Linux

yup, this hits the nail on the head for me. I consider myself very tech literate; I am my family's IT guy. I even have Mint installed in a separate drive but I seldom use it unless I have nothing else to do for an afternoon. And the reason is that the more I know about windows (be it editing the registry, troubleshooting services, learning diagnostics tools...) the less comparatively capable I feel in a linux environment. It's like moving countries after I spent my whole life learning this city and I could't even speak my native language anymore. Yeah I know it works out of the box and there's wine and I can make my UX the same. But, going back to my metaphor, that feels like moving to a different country and just not leaving my house and only talking to the people I knew back home. Yeah it would be the same if I severely constrict my comfort zone. You just have to learn a bunch of new shit and leave all you know behind and that's just one distro. Because YEAH linux isn't an OS it's a whole family of operating systems. The nerd yelling that it's a kernel is right in the worst way possible. I can learn Mint but I can form an opinion on Linux because I still wouldn't know shit about Arch or Fedora or Gentoo or what-have-you. It's all very daunting and what I have is functional. No, not "functional enough". This does literally everything I want in less than 4 clicks, everything is plug-and-play, everything works out of the box (and if it doesn't you're sure as shit it wouldn't work out of the box on linux), my knowledge on windows is applicable on every machine I find, it's the system everyone expects me to have (I'm fucking sure the software my uni made me install for online tests wouldn't have a Linux installer). It's not just that the path of least resistance points to mac/windows, Linux as a whole also has very potent repelling field. I still want to learn it but not because I see any practical value/utility in it.