My first Linux desktop in 1995 was Slackware Linux installed off a cd-rom inside the pages of The Linux Bible. I ran Blackbox window manager and loved every minute of it.
I became a strident anti-windows Linux propagandist, and spent untold hours configuring and compiling everything.
Many years later I recall being in a room with 3 other devs who sat down and got to work while I spent 30 minutes getting my wifi recompiled to support whatever the AP was using that I’d never seen before. The guys paying my hourly rate glared at me over their MacBooks.
A year later at another contract they put an old MacBook in front of me, and by the end of the day I had ordered my own personal one too and never looked back. Everything just worked. I had been trying to do music production on my own in Linux too. Switched to Mac and instantly my results massively improved.
A year ago I built my first gaming rig in a long long time and gave Linux on the desktop another shot. I tried valiantly. I’ve been a hacker and professional programmer for 25 years. I just couldn’t deal with all the brokenness. I paid for windows and enjoyed using the applications I was there for.
Linux is amazing, has dominated the world, and I use it every day all day in my work. I just won’t waste my time on desktop until I try again in 10 years.
I started with Windows, in 94, because in France it was the reference system for work, then I stayed on it for a long time because of games and Office, although I used Linux for servers. In the end I'm glad I avoided Macs altogether, I probably would have spent more money, learned less and done less computing.
Then around 2016 I tried Linux on desktop and it gradually became the only system I use, for development, games and work. For 2 years now, I haven't had any issue with games, the performance is even better than on Windows.
I have hardly touched a Mac (mostly trying it out in Apple shops) and used Windows almost daily in the workplace.
I have been full-time GNU/Linux at home, though... since around 2005. Other than the learning curve + trial-and-errors, I hardly have any issues with networking or even nvidia cards.
There was one time when the wifi did not work. From memory, I think the kernel version I was using did not support it. Other than that, I cannot say I share the same issues.
In the early days I tried many distros. Started with Ubuntu. I even tried Slackware. Today, I mostly stick with Debian but like to keep an eye on GuixOS.
There was one contract job I took which I used Debian exclusively. Everyone else was using Macs. I did not have any loss by comparison other than converting some videos for a web application. I was missing some video formats. For development, I had emacs, apache, etc... no problem. They had their vim, or objective-C, for their applications, etc.
