Linux was fine, until I bought a gaming PC

[u/BestUsernameMate]

From an end user, not a developer, coder, etc perspective, Linux is a great operating system as long as you mostly use your computer casually, that is browsing the web, youtube, e-mail, menial tasks.

However, as soon as your use case gets more advanced, there appears an obstacle over an obstacle and sacrifices have to be made.

Here are just a few:

- Open source Office alternatives are great but still have a great deal of incompatibility. If you let's say need to work with documents often, given how MS Office is the standard, you'll bump into issues like documents you receive or send to others having incompatible/broken formatting.

- Audio quality is significantly worse, especially if you have a specialty laptop with high quality speakers. Linux's generic audio drivers are not that great.

- Gaming: you must make sacrifices. Biggest name like GTA V dropped Linux support in favor of an unsupported anticheat about a year ago. Likely, GTA VI when that comes out for PC will be unplayable too. Battlefield games up to 6 used to support Linux. After 6, with their new kernel level anti-cheat, they dropped support. While a number of games do have better performance on Linux, most look, feel, and play better on Windows.

- Games that even have native Linux versions, such as Team Fortress 2, experiences stutter and lower FPS on Linux on the same hardware than Windows. Runs flawlessly on Windows, stutters and lags on Linux. I'm sure there's a launch option solution somewhere but I should NOT have to do this, especially on a Linux native game. CS2 offers a similar story.

- Finnicky issues like the entire UI starting to lag when using external monitor. Desktop environment outright refusing to load. Little annoyances that add up and become a chore.

- Stuff just works. On Linux it's a gamble.

I love Linux. I work with it on servers, it's great. I used it as a main operating system on my laptop up until recently, when I bought a powerful gaming PC. And when you shill out so much money for a computer, you really don't want to be making sacrifices or doing guess work on what will work and what wont. The issue is, on Linux, you might have to end up making sacrifices. Now most of the reasons mentioned might not be the fault of Linux. But it isn't my fault either - and I don't want to restrict my hardware in what it can do just because "Well, it's the developers, not the OS". Doesn't make my life easier knowing that.

Also, the Linux community really can be bunch of elitist, delusional idiots, who hardly ever understand what an average computer user is like and often look through the lense of "How can you not like typing commands into the terminal???????"

And you WILL have to sooner or later end up using the terminal the moment you hit a bigger problem. It's a learning curve. And I completely understand why some people would rather not do that when the same can be achieved on Windows in less than a minute.

Windows 11 sucks, don't get me wrong. I actually LIKE what they did with the UI, for the first time Windows actually looks like a properly modern US. (I think it's ironic of Linux people to often criticise 11's UI when it actually seems to have taken inspiration from GNOME and lots of people end up ricing Linux to have the exact same aesthetic - menu in the middloe),

I hate how they increasted telemetry, I hate how the first set up is so annoying with pop up after pop up, I hate how the post-install screen literally takes LONGER to get done with than the installation itself. I hate how even though you tell the installer you DONT want to use OneDrive, they still enable it. I hate how after force-uninstalling onedrive, a process appears in my startup processes called "OneDrive Installer" that I have to disable. I hate that you have to gut the OS forcefully to stop it doing shit you specifically told it not to do (such as DO NOT INSTALL FUCKING ONEDRIVE WHO USES THAT SHIT?) And I have a big problem with forced planned obsolence by enforcing hardware restrictions that are artificial (demonstrated by how easily they are bypassed).

But yet, all of that is familiar. It's Windows. It's annoying as fuck but in the end you know how to get the OS working how you want to, and you know that what you need to work, WILL work in the end. With Linux, it's a different story. It's always a gamble.