I was the #1 KDE hater until GNOME 3/Shell. They have made great strides in performance (largely because Canonical has made a large push for it), but even still my every attempt at GNOME Shell ends the same: Quickly unusable due to freezing. I blame this on the Mutter window manager, because I experience the same issue to some degree on every other Mutter-based DE (Cinnamon, Pantheon, Budgie...). Meanwhile, I've considered KWin the best WM since KDE 4 (which was very buggy, but had enough great features that I stopped considering myself a KDE hater). Despite still having occasional gripes with Plasma, I consider it by far the best DE since KDE 5 was released. It's nice to see how much more inviting and personable their devs are too compared to the notoriously difficult GNOME devs, and Nate Graham's "Adventures in Linux and KDE"/"This Week in KDE" posts are an absolute treat.
Windows has improved immensely as an OS for developer (largely thanks to Linux, and again especially Canonical), but as you said, not great, not terrible.
MacOS is mostly great, when it allows itself to be installed - and I'm not talking about a Hackintosh on bare metal or VM, where I've had few problems on either in the last few years going with the newer, more vanilla install method; no, I'm talking about now being on my THIRD MacBook Pro (still supported, not an EOL issue) on which MacOS installs suddenly started erroring out and I was forced to install Linux (hell, on one I even successfully installed Win10 with EFI boot, not the crappy hybrid MBR that Bootcamp forces on you... But no MacOS). As much as I've invested in MBPs, I have zero qualms about running MacOS on something besides bare Apple metal.
I always come back to Linux anyway. I don't miss Photoshop at all, but I barely used it (for the types of small edits which are easy once you're used to GIMP anyway). Same with Illustrator, I'm perfectly fine with Inkscape. I'm looking forward to better Lottie support in both Inkscape and Synfig, because that's the only reason I'd ever bother with AfterEffects, and that seems like a convoluted workflow anyway. Likewise with office, I rarely find a situation where LibreOffice doesn't suit my needs
I'm a big fan of Manjaro (and it's stupid to me that vanilla Arch is still such a pain to install, even to someone with ~18 years of Linux experience like myself), but Ubuntu and its variants have always worked better on MBPs. Also, snaps aside, I prefer PPAs or other third party deb repos to AUR any day (and don't get me started on the horrific RPM collisions I've encountered from RedHat/CentOS/Fedora, OpenSuse, etc.). Also, there's no better distro for widely-supported and organized creative tools (even KXStudio can't compete with ubuntustudio-menu, and I use their repos too for audio). I'm a little miffed that Kubuntu 20.04 is stuck on KDE 5.18 (even if it makes sense because they're both LTS releases), but that will be solved in October with 20.10 (if I don't just go the Rolling Rhino route and pull from the devel repos - have I mentioned that I'm thinking about building my own distro based on all of the above?)
I made an account justo to agree with your comment. More than 10 years on Linux in my case, many distros, and Manjaro KDE has offered the best experience (really surprising for an Arch based rolling release distro).
I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
Just because of past experiences with ArchLinux.
I don't have a full opinion about Arch... but I think rolling distros can be a bit more difficult to maintain. Generally, I do not recommend Manjaro to newcomers, because you have to worry more about keeping things up-to-date. And with updates, we know, sometimes small things need to be fixed visiting the forums jeje.
Sorry to disappoint you, then. To be clear, I still prefer Ubuntu-based distros (namely Kubuntu, or soon Ubuntu Studio when it switches to KDE in 20.10, because KDE Neon is even slower than LTS releases to update its base).
I might feel differently when I buy something other than a MacBook for my daily driver (this will be my last, both due to cost and the issues I detailed above). But Manjaro does get a lot of things right... though I don't think including Steam as a dependency of manjaro-{whatever_de}-full is one of them, as trying to remove it (I'm not a gamer) has led to it threatening to remove a lot of packages I do need (manjaro-{whatever_de}-minimal solves this mostly, but it's not a good feeling when coming from Debian/Ubuntu, where metapackages can be removed without uninstalling the dependencies they reference).
Chances are, I'll stick with (K)Ubuntu (Studio, plus a lot of extra repos). I'm not sure I'll ever trust another package manager as much as deb/apt, and I'd say that Ubuntu has done better in hardware support than other distros in 95% or more of the cases I've encountered.
I always try plenty of others, in typical Linux distro-hopping fashion, but always come back to Ubuntu.
Yes, I agree with the general diagnosis. The discussion about distros might be interesting, but currently I think desktop environment discussion is more interesting. I'm glad to see many people recognizing the great job KDE is doing.
(K)Ubuntu is great, solid and a huge community which is very important, my default option to everyone who wants to start with Linux or for work. Manjaro is also great, really focused to bring an usable solution, personally I love having the latest software, specially KDE related updates.
But the original question was another, and the answer is yes. With Linux you have many options to get the most productive version of you. That is what you need for work, be productive, and in Linux environment you have the right tools to do that.
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I was the #1 KDE hater until GNOME 3/Shell. They have made great strides in performance (largely because Canonical has made a large push for it), but even still my every attempt at GNOME Shell ends the same: Quickly unusable due to freezing. I blame this on the Mutter window manager, because I experience the same issue to some degree on every other Mutter-based DE (Cinnamon, Pantheon, Budgie...). Meanwhile, I've considered KWin the best WM since KDE 4 (which was very buggy, but had enough great features that I stopped considering myself a KDE hater). Despite still having occasional gripes with Plasma, I consider it by far the best DE since KDE 5 was released. It's nice to see how much more inviting and personable their devs are too compared to the notoriously difficult GNOME devs, and Nate Graham's "Adventures in Linux and KDE"/"This Week in KDE" posts are an absolute treat.
Windows has improved immensely as an OS for developer (largely thanks to Linux, and again especially Canonical), but as you said, not great, not terrible.
MacOS is mostly great, when it allows itself to be installed - and I'm not talking about a Hackintosh on bare metal or VM, where I've had few problems on either in the last few years going with the newer, more vanilla install method; no, I'm talking about now being on my THIRD MacBook Pro (still supported, not an EOL issue) on which MacOS installs suddenly started erroring out and I was forced to install Linux (hell, on one I even successfully installed Win10 with EFI boot, not the crappy hybrid MBR that Bootcamp forces on you... But no MacOS). As much as I've invested in MBPs, I have zero qualms about running MacOS on something besides bare Apple metal.
I always come back to Linux anyway. I don't miss Photoshop at all, but I barely used it (for the types of small edits which are easy once you're used to GIMP anyway). Same with Illustrator, I'm perfectly fine with Inkscape. I'm looking forward to better Lottie support in both Inkscape and Synfig, because that's the only reason I'd ever bother with AfterEffects, and that seems like a convoluted workflow anyway. Likewise with office, I rarely find a situation where LibreOffice doesn't suit my needs
I'm a big fan of Manjaro (and it's stupid to me that vanilla Arch is still such a pain to install, even to someone with ~18 years of Linux experience like myself), but Ubuntu and its variants have always worked better on MBPs. Also, snaps aside, I prefer PPAs or other third party deb repos to AUR any day (and don't get me started on the horrific RPM collisions I've encountered from RedHat/CentOS/Fedora, OpenSuse, etc.). Also, there's no better distro for widely-supported and organized creative tools (even KXStudio can't compete with ubuntustudio-menu, and I use their repos too for audio). I'm a little miffed that Kubuntu 20.04 is stuck on KDE 5.18 (even if it makes sense because they're both LTS releases), but that will be solved in October with 20.10 (if I don't just go the Rolling Rhino route and pull from the devel repos - have I mentioned that I'm thinking about building my own distro based on all of the above?)
I made an account justo to agree with your comment. More than 10 years on Linux in my case, many distros, and Manjaro KDE has offered the best experience (really surprising for an Arch based rolling release distro).
I'm not sure why you would be surprised about this?
Just because of past experiences with ArchLinux.
I don't have a full opinion about Arch... but I think rolling distros can be a bit more difficult to maintain. Generally, I do not recommend Manjaro to newcomers, because you have to worry more about keeping things up-to-date. And with updates, we know, sometimes small things need to be fixed visiting the forums jeje.
Sorry to disappoint you, then. To be clear, I still prefer Ubuntu-based distros (namely Kubuntu, or soon Ubuntu Studio when it switches to KDE in 20.10, because KDE Neon is even slower than LTS releases to update its base).
I might feel differently when I buy something other than a MacBook for my daily driver (this will be my last, both due to cost and the issues I detailed above). But Manjaro does get a lot of things right... though I don't think including Steam as a dependency of manjaro-{whatever_de}-full is one of them, as trying to remove it (I'm not a gamer) has led to it threatening to remove a lot of packages I do need (manjaro-{whatever_de}-minimal solves this mostly, but it's not a good feeling when coming from Debian/Ubuntu, where metapackages can be removed without uninstalling the dependencies they reference).
Chances are, I'll stick with (K)Ubuntu (Studio, plus a lot of extra repos). I'm not sure I'll ever trust another package manager as much as deb/apt, and I'd say that Ubuntu has done better in hardware support than other distros in 95% or more of the cases I've encountered.
I always try plenty of others, in typical Linux distro-hopping fashion, but always come back to Ubuntu.
Yes, I agree with the general diagnosis. The discussion about distros might be interesting, but currently I think desktop environment discussion is more interesting. I'm glad to see many people recognizing the great job KDE is doing.
(K)Ubuntu is great, solid and a huge community which is very important, my default option to everyone who wants to start with Linux or for work. Manjaro is also great, really focused to bring an usable solution, personally I love having the latest software, specially KDE related updates.
But the original question was another, and the answer is yes. With Linux you have many options to get the most productive version of you. That is what you need for work, be productive, and in Linux environment you have the right tools to do that.