- NTSync coming in Kernel 6.11 for better Wine/Proton game performance and porting.
- Wine-Wayland last 4/5 parts left to be merged before end of 2024
- Wayland HDR/Game color protocol will be finished before end of 2024
- Nvidia 555/560 will be out for a perfect no stutter Nvidia performance
- KDE/Gnome reaching stability and usability with NO FKN ADS
- VR being usable
- More Wine development and more Games being ported
- Better LibreOffice/Word compatibility
- Windows 10 coming to EOL
- Improved Linux simplicity and support
- Web-native apps (Including Msft Office and Adobe)
- .Net cross platform (in VSCode or Jetbrains Rider)
What else am I missing?
It's not about being 1:1. I have used Android, iOS, MacOS and a bunch of other systems. Most of those have been easy to adapt. In fact, like your friend, I prefer the GNOME look because the MacOS-ish UI feels fun and fresh after being on Windows for so long.
It's the ratio of troubleshooting versus usage and the lack of definitive resolution for things.
FWIW, I just went back to Windows, not because I found the terminal commands hard to grasp (I started working with computers in the 80s, I'm not intimidated by a command line), but because they often didn't match what tutorials said, or because something that didn't work didn't generate an error and simply did nothing, or because something just randomly stopped working for no reason and just dangled there, broken, indefinitely.
Say what you will about how haphazardly Windows is architected, but most of the time if something breaks it's a matter of either installing the right thing, uninstalling the right thing, finding the right setting or reinstalling the OS. That sense of rebuilding your bike as you ride on it that Linux still forces upon you is just so friction-heavy, and the failstate of it is so frustrating. There's a reason why a dedicated Android or ChromeOS for your hardware feels just fine but desktop Linux is untenable for 90% of users, and it's not the 1:1 parity with Windows.