It sounds like you were running Linux on hardware that wasn't Ubuntu certified.
This is like complaining about how hard it is to get OS X up and running when installing on a Dell, but I see where you're coming from and realize this wasn't you whole point.
Anywho.. I would say it's easier to take skills learned from using Linux and apply them to the Windows OS than the other way around.
Yep, it wasn't Ubuntu certified because it was the year 2000 and Ubuntu and Mark Shuttleworth weren't around yet. My old 486 had a rubbish VESA compliant card in it that was a pain to get XConfigurator to use.
Admittedly, I did learn many skills with the command line but this DIDN'T translate to me being a wizard with the DOS prompt on Windows 98 back then - I didn't use the DOS prompt. Task manager didn't show a hierarchy of processes like pstree does now, and pstree didn't come (or even exist?) with RedHat 5.0 or 6.0. This was RedHat, not RHEL.
I got OSX up and running on my Acer Aspire :-)
You're right though, that was difficult.
I think the skills for the different OSes are only mainly applicable to their OS, despite how we think and how easily you and I can use the different platforms.
Using a keyboard and a mouse translates, but nothing else does really. Getting my wife to use OSX is frustrating for her, my brother gets angry using OSX too, my brother is lost under Linux, my mum gets lost under Windows (she's fine with iOS mostly now) and my dad is fine with Windows 7 and before but hates Windows 8. My wife gets lost under Android after using iOS for years.
Don't even think about programming for any of them on any of the platforms!
I'm not Jesus. You got my name wrong. I get the feeling in reality that you DON'T love "guys like me". You manage to judge a lot about me from two comments!
Seriously though, I use Linux every other day and my last job involved maintaining racks and racks of Linux servers. I also use a few Raspberry Pi s at home, and I appreciate that things change. The ditching of the normal windowing paradigm is the biggest recent change that made me use Linux less as a desktop OS. I didn't say that things don't change - where did you read that?
But it still stands that giving my mum a Raspberry Pi and an SD card, and she'll be none the wiser about runlevels, CLI, or the main point of the discussion, programming. She'll instead spend more time learning how to use Linux, surely?
Or are you saying that my mum will suddenly be able to start development or something?
Or are you just offended that I had some experiences in the past or something?
This is like complaining about how hard it is to get OS X up and running when installing on a Dell, but I see where you're coming from and realize this wasn't you whole point.
Anywho.. I would say it's easier to take skills learned from using Linux and apply them to the Windows OS than the other way around.