Me seeing Linux gain 0.0001% of the Desktop Market

Is this the year?

OpenBSD master race.

OpenBased
- OpenBasedSecureDistrobution
I don't really get the hype? I'm using arch myself and all I can find online is that it's suppose to be more secure. More secure in what way?
- In many ways.

Me: I'ma install mint and stop using Windows. Bullshit OS locked me out one too many times

Steam voice chat cracking sound: u sure 'bout that?

Gamepass: we got literally every game you were looking forward to this year except like... one. Sure, you could wait 10 minutes in line to play them on X-cloud, but you won't hit decent FPS.

Civ 5 starting in 4:3 and crashing as I join a game: you should boot into windows my friend. This ain't it.

Death by 1000 papercuts, there's always a thing or two that won't work perfectly. Sorry to hear that man. It's really nice for those of us that don't have any issues like that. Hopefully when/if you try again in the future things go more smoothly.
- Yet all the issues on Windows are not painful to work with? It seems like Linux issues are becoming largely simple as using a more up to date distribution like fedora. Could try to replicate the steam os configuration to get better gaming performance and stability. The biggest thing about Linux is that you are in control. There are too many people who don't want to have any control and act like pets to these corporations.
(edit: as a preamble - I recommend against using Mint as a new user, since it leverages outdated technologies. Fedora uses newer tech that has a lot of rough edges from the past already smoothed out. But the following comment still applies.)
I'm a heavy Linux user who has dropped Windows but I agree. It's fundamentally based on luck: a combination between your hardware configuration, the games you play and the software you use. Linux gaming is gaining popularity because for a lot of people it mostly just works, minus a couple papercuts that are tolerable, especially when you factor them against all the jank you left behind from Windows.
But if you get unlucky enough… as another person said, it's death by a thousand papercuts. Or, like The Linux Experiment put it, a permanent state of 99% there. Things working, almost fine, but never quite perfect, and enough things being rough around the edges that it does put you off. I am going to be completely honest: the fact that Microsoft has been seemingly self-sabotaging the user experience they offer and murdering the UX with their bare hands with Windows 11 is helping bridge the gap a lot.
Personally I have gotten quite lucky. I don't use any NVidia hardware - and this alone already wipes away 60-70% of the common issues that people complain about. There is a lot of weirdness that doesn't even look like it depends on the GPU (like buggy standby behaviour) that depends on the GPU and that is not reproducible - NVidia setups are a toss up that could go anywhere from "just fine" to "a total disaster". Not only that, but Linux support means that if any of the dozens of components on your computer doesn't quite support Linux, there is so much seemingly unrelated stuff that breaks that you wouldn't believe. I had a friend who was incredibly unlucky on Linux and had mysterious sudden system crashes and some very exotic errors that I had given up debugging. We finally got down to, literally, trying to unplug device after device for an extended window of time out of desperation - and we found out the culprit was a small USB audio card that he used for headphones. A small USB audio card that was misbehaving and had a poor quality Linux driver caused a lot of issues that never would I have traced back to an audio card. I have also used a laptop that had a lot of mysterious issues like erratic sleep/wake behaviour and system hangs / freezes that were caused by the Wi-Fi card. Would you ever think that your Wi-Fi card is causing your computer to randomly crash seemingly out of nowhere? Exactly. This is why I think the "luck" factor is huge for your success on Linux. Sadly, hardware manufacturers mostly target Windows. Linux works well with simple setups with hand-picked components from a handful of brands that are known to work as intended. But the more complicated your gaming setup is, the worse it gets. Hell, multi monitor setups with different resolutions and refresh rates can already be a challenge, whereas Windows has a good handling of them now. If you mix GPUs and have a GeForce and a Radeon in your system, just forget about it. You will get a lot of erratic behaviour unless you exclusively run AMD.
The Steam Deck is an example of how well a properly supported Linux system could work. It's custom hardware with parts picked with Linux support as the utmost priority. The Steam Deck experience is, in fact, much smoother than the average Linux desktop experience, with a hell of a lot less rough edges that show up.
I still encourage you to run Linux, but also understand that it's still growing, and this means that hardware and commercial software vendors are yet to support it properly still. It's going to be a d20 throw between "perfect", "horribly broken" and "mostly working well but with some rough patches you can work around".
- Oh yeah I'm still trying, not giving up on this. I really want to make this work. I can't stand the way Windows locked me out from my PC because I upgraded my CPU the day I was gonna play Baldur's Gate 3 with a friend for the first time.
  Gamepass being better than it has any right to be is absolutely making me keep a Windows partition until they pull some BS move that sours me. I will try some other distro another person told me to give a shot for my general usage. I hope that it will help me get the AMD FSR stuff running because I feel like I'm not getting everything out of my hardware if I can't use the upscaling.
  Your description of 99% describes perfectly the last time I tried to start using Linux. Since then, I had to learn to navigate GitHub for work so a lot of things were easier. My friends look at me like I'm an alien when I try to explain them what I had to do to make the Xbox wireless controller work. When they saw me run a command in the terminal to initiate the pairing, they were.....unimpressed.
stop using old shit like Mint and use Nobara or any other distro that has already implemented all the new driver gaming improvements
- You're the first person to tell me that. Everywhere I looked told me to use mint. I will look up Nobara this weekend.

How's the market share going?

It's those damn computer makers! Damn them all to hell. They won't pre-install, so clearly that's what is keeping the far superior OS with single-digit marketshare. Clearly, that must be it!1!!

Flatpak is not an improvement

Yes it is. Why would it not be an improvement? Software packages that support every single distro makes stuff so much easier for both devs & users
- Because it is packaging regression. 497 megs for GIMP vs 49.7 is very bad. For graphical libraries this is very bad. Why many games don't support wayland? Because libSDL shipped with it does not support wayland.