I can’t tell you what it is, because I don’t understand it either, but it’s not that. I’m Honduran, I do spend most of my day with AC. I primarily dress in shorts and breathable clothing. I also see all sorts of people heavily overdressing for the climate, who most definitely don’t have AC most of their day. Things got VERY hot during this time, so I have no idea how people are tanking their way through it. I do know that it feels like I stand out by simply wearing shorts and sandals, even though I really shouldn’t.
Temperatures did hit mid 40s, with temperature sensations breaking the 50c mark. You could stare directly at the sun without any eye protection and be perfectly fine due to how thick the atmosphere was due to the heat dome; a street lamp was probably more intense. It’s just now starting to fade, but it’s still hard to breathe outside some days.
Speaking as someone who’s still transitioning from windows to Linux on his machines…
My main concern is that the software I use should feel like it’s there for ME, not for the company it’s from. Windows does not feel like it’s putting me first. Many have covered all the reasons in detail, but I don’t like having to fight my OS to get things the way I want them… Which is funny because
Yeah, its fun to tinker with Linux, but there is some fighting to get it to do what you want, especially when you’re new to it. For instance, I’m on KDE, I set up a very aesthetic top bar with a calendar & time widget in the middle. It took me MONTHS and countless small sessions of reading to get my email’s events and special dates to show up on the calendar. I was missing KOrganizer, as well as some extra settings that only show up on the calendar widget if you have KOrganizer installed. I’ve yet to figure out how to refresh the data to get up to date info, because so far it seems like the data just stays stale. I’ll eventually get to it.
I also randomly corrupted my partition during an update and spent a good 5 hours getting it back. I’m experienced enough that I wasn’t worried at all, and I was even enjoying the process at the beginning…but by the end of it, I was just annoyed. The solution? Yeah my distro’s documentation mentions a specific command, “rebuild-kernels” which instantly fixed my partition. It was like the second sentence in an article about my bootloader. I felt stupid for how simple that was, compared to how much I was doing with other suggestions I found online…
So yeah, point is, it’s tough, and I personally am not fond of it, since I just want my PC to let me do my thing while I let it do its thing. Even then, I would still rather deal with that kind of thing than deal with Microsoft’s or Apple’s shenanigans (also, kinda hoping that immutable distro’s aren’t as tedious, even though I know they will be, cause I think that would be an even more ideal system, one that’s very tough to corrupt).
The amount of stuff that can be self hosted is insane, and it can absolutely replace a lot of the things you’re currently using, and it can all happen in a specialized Linux-based OS for running a bunch of services, such as Proxmox, TrueNAS Scale, unRAID, etc.
In the end, though, there’s a lot of “having to learn new things” and “loving to tinker” needed for a lot of it. It’s fine that your average user isn’t interested. It’s sad for those of us who care, who truly believe we need to regain most of our freedom from this tech, but it’s totally not the end of the world either. Maybe there’s no appeal to the average user…yet.
My advice would always be to try, say, Linux mint on a spare laptop, and force yourself to use it for casual stuff. Give it a try, and if it geeks out on you too much for your liking, you go back to your platform of choice. No biggie, it just doesn’t hurt to see what’s on the other side. Who knows, maybe you don’t mind the casual tinkering that you may encounter, maybe you don’t even feel a difference in day to day use compared to your platform of choice, or hopefully you like it even more because it might do things in an easier manner than you’re used to. If that’s the case, then think about whether you’re ok with Apple’s walled garden, or Microsoft’s occasional antitrust infringements, or if you might simply want something to work your way and not the creating company’s way.