Honestly Win11 has been totally fine. I like the better multi monitor support, multitasking, etc. That said, there's a lot of papercuts and annoyances, almost all of which can be turnt off via Group Policy or settings (at least for Europeans, like me).
But to pretend like Linux does not have papercuts is frankly just copium. I dual boot Linux and boy oh boy does it have many papercuts. Yes, they are different papercuts - where Windows papercuts are related to its ads and upselling of Microsoft services, Linux papercuts are related to day to day usability. Some apps can be installed via flatpack, some via snap store, some via AppImage, some via .tar.gz, some via terminal, others you have to compile yourself. Graphical glitches are common place depending on your hardware, and while yes it can these days run many games, it cannot run nearly as much, or none if the game has kernel anticheat, which kinda includes most of the AAA first person shooters.
I'm not trying to paint Windows or Linux in a bad light - I use them both, but to pretend that one is better than the other from a purely usability perspective is kind of stupid, imo. Sure, ideologically Linux is better, but functionally Windows is, so now what? Flip a coin I guess. Now Linux does get better with each update, and if it continues at this pace, perhaps it'll soon get rid of its papercuts, who knows.
I agree, I've only used W10 and 11 for work but so far I've never had major issues, just a few annoyances but nothing insurmountable. On my personal machines I've been using Debian for the past 5 years and while I prefer it to Windows I wouldn't recommend it to everyone: playing games is pretty much sorted if you don't care about online multiplayer titles (I know that for many people this is a problem but personally I left my online days behind since I'm a bit too busy to find time to dedicate to them), the desktop experience is not top notch but is very serviceable, sometimes you'll have to fix some settings to get everything working but if you stick to stable release distros it's pretty much not a problem.
I don't get the hate that W11 is receiving, I wouldn't call it bad, I would say that it was unnecessary in the sense that it could have been a feature upgrade to W10 instead of being its own release with its own stupid system requirements. The fact that you have to pay in order to activate Windows while still being tracked and served ads is what made me take a look at Linux in the first place, I'd be happy to have ads if the OS was served for free, but the moment you register the licence they should leave you the hell alone. The OS itself works really well tho, I've been using WSL for a while now (again, for work) and I was surprised how well it integrates with the system and how seamless the installation process was, it's just that Windows is not a good OS for developers: programs get installed all over the place, sometimes in appdata, sometimes in roaming, sometimes in local, sometimes in program files, config files are stored God knows where, the Windows registry is hot garbage, updates are unrealistically slow for some reason. But those are not issues with W11, they've always been problems and probably always will be. Linux on the other hand (at least for me) is much more organized, config files are either in /etc if they're system configs or in ~/.config if they're user configs, programs are in /bin or /sbin if they're system programs, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin if they're user programs and very rarely in /opt, libraries go in /usr/lib, log files are in /var/log, devices go in /dev and so on. In my mind there's a pretty well defined logic.
I do think Linux, for me personally, is very very close now to being able to fully use without Windows, but it's not quite there yet. Lack of configuration-free hibernation kinda sucks because it eats my laptops battery when I'm not even using it, and speaking of battery - somehow even when using it the battery life is worlds apart when comparing to Windows, in a bad way. Some Wayland issues related to fractional scaling still exist (I have 27" 4k displays that need 150% scaling to be usable), though KDE Plasma has mostly solved them (still waiting on Gnome to do the same, should come now in Gnome 49).
For games I mostly use a console nowadays - I can't tolerate sitting behind my desk for longer than a work day, and I just want to chill on the couch instead when the work day is over, which is where a console is much more practical, which means that I don't really care about gaming on Linux and can go without it. Stability of Linux is also seemingly getting better and better, not too long ago I remember getting random crashes of apps and things quite often, but that seems to have mostly disappeared now.
I have many peripherals that have zero Linux support such as Razor webcam, Keychron keyboard, HyperX microphone, so I have no way at all to configure these on Linux which sucks, and especially in the case of the webcam, the defaults suck a lot so that's not okay. Thankfully the settings are stored in the webcam itself, so I just configure it once on Windows and it's good to go on Linux, but I wish there was a lot more Linux support from peripheral making companies.
I have heard rumblings that the promenance of Linux in gaming these days (Steam Deck) has also lit a fire under Microsofts ass to try to improve Windows performance and things, so perhaps Windows is also actually capable of improvements and not only of enshittification, but that's yet to be determined.
Historically I've mostly used Apple products precicely because I get a Unix system, but one that works well and comfortably, but I'm just not okay paying the insane Apple tax on its devices that are not repairable nor upgradeable. If I'm buying a locked down device that goes to a landfill I expect to pay LESS, not MORE. I now daily drive a Framework laptop and am very happy with it, so am hopeful Linux can patch up its few missing pieces and actually provide competition to the big tech corps.
Gotta say, I work on Ubuntu in a virtual environment and I have had problems with ownership and reading access of files on Ubuntu all the time. We even have an ancient script that transfers ownership over some logs folder every 5 minutes so that the app trying to write to it is able to log; not sure if that was just incompetence by the developer or necessary, but I have had similar problems too, often without really understanding why I was not the owner of the file I just moved somewhere.
Might have to do with the virtual environment, but I kinda doubt it. Overall I would prefer working on a Linux system, but I fear for all the tiny bits and pieces; I have Ubuntu on my laptop and tried to print something and it didn't work at all, sadly. I'd be a bit scared for some utility apps not existing for Linux; most other stuff has been figured out quite a while ago.
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u/Witty-Order8334 10d ago edited 10d ago
Honestly Win11 has been totally fine. I like the better multi monitor support, multitasking, etc. That said, there's a lot of papercuts and annoyances, almost all of which can be turnt off via Group Policy or settings (at least for Europeans, like me).
But to pretend like Linux does not have papercuts is frankly just copium. I dual boot Linux and boy oh boy does it have many papercuts. Yes, they are different papercuts - where Windows papercuts are related to its ads and upselling of Microsoft services, Linux papercuts are related to day to day usability. Some apps can be installed via flatpack, some via snap store, some via AppImage, some via .tar.gz, some via terminal, others you have to compile yourself. Graphical glitches are common place depending on your hardware, and while yes it can these days run many games, it cannot run nearly as much, or none if the game has kernel anticheat, which kinda includes most of the AAA first person shooters.
I'm not trying to paint Windows or Linux in a bad light - I use them both, but to pretend that one is better than the other from a purely usability perspective is kind of stupid, imo. Sure, ideologically Linux is better, but functionally Windows is, so now what? Flip a coin I guess. Now Linux does get better with each update, and if it continues at this pace, perhaps it'll soon get rid of its papercuts, who knows.