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Originally posted by PackRat
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I've had plenty of problems with Windows and macOS along with their various free/paid softwares. I've also had some really great experiences with free and open-source software over paid/proprietary.
UX would be subjective, people often rave how good Apple UX is on their products which I've on more than one occassion disagreed with when I've used it personally. On Linux there is a lot of option/control for that, if the distro you use doesn't provide what you want by default, sadly yes that does require you to put in some extra effort.
I didn't have any issues with substance on Arch, but this was Designer not Painter. It sounds like more of an issue with that software and their distro support(especially if they're officially supporting Fedora), they're not open-source, so you shouldn't expect it to play well on Linux unless they have an endorsed distro support where it's their obligation to maintain support for officially. Windows can be better for situations like that, but at the same time Windows isn't always a great experience. I remember trying to do some Qt development on Windows with Python and wanting to package that for distribution. Fun fact, unless you used a much older 5.6 release(5.9 had been out a while but the maintainers refused to release it for another year due to difficulties with supporting/building it on Windows) you'd have to manually compile it on Windows, which from what I had been reading when I was looking down that avenue was not a fun time.
This is similar story with some other projects like a deep learning one I wanted to play with(so much easier on linux with Docker and their nvidia GPU support that Windows didn't offer). Difficulty of just getting started with the project in terms of effort was Linux? piece of cake, macOS? bit of effort, paragraph of instructions to follow, Windows? Goodluck, 2 pages worth of instructions that were prone to break over time iirc.
Windows also becomes prohibitly expensive if you want to get into multiple virtual machines with their license models, if you've got the money great, but I'd imagine for certain use cases, it's a big dig in profits or barrier for getting business off the ground if it builds around that need as a foundation. Apple likewise, very strict on their license with their OS and what hardware you can use it on(virtual or otherwise).
As for time saved, have had a 10k workstation doing some processing work on Windows 10, several days in, almost completed it's processing and it decides to force restart itself due to some update policy that you had little control over at the time. That's a lot of time and money for business, especially with deadlines. Not only that, we'd also have a few other attempts where we'd get BSODs, seemed to be from a bad hardware driver, yay Windows and proprietary software, that's sure going to get fixed in a timely manner!
Paid/proprietary isn't always great..sometimes it's the best option, sometimes it's going to definitely offer better results or time savings, not always. Windows isn't as flexible/tunable imo compared to Linux. I think you'd get a better story there as is noted in the server world. Goodluck also getting it to run on old or budget hardware too(I'm aware of the S version that involves removing features/support for certain things to allow this, Linux doesn't).
All have pro/cons, it ain't black/white.
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