I wouldn’t call it Stockholm syndrome. The problem is that even a single application that’s critical to your workflow can keep you from switching, even if everything else is much better.

I’ve switched to Linux on my laptop about 6 months ago and the overall experience is pretty good. A few annoyances that I can’t seem to fix but overall pleasant. But there are still some things that keep me from doing the same on my main workstation:

• I just can’t get used to RawTherapee or darktable for developing photos. Everything takes me three times as long to get the results I want and at hundreds per photos per shoot, that adds up really quickly. I’m sure I could learn those tools and get as comfortable with them as I am with Adobe CameraRaw but that would cost me weeks or even months of productivity and I just can’t afford that right now.
• Similar problem with general graphics stuff. I’m sure that Gimp and Inkscape are amazing tools if you’re used to them but coming from tools like Photoshop and Illustrator, they’re so different that the switch feels like hitting a brick wall at running speed. Krita is nice but it seems to focus heavily on painting which is my least common graphics use case. I really hope that Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer will get ported to Linux at some point even if that means the open source purists will probably kill me.
• A lot of my existing software projects are written in C#. Most of them are cross-platform and run on Linux servers anyway, so that’s not the problem. But neither VSCode nor Rider are quite as comfortable as VS2022. No, I won’t just port everything to Rust.
• Steam on Linux has made amazing steps but getting some games to work is still pretty fiddly and reminds me of gaming on DOS in the 90s when you had to dig through half a dozen config files before you could play your new game.

All those problems can be solved with enough patience but to be honest, I’m in my late 30s and free time is getting rare so I’d rather spend it on something that brings me joy or on learning something entirely new instead of relearning an existing skill.

And no, this not a criticism against Linux or its community. I’m just trying to give an insight into how small problems can make the switch incredibly hard, even for someone who has a degree in computer science, has worked with Linux machines for about 20 years now and would love nothing more than to leave Windows behind.