Employers requiring that I use Windows on a computer they provide has been a thing, once or twice. It's their computer, so no argument from me.

Nowadays that would be pretty weird thing to do though. I mean, I'll gladly do it if you're paying me by the hour, I guess.

I'm actually looking at rolling Linux exclusively at some clients. The employees are working through a web app. All the ads, interruptions, and poorly tested updates in Windows waste time, but not enough to be a problem worth solving on their own. It's managing software licenses that's just too much of a pain when we need to suddenly bring on more staff (it's a small business so no dedicated IT department). Easier to just have a standard Linux image that I show up and spam onto a dozen hard drives. I'm available for maintenance, but it's never actually been required.

About 20 years ago, I was trying to get audio playing to stay stable, and have audible alarms from KCal. I did everything, recompiled kernels, nothing fixed it.

So I went out and got a G4 Mac mini, set it up with my audio and it worked perfectly. Within a week I'd shut off the Linux trash for good. Mac OS X does everything better.

For servers, I use FreeBSD, it's dumb to run Linux there, too.

Nothing's improved, I have the same audio problems on my RasPi in Linux. Linux is bad at just about everything, any other OS or possibly just a dead badger will do the job better.

Too much of a hassle. I don't wanna risk having my setup break when... Never, really. I want to use my machine and that's it.

I've always loved using Linux, but sometimes I just need things to work; so that whatever I'm doing is quick/painless. But as much as I've switched back and forth, I keep getting pulled more into Linux, the more I learn about my (personal) technical problems

Sure, I can fix it on windows... but the more I delve into Linux, the more I begin to understand the underlying principles of all of it. And for a lot of things; the more I learn about Linux, the more I'm able to navigate across multiple OS's. Learning a little Linux has taught me a metric shit-ton about how computers "speak", and that knowledge has crossed over to a lot of different applications.

I still don't use Linux full-time. But I'm definitely starting to prefer it the more I learn. I hate fighting against locked-out bullshit on windows, when I "just need things to work". But I still like being spoon-fed sometimes, when I don't have time/patience... but I now much prefer taking the time to make my computer work for me. I've learned a shit ton about computers because of Linux

People use Mac and Windows because everything just works and it comes pre-loaded on the system. That can be the case with some Linux distros, but more often than not you'll spend forever troubleshooting because some random bit of hardware on your system is not supported immediately out of the box.

I put Linux Mint on my mom's laptop several years back in an attempt to breathe some new life back into that piece of crap. It's still a piece of shit, but I thankfully haven't had to tinker with it and nothing has broken for her.

The other day I tried installing Pop OS on my laptop after having been away from linux for several years. I was infuriated at how long it took me to fiddle with it and get certain components of my system working. Even then, it randomly boots into a black screen occasionally until I restart it a few times. No idea why.

As an example, when I paired my bluetooth mouse, it had missing functionality for the extra buttons. I tried installing some program that you have to manually configure from the terminal and it just threw errors and broke functionality of the scroll wheel. Found a program with a GUI interface...it had both a flatpack and a .deb available. Tried the .deb and it threw an error and never worked. Tried the flatpack version...still didn't work but this time it no longer told me what the error was (and neither did reinstalling the .deb version)...gave it once and never again so I hope you memorized it. Through some googling I found out that both installations packages were missing some stupid vital and necessary permissions file for some reason. I have absolutely no idea why they were missing the file. It reminded me of the old days when windows was missing some obscure .dll file and I had to download it online. Had to do some more googling to actually figure out what the file was supposed to contain and ended up creating it myself. Finally I got all of the mouse buttons working after all this headache.

If everything works out of the box, you're golden. If you have to configure shit or things break randomly (like the intermittent black screen issue), things can get frustrating real quickly.

To top it all off, I had hoped Pop OS would make my laptop run snappier, but it even feels a bit more sluggish than Windows 10. I'm still trying to give it a chance though because I missed a bit of tinkering now and then and my laptop is starting to show it's age a bit. And the new look of GNOME was interesting (well "new" to me...I used Ubuntu back before they updated GNOME to have this dock thingy).

Edit: For anyone who wishes to comment on the black screen issue...no, I do not have a NVIDIA graphics card.

Why people gave up adulting?

command line interface

I’m fine with it, but it’s cryptic and a deal breaker for many.

My daily driver is a Mac, so use Unix, mostly because I like the ecosystem and, as a designer, I’m tied to the adobe apps. This is what keeps me on the Mac side of things.

I do have a Linux server I use as a media server and other library storage running pop_os, which I really like. I also like how smoothly it interoperates with my Mac. I will say, though, a couple of decades of using Linux on my servers have taught me a lot about using UNIX on my Macs.

Hardware support. My laptop speakers and fingerprint reader don't work in Linux.

I've been using Linux on my laptop for years; I use i3wm that makes using it way easier than anything Windows can provide; but on my desktop pc I have too many stuff installed that I can't be bothered to migrate all to Linux.

On my gaming PC: I had a lot of random boots to black screen. (Vega 56 GPU)

USB ports did not function at all with USB drives.

TF2 had terrible performance compared to windows.

There was no way to configure my sound card settings.

I still run Ubuntu + kodi on my HTPC, have done for about 10 years. Updating versions of either can often lead to time spent in the terminal. Usually nvidia gpu related. So far the issues have been overcome.

My guess is also choosing the wrong distro and/or the stress of having to reconfigure your digital life.

Most people are coming from being on a PC/Mac for +10 years and so it feels inefficient for the first month or so until you get the hang of things. I legit had a checklist of +20 tweaks to make to my env to make it more to my liking. The joys and frustrations of choosing KDE as my intro DE almost drowned me but I made it to the other side.

I really only want Linux for software dev work(docker mostly). Windows has wsl which has worked beautifully for me besides memory leaks a couple times a year. The issues I face with wal pale in comparison to my experience dealing with Nvidia drivers and gaming on Linux.

I haven’t given up on Linux. I have at least 5 Linux machines in the other room, including tablets, laptops, and servers.

There’s a few Mac’s in the mix too, but those are workstations.

Though I can sympathize with the complaints here in these comments. I brought a ryzen laptop home and installed a distribution on it. Sleep didn’t work. Tried 2 more distros, sleep still didn’t work. Now that laptop just sits there. My Chromebook gets more use than it. Having to shut it down and boot it back up every time wasn’t worth using it anymore when my pinebook pro does have the support you’d expect for functions you’d expect from a laptop.

I gave up because sound stopped working every time I rebooted.

Who gave up?

Hardware compatibility and, unrelated to the this, Adobe sw are the main reasons for me

I want to use SolidWorks. My kids want to play Fortnite and Valorant.

It's due to lack of support by mainstream developers. I can only hope the Steam deck takes off and continues to sell; once a critical mass of people are on the platform it'll only gain momentum. We're not there yet but this is the closest we've been in 30 years.