I got scared and fed up with Windows 10 and retreated to Mac OS for 5 years until I had a fiasco of a time trying to upgrade my mac pro to Mojave. During the time I used Mac OS I became familiar with Bash and some Unix ways of doing things. I found Bash to be really useful and powerful compared to the command interpreter in Windows.

I had a big interest in virtualization and along the years of using the mac I tried all kinds of linux servers in VMs for research and self education. I never did like ubuntu's standard desktop. I tried them all. After the Mojave fiasco I thought I'd buy a mid range computer with the latest Nvidia card (partially just because I could do that and I could not do that with mac). My mac was on the cliff edge of planned obsolescence anyway (Apple decides for you when it is time to upgrade).

Long story short it is indeed difficult to get used to Linux. You have to develop a survival attitude first. I found that changing one thing like fstab could make the system unbootable. Sudo can ruin your system fast if you are not careful and an expert. I did not want to be either careful or an expert just to get work done. So to survive my poor administration skills I found I could lean on a program called TimeShift which works a lot like timemachine for Mac. Its really like the best parts of Time Machine combined with Windows' restore points. Anytime I am about to install something new or tweak something that has the potential for causing a disaster I take a few minutes to make a snapshot via TimeMachine/Rsync. I can always go back, and if I really mess everything up I can boot into a live cd and run TimeShift from that.

TimeShift unfortunately does not do home directories very well but there is another gui/cli program called BackInTime that I use for the Time Machine like solution for my home directory and a couple others.

I use rotating backups. I have backups on a big 8 TB external drive and then I rsync that to a copy drive and leave that one offline in case my main machine gets poisoned by ransomware.

So thats my survival technique..

But is it worth it? It took me about a month to figure out what to do for disasters and bad configurations and I spent about a month deciding what "distro" to use. I tried all flavors of Ubuntu, and tried Mint but settled on Debian with the Cinnamon desktop. I got to say I really like cinnamon, it is very ram hungry but ram is cheap so it isn't a problem for me. It supports high dpi (well 2x at least). The file manager is great, it even has ftp built into it. Context menus work good, right click to open as root, or open a terminal. Cinnamon is a classic take on well established principles in UI design that were perfected over a decade ago, instead of changing things just to change them.

But so what if there are no good applications! I have a multimedia background so that was my interest. I used to use Photoshop cs6 for years but Adobe is too incompetent and greedy to rely on for the future. My photo editing needs have not changed much since I bought it in 2008 so Gimp isn't too far behind what I owned since then. I just tried using lightwave recently but it fails to work even in a VM so I decided to learn Blender. I could not justify purchasing Modo even though it is available for Linux. Main thing is Muscle memory. The proof is in the pudding for art programs. If people are doing amazing things with it, the software has merit. So I have a lot of optimism that I can still get some nice work done.

Visual studio code on linux is really nice. There were some snafus I had to get around but when it is setup its terrific.

I never used Microsoft office at home and my office requirements are simple. But if I did need it, I could use Office 365 on a web browser I presume. I just need the occasional word processor and spreadsheet.

Video editing on Linux is still a sore point but I like Olive editor and I am trying to support it with Patreon. It feels a lot like an early verion of Sonic Foundry Vegas. I in no way will ever miss Adobe Premiere

Debian has tens of thousands of software packages that are just a apt install away. That is a gigantic value. I don't have to worry about Window's malware as much as linux malware. I don't have to upgrade my hardware according to Apple's schedules and demands. I have access to the latest or near to the latest Nvidia hardware.

Desktop computing today is a disaster. I hate windows, I can't afford to waste money on inferior hardware and pray that the designers don't forsake my professional platform for consumerish goals. Debian isn't the only or the best linux perhaps. But if I didn't have Linux I would just give up on computing entirely and work at a factory or something.