[ghusto]

> I subconsciously tell myself 'If I just used Linux, I could be like them!'.

Your intuition was right.

Learning to fix issues in Linux gives you long-term transferable valuable skills in troubleshooting and far-reaching knowledge. Learning to fix Microsoft's latest fubar gives you nothing, unless you're in corporate IT fixing other people's computers.

You'll become more confident and niggles won't bother you that much.

[graceful6800]

You know what? I think this is dead on. Like a lot of us, I grew up in the 90s tinkering with Windows regestries and internals. That knowledge only ever really helped me with Windows systems, and it really only carried me up to Windows 7/10. After that, it felt like debugging an opaque blob, just pulling levers until something different happened and trying a blind binary search across random behaviors.

But since Linux is open, you can observe it as a holistic system. You don't need to-- and likely shouldn't try to understand it as a whole, but you can follow a thread all the way down if you want to. If the audio system really pisses you off, you do have the power to follow it and fully understand it.

Thinking about systems and how many different pieces fit together to make a cohesive whole is honestly the vast majority of my life and work as an engineer. It's a fundamental skill that doesn't seem very common outside the realm of nerds who like picking apart complex problems. But it's certainly my most heavily used skill, and in large part it's because I got into Linux as a teenager in an era where Linux was absolutely not meant for teenagers to be daily driving on a new laptop with no drivers.

[0x073]

As Linux moves faster than windows I disagree. Systemd, wayland and flatpak resetting my skills in this areas completely windows 11 is still more or less the same.

Additional the UI behavior also more often changed than windows e.g gnome 2 to newer versions many core apps are more minimal/less functions and yes I just can fork and use the old behavior as open source but then my pc is more about fixing issues like under windows.

[ghusto]

High churn stuff in the Linux world is take-it-or-leave-it. You can go without and still end up aquiring skills that you use 20 years from now.

I haven't used Linux as a desktop since well before Systemd days. When I picked it up a few weeks ago (for a desktop), I had no trouble applying the troubleshooting skills I acquired 20 years ago to fix issues. In contrast, I had to drive someone's Windows laptop a while ago and I didn't know what I was looking at, never mind fixing anything.