I've been using all major OSes for a long time. I have the most experience with Windows, I've been using it since Windows 95 and stopped at Windows 8. I've been using macOS for about a decade and Linux (in total) for about 5 years. I have started with Mandrake, moved to Mandriva, spent over a year on Ubuntu and recently I've been using Fedora as my daily driver. And honestly, I'm running out of patience.
Few days ago I ran into the gpu driver issue. Long story short, Steam games started to crash on directx issue. Games that were working few weeks ago. I admit, I was mocking around with GPU drivers in order to make Podman containers to access the GPU. But I did the fresh diver install and it didn't solved the issue (also my GPU was not found despite all commands showed it was there). I don't have much spare time and I would like to play a game, I used to play before, without spending hours/days fixing issue that didn't exist last time I played it.
But it's not only about games. I have two laptops, both running Fedora 40 KDE spin. Some time ago on one laptop the power widget stopped working. It shows "no power profiles found on a device". But when I delete the widget and add it again, it works fine.
Other issue is with the general look and feel. There are many apps that don't follow the OS look - lack of window borders/shadow, random icons that don't match the system, flatpacks having issues accessing system configuration (e.g. vscodium not recognising zsh as a default shell).
Few more problems I had:
- on GNOME, some extensions where crashing without any reason
- some apps don't respect desktop scaling
- bluetooth randomly dropping connections
- syncing files between devices is always a struggle
- you never know what's going to break when installing updates
If you want a Linux like experience use macOS, and if you want to play games, stick to Windows.
Computers are not a good choice for "regular users". Get them a locked-down iPhone and be done with it.
What you are describing is not a situation unique to Linux - or even Windows. "Software is hard and it sometimes breaks". My Windows 11 laptop that I use for work and to which I have made exactly zero modifications sometimes doesn't recognize when I've connected external speakers. And I can't disable hyper-v despite following all of the instructions. This is a corporate provisioned and managed system and simple stuff just doesn't work.
X% of all things have bugs. Your mistake is in thinking that the percentage that you're seeing are somehow special or related to the particular OS you're running at the time. The classic "the grass is greener" fallacy. This is pretty evidenced also by the fact that you're a classic "distro hopper" whose always looking for the perfect system rather than taking the time to understand the problems and deal with them as they come.
I'd be careful of pushing the narrative about computers not being a good choice for regular users. I'm going to channel a bit of Stallman and say that that's how we end up without The Right To Read
That's fair - I'm not saying users shouldn't be able or allowed to use computers, but just that it's been proven over and over again that most people simply don't get computers. They should always have the option to learn what they can though.