Glad to see that Microsoft is making Windows more and more similar to Linux by every passing day :)
Yes, it is true, that on Linux there are many, many things which are best done through command line fiddling.
But installing a system update, that update borking things, belching up a totally cryptic error message, and then forcing you to clean up the mess through the command line, is nothing something I've experienced on Linux so far. For me, apt updates have always been super reliable - and error messages have mostly been quite specific and easy to google.
So, this specific case seems nothing like Linux to me.
The ocean between. While you or me might appreciate a good error message and handy debugging options, the standard windows user experience is optimised to not confront users with errors at all. Either approach comes with its trade offs and is implemented with varying degrees of success.
Windows discourages this kind of professional responsibility, hides everything it can that would give you an inkling of what's going on under the hood. Microsoft wants you to be dependent on them for doing ANYTHING out of the ordinary. And of course, when anything out of the ordinary occurs, there is wailing and gnashing of teeth from millions of windows users, billions of dollars lost by their employers, and all the Linux users just stare in disbelief that y'all don't know how to change your own oil. If you use a computer for work, should probably know how it works. Microsoft has intentionally made it difficult, so... Have you tried Linux, the backbone of modern computing, installed on more devices than Windows by at least a factor of two?
Microsoft had extensive documentation of nearly every API they support, and some they don't. Comprehensive documentation with notes and caveats. Automatically available from their tools.
Compare, for instance, with Apples almost total non-documentation of anything. Mostly just scraped comments with arguments barely described e.g 'a string'. No notes, no architecture, nothing.
Interesting, I've never found Microsoft documentation for Windows thorough enough to reason about a problem, especially when compared to Arch or Gentoo's docs. I always feel like I'm reading the abstract of a paper, with no access to the rest of it. Is there some kind of special access or login requirement for deeper documentation, or am I just spoiled by the great Linux docs?
Apple products are the king of the "you don't own your device" mantra. I just refuse to develop anything for them, because the time expense of trying to guess how to get the OS to comply hasn't been worth the reward. That being said, I've found the documentation for Swift to be extremely good, better than most other languages I work with.
I was privileged(?) to have access to source under license for years, contracting with a company that ported Windows to various industrial platforms. So my view is similarly colored.
Linux is definitely the king, no argument there.
Lmao, come on now.
"Error: unmet dependencies"
I swear, I haven't run into this.
Yeah, I found that one out the annoying way too.
What's surprising though is that it listed the msstore source as operating normally when I did winget source update. Regardless, kind of crappy this doesn't work out of the box and I have wave dead things not mentioned in any instructions to get this dumb thing working.
WinGet would... launch, but provide no output. And of course, it was my first time trying to use WinGet in general...
A few reboots later suddenly Win+X had Terminal and WinGet started working, and on a subsequent reinstall in a VM I spotted that, yeah, apparently all the extra WinGet, Terminal, etc stuff all has to be pushed from the MS Store instead of Windows Update.
Total pain in the ass.
Ultimately, thinking winget can be used like apt to get a new system up and running is misguided on my part.
My experience is: On Windows, for most enduser use cases (and this absolutely excludes anything dev related), I would expect the user to get by without touching the CLI. In fact, I would assume that any given application will expose all of its functionality only through a graphical UI. For me, on Linux, the opposite expectation applies.
It's either crashdump or nice error message. If not I just increase loglevel to find the actual problem.
I've been on Linux some 28 years now, and it used to be like that¹. But today? I haven't had a kernel or graphics driver update failing on me for years. Maybe 10+ years? Granted, my Linux is the most boring, hardly-configged Unbuntu LTS. Boring hardware. Boring drivers. Everything optimized to "Just Work" - My machine pays my bills and if I'm down for a day because I fiddled around with some fancy custom trackpad module, or special Bluetooth whatevers, it's costing me actual money.
I'm certainly in my terminal 80% of the time (developing in nvim etc), so can't say much about how much it is needed by someone who doesn't know or use that terminal.
¹ My personal worst was at a conference doing a presentation for a 200+ audience having to recompile X, while entertaining the audience, because the beamer wasn't found and X crashed on it.
Edit: oh, and not to mention graphics (Nvidia), multiple monitors and HiDPI, especially with fractional scaling and different multiples per display. HiDPI on Linux doesn't work nearly as well as Windows and macOS.
On the AMD, I couldn't use the webcam for a good six months under Windows. It wouldn't detect some part of the USB tree.
On the Intel, for a good year, I couldn't get 4k@60Hz over DP via the HP dock. Then at some point, installing Intel drivers fixed the issue, but Windows would insist on "updating" to the older, borken version every so often. Now Windows also has the correct drivers. A different dock still doesn't work. Then there's the fact that the Windows installation (11 22h2) doesn't support the touchpad, nor the wifi card. Bonus points for the default install insisting on connecting to the internet for the online account thing.
Linux had 0 issues on both since the day I got them.
As for HiDPI, yeah, the Linux story, at least with X11, is non-existent if you want multiple HiDPI settings. But Windows is a crap shoot, too. It's easy to get a blurry mess: just connect and disconnect an external screen, and even the freaking windows 11 start menu is borked. It looks fine when you open it, but start typing something and enjoy the blurriness. Apps will be stuck with either enormous or tiny text. The context menus of the systray icons will appear all over the place.
Some apps manage to combine everything: tiny text, yet blurry, and displayed in the middle of the screen. To name and shame: Fortinet VPN client.
I'm not trying to argue that "Linux Just Works" or that "you won't run into hardware issues on Linux". I'm arguing that by choosing "boring" hardware, and "a boring LTS from a large distro" you won't.
Intel for graphics and wifi is generally the safest choice. I pick laptops with those and have great success.
I had a kernel update break a memory management API that JavaScript engines use about a year ago, and then before that my last kernel induced update breakage was in like 2012 with fglrx.
That broken kernel update also would not have made it into more conservative distros, as the change was rolled back 5 days later.
Meanwhile I have previously experienced the windows issue in this topic in like 2019. The windows 7 installer created even smaller reserved partitions than the windows 10 one (100 Vs 500 mb iirc), so users with systems upgraded from 7 to 10 would have seen this sooner.
And for completeness sake I've also experienced OS X fail at updating to High Sierra as that updater didn't like something about the way my employers provisioning software had set up the partition layout some years earlier.
I've administrated a fleet of ~100 Ubuntu devices that used nVidia for some AI stuff - unattended-upgrades disabled and all that - and yet graphics drivers broke in regular intervals, every couple of months. Apparently, nVidia drivers have some system in place that can update drivers on its own. The only solution was to uninstall all nVidia drivers, upgrade all packages, then re-install nVidia drivers.
I realise it doesn't help now, but in the future you may want to avoid hardware that's specifically hostile to Linux.
there's a reason I chose my latest laptop specifically because it was Ryzen.
But somehow Debian keeps uninstalling the display manager. One would think this is the easiest problem in the world to avoid, but they avoid every hard problem, and this one passes by.
I just meant it as a lighthearted joke.
Every time I've tried Linux, I've had to dive into the terminal and paste commands from the internet to get normal things to work.
I've no problem with more than that. I don't know what hardware you're using, but that's atypical.
I'm very hesitant to touch Linux updates, but I am occasionally "forced to" when I need to run a new piece of software that ends up being like pulling on a loose string on a sweater.
I'm not going to have an argument about my personal experience. You can find plenty of others in the comments who have had similar problems. I enjoyed the response, as I've been joking for 20+ years that 95% of the time Linux advocates will tell anyone running into issues "you're using the wrong distro".