love using their paying customers as beta testers with every second OS they release but now I'm not so sure. Hoping there will be some sort of hack to keep enterprise updates coming or something.

i dont know what you are using but the general linux experience hasn't been like this in years. and even if there is a problem now and then a bit of googling generally is all it needs. the one thing you cannot get around is malware like kernel level anticheats. that's windows only.

having a backup is good advice no matter what system you use

This is why I really don't want to have to use Linux, but Microsuck just can't stop with the fucking greed and I'm absofucukinglutly not running anything with recall... :(