This is a case of YMMV. I hate nearly everything about Windows, but there are people who swear by it. After nearly 15 years on it, there are many things I find natural on linux that are rendered difficult for no pissing reason on Windows.
To this day I don’t understand what the difference is between the networks one can choose “Home network”, “Public Network”, etc. . Also, sporadically dying DHCP was so much fun to fix. There were some WiFi networks that worked fine on other computers, but mine just refused to get IP, subnet, and gateway, so I had to copy paste them from others.
Setting up a developer environment was incredibly annoying the last time I tried it on windows 7 because every flipping thing has to go through a GUI that you have to find first. The PATH variable is in some setting somewhere that took me ages to find and it didn’t work. Ended up configuring the IDE’s environment variable individually, but it didn’t have a console in it (very early days), so opening cmd.exe meant trying to find the right env vars to set.
I remember installing a firewall and window deciding that “no, windows firewall has to be activated now”, activating itself and conflicting with the installed firewall.
Dunno if it’s still necessary, but reg cleaners and defragging were absolutely essential back then to have a fast system for more than a year. Recently had a friend with a slow system and her boyfriend just reinstalled windows for her because he didn’t want to deal with whatever it was that was slowing down the system.
Semi-related: hardware stiff was no fun either. Printers were always a nightmare. “Install this Epson driver that installs a bunch of bloatware for free!” and you find out that the installed version doesn’t work for some reason, so you have to hunt down why it doesn’t work on your particular laptop only to stumble upon drivers for that printer by the damn laptop manufacturer.
Or laptop and desktop manufacturers that packaged their own graphics drivers and were constantly a few months behind the official drivers - and the official drivers wouldn’t work on your hardware because the manufacturer had to do something special and your were stuck waiting for updates from the manufacturer. Of course manufacturers had their own updaters that barely functioned, so all you could do was check periodically yourself or wait for a bug to appear, hunt down the reason, find out it’s an outdated driver and download it from the manufacturer.
I could go on. The trauma is deep. And don’t get me started on those goddamn rainboots (Mac). That system is even worse than windows.
Anyway, all I’m saying is you had a shitty experience with “absolutely basic stuff” on linux desktop, big deal, it’s a computer. Computers and software are buggy. Nothing’s perfect. No-one claims Linux is perfect, it’s just better for whatever they are doing and they are willing to put up linux specific stuff (like the totally valid stuff you pointed out) instead of putting up with windows/mac specific stuff. Linux desktop doesn’t rub you the right way, fine. Windows nor Mac rub me the right way. That’s the way of the world. We all decide how much stuff we can put up with. Maybe this is the end of the road for you with linux desktop, but it sure ain’t for many other people.