Fucking up my UEFI on my laptop, making it difficult to boot into Linux.

Undoing that.

Got a long one. I've gone back and forth a few times (I've landed on a dual-boot Windows 10 and Arch setup, maining Arch) (btw) and my biggest takeaway is this:

Mainstream Linux distros, like Mint, do have admittedly very polished basic experiences. The problem is, though, is that it breaks down as soon as you introduce it to unique use-cases or hardware features.

Linux, specifically stable distros like Mint, are already ready for mainstream use for people who use it for basic stuff like email, web browsing, desktop social media like Facebook, and so on. It's also very usable for gaming, as we saw with Steam Deck, but still has issues primarily with adoption.

But if you have for example, a 2-in-1 laptop or a VR setup, things break down very quick. I had to configure my 2-in-1 manually and not everything works still, and VR is a joke if you don't have a Vive or Index, and even that's iffy. SteamVR is still extremely buggy and missing features.

Linux is, by design, configurable and open. This is both its greatest strength and weakness, because it allows users to set up their systems how they want, but only if they know how to. A truly "user-friendly" distro is simply not possible if you retain the configurability, which Valve knows, and is why SteamOS is locked down the way it is. This model is growing in popularity but it's not quite here yet.

At the end of the day, I still use it despite these shortcomings because I feel it's important. I should be able to look at the code and know what my machine is doing, and trust that it respects my rights and freedoms. This is why Linux, and maybe BSD, have to win. But for now, I still have a drive with Windows 10 because it's just simply not a full experience yet, and that's okay. For now

I like to use parsec to play games with my friends. When I found out Linux could not host parsec, that was a bummer for me. If parsec had compatibility to host in Linux I'd switch back immediately.

I've used Ubuntu as at least a dual booted daily driver since 2016 and have also discussed with friends and family about what they liked and hated about it when they have used it, how they use their computer and whether they would swap. Here are some observations from that:

Hardware Issues and stability: For the most part, I've not really had to deal with hardware issues outside of trying to get NVidia graphics cards to play nice with everything else. However, I often have weird system stability issues or just plain quality of life. E.g. 2-in-1 decides randomly when put into sleep mode to flip the screen to a random orientation which I then have to go into settings to revert back. I'm used to buggy and annoying software, but for a lot of people this is a complete killer. Similarly, while I love the diverse options within Linux, having so much diversity means that troubleshooting and testing is so much more complex and you will usually have to go over multiple answers in order to solve your problem making it much harder to get into and use reliably

MS Office: This one tends to be the largest reason in my experience for people not going over to Linux. For a lot of people this is their main use for a computer and the fact that it is not available on Linux is a deal breaker. I've tried the online version and it is just not a viable alternative (nor is any cloud option). Similarly LibreOffice is a lot better than nothing, but the UI feel like it came out of the 90s, Latex is faster and easier to use than the math input, I never have been able to get referencing to work, drawing tools are lacking if they even exist at all. Opening office documents breaks all the formatting and looks awful, etc etc.

Games and other windows software: While I think value has done wonderful work in encouraging developers of games to support Linux and Proton does work quite well, you never quite know how a game will perform on Linux and if it will even work, whereas on Windows you can guarantee it has been tested and will work well. Similarly for other software: Will this work on Wine or Crossover? Maybe or maybe not but it's a bit hard to swap if you are paying large amounts for software just to find out it cannot run on Linux.

A reason to move: I think Linux will always remain fairly niche as for most people there just isn't a good enough reason to move over from Windows or Mac. These platforms already offer them everything they want in a computer in an easy to use and polished way. For most people, they really don't care that windows is constantly spying and with ads everywhere already, what is a few more ads or that the cost of a Mac and is absolutely extortionate. Moving across would require a whole bunch of troubleshooting and learning how to do just about everything all over again and that would require a really good reason to do which Linux doesn't (and possibly can't ) provide and MS and Apple haven't done anything stupid enough to offer.

I bought Skyrim for PC so that I could give mods a try. Wine was garbage at the time, and I wanted to use my computer to game. So, Windows it was.

Thanks to proton, I was able to switch to arch on my desktop for the last few years before my power supply died. At least I'm pretty sure that's what's wrong with it. I've been staving off insanity for a few months now with my steam deck. I got a dock for it a couple weeks ago, so I'm technically running an arch desktop again even if it is KDE.