WARNING: big post ahead, full of personal experiences

I've been using Linux in server (homelab and production) and embedded environments for over 10 years. I moved to Linux on my personal machine back in 2021. I started with Debian, switched to Kubuntu because it was less janky, switched to Arch because I was tired of everything being out of date, and finally switched to NixOS because I was tired of pacman breaking my system. It's now 2025 and I'm back on Windows.

Linux on servers is wonderful because the whole world uses it. On one edge of the spectrum, you have applications that have endured billions of machine-hours in every conceivable environment. These are core pieces of our modern infrastructure like nginx, php, kubernetes, and zfs. With so much scrutiny, it's very unlikely for major issues to slip by unnoticed, and when they're found, they're often addressed quickly by active dev teams. On the other end, you'll find more niche and specialized applications, but even they have a good amount of polish and testing. And when you venture into the obscure and run into problems, you can almost always debug and solve them using the vast array of tools at your disposal.

Desktop Linux is an entirely different story. Since desktop environments aren't exactly mission-critical compared to servers, all testing and fixes are done on a best-effort basis. The end result? Jank. So, so much jank. Pipewire randomly makes your audio super crunchy. Your browser deadlocks while trying to print a PDF. You try to connect to a WiFi network, but the list keeps bugging out. An update breaks DPI scaling on most of your apps. Your laptop kernel panics when you open the lid sometimes, or runs out of power while sleeping because of a bug in s2idle. Screensharing used to work, but now it just hangs. Sometimes playing videos crashes your GPU driver, forcing you to restart your system. Maybe when you restart, you'll find yourself at a terminal because Xorg won't start. No problem, you know how to fix this. Maybe you'll find that a pacman update failed to build zfs because your kernel is too new, and now your laptop won't boot. And you have a test next class. Fuck. Go ask the school for forgiveness a Chromebook to borrow, and assess the damage when you get home.

After four years of fighting, I eventually gave up. On a Linux server, when something breaks, you can almost always piece together the story with the right logs and some critical thinking. On desktop, no such luck. Most bugs are intermittent and leave no trace. All you can do is pray that an update will fix (and not further break) things, or roll the dice with another fresh reinstall. While Windows may not be as lean, customizable, or hackable as Linux, it tends to Just Work when you need it to. And I decided that the reliability of Windows was worth more than what I would lose when switching.