[coconut08]

you are correct about fractional scaling being suboptimal and there are a few quirks here and there but linux has become largely usable at this point. most of the criticisms you have made about linux are due to inexperience and not being familiar with it rather than being fundamental problems with it. If instead of spending the last x years of your life daily driving windows or macos you had instead spent that time daily driving linux you would have all of the understanding infrastructure built up around linux instead and these would be non problems. I use fedora with gnome and I don't install any extensions or do any tweaking or workarounds as you say.

I know this is true because i'm a non developer, non power user (though still relatively technical) who has been using linux since 2006 and it works just fine. Not only that my dad has been happily setup using linux since around 2014 and he is as non technical as they come.

To really go in on this point I bought a macbook pro when the m1 devices came out and the experience you have with linux I have with macos. It's the worst operating system I have ever used. You complain about linux having bad window management but macos has basically no window management. you double click the top bar and depending on the software sometimes it will maximize, sometimes it will pull the window all the way down the screen and sometimes it will do nothing at all. You drag the window to the top or to the side and nothing happens at all. Window management on macos is so bad that most people say that you need to install external tools to mac it even half way usable. Even when you do its still less performant and buggier than what gnome or windows offers out of the box. You say macos needs no setup, but I spent 10's of hours desperately trying to make the workflow and ux of macos not be a horrible experience for me. Everything from no tools and trying to work within its paradigm, simple window management tools even going so far as to trying yabai and none of them felt right to me.

Now that said I would bet a person who has spent a decade daily driving macos probably has internalized the ins and outs and quirks relating to macos and wouldn't find it nearly as problematic. Most of the issues people have with linux are much less problems with linux and much more a lack of workflow understanding that they haven't built up but have built up around other operating systems instead.

The main exception being that there are some proprietary tools that are pretty explicitly not supported on linux which require windows or macos.