I've taken the dive to running Linux again recently. Not on all my machines, just on the older gaming laptop which I set up with a bigger SSD and Ubuntu Studio. I realized that I was right on the precipice of actually having an entirely open media creation app stack I could see myself using(Blender, Inkscape, Krita, plus Syncthing to move data from other devices), and therefore could have a media making box running Linux - so I booted up on a freshly flashed USB, tested my tablet, it worked. All the hardware has worked, although the laptop keyboard is doing the "shift and pageup acts like numpad 9" thing, which I haven't looked into yet - but isn't too important since I am gonna use external keebs. Then add in that Renoise works and supports plugins - maybe not all the commercial plugins, but in exchange you get hundreds of LV2 plugins with no separate install process, and I was sold on the concept. In this limited role, I wouldn't run into problems related to software I wasn't using, and therefore it wouldn't develop into that general frustration with Linux as an all-purpose desktop.

There are still flaws - the keyboard thing, and then Pulseaudio and JACK not getting along well so if I want to listen to a reference on YouTube while Renoise is open, I have to fiddle with the JACK session management to plug one into the other - but even that one has been addressed with the Ubuntu Studio UI having a feature just for that use case. And I have two installs of some of the media apps because I have a version from snap plus a version from apt. It's like, yeah, still rough edges, but these are comparable rough edges to what I see on contemporary Windows, and I'm in a better position to fix them.

I've actually been helping to troubleshoot a Windows issue for my mom while I set this up: "sometimes only the right side of my earphones (her term) plays sound, it's been happening for months". At first we thought this was a connection issue and after determining that the headphones were not faulty, replaced the speakers she plugs into(which she likes using because of the physical volume knob). Then it still happened afterwards and I finally caught on to the idea that it was software, and after poking around saw that there was preinstalled audio enhancement crap on top of the Realtek driver doing auto detection when the jack is plugged in - just poking around with the software, it started working, perhaps because doing that updated a config file somewhere. Perhaps it originally started because of a Windows update. It's all mystery meat, so who knows. For now I've advised her to turn the speakers off and then on again if it happens, but I might look into removing the bloatware too. I did have her temporarily on Linux at one point just running off a USB stick when the OS drive on her old machine failed. She loved it, all she ever did was watch YouTube and check email and it was perfect for months. Then Dad got her a new computer, and she's now a bit resistant to using Linux again because of her Word documents. But she also hates that Word has cloud features(even though she does nothing to properly archive her documents and is an obvious candidate to benefit from cloud sync). Perhaps I will broach the question of using a Word alternative if the computer issues keep up.

Bottom line, I do still think of Linux desktops as a tinkering space, but increasingly a viable one in a professional setting if you aren't working against a fixed standard(like an artist that needs Adobe CC or a grandma that needs Word) and can use tinkering to your advantage to hack out a custom workflow.