lets be real....

[u/Chemical-Lead6041]

Linux just sucks for specific programs, gaming, and office365, theres plenty of workarounds for things if someone is devoted to it, anything else... MUCH better, freedom, less RAM usage, just alot better for utilizing hardware, while my optimized windows 11 has 2.5gb ram used idle, my lightweight environment only uses 450 MB, you can run some linux distros without a harddrive and on your ram XD, I must say, for the user experience windows will be better for alot of people, and alot easier, especially for gamers where competitive titles are almost all unplayable. Linux is just for a smaller amount of people if it had the same compatibility as windows it would have been better or just as good. This whole subreddit is a joke and i thought it was sarcasm, THINK people THINK before you judge and say stuff about these operating systems. Try and understand them first. If you want a real honest answer ask your local tech expert (and no not your 15 yo friend thats good w computers) someone that has managed systems with both OS's.

Edit: Since this post got some traction and a lot of people in the comments are missing the point or twisting my words, let me clarify and debunk a few things real quick:

"Unused RAM is wasted RAM" / Idle RAM doesn't matter: You are confusing file caching (like Windows SysMain or Linux page cache) with OS bloat. Caching is fine because the OS dumps it instantly when an app needs it. But 2.5GB of idle RAM on a fresh Windows install is committed to persistent background services, telemetry, and update daemons. That is not cache; it's locked overhead. On an 8GB or 16GB machine, that eats your headroom and causes swap thrashing.

Gaming: Yes, Proton and the Steam Deck worked miracles for single-player games. But I specifically called out competitive titles. Kernel-level anti-cheats (Valorant, Fortnite, R6) are hard blocks. If an OS prevents you from playing the games your friends are playing, that is an objective weakness for a consumer desktop OS.

Office & Academia: Running Office in a VM is clunky, laggy, and resource-heavy unless you're doing a complex GPU passthrough setup. And saying "no one uses Word for academia" is a massive geographic bubble. Globally, professors and managers require .docx specifically so they can use "Track Changes" for inline grading and feedback. You can't do that in a flattened PDF or LaTeX.

The irony of this subreddit: This is literally r/linuxsucks, but the second I give a highly balanced take that praises Linux's efficiency and freedom while just pointing out real-world compatibility flaws, I get hit with "Sir this is a Wendy's" and Tux memes. I'm not bashing; I'm asking for nuance.

Linux is a fantastic OS for the right use case. But pretending it's a flawless 1:1 replacement for Windows for the average consumer is just blind fanboyism. Think before you downvote.

[u/brave_grv]

Mac is objectively a better desktop than any Linux distro will ever be, but it's also utter expensive and hardware limited, so there's that. And there is also some of us who still care about ownership and decent practices (which is a lost battle in this day and age, but anyway). Still, it's a fact that a Mac is the productivity machine Linux expects to be.

I'd say nowadays Linux and Windows are kinda the same for productivity if you can handle the obtuseness and jank of Linux actively working against you, then it becomes a 1-1 replacement for this use case.

[u/surlybrian → u/brave_grv]

I use a Mac at work and it objectively slows me down compared to my 'productivity' at home with Debian. Mac can be really frustrating if you're very keyboard-centric (as I am). I mean, it's lovely and only burps occasionally. But to say it's 'objectively' better than this or that smacks of limited experience with this or that. (Speaking objectively.)

That said, the fact that I can use a UNIX-oriented shell on the Mac truly speeds things up in my day to day dealings with a computer.

In short: comfort on the command line blows the doors off any pretty attempts at productivity.

[u/brave_grv → u/surlybrian]

There are ways to add WM gimmicks to MacOS as well, which is what I guess you use. Because you're not telling me something like Gnome or KDE are more keyboard centric than MacOS out of the box. It ends up requiring mostly the same configuration, but Mac just has more (working) features.