inverted_deflector

Its not specifically hard but its also not just as easy to use. I say this as someone whos been gaming on linux for over a decade now. You still run into issues here and there with proton(often a devs fault for bad code) and there is genuinely a lot more going on and tweakable on the steamdeck.

Steamdeck is a great device but Nintendo is good at making simple systems

In many ways it was better. More organic and even the big names like google and amazon were more quirky upstarts rather than the evil megacorporations they are today.

That said lets not sugarcoat it too much. The early 2000s were edgelord central and message boards like 4chan and something awful were quite influential. Then you had gaming message boards like gamefaqs and the like. Woof so much bad trolling. Some of it funny and well done to the point of art but most just abrasive and annoying. The small message boards and communities were amazing though.

There are definitely a lot of little things in gimp that make it hard. The lack of a shapetool is one(yes yes it's not a drawing app but a basic edition helps) and other things like adding text with a black outline or shadow. After literally decades they finally added in a way to make it easier to image macro text in. The old way involved several submenus and I know I couldnt figure it out on my own without a guide.

I know sometimes people come into an opensource ecosystem and complain that everything is worse because they arent used to it, but at the same time there are a lot of open source programs that are very rough around the edges and the developer cant see it because they know the program inside and out so of course it's intuitive that this feature is burried in here and this feature way in there.