I used to quite like Windows, but it has gotten worse every patch day for years now. The pain of learning a new system is not so bad and at least I own my computer now.
I have been forced to use Windows 11 on a succession of work PCs, but I stayed 10 at home due to the lack of a movable task bar and the terrible right-click menu in 11.
When Microsoft started pushing hard against remaining on 10 this year, I made the switch - to MacOS. It was an easy decision, since I was finally able to get a MacBook for work, too, so no context-switching required. I run a copy of Win11 in a VM for apps that need it, but find that I rarely have to spin it up.
As a product manager, I cannot image the decision-making behind building a product update so shitty that you drive away 35-year customers.
A while back (Win XP?), I got frustrated with Windows and installed Linux on my dev machine instead. But I still had to run Windows, so I installed VMWare on Linux on that machine and ran Windows in a VM. For whatever reason, Windows was noticeably faster in the VM than running on bare metal. Super bizarre OS.
Using Linux in a VM compiled three times faster.
I don't know how people tolerate it.
Visual Studios is like Windows, each version just seems to be getting worse with more bugs.
Still on Windows for work, but would happily swap. I also use an M1 Air for my personal laptop, but that is probably my last Apple hardware.
When they threatened Windows 10 EOL last year (?), that’s when I took a day to do a clean install of Mint and port my games and LLM tinkering over.
Because I knew MS was doubling-down on the user-hostile experience.
I thought I’d miss Windows but Steam, Wine, and Radeon made it delightful.
Windows is now only on my company-issued laptop. I predict that will also go away, as Windows 11 has introduced backdoors to circumvent company controls and install their BS.
Or trying to get Steam to work, which is wildly better than it used to be thanks to proton, but still not quite a perfect experience. For example there's a menu compatibility setting you have to enable for some menus to work, and other menus don't work when you have hover-click enabled in the accessibility settings of Cinnamon. Those weren't fixed by Claude CLI like the icons example, but definitely identified through chats with Claude.
The only "fail" states I get into are when I'm doing homelab power user stuff, setting up ownCloud, configuring Caddy, proxmox, etc. I don't blame Linux for that though.
All in all, I would say Linux is absolutely in a state I would install on my parents' computer without fear like I would've had in perhaps 2010.
Example someone will want to configure something and the LLM will give them advice from the wrong distro thats 5 years out of date. If they asked a person or looked on the fourms they'd have got what they wanted in a few mins. Instead they go down a rabbit hole where an LLM feeds them worse and worse advice trying to fix the mountain of issues its building up.
Tried Linux around 5 years ago - took many issues, had to learn various commands.
Tried again a few months ago and used various llms to configure everything well, troubleshoot etc
Eg when waking from standby and your mouse isn't working, do you want to troubleshoot and learn various commands over an hour or ask an llm and fix it within a few minutes?
When creating an on demand voice to text app for Linux do I learn various commands and dependencies etc that may take one/many days or use an llm to make it within 30 min?
No brainer
Not minutes. In best case scenario it is hours, in worst it is years to infinity.
You are also not taking into account the survivorship bias. You only see people who couldn't fix their system with AI and need further help. But you are not seeing a huge number of beginners (recently a big influx of those), who were successful in fixing problems using AI the vast majority of time.
Nowadays, there is no good reason to use a simple Search engine to find solutions by manually browsing all the possible links. Just ask Phind/Perplexity/others to explain the problem, give the solution and provide verifiable links one can check to validate.