Mostly avoid downloading and running packages from sources you don’t trust. And if you’re going to run something you don’t fully trust, try to run it sandboxed (like firejail or a vm, for example). Linux is generally safer than Windows because a lot of malware are created to exploit Windows weakness… also, if you use Flatpak (sepecially verified ones) or your distro package manager, you will hardly get infected.
This, AND the fact that companies usually don’t give a flying fuck for developing countries. They want to sell their services for USA and European markets, and then they just make it “available” for the rest of the word with absolutely no regard for the monetary reality of each of these countries. You can’t expect people to think it’s fair to pay 70 USD on a game, for example, or 15 USD a month on a subscription service, when this translates to 30% of a minimum wage somewhere else.
In my experience, the main cons are overall support from some 3rd party applications. I can’t as easily access some software as I can on Windows, such as a digital certificate software that’s required for my job, for example, which requires me to have Windows on a VM just to upload some files on a specific system. In this case, Wine/Bottles unfortunately does not work.
And, for gaming, sometimes modding is not as simple as it might be on Windows, requiring some extra tinkering to make things run on a same prefix, which is generally not very intuitive.
But the gap is definitely way narrower nowadays. Running games, without mods, is super easy with Steam or Heroic. And software support is also huge nowadays! Even Nvidia driver support is getting much better - I usually have zero issues running (stock) games on CachyOS with Proton.
My Windows usage nowadays is very minimal. And even then, I don’t really support Microsoft anymore… I don’t pay for a Win11 license, I don’t use Windows Office, I don’t use Xbox app, and I definitely don’t use OneDrive. And I also cleaned lots of telemetry and other bullshit with WinUtil.
And regarding the pros: Full control over my device (never again locked by the system to access a path even with admin rights, for example) is the big one.
No telemetry, no ads, no one trying to force me to use software I don’t want, and ZERO dark patterns. No more having intrusive notifications asking me if I want to use software X when I said I didn’t numerous times, while also offering me just “maybe later” as an option. No software being intrusively installed on my system without my consent. No setting options being silently re-enabled without my consent after an update.
And, as a nice extra, Linux distro’s are generally way cleaner and lighter than Windows, with much better performance all around, since they’re not filled with clutter and a bunch of shady processes running in background.
I despise using Windows nowadays. I don’t want to use a product or a service that does not respect me as a consumer.
I have it on my desktop just as a remote server for gaming with Moonlight/Sunshine, and as a VM on my laptop exclusively to digitally sign some documents as I mentioned earlier. Other than that, everything else I do, I do with Linux. I don’t miss Windows at all, and that has been the case for some years now.
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I don’t know if Ubuntu has fixed it, because trying to enforce their Snap store was intentional. But I can’t say for sure because there have been years that I don’t use it.
But yeah, for anyone using it, I’d recommend to just remove Snap entirely, since it’s totally unnecessary and goes against pretty much every Linux core concept.
Or just use something like Kubuntu or Linux Mint, that have Ubuntu under hood but are more community driven instead of relying on Canonical.