Windows users don't think about or even realize that other operating systems exist

I put off the switch for ages due to similar reasons, tried once that failed horribly. Later had a motherboard failure and Microsoft showed their whole arse. Reactivated the dual boot, channeled my inner old woman energy, solved the video issue and have been happily tinkering with the smaller issues as they come up. Still playing whack a mole, but now I'm getting things the way I want them, instead of disabling things I'm being told I want by some corporate nutcase.

And hilariously, I am spending less time maintaining Linux than I did for Windows.

You're a honorary member of the cool kids!

Mint gets tossed around because it's pretty forgiving. It just shits me i have to rewrite udev for usb key removal. Its the 21st fucking century, no one "dismounts" usb any more

Kubuntu is another one that just works. Hubs hasn't has problems and he's definitely not hardware wired

I was prepared to go through hell when I switched recently, since Windows was making me so mad. Everyone told me my graphics card wouldn’t work, gaming would be hard, etc. Then Mint just worked. 🤷

I did have to troubleshoot why my speakers were muted on startup, but it was worth it. Oh, and volume up defaults to 5% instead of the standard 2%, that took some fixing. Games just work, though.

Don't despair, Vespair,

I like your vibe btw;

Being on the penguin side,

having a sharper mind,

does not garantee.

Let me assure thee,

for plenty of us,

are plenty dumb.

Linux/GNU BTQI+

I keep my dislike of Linux to myself.

Clearly.

When I complain about Linux it's in the hopes that some nerd will come along and provide actual solutions to the problems I'm having with it in an effort to prove me wrong. Unfortunately mostly I just get the "That's normal you just have to deal with it" kind of answers.

I see you have not been graced by madthumbs and the linuxsucks community. It's so hilariously stupid I've got it blocked so I can't link, but that should be enough to find it if you like.

Oh it does happen. I've had people tell me linux isn't a desktop OS multiple times and they listed ludicrous reasons that either are completely irrelevant or not true for like 10 years.

I've also had people tell me that PHP is a shit programming language and the reasons for them hating it were all outdated for like years or even decades. Once had some kid at a university I gave a lecture tell me "PHP doesn't even have classes wtf how are you coding in that shit?" my man classes were introduced in PHP 5 which was released 22 YEARS ago, you weren't even BORN when PHP5 was released.

Some people just want to hate something. Mostly if it's something that's "competing" with what they're using. And that's especially true in the tech world.

Windows users complain and meme all the time about the linux fandom of the fediverse, which is what I assume OP was referring to.

I'll openly admit that I've made comments that could be interpreted as this comic. That said, I don't hate Linux or look to "dunk on" people, I just see a lot of really uninformed takes about Windows being tossed around and can't help but try to correct people.

Like someone said something abysmally wrong and very confidently, I asked them when the last time they used Windows, and they said it had been over a decade. I get that people pull that sort of thing online all the time, but when I see it it bothers me.

So I end up making the occasional comment defending Windows from blatant misinformation in a Linux thread, or insisting that the Linux experience still isn't as smooth as it needs to be for non-tinkerers.

Usually someone will pop up and call me uninformed or something, which is rich given I've been casually messing with Linux since before USB thumb drives were ubiquitous, and I have a little more than a decade of career experience in IT support and systems admin/engineering/architecture neck deep in a Microsoft environment.

I love Linux and open source software. I want it all to succeed. But Windows does have its place, it is valid for certain use cases, and is not anywhere as awful as it's made out to be. Especially if you have the tech chops to switch to Linux, de-crappify-ing Windows is of comparable difficulty and I have not had any of the supposedly unavoidable Windows issues people regularly cite in around a decade.

Switching to Linux is a more than valid choice, but I hate to see it happen only because someone isn't getting good troubleshooting information for a Windows issue.

I also have a seriously hard time keeping my mouth shut when Linux users claim daily driving a Linux Distro as a smooth process. It is leagues better than it used to be. Mind bogglingly so, and getting smoother every day. But it is still inevitable that you will hit a point of major friction and have to get deep into tinkering, and you will still likely need to make concessions in terms of hardware feature support.

I'm no stranger to tinkering. No stranger to compiling things myself, or even troubleshooting an error all the way down to a specific line of source code and making a PR to correct it.

But I've reached a point in my life where I don't want to be spending hours troubleshooting things that in my mind should "just work". I want more control than Apple offers, and less tinkering than Linux tends to expect.

So I keep up with the Linux space, use it on VMs personally semi-regularly, and maybe once a year give it a serious try as a daily driver. For now, stripped down/customized Windows installs on my gear is more than good enough.

I think the majority of Windows users know you can buy an Apple or a Windows, and that's all they know or care to know. The percentage of Windows users who know enough about Linux to decide they don't like it has got to be pretty low.

On the other hand, most Linux users know the other systems well enough to have a strong preference. This meme should be reversed.

I find that I just don't really know what I'm doing half the time, and find it difficult to find help at a genuinely practical level. It's either total beginner "This is called the terminal" or assumes you already know exactly what you're doing. Like the installation instructions for something I was looking at was literally "usual cmake build" with absolutely zero elaboration what that means. The other thing I don't like is when you look up how to do something and the answers are always "copy and paste this code" without explaining what any of it is or what it does.

Something else I'm still not at all sure about is where you're supposed to install things. Like at least on Windows I know you just bang everything in "Program files", but now there's bin, etc, home, usr, and whatever else and don't know where you're supposed to actually put things.