Programming

Windows may be easier for games, they're exclusively written for Microsoft so that's to be expected ( although Valve has done a lot here).

Generally speaking, modern distributions like Fedora will be no more difficult than Windows or Mac. The important distinction is that it will be different.

Microsoft has spent a lot of effort putting their operating system into every single school and business on the face of the Earth and as a result many have decades of training with that OS. That doesn't mean their operating system is better or easier. It just means it's familiar. If you used Android for two decades and then picked up an iPhone, I'm sure that would be just as difficult.

In the scientific space, we've been using *nix systems since well before Microsoft was even around so our tooling doesn't typically support Microsoft. For us Microsoft is more difficult because that's the training that we have.

So, it's not that Linux has a worse user experience per se, rather it provides a different user experience. Some may consider shell scripts worse than control panel, but that's a preference. One isn't worse than the other. They are just different.

In my opinion:

• Web browser
  • exactly the same
    • slight edge to in terms of privacy and security (there's a reason Tails isn't written in Windows)
• Media -- Movies
  • exactly the same

The difference is in work, If your workflow is heavily Microsoft focused, Is a truly awful experience and you'll feel like a second-class citizen. But if you're working on technical things, the inverse is true, eg

For document production:

• TeX
  • Linux is much easier
• HTML / Markdown / pandoc
  • Linux is much Easier
• Microsoft Office
  • Windows is much better here
    • I don't use Microsoft Office though so YMMV

Finally, it's not really fair to lump all the next distributions into the same bucket, Is over 1,000 distributions and they are all quite different, Only common element is the kernel.

Gentoo is very technical but it's also very interesting, Arch is similar. Fedora OTOH we'll usually walk out of the box And you have your choice of desktop environment with Good support for alternative window managers like sway/Hyprland etc.