It is always different. I was born because times before I was born were different, my parents’ friends were being drafted and sent to Vietnam to die, or worse: come back mentally or physically screwed up. Apparently, being a new parent was just enough consideration to keep a college enrolled man from being taken - so they did that and here I am.

If it’s any consolation, there was a nuclear sized crater of a job market for all engineers (software and otherwise) after Reagan’s 8 were up. The .com aftershocks were pretty huge, and the 2008 housing crisis hit everything really hard too. Then in 2012 I got laid off due to the end of our Afghanistan debacle, then there was that pandemic thingy…

So, yeah, the current foolishness is going to make a hell of a mess, but there has always been a huge mess either cleaning up, or coming soon for the past 35 years, and longer I’m sure, those are just the ones I’ve been hit by.

I started using Linux more or less full-time in 2014. I find it to be just as “stable” as Windows or OS-X, which is to say: it’s stable until you do something that makes it not stable.

If you’re staying in the mainstream, using a “stable release” from a big distro (Ubuntu, Debian, there are others…) and waiting at least 6 months after the release of that stable release before using it, I have found Ubuntu to be just as stable as Windows or OS-X. You might want to use an unstable app, that can be a problem in any OS, but granted: there aren’t as many “stable” apps to choose from in Linux as Windows.

OS-X and their apps have burned me hard, repeatedly, for things that Windows and Linux had under control 10 years earlier.

The major difference in my WIndows vs Linux experiences has been: when you want something to work and it just doesn’t, in Windows you have to shrug your shoulders and explain to your customers: It just doesn’t work, there’s nothing we can do. In Linux, you have the option to do the heavy lifting and make it work. It will frequently not be worth the effort, but if you’re really determined you can fix just about anything in Linux.