Currently there are three things that stop me from going Linux and two of those are purely software related (the third is that I don’t want to hate my work software anymore than I currently do). Is it vital software in the sense of it allowing me to work or bring me income? No. Is it something I wish to just use without fiddling after every update because I use them for fun? Absolutely yes.

I am a 90s child, so I don’t completely fit your timespan, but I remember the first PC with SuSe Linux that I built with my father from old server hardware he got from his job.

Back then his job used unix and it was pretty common in his field of work. So Linux was the natural choice for a home pc. SuSe was popular back then, I think mainly because it came on CDs and had books available.

One of the main things I remember is the hassle with network drivers, having to download them on a working pc first.

I haven’t used Linux in a decade and half (I know myself and I wouldn’t reboot once done gaming and I have one game that is not just wine or whatever and done and it’s my main one) and I still miss things from it. The first few PCs I used were Linux. It just sticks with you.

If you have to go back and forth with PSDs, GIMP falls of with layers and such. I had it happen that it basically rolls which ones to open every time on a layer heavy PSD.

I interpreted your comment as between countries, my bad then.

So you are always at least at the maximum average we have and often higher, with less PTO and holidays?

You also missed my core statement: how would the salary comparison go if we break it down to a hourly one? How would the gap look then?

How do these comparisons look if we go by pay per hour worked? Because here in Germany the maximum amount you are allowed to work in a week is 60 hours. Unless in special positions (like the ones that have harvesting season or mine stuff), this has to be equalised down to 48 over a 6 week period at max (the special ones just have a longer period for it or a different timing system on what counts as break). If you are in a position that equals to 48 hours a week (6 day week), your minimum PTO is 24 days. If you have a 5 day week it is 20 days, and the numbers above shift down to 50 and 40 respectively. Most jobs that have any kind of skilled work behind them have 30 days PTO. Plus there are a lot of national holidays.

I work in taxes and the average days worked in a year is assumed at 230 (if we don’t have information otherwise ofc). That is less than 2/3 of the year.

Whereas my knowledge on the US is that 60 hour weeks are not necessarily an exception, you get way less PTO, you have less national holidays and you often need to network after hours to even be successful to a moderate degree (of course networking is a thing here as well, but it isn’t that necessary at a medium level, only if you want to get the high positions).

Vacations maybe because that also depends on where you want to go. Cars can differ wildly, unless you want a sportscar or some such. Same goes for phones, often you get one „free“ with your contract for mobile. Gas/Petrol vary a lot, because of taxes and other state side things attached to them. Same goes for electricity plus those also depend on availability.

Discord needs to be maintained too. The way rights for users are handled is confusing, even when you’re used to handling such.

And it isn’t fast to use. You have to register, you need the app which does not function well, it uses a lot of system resources, the list goes on.

Define medium size.

All messages notifications? Hell no never, not even on my own less than 10 persons server.

Stuff like announcement role pings? In servers I care or the roles let me filter very finely yes, irrespective of size.

@everyone pings? Only on servers I care a lot about or that use them sparely.

While it might not be as much, it still will be something.

I work in a purely windows environment because our main software does not really exist outside of it. The hours of IT troubleshooting for the most inane things I see happening is a pretty penny as well. The newest curiosity is Teams killing my RDP session once it loads in the GUI and the IT team is utterly clueless why. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t happen to anyone else and the only way to stop it is to kill the process via taskmanager.

And while a government might not be able to go FOSS, there are tools for communication that aren’t built like Teams.

My SO is in a government job and most of their software is some adaption on SAP or similar. They don’t have any chat apps. They use mails or telephone. They do have Skype, but that thing is a performance nightmare in their environment so they only use it if they absolutely have to.

Same goes for stuff like OneDrive. Even if you could wrangle it enough that it fits data security laws, it isn’t something they use in their daily work.

Windows being „helpful“ is the worst. I can’t remember an instance were it actually was helpful. Just some were it managed to break things.

I know of someone who wanted to dualboot for certain games and their windows did exactly that too. At one point their AMD driver managed to uninstall itself somehow. On Linux they never had any problem whatsoever.

I know multiple people that do Skyrim on linux, at least one heavily modded. Outside of DyndoLOD not working right I can’t really remember any issues they had.

I use Sonar from Steelseries since I have one of their headsets. It does work for other headsets too, afaik it’s windows only though.

Any audiochannel mixing software that has an input (and output for microphone) should work. The main thing is to not let discord touch the device directly basically.

That is discord being sucky. Have had that problem a lot with various headphones, only thing that helped for me was using another software to manage things.

As for your actual question, my father has worked as a mechanical engineer for a few decades (recently retired) and after the major players did switch to only windows (they used unix in earlier days) he always had a dualboot system at home just for CAD work.

When I was about 11 roughly two decades ago, on the first PC I got to actively use. I think it was OpenSuSe. My father had unix at work back then and saw no reason to use anything but a -ix system.

I liked it a lot, back then so was mainly reading things on the internet, no gaming needed.

Haven’t cycled back yet, since I play a few games that don’t run well on linux at all and use some proprietary software. I do find myself trying to use linux commands on windows from time to time, getting annoyed with it not working before remembering.

I live in an area that was next to perfect when I first learned about OSM, so I had no real reason to contribute. I have seen their maps used by our public transport to show the way to/from stops (or even inside them on the particularly large ones).

This just reminded me that I can in fact contribute and I will check out the iOS options for doing so.