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> OSS usually lacks polish and only works well if your workflow is sufficiently similar to the developers' workflow.

On the polish side, you're not entirely wrong, but it's debatable. On the UI side, most of the applications doesn't have the level of polish of paid applications however, some of the open source software is extremely capable and stable at the foundation level.

Amarok can handle ~350GB music archive with its metadata without even sneezing but, JuK shivers and dies when encounters the archive (both open source). Eclipse is a very robust piece of software while its UI is old, dated, and relatively ugly (I like it as it is though). Similarly Digikam is probably the best large photo management application out there with some very nifty features. There are not many multi-TB capable photo libraries out there. All of these software is free software. Also, Darktable, while is not the best, I use it more than my many paid and expensive photography applications because its tools and results are so good. These are the ones I use regularly. Not any of these applications force you to use it in a particular way because many people have provided feedback to it and they have large development teams and user bases.

I think we can say that software without big user bases force the workflow of the developer because, developer(s) cannot think any other way. Genuinely asking, can you provide some examples to such software? I may be biased since I'm using this thing 15+ years and may have lost some perspective, honestly.

> Linux is great if all you're doing is developing software with popular tools/languages,

I want to politely disagree with this. I'm an old school C++ developer who uses Eclipse and takes some photos and postprocess/edit them with purely free software and, I think it works better than most Mac tools that I paid substantial money.

> but if you want to use your computer like a normal person for a change, it's pretty bad. I've consistently had issues with basic functionality like HiDPI scaling, trackpad and wifi drivers, power management, and just general polish.

I didn't recently install Linux to any modern laptop built in ~2 years but, I have an HP EliteBook 850 G2 at office. This thing is running Debian since day one and almost everything (Trackpad, WiFi, power management) is working out of the box (I didn't compile anything or fiddle under the hood) and it runs solid 7 hours before its battery depletes. In your defence the fingerprint reader was unsupported at that time so I didn't fiddle with it and since I was not doing any hard work, I disabled its discrete graphics. I only reboot it when I install a new kernel to it.

My office desktop has a 2K display and, everything scales on XFCE4 and GTK out of the box. I didn't do do any tweaking. On the polish side, out of the box DEs are all ugly. A good theme and a good wallpaper makes them top notch I think. I personally use XFCE4 on my desktop and KDE on my laptop (and home desktop) and, I can say that, KDE can boost productivity of an average user 3-4x just with included search & indexing facilities and usability features.

> That's not to say that Windows and macOS are amazing and perfect - they aren't. But they're a whole lot better than Linux for normal use.

Nothing is perfect. Neither Linux, Windows or macOS. they are all tools. I love Linux because I believe what it stands for and I can work blazing fast with it but, I also have a Mac and support my families Windows systems. macOS is the most time-efficient system out there. Linux with KDE is a very close second. Well, windows is the same experience for me since Windows 95 (productivity wise, not stability).

Progress is only possible if we're honest to each other and ourselves. I'm not a Linux zealot and if I sounded like one, I'm genuinely sorry.