Community will crucify me for this, but Linux DE maintenance is the bane of my existence.
Shit "just works" until it inevitably doesn't, and it takes Linus himself to figure out how to unfuck it due to the absolutely insane level of version churn packages & distros see over the years, making most resources short of "just reinstall it" a fools errand.
Servers? Beautiful. Desktop environments? I literally can't anymore... Having something go to shit when I REALLY need to get something done has forced me to always have Windows on hand.
Which has turned into "Windows primary" and "Linux DE secondary " over the years. I hate Windows, I yearn for my plasma desktop, but it's almost always more reliably stable without maintenance for longer in my experience.
I don't understand what people are doing to their machines. I've been using Arch Linux exclusively for ~10yrs now and only ONCE had a problem when upgrading Java. That was fixed in about 10mins after reading the Arch update notes.
Most recently I've been running AwesomeWM for 2yrs and it's been so bloody stable and simple. I found KDE just as stable before but a bit heavy for my taste.
Exactly this, I've had the same install of the "most unstable de" -arch btw for about 8 years and its fucking fine, yes sometimes you have to remove some old dependancys... the command line had always told me exactly what's wrong and a quick google later if I'm unsure, blamo it's fixed like new... haven't used Windows in about 10 years
This. This exactly. I'm wanting to teach my kids how to use Linux and first I want them to get used to it so I'm exposing them to computers through gCompris... So one of the features of the software stops working I don't know why I uninstall it I reinstall it. Same problem. So now I've got to go figure out what's wrong with the OS itself that's causing that problem in the software or just reinstall it, the OS that is, because that'll only take a few minutes to kick off and I can just leave it alone and it'll finish whereas the OS troubleshooting could take days or it could be something I never figure out.
Not to mention wrapping wifi drivers... 😭
For fun, I once decided I'd figure it out. I was doing a job where I had free time at work and there was spare hardware sitting around so I decided to go ahead and do it.
PAIN. So painful.
I love Linux, but I like to work on whatever I want to work on, not what the OS decides I need to work on that day.