It's fast! It's reliable! It's open source! It's Linux on pretty much every piece of hardware on earth minus gaming computers. But also, it's a complete shit show.
I feel I should preface this rant by saying that I've used Linux for a damn long time. Since childhood. My first personal desktop was made usable with Ubuntu, and my first laptop was made usable with Zorin. That was in around 17 years ago now. In those 17 years, I've installed and used a ton of different distros on a variety of new and old hardware. Through all of that experience, one thing is common and clear;
Linux sucks and is not user friendly.
Let's just start with the biggest and most over-used argument in favor. Linux is much more secure. Or rather, the developers who work on the Linux kernel and various distros would like you to believe that it's much more secure. But let's be real for a second. What country is your favorite distro coming from? What do you know about the team who built it? Even if you CAN read the code; the Linux kernel is massive, and distros are even bigger. If somebody was backdooring you in secret, you would never know because it would be unrealistic to dig through all of it.
On security, one argument I hear a lot is that hackers are far less likely to attack you because there is a substantially smaller number of Linux users. Except for all of those serious hackers who do all of their coding on Linux. Honestly, this claim is just as dumb as when Apple swore MacOS was completely virus proof. It's just nonsense. Linux is actually much more unsafe because of the open-source nature of everything. A rough majority percentage of users who get hacked are users who get hacked because they make a real-time mistake. Clicking a bad email disguised as a corporate email, or downloading a bit of software that they thought would be helpful without reading about it. The system you're on can't save you from being a moron, but at least Windows *tries*. Linux just lets shit happen.
Linux gives you all of this administrator freedom. Except for that part where every single administrator tool is locked behind a system-hidden root account that you can only barely take control of. The average PC user switching to Linux would probably shit themselves at the realization that just being the administrator account doesn't actually make you the administrator. There's no convenient button to allow admin privilleges. There's a hidden root account that you actively have to search out and modify, and then when you do you need to input a password every single time you do something related to admin. Inconvenient at best, and outright insulting at worst. Distro devs legitimately believe that you are too stupid to keep control over your root account.
Oh but also the desktop environments. They look so pretty, right? You can get something similar to Windows or Mac, and you can even just have a command line if you want. The problem? On Linux, applications are GUI specific. Things that run specifically on GNOME won't run on XFCE and those won't run on Cinnamon and so-on. Plenty of apps do have cross GUI compatibility, but the fact that Linux doesn't have any form of universal software standard is just annoying. You don't even need a file extension to run a program. I'm sorry, how exactly is that secure? What's to stop some douche from disguising a malicious executable as just a code file or something? Oh, that's right; Nothing.
Then there are the package managers. Call me privileged, but I prefer just going to a website to download something. You can read and analyze the website. You can look for reviews about the software. You can vet whether or not that software does what you want it to do, or whether or not it's malicious. Sure, you can do some of that with a GUI package manager if one is included. But with a command line; you're just banking on the hope that the package you get is up-to-date. I don't want to add 100 repositories and I don't want to sudo apt-get install anymore shit! I just want to click the download button and double click to run. Why did Linux users make life easier if they just prefer the hard way anyway?
But it's so much better for all of these things! Like running a library of software that is entirely available to Windows users. To boot; Even if there isn't a package for Windows, there will always be some other alternative. The only thing Linux has that Windows *doesn't* is the ability to slightly modify Debian and release it as your own distro. So I guess if you want extreme inconsistency, Linux definitely has that.
Finally, the biggest lie ever told about Linux; It can make your old computer usable again. This is far beyond a load of bullshit. Anything older than 10 years will perform better with a windows 10 installation. Here are a few of my tests from over the years;
Acer Boxer
AMD Sempron LE 3000 1C 1T
4GB DDR2 800
MOBO iGPU
Refused to install Linux beyond Tinycore. Win10 worked, but most software didn't.
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Toshiba Satellite L305D
AMD Turionx64 TL-60
4GB DDR2 800
ATI Radeon X1250
Refused to install any Linux without XFCE/LXqt/LXDE. Couldn't run any software because ATI Catalyst driver is incompatible with modern XORG and refuses to install. Open Source AMD driver has 0 support for older graphics. Windows 10 worked just fine but shared the software problems from the Sempron.
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Acer Aspire Z5700
Intel Core i7 860
16gb DDR3 1600
Radeon RX 570 4gb on EXP GDC EGPU doc
Ran windows 10 perfectly for a very long time. Refused to install most Linux distros. Even when Linux distros worked, they had no idea how to handle the EXP GDC so artifacting was insane. The one exception was Linux Mint Cinnamon, which would crash randomly after an hour of use.
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Dell Mini 910
Intel Atom n720
4gb DDR2 800
Intel GMA 950
Wouldn't install anything. Windows and a variety of Linux all failed horribly. The only OS this piece of shit could install was Androidx86, and that was actually pretty impressive. But honestly how is a port of Android more compatible than any Linux distro smh.
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Generic LGA1156 w/ Machinist Mobo
Intel Core i7 860
8gb DDR3 1600
RX 560-B 4gb
Installed Zorin, Fedora GNOME and MX Linux XFCE. Ran fine. Refused all other distros. Not sure if motherboard problem or whatever, but Windows 10 worked perfectly with full compatibility.
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HP b002nt AIO
AMD-A6 9225
8gb DDR3 1300 (Single channel avail, fuck you HP)
Radeon R4
Once I figured out how to get into the real BIOS and not the bullshit HP fake bios, it was disappointing to find out that absolutely no Linux distro would install. This was the one PC that needed it the most. With single-channel memory, Win10 is pretty much unusable. Linux was the obvious option, but there wasn't a single distro I could get to install.
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My bigboi rig
AMD Ryzen 5 3600
32gb TridentZ DDR4 3600
GTX 1070 8gb
This PC will install whatever the hell I want on it, as long as it's made for x86_64 architecture. But I use it for gaming specifically, so there's no reason to use Linux at all.
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My work rig
Intel Corei7 6700
16gb Crucial DDR4 3600
GTX 1060 6gb
Again, this PC will install whatever I want in the x86_64 area. But windows has superior driver support, and I don't think overcomplicating things with a virtual machine is very smart. Why would I run a less compatible Linux frontend just to use a text editor and a compiler that I can also get on Windows? Short answer is, I wouldn't.
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Unreliable and mostly incompatible. That's my experience with Linux. I've been an enthusiast since I was a child barely learning to use my own computer, so it's sad to accept that it just never actually gets better. It's been decades without any real standardization or reliable and consistent software pipeline. It's been decades of talk about how "It's getting better every day" which is a load of horse shit. I feel bad for Linus Torvalds because the Linux kernel is a great thing. It's just the insane variety of horrible distributions that ruin it.
If you're one of those people who are worried about Microsoft harvesting your data; How important do you think you are? Do you think this multi-billion-dollar company actually gives a shit about you or your info? They collect generalizations for market and technology research. They have to because they're proprietary and have no other form of user contribution. They legitimately don't give a shit about you or your personal data. All they want is to know is how your numbers fit in with the gigantic stack of other users. If you're conceded enough to believe that Microsoft wants anything you have; You probably need to get in a boxing match and lose or something. You need something to knock that main character syndrome out of your dumb noggin.
Are you a Windows user switching to Linux? My advice is "don't" because you really have no idea what you're getting yourself into. You'll spend %90 of your time just getting shit to work, %5 of your time smacking your head against a wall, and the other %5 actually getting something done. It's not just a skill issue when a user downloads an official package that doesn't actually work. You can't expect every single user to build every single app from source. That's not only unrealistic: It's insanely inconvenient. Linux does absolutely nothing to appeal to the general user, and it only makes the life of a creative user that much harder. I would rather use MacOS by this point, and I hate Apple more than I hate stubbing my toe on a cinder block.
So after years of disappointment, I think I'll stick to windows. If it was really as bad as everyone says it is; it wouldn't have been the most popular OS for 30 years. Some people are incapable of satisfaction. You give them gold, a kingdom and a palace; They want to conquer the neighboring country. You give them windows with constant security updates, universal app support, and the best built-in antivirus in history; They take it and shit on it for asking you to contribute some info to the development.