I haven’t tried Element X, but I’d like to recommend SchildiChat as a good matrix client for desktop and mobile. My understanding is it’s a fork of element, but it works much better and more reliably in my experience. Element was very inconsistent about fetching messages for example.
To be fair, those are both issues with flatpak too. You can change the file system permissions with a command or flatseal, but I don’t know of a fix for the password extension issue.
My first thought with this meme was chronic distrohopping. Do I tell them what I’m using this week? Or the last distro I used for any amount of time? Do I tell them the obscure distro name or the name of the major distro it’s forked off of? If I’m dual booting do I tell them the experimental OS I’m daily driving or the reliable fallback I have on my other partition?
This is all fair complaints about Linux, but I don’t really feel like windows is much better. I’ve had windows break on me or family members a lot over the years. Sure I’ve had some Linux distros break with an update and fail to boot (namely Manjaro), but windows has broken itself with updates dozens of times for me. The whole reason I started using Linux at all was because windows was breaking so often on my computer that I needed to try Linux to make sure my hardware wasn’t defective.
You talk about having to fall back on the command line in Linux, but that’s also true on windows without 3rd party software. I’ve had to use windows command line utilities to fix drives with messed up partitions and to try to repair my windows install after windows update broke it. A couple weeks ago I had to help a friend on windows do checksums using the windows command line because windows doesn’t support that through the gui. Meanwhile dolphin on KDE let’s you do checksums in the gui from the file properties screen.
I honestly feel like Linux isn’t really that much harder or more prone to breaking than windows, people just have less experience with it. The smaller user base means there’s a lot less help available online as well.