I consider myself a geek, a fairly advanced user of software and a software developer.
I have been trying different versions of Linux since the Mandrake Linux times, so about what, 20 years?
I always come back to Windows, which from Windows 2000 has been getting better and better. Of course there have been sh*t moments like Windows Vista and Windows 8, but Windows 2k, XP, 7, and now 10 (enterprise version), have always been good to me.
I can use Linux for sure, and I appreciate the effort the community does, however, for my use case, I don't see the advantage of using Linux over Windows, and I find many disadvantages: missing software (office, adobe, although I have run it under wine), missing or not perfect drivers (energy efficiency is a problem even on thinkpads).
Again, I really like the effort, and if I must use it, I can, but I don't see the advantage.
Now, I use it on my dad's computer (he is 80), as it is much difficult for him to screw up than Windows.
I think it really comes down to what software you need, more than proficiency. Just like you, I'm an advanced user, a software developer, and Mandrake was my first serious Linux.
For me though, software isn't missing on Linux, it's missing on Windows. I rarely need an office suite, and my needs are limited to simple Word/Writer documents and even simpler Excel/Calc spreadsheets, so even MS Office 97 or StarOffice 5 have all the needed features (minus support for XML file formats). The extent of image editing I do is limited to cropping, rotating and resizing images, so even GIMP is way overkill.
On the other hand, the software I do use and like is a pain on Windows. First it's basic text manipulation tools. Things like grep and sed are missing on Windows, and I want to e.g. "replace this line in all files in this folder" far more often than I open an Excel file. I use SSH, which isn't on Windows, and applications like putty are great but don't provide anywhere near the seamless experience that Linux has with SSH. Then there's the desktop environment itself - I use KDE Plasma 5 and find it amazing, having been a fan of KDE since 3.5. I like KDE Plasma overall much more than Windows Explorer, and then there are the individual power features, e.g. I have a button on the titlebar that toggles always-on-top for a window, and I exclude certain applications from appearing in the taskbar because they already have a systray icon.
I use Linux at work, and haven't had to boot Win7 at home since Steam Proton. I've heard that Win10 makes some things better, like it has built-in SSH. But I haven't tried Win10 myself, and at this point it'd take some Windows killer feature to make me switch.
> That said, for my use case, I have never found a software that I need on Windows that is only available on Linux.
For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that most Linux software is open source and can be run on other platforms even if mainly meant for Linux. Git is a prime example, developed as a Linux program - in fact developed by Linus Torvalds specifically for the kernel - but it runs on Windows with a few quirks. LaTeX is a Linux-first project but you can also use it on Windows, etc.
This mostly doesn't happen in the opposite direction because of closed, proprietary software. Could Photoshop be ported to run on Linux, and with how much effort? We do not know.
Probably we use different Windows. Cygwin installation is simple and gives you grep, sed, ssh, any Unix utility. Windows 10 comes with complete Linux Subsystem.
I consider myself a geek, a fairly advanced user of software and a software developer.
I have been trying different versions of Linux since the Mandrake Linux times, so about what, 20 years?
I always come back to Windows, which from Windows 2000 has been getting better and better. Of course there have been sh*t moments like Windows Vista and Windows 8, but Windows 2k, XP, 7, and now 10 (enterprise version), have always been good to me.
I can use Linux for sure, and I appreciate the effort the community does, however, for my use case, I don't see the advantage of using Linux over Windows, and I find many disadvantages: missing software (office, adobe, although I have run it under wine), missing or not perfect drivers (energy efficiency is a problem even on thinkpads).
Again, I really like the effort, and if I must use it, I can, but I don't see the advantage.
Now, I use it on my dad's computer (he is 80), as it is much difficult for him to screw up than Windows.