Nothing really. You pay with your time by going to Linux but the effort is getting lower both because of me getting better but mostly the experience won’t compare with 20 yeara ago.since the non FOSS alternatives are getting more telemtry/call home functions rhe choice is an easy one.

As a former Arch/Debian enjoyer on all my rigs in between 2012-2017, I can say several things but they might be outdated as of now. I haven’t rechecked it so here goes the list of things at that age:

• Anything remotely related to Nvidia, especially if you had switchable laptop graphics. Running games was a nightmare and a coin flip. Sometimes you can get games to work, but you got an awful screen tearing even in OS, sometimes it’s vice versa.

• PulseAudio was problematic. Sometimes booting the pc up resulted into missing audio output or input, or both. Sometimes, under heavy load, lots of audio was crackling until PulseAudio server was rebooted. Rebooting PulseAudio required restarting many apps so they even produce sound.

• Drove away for like 2 months, came back to dead Arch install after updating it. Switched to Debian cause I realized I value stability over newer stuff. Until I bought newer hardware which just didn’t work at all, can’t recall what that was to be honest.

• At least during 2012-2015-ish, any browser scrolling was jittery. Like, any. I heard it’s fixed right now but every time I used to boot Windows, it was completely different web experience.

• As soon as I started using laptops, I noticed that my battery was draining like 2-3 times as fast. Shouldn’t be an issue nowadays I hope.

• Printing was hell of a nightmare. Especially when I tried bringing my laptop to the office printer.

• Probably also related to Nvidia, but still: connecting external monitors never yielded out-of-the-box experience I expected to see. Nothing used proper resolution, scaling or refresh rates. Lots of things required manual configuration every time.

• Office software in general. Thank god most people switched to web alternatives right now.

• Back in 2012-ish years, Flash was still common and it generally refused to work in many distros. Especially with Nvidia graphics.

There are plenty more reasons I decided to ditch Linux on my workstations and the ones above are just “honorable mentions”. The biggest thing I found myself doing is tinkering with my setup much more than doing actual work.

So currently I just use a Windows laptop and WSL when I need local Linux. And of course I monitor and configure hundreds of Linux machines at work. I also have a Macbook Pro 16 mainly for iOS apps debugging and watching movies in bed.

I can say I’m currently neutral to Linux, Mac and Windows these days. They have their own use cases for me and they all allow me to reach my goals in their own way. Just getting best of each world, I guess?

Nothing TBH. I find Windows too stressful, Macs are too boring, and I can’t use TempleOS because I don’t have schizophrenia.

The longer you use linux excluslively, you don’t think about windows or mac. You think about fedora or suse, kde or gnome, yay or apt, distrobox or toolbox.

Just want to turn my laptop on and not have to wonder if everything will work.

Not have to perpetually debug small issues like “why is there no sound? Oh it’s playing out of a different audio device”

Not have to worry about installing software and where it comes from, and in which format.

I just want shit to work, day in, day out. And I’m fully aware that I’d probably have these issues, plus others, with osx or windows.

Nothing.

Using Widows on my private rig now to play Fortnite with my son after ~15 years on Linux only. Also getting a MacBook Pro at work now, since I have to use Zoom and stuff like that everyday. Having no hardware acceleration on Linux is a no-go. This is not Linux’ fault though. Also I’m old enough to just use the right tool for a job.

What makes you not want to use Linux anymore

Your question is malformed because even the odd troubles of Linux these days are absolutely nothing compared to the hoops I used to go through to try to get a Kernel built for my hardware 25 years ago. The occasional non-working speaker or other config issue is tiny. It doesn’t even register as a problem.

Compare that to the shit show that is Windows? Fuck that OS. I try not to be very vocal when I meet people about it, but Windows just won’t be a choice for me. I’ve turned down jobs because it would move me to a Windows house for tools. It’s not worth living in that kind of hellhole UI design and wrestling with whatever enshittification MSFT has driven down your crop with the latest updates. I have a life to live and wrestling with my OS isn’t what I’m going to spend it doing.

I don’t know much about the current MacOS environment these days. I stopped in the OSX 10.4 days. I just don’t have the hardware to consider it, so no real opinion.

So… your question is malformed because it’s not even worth considering and I’ve got a quarter century of experience to back that one up.

Lack of good VR support.

I never “switched”. I just started using the right tool for the job. I use Linux for productivity stuff. Windows for gaming and audio/music production, mostly. I don’t own a Mac anymore but if I did, it’d probably be their laptops, and I’d probably take over some of the development and creative work while on the go. I’m admittedly not very “religious” when it comes to the software I use. Whatever works best for me. I’m not married to anything. Makes it easier to switch things out down the line.

Well for the most part Wayland ruined my experience but I’m willing to try again, just not in near future. (was using Fedore 38 KDE for 2months).

And for the rest, I assumed that most things that work with AMD on Windows will work also on Linux since I had that experience on PoPOS with NVIDIA about 4y ago.

Mainly GPU accelerated rendering in Blender which requires the AMD proprietary drivers and does not seem to work with MESA.

KDenlive only supports the AMD x264 encoder and not HEVC and Davinci Resolve has no support for AMD encoders on Linux. They all work fine with NVIDIAs NVENC though.

The ease of buying a quality laptop without having to worry about if it will run well with my OS.

I’ve been using MacOS for about 8 years at work and I never really taken to it. It’s fine and I can do my work but I won’t use it if I hadn’t to (unless the only alternative was Windows). But one thing I really like about Macs is that you can buy one and you won’t have any headaches with battery life, software compatibility etc. You get decent hardware (let’s ignore the whole 8GB on an M3 = 16GB on other machine debacle) and know that it will work decently well with 3rd party software/hardware and if something breaks you can just bring into an Apple store.

While there are dedicated Linux sellers (System76, Tuxedo Computeres, Starlabs), I’m hesitant to spend 2k on a computer just to find out that the build quality is subpar, the battery life sucks or that customer support will just ignore my requests (read some bad experiences on the Starlabs subreddit).

Something else I miss on Linux is a good alterantive to RoyalTS. RDP, SSH, VNC, etc. connectivity manager. Remmina I think is the closest but its not as good.

Low performance of very specific games made by small studios on middle-aged low-budget hardware makes me consider dual-booting, but then I remember that I hate closed-source, software-as-a-service, tracking-financed operating systems.

Windows

It never was free.

MacOS

It’s not free any more.

TempleOS

I’m not religious.

So, I guess I get to stay on Linux for longer. Well, damn!