I tend to disagree, I do have several devices running Linux and with all of them I had issues after install (standby not working, swap partition not recognized, sound only playing on half of the speakers, issues with monitor scaling etc…) Im fine with it and like the journey, but there are still quirks.

Probably Im in an in-between-world where I do have some tricky use-cases, but missing the full know-how to do it…

thing which makes it not normy-usable, are the documentations: for windows issues you can find DAU-conform guides to solve something. Mostly on “official” (with probably too many ads) pages.

For Linux it’s usually a rabbit hole of official documentations (which dont show all the options), forums, reddit pages, where some guy tells another guy to add xyz to the config file…without telling which file and where in the file. Why is this command not listed in the documentation? What does that command actually do?

It has gotten much better, but there’s still some way to go

Unfortunately, the availability of “one time purchase” is not a guarantee anymore as more and more devs have killed existing versions sold with perpetual licences.

What helps a lot for apps with multiple config files:

• if you tell the user to “add code xy to the config file” : tell me which file. is it the main config file? the one of the reverse proxy etc.?
• provide a sensible example library of the config structure. For example: duting the implementation of an importer for beancount I was struggling with what goes where. The example structure was really, really helpful.
• also, if you have configurations which allow different options: TELL ME THE OPTIONS! If I get an error during startup, that for config.foo the value “bar” is not allowed, I need a list of options somehwere, so many hours lost to find out what I can write to config.foo

Probably a bit more polished UX (especially for not too tech-savy people)

but I’d say the biggest difference is integrated multidevice support, either via their cloud or selfhosted…

In some Linux distributions it blocks you from installing system packages via pip, often there are then packages which can be installed via your distros package manager.

With arch for example:

sudo pacman -S python-'package'

Or, as others mentioned using venv.