Windows has problems, no doubt. But in terms of surfacing functionality in the GUI, it does it a lot more thoroughly than Linux does.
Not to mention having to know things like what my window manager is, am i running “Gnome” or “KDE” before i download an app in a software store. And on and on. Linux is so much less friendly.
Every print dialogue in Windows, they all pretty much have all the same basic options, called the same things, so that inconsistency isn’t that big a deal.
My experience has been filing a bug on a FOSS app, and having it almost immediately closed because it was a dupe of a bug reported ten years prior which remained open and unfixed. I’m not a programmer, so it’s just, “Well, I guess I’m out of luck on this ever being fixed.”
I’ve done a fair bit of UI/UX work in my career, so I have a lot of sympathy for naive users, and FOSS devs mainly do not. If there’s some functionality that is only exposed with a command line parameter, well, that’s good enough. Read the man page.
Linux users are self-selected for increased tech savvy, so they’ll say, “Yes, it’s the best,” but really, the Linux community is still extremely forgiving of terrible user interface, and value things like FOSS over things like apps with robust, accessible feature sets. Linux users are happy to fix functionality holes with writing a shell script, and think nothing of it: it’s not a lack in the OS, it’s a testament to the power and flexibility of the OS!
I’ve used a few flavors of Linux, and their GUIs are almost uniformly terrible, only partially functional without using a terminal. For instance, they have various software and OS update apps located in semi-random menu locations, and none of them work as well as “sudo apt update / sudo apt upgrade / sudo apt full-upgrade / sudo apt autoremove”. And there’s a huge part of the Linux community that thinks this is great and not a problem at all.
Windows hides the ugly sausage-making from typical users, and forces IT folks and other developers to wrangle with it. Linux makes IT/dev lives easier while making typical users somewhat hamstrung if they’re scared of a CLI. So, if that has meaning for you with regards to the question “Is Linux as good as we think it is?” then you may have your answer.
The name holds it back more than you know. No EP or AD wants to put “The GIMP” on their software list for a project. I have to have a conversation with someone ensuring we’re good on all our licenses, and they ask, “What is this GIMP thing?” Answering it makes me sound like an unprofessional jackass. The company would rather just pay Adobe.
Requires a constitutional amendment, which, in case it isn’t obvious, will not happen, as it will require the yea votes of states that currently wield outsized power under the current system.