Technology

I am sorry but you aren't good at tech stuff if you are having these issues. It's common knowledge that macOS and Windows don't use the same file system, why would you assume Linux is any different? macOS meanwhile can't write to Windows partitions at all by default. Windows can't even read Linux ones. Linux is actually the good guy here, it can read and write to Windows partitions, and even read macOS ones I believe.

Backing up all your stuff before formatting or reinstalling is common practice. You tried to get away from that by using multiple drives without actually thinking through the consequences.

Also using Fat32 is a terrible idea. Use ExFAT, or better yet just use a real Linux file system and be done with it. Honestly you could have stuck with NTFS and it would work better than trying to use FAT32.

This is like amateur hour for running servers.

Up until this point your arguments sort of made sense. You do tend to run into more issues on Linux than Windows, primarily because of the lack of support from third parties but sometimes because of Linux distro shenanigans too, and the community is kind of toxic. But my god this last couple comments reframe it all. Your trying to do things beyond your understanding then blaming Linux when they go wrong. By the sounds of it you aren't even running RAID or have any kind of data integrity/bit rot protection.

All of that, just to have a Linux server that could natively handle the default windows file format.

All of that has nothing to do with standard operation of Linux. I also switched from Windows, and I haven't reformatted two of my drives. They work perfectly fine. They are NTFS. I have used them on Ubuntu, Fedora, and now Garuda. I didn't have to install any other packages or anything for them to work. Debian probably just doesn't include it by default, but every distro I've tried does. Linux doesn't natively support many things, which is why distros include a lot.

The average Windows user switching their computer will probably choose a desktop focused distro that will include this support by default. It won't be an issue, and if it is then it's only a time-sink, not difficulty, as you move files to storage temporarily while you reformat.

I won't even start on all the small tedious things I have to on Linux VS doing the same thing on Windows. (I wish g hub was able to run on linux)

Yeah, some things are annoying, but some things suck on Windows too. Have you ever edited your registries on Windows (I'm sure the answer is yes.) It's not a fun process, and you can fuck things up easily. There's no need to do things like that on Linux.

As for G-Hub, yeah it sucks it doesn't work, but there's Solaar that does most of it, just in a harder to use package. That's a choice by Logitech to not support Linux though, not a difficulty intrinsic to Linux. They will support it if more people change over.