I used to hear "Linux is only free if you don't value your time." - this article seems to validate that this is still the case. Am I getting the wrong impression?
Personally, I've been riding the linux struggle bus for years in my personal time. It really hasn't been a struggle, but weird issue's I've dealt with during my "Linux evenings" has made obscure struggles at my day job far easier to debug and deal with, and overall has made me a better engineer because I know how my tools work and I can use them more effectively.
It's a whole lot more fun learning about kernel drivers, systemd, networking drivers, etc when you're personally invested in tweaking your machine just right. I much rather deal with a Linux issue for an hour than spend an hour on leetcode.
If you're dealing with new hardware, situations like the one described in the article may pop up since vendors will focus their testing on Windows (and possibly macOS) so there is a good chance that it will work on the commercial operating systems but not the open source ones. That is going to be especially true to more exotic hardware since there will also be less testing by the open source community.
On the other hand, I find managing a Linux system significantly more time efficient. Some of it is because of the nature of open source. For example: installing, updating, and removing software is much easier since the licensing model allows distribution maintainers to create a universal software management tool. In other cases, it is simply because of the approaches typically taken by open source developers. For example: it is usually easy to copy configuration files from one system to another.
Anything you use has a chance of failure and on the whole I feel Linux has taken less time to do what I want to do with it than other similar options.
Thought I started using macOS at home because I got tired of dealing with Linux desktop shit, so take that as you will.
> “If you’ve ever read a mystery story you know that a detective never works so hard as when he’s on vacation. He’s like the postman who goes for a long walk on his day off.”
I got tired of taking the long walks.
To me, a lot of the frustrations boiled down to familiarity. I used to be touchy around Linux, because it was weird to me all the time, switching from a decade plus of Windows experience. Whatever broke with Linux, it was a Linux problem, and whatever broke in Windows, it was a stupid computer problem. Do you see the bias? Now that I have the user experience, Linux issues are familiar, and whenever there's anything that's out of place, I know where to look, what to search. And Windows, with its penchant to reorganize the Control Panel every release, seems like a maze to me, where I get more frustrated at every turn.
At the end of the day, it's pick your poison really.
2 - Have you actually tried Linux?
My KDE Plasma setup is nothing like MacOS.