But what about Linux?

What about Linux? Friend, if you're already running Linux there's probably nothing that I could tell you that you don't already know.

"But you talk so much about Windows"

Yeah it sucks but most of the world still runs on Windows. I don't like it, but if you're trying to help people with the computers they're going to use at work or in the lab at school, most of those are going to be Windows machines.

Which I hate but TBH I still find Windows less troubling than either iOS (and its contempt for users) or ChromeOS (and its entire universe of problems).

I'm not saying that Windows isn't evil, or that it isn't shit; I'm saying it's what most of the world uses so the advice that I can give about Windows is going to be generally much more useful than my advice about Apple (don't buy it!) or Linux (please use it but "linux" is such a huge category that I can't give you meaningful advice!).

"Okay so why don't you tell more people to use Linux"

For the same reason I don't tell more people to replace their own brake pads. The people who are comfortable doing that without very close supervision are already doing it, the ones who aren't comfortable with it aren't going to get anything but anxiety from trying to do it on their own. I would love it if more people used Linux or did their own car repair or baked their own bread but different people are comfortable with different things.

If I was talking to my neighbor, or my cousin, or my coworker about switching to a different OS I'd probably push harder for them to try Linux because I know that I'm there to be the training wheels they need. I can come over and sit next to them and show them how to find information about the problems they're having, or how to find that file they lost. I can't do that for everybody on the internet, and if you saw the way that people get me to try to troubleshoot firefox after reccing it, you'd understand why I don't want to play tech support for a whole-ass OS.

"...Okay what distros do you recommend?"

It depends on your use case, of course.

Personally I use MX Linux on my 2009 EeePC and Cinnamon on my 2014 Lenovo G50.

I generally hand out links to Linux Lite for people who are looking to get more life out of very old machines because it's the leanest option I've found that has a decent support community; otherwise I tell people that they'd probably like Mint.

If someone is asking ME about Linux it means they know even less about Linux than I do, which is pretty hard to pull off, so I don't get into the weeds with them about it.