So uncomfortably true!
I recall spending a (large) number of weeks struggling through Elementary Stochastic Calculus, which had an incredibly misleading sticker on the cover proclaiming:-
"This book is suitable for the reader without a deep mathematical background."
Linux font rendering is generally very good now, so I think they've gotten past that. Apart from a System76 desktop, which was terrible, I haven't hated the rendering for many years. It's just that Microsoft's font rendering (maximizing clarity at the expense of destroying the font metrics) is exactly what I want to look at all day if I'm staring at code. When I look at screenshots of vscode on Linux and Mac the code looks beautiful, because the font renderer hasn't beaten the characters with a big stick to make them fit the pixel grid, but when I switch back to windows after using Linux/Mac then it feels like someone fixed the focus and de-blurred everything.
And now that I can have as many Linux installs as I like running concurrently via WSL2, I get to use Linux all day without losing the stuff I like about Windows.
I don't play games, but I do plenty of dev work including a lot in Visual Studio & SSMS. I always have a few Linux boxes running & try every few months to live on Linux rather than Windows.
Visual Studio can be swapped out for Rider. Rider is quite different feeling than VS, but I guess a lot of devs use another Jetbrains IDE of some kind, in which case it's a fairly easy switch.
SQL Server runs happily on Linux. But SSMS is harder for me to do without. I have Aqua Data Studio & Jetbrains DataGrip, but they don't feel as seamless as SSMS.
In the end though, it's hard to beat Windows + WSL2 now that Windows VSCode & Jetbrains IDEs seamlessly connect to Linux projects. And if you enable nested virtualization and MAC address spoofing then Hyper-V can run anything WSL can't.
Usually I end up moving back to Windows because of font rendering. I far prefer Windows cleartype font rendering on 2160p desktop screens. One day Linux fractional scaling will be perfected or 200+dpi desktop screens will become affordable. Then I might stay on Linux.
In addition to the excellent https://sci-hub.se suggestion...
I can find the paper for free 90% of the time by googling the authors and visiting their personal page on their university's website.
(Tweaked) Verdana FTW.
I liked proportional fonts for reading code - several of my favorite programming books used proportional fonts for code examples - so when Verdana was released in 1996 I switched to using it in my IDEs. I've had 27 years of pleasantly ergonomic coding - it has a high x-height, different 0/O, I/l/1, and impeccable hinting and kerning. ❤️❤️❤️