Change is hard.
My father is a 70-year-old software engineer who programs .NET Core in Notepad and builds using custom BAT files that build the project using csc (the outright compiler). He browses and copies files in the Windows Terminal. He is also accustomed to Linux since we deploy to it in our business, and he can do everything comfortably in the Linux terminal.
He trusts me almost blindly, yet I can’t convince him to swap to Linux even though every time he keeps fighting Windows. I'm actually fairly surprised since I'm certain he'd find himself at home almost immediately( he already is when managing servers)
I’m fairly sure it’s Notepad keeping him there, but I’ve told him there is also a Linux clone or Wine. I had been dabbling in Linux for 30 years, and it’s been about 7 or 8 years since I switched full-time and couldn’t be happier. But honestly, we're going to get there because it’s inevitable. It’s the only OS that's currently not wholly incentivized to "enshittify" itself and is actually improving at a pretty good pace due to Wayland's novelty fostering a plethora of alternative window managers.
Notepad, of all things, is a CRAZY thing to be so tied to. It's not even a good editor! MS-DOS edit.com was honestly a much better experience.
I'd love to hear more about his programming journey. vi? EMACS? Nope, notepad.exe.
I'm only a decade younger - I write .Net (C#) professionally - work it is Windows & Visual Studio (there is no way I'd want to mange any project that size without an IDE, tbh I much prefer using a IDE since I first got one in early 90s)
But at home - I use Jet Brains Rider (free non commercial) for C# .Net projects on Linux machines (Debian + KDE or Mint depending on machine)
I wonder if you mean Notepad++ not Notepad - I find KATE on KDE is good enough, when I just want to edit a file, but I've run Notepad++ under wine before.