I work for a MS shop. I tolerate it because they provide the machine (as they damn well should in any case!)

In my personal world, I’m Linux across the board - couldn’t pay me enough to a) own securing RDP on a win box or b) use IIS.

Is Linux perfect? Nope. Never suggested otherwise. But in the areas that matter to me, it’s far superior.

Definitely haven’t given up, and my main personal machine would have been in the trash heap ages ago if I was still trying to force windows on it.

About 23 years ago I couldn’t make it boot when I plugged in a USB hub.
And since, my life just became too invested in Microsoft/Adobe products to be able to use something else as a daily driver.

But I “use” Linux every day - whether it’s the PiHole, the NAS, the server that runs my 3D printer, or WSL in Windows PowerShell. I’m about to spin up my own OPNSense router, too.
Weird trajectory on WSL - I learned Unix commands using MacOS terminal for a previous job, but I generally abhor windows command line (it just doesn’t work with my brain). So now when I use commend line in windows, I default to *nix.

It sort of works out that I use Macs for personal use, Windows for work, and Linux to run the systems of my life.

LibreOffice is an an amazing replacement for the MS-Office suite.

I have a spare nvme SSD and recently took a weekend to play with various Linux desktop distributions. EndeavorOS and Pop! OS were my favorite. But I have an RTX 3080 and can't afford to replace it with an AMD GPU. It didn't work well enough with my games. I'm really attached to HDR which seems to be coming but is not generally available for most games yet. I feel like the writing is on the wall and Windows will not be a suitable option for me in the near future, but right now I have the least issues with Windows 11.

I use Linux all the time for hosting various services at work, but never with a GUI.

Having to mess with it every time I turn it on.

I started out on Red Hat over 20 years ago, then went to Gentoo for a few years. I got a new job after the me I was at crashed and burned and switched or the Fedora, but the rest of the folks at the shop were running fancy new MacBooks as was the style at the time. As a tech lead I didn’t like the idea of being the odd one out when it came to what we were running so I just bit the bullet when my linux laptop died and got a MacBook and I’ve just stuck with that ever since, at least for professional dev work. It’s still a UNIX under the hood and I get most of what I want and basically all of my tooling is OSS and free software, and I don’t have to mess with fiddly settings anymore. I still run Linux server-side and keep a few Linux laptops around, but I just run macOS now for dev work and I’m fine with that.

I did my time with compiling the entire thing from scratch in my Gentoo days, did all sorts of tweaking on compiler switches for KDE and X, debugged kernel drivers on racks of Dell PowerEdge blades when the network stack would inexplicably start dropping packets seemingly randomly, all that stuff. I still run Linux but it just ain’t my daily driver anymore.

And I have a Steam Deck too, so there’s that.

I have incompatible hardware.

I asked someone with a lot of experience in the matter which distro to use and their recommendation was way below my standards.

I wanted a new laptop and the I/O on them were ridiculous. I switched to USB-C for most of my stuffs and the available Laptops in my country had one or two USB-C port. They need to step up on this field.

I still use Linux for a NAS, but had to switch for my Laptop. :(

I am dual booting because I bought a nice OLED monitor with HDR and Linux doesn't support it yet. For certain games with nicer graphics, HDR is really beautiful.

The moment Linux support HDR, I nuke windows for good.