Fewer years than I've been using windows. 20 years of Linux, 25 years of Windows. I personally think the stigma that Linux has is due to the past. I would agree that it was difficult at points in the past.

Yup, and I've spent hours troubleshooting dumb fucking issues on Linux servers that often end up with me just blasting it away and starting again because the further I get into it, the more shit I find broken.

Linux is stable and repeatable, that's why it's great for servers. But I've wasted way too many hours of my life troubleshooting dumb problems that shouldn't even be problems and often I just say fuck it and rebuild it. I don't want to do that on my desktop thanks. Especially because sometimes I do random mindless shit. Look how Linus uninstalled his UI because he didn't know any better. The last time I uninstalled the entire UI on windows was when converting a Server 2012 machine to server core.

But I think the bottom line is, let people use what they want.

My friend only uses arch and there's a few games we want to play together but it doesn't work on Linux, there's also plenty of times we have to wait while he's troubleshooting shit when we want to play games.

He's an SRE with about 22 years of experience. It's not even a skill issue.

We often jokingly say "have you tried using windows?" or "this wouldn't happen on windows" and dumb shit like that. But he uses Arch and wr all accept that and that there are some issues and the things said are in jest. He sometimes hits us with the same shit. But overall we respect that we want different things from our PCs and I do enough of this shit at work for me to want to do anything at home besides click on some UI shit and things just work.

Its okay to be different and it's okay if you use Linux and I use windows, bashing on about how bad it is isn't winning any friends or favor and the general toxicity with this shit puts a lot of people off of even trying Linux.