I've worked in IT my whole career and if someone wants me yo install Linux on their machine, or has questions about bash scripting, I'm dropping whatever I'm doing to help them.
How else are my friends and family supposed to teach each other it nobody teaches them? Not everyone was as lucky as I was to be encouraged to pursue tech, that doesn't mean they don't deserve the same privacy and options that I benefit from.
Im not even gonna try to learn music creation again, just assuming ableton and flstudio would both be issues.
I understand that more conventional software is proprietary and not released natively for Linux, but it seems unfortunate yo me to let proprietary software stop you from making art. Ive got friends who produce music exclusively on Linux machines using qtractor, which is free and open source, so there's no need to crack it. I can't speak for the rest of the tools you mentioned but maybe it would just be worth exploring some of the Foss options to see what you can do with them? I haven't bothered cracking software since I made the move over to Linux because I just haven't found any piece of my workflows that actually depends on non-foss software. Turns out tools developed by the communities that use them rather than corporate entities typically turn out to be pretty good.
I find dockerization tends to make things waaaay easier to bring up/take down with simple yet consistent configuration schemes. I distribute all my self hosted stuff across a small cluster of machines- if I want to move a service from one to another it's as easy as moving the config folder and the docker-compose. Don't need to have startup scripts, or remembering installation steps after a fresh install, or worry about python/package versions. Plus it helps keep track of what services are set up, soni don't have to worry about leaving anything unused but still installed and running. And updating is as easy as pulling the images and recreating the containers.
And FOSS is just cool.
It's such an underrated feature of desktop Linux. The fact that if I experience an issue with a piece of software, I could find the program's source code and browse issues to see if anyone had a shared experience. And if not, I could publicly submit an issue which the developers and other users/contributors could help resolve. And if you're brave/experienced enough, you can take a crack at fixing it yourself and potentially resolving the issue for other users!
On windows/macos which both fail to foster robust foss communities remotely comparable to Linux, the best option more often than not was sending an email to some support address that either never gets checked, or only replies with canned messages. After which you'll never know whatnif anything happened to your report.
I mean compared to some elements of windows, yeah Linux is more similar to macos. But compared to other elements of macos, Linux is more similar to windows. But to say it's super similar to either one in particular is kind of missing what makes each of them what they are.
Macos and Linux skills and fluency aren't significantly more transferable than between Linux and Windows. They're three pieces of software that ultimately try to do the same thing, but go about it in drastically different ways. There are only so many ways from your house to the grocery store, so some of them are bound to cross.
If Microsoft keeps fucking up at every turn, it seems like at some point the only thing that'll keep them afloat is workplace/education investments in their environment. Seems like they're even losing their grip on being the default OS preinstalled on non-apple PC hardware and the advantage that provided.
I mean, that's kind of a whole separate thing. An account in a mobile food ordering app is significantly less invasive than an account on your whole entire operating system- like, laughably so.
Never mind that one is on your mobile device, which is an incredibly invasive surveillance device as-is for all except those with enough dedication and paranoia. Conversely, a desktop is at least conceptually much more practical to harden for privacy.
For what it's worth I guess, I do not use mobile food ordering applications or accounts.
You don't have to host a website. Just make software that works like the website and runs locally.
No offense, but you were told about handbrake, a tool that goes out of its way to offer a cross-platform GUI and complained about it not immediately working- with no elaboration.
We learn to write before we learn to navigate computer systems- the command line is only scary because digital illiteracy is taught to us the second we are presented with the windows/macos login screen. It truly does not get simpler than telling a computer convert image.pdf image.jpg.
These tools are daunting, yes, and it's not your fault that everyone is taught that computers are magic boxes we have no real control over, but the hours you spend in a command line are just like the hours you spend learning to sew, or play an instrument. Nobody starts with every manpage seared into their brain, but if you're able to look up a sketchy website that may well give you malware, you have the tools needed to learn this valuable skill.
Call it fewer options, I call it curated options. Yeah, I don't get to install every piece of software I could on windows (though that list is shrinking really fucking fast), but i also don't want to. I don't need to put energy into cracking adobe software so they can steal my licensing and farm my data to sell or train their AI on.
I don't want to use a drill that only works with screws that are officially approved for DeWalt drills, and I don't want to hack a DeWalt drill to make it work with other screws. I want a drill that fits whatever screw I want. People aren't switching to Linux because of the vast amount of software available for it, it's because it's the option that actually respects us as consumers.