I've actually started to find Windows to be more difficult than Linux for many things.

Simply because windows requires using config user interfaces and they keep on changing where the setting UI I need to use can be found. When I search for instructions on how to do something, many times the instructions are for a different version of windows so I have to spend a lot of time trying to find where they've moved the setting to.

Sure some bash command can seem basically like a magic incantation. But I've learned enough to understand bash well enough to know when an incantation is suspicious, the rest is just copy and pasting text into a terminal window.

And really "apt install" is what I'm doing 99% of the time. Sure it's not clicky clicky, but it's consistent.

Yup. I've been using linux off and on since middle school - just installed Arch on my laptop because I felt like tinkering and such, but I've tried dozens of distros over the years, even fully switching for months at a time, and for a daily driver Windows is still unbeatable for me - sometimes I do feel like messing with my computer, but not all the time.

I rarely have to tinker with Windows more than a bit to get it doing what I want.

However, I do wanna get to the point where I'm as comfortable/knowledgeable with Linux as I am with Windows, but it's definitely a wildly different beast.

I find it wild that your experience is that Linux is difficult to install software, but that said: I'm not constantly trying to install Windows software.

I'd use Mac again, except that it tries to punish you every time you go outside the Apple box

I'll admit I haven't used a Mac for a little over 5 years now, but when I did use one this did not match my experience at all. I never had any trouble getting it to do what I wanted, and I rarely used any Apple ecosystem stuff because I was always Apple laptop + windows desktop + Android phone and needed cross-platform tools.

It's not as free as Linux for sure, but all these people talking about a walled garden feel like they've hardly used a Mac at all and are just assuming it must be similar to iOS, because nothing about my experience felt like a walled garden.