Many (most?) Windows users find Windows to be frustrating. I find Gentoo to be extremely frustrating a lot of times. Frustration doesn't really drive people away from tools that are necessary to them.

I dunno, why would anyone be frustrated by having everything labeled with an incomprehensible acronym and an entirely unique and often vague directory structure with a stringent yet useless file level security?

Linux is amazing for it's ability to be customized. That comes with a cost in on ramping new users. Hell, I'm an old user, and what I know is half useless because it's so old. The end result is that I use linux to run a raspberry pi that shares out instrument data. And that's all it does. It's not a desktop, it's a tool that does a thing. It does that one thing reasonably well, and I don't have to screw with it. Because I never update it, never connect it to the internet, never install new things. Until I make a new one to do a new thing.

Honestly I have no idea why anyone would want a linux desktop for daily use. It's nice to have an environment to set up the device for what it's going to be doing. But beyond that, it's usually not even going to have a monitor attached to it.

I use Ubuntu as my main operating system in my Desktop, but I always end up feeling very limited.

I used to use Ubuntu for a long time and had a similar experience where there were constantly annoying issues. I have since distrohopped around and ended up with fedora, which even though it is a more cutting edge distro, the experience has been a lot smoother and more stable, even compared to windows.

Maybe Linux is not good for beginners working full time?

I mean any OS takes time until you get fully into it and I would say Linux does take maybe a little more effort simply because there are more options in terms of pretty much everything. First, you need to be familiar with the concept of having different distros and be familiar with the differences between distros. Then you need to actually figure out how to install a new OS, which can be tricky to most people who are not that familiar with IT.

Another thing is that an experience with an OS can depend largely based on what hardware you are using. That's why apple strictly controls the hardware on which their OS can run on. Microsoft has also started restricting this slightly. Linux goes the complete opposite direction by trying to allow running linux on any possible system.

My first foray into Linux was Mint on an old laptop. Then on my desktop I can't quite remember what I used, but I stumbled across the rolling release versus point release divide in distros. I think I wanted a more up-to-date PHP version at the time, and debian/ubuntu were both slow to update to cutting edge had me jump to Arch, at least for development purposes. That was 2017, gaming on Linux wasn't really great back then.

I ended up dual-booting Arch on my desktop, and for all the supposed complexity, if you can read a manual properly, and work through the guides on the wiki… it actually leaves you with a better understanding of how Linux is put together. So long as you're aware of what commands you're putting in.

If I were to compare it to anything, then it's the same sort of difference between building your PC for yourself (Arch), against getting something custom built (ubuntu) versus getting a prebuilt system (Windows). And you know, since migrating to Arch I haven't actually reinstalled once—people who do that are, and this may be controversial, but they're doing it wrong. If you fuck up majorly, like running rm -rf / then sure, you'll have to.

A tip for using the terminal, when you're trying to discover things, you can use tab completion to speed things up. You don't have to type entire commands, or entire directories/filenames. Of course it won't give you any arguments for a script or program, that is what man <command> is for, or a quick search online.

Only a few weeks ago did I finally scrub Windows from my system, I'm never going back, and if I really need it… I'll look into a virtual machine.

There is some software that it will plain just not run. I moved over to fedora from Windows and was loving it for about 6 months, but I needed CAD software for work that I could just not get to work, no matter what tinkering I did.

I stopped trying to learn linux. Windows isnt perfect but in general it just works. Want a program? download and install the exe. drivers are PnP.

I do tech support for a living. At the end of the day i just want my stuff to work. I dont want to do more work. Same reason i replaced my Ubiquiti APs with Eeros and stick with a simple hardwire topography where possible.

Well, why should the average end-user use Linux, actually? If your answer is privacy, taking control back or something in that general line, you're essentially advocating for a technological solution on the individual level as a solution to what essentially are and always have been political and ideological problems. Expecting that to work out is wishful thinking at best. I have growing suspicions, though, that it's more like a different ideological layer, and in that regard quite akin to making the climate catastrophe about choices of individual consumers (of which they often have very few, actually).

I only touch windows when I absolutely have to, and luckily that is getting rarer over time

It's not frustrating if someone starts with linux without using windows once.

Most of the time the frustrating thing is it's users. If you look for help about something that is obviously badly designed somehow... You get gatekeeping or "you're using it wrong" responses.

While this isn't the only reason, I think part of it is that linux, windows and osx are good at different things. If you move from windows and try to install your favorite windows programs, you're probably going to have an experience that's worse than the windows one. If you move from linux to windows the experience is much worse in that regard. To really see the value of linux you have to get used to having e.g. a tiling window manager or a package manager (tbf, chocolatey on windows is ok). But when you're just getting into it, linux just feels weird and convoluted in comparison.

Is a different paradigm. The way you do almost anything is different from windows, from updating drivers to downloading programs. It's frustrating in the same way driving in the wrong side of the road can be frustrating, or going a whole day using only your non dominant hand.

I've tried to convince a couple people over the last few years to convert, and their issues always baffle me, until my brother tried for a week and I finally understood. It's just unlearned everything they've been doing for years, to do things a different way.

I hope that snaps, flatpaks, AppImages, etc., will make a big difference in terms of adoption and ease of use. As @Millie@lemm.ee said, if complications arise while trying to install or use software, then you're basically screwed unless you have a really good tutorial or deep knowledge. I've been using various Linux distros as daily drivers for the past ~10 years, and in that time, I still haven't figured out why there's such a big emphasis on compiling software. Your average Windows user has probably never even heard of compilation let alone been required to compile software in order to use it. For better or worse, the emphasis in Windows is on shipping binaries that the user can simply double-click to run. And if we want to reduce frustration for new Linux users, we can't expect them to know how to compile software. Snaps, flatpaks, and AppImages definitely move us in the right direction even if there's a lot of internal debate about which of those is best.

It's also nice to see big flagship projects like Gnome finally really taking off in terms of quality. Of course, the Gnome desktop environment won't appeal to everyone aesthetically, and it's generally much more resource-intensive than Cinnamon, KDE, XFCE, LXQt, etc.; but distros like Ubuntu, Fedora, Pop!_OS, etc., look really great and work really well out of the box for most people. Same with Linux Mint. And I personally don't care for KDE, but it's another DE that's pretty solid.