I've been using all major OSes for a long time. I have the most experience with Windows, I've been using it since Windows 95 and stopped at Windows 8. I've been using macOS for about a decade and Linux (in total) for about 5 years. I have started with Mandrake, moved to Mandriva, spent over a year on Ubuntu and recently I've been using Fedora as my daily driver. And honestly, I'm running out of patience.
Few days ago I ran into the gpu driver issue. Long story short, Steam games started to crash on directx issue. Games that were working few weeks ago. I admit, I was mocking around with GPU drivers in order to make Podman containers to access the GPU. But I did the fresh diver install and it didn't solved the issue (also my GPU was not found despite all commands showed it was there). I don't have much spare time and I would like to play a game, I used to play before, without spending hours/days fixing issue that didn't exist last time I played it.
But it's not only about games. I have two laptops, both running Fedora 40 KDE spin. Some time ago on one laptop the power widget stopped working. It shows "no power profiles found on a device". But when I delete the widget and add it again, it works fine.
Other issue is with the general look and feel. There are many apps that don't follow the OS look - lack of window borders/shadow, random icons that don't match the system, flatpacks having issues accessing system configuration (e.g. vscodium not recognising zsh as a default shell).
Few more problems I had:
- on GNOME, some extensions where crashing without any reason
- some apps don't respect desktop scaling
- bluetooth randomly dropping connections
- syncing files between devices is always a struggle
- you never know what's going to break when installing updates
If you want a Linux like experience use macOS, and if you want to play games, stick to Windows.
I think Windows has a very poor track record for ui consistency as well. It feels like every Windows app wants to roll its own UI; Firefox, Discord, Steam etc. I know Discord and Steam also have those issues on Linux as well, but it feels like every Windows app wants to roll out it's own window decorarions and theme.
Honestly, I'm pleased at how consistent most gtk based apps look.
Windows can't even get their own UI right.
Look at the win10 control panel. Nearly a decade later and we still have to use the classic control panel to change settings.
If you want to edit macros in Excel, you'll see a Vista window. Vista! In 2024!