The year of the Linux desktop better be getting closer, because Windows and OSX are both doubling down on their closed source codes and shady snooping practices.
Just yesterday and today I've spent hours debugging a segfault in VMware. During the course of that investigation, I've found (again) that after all these years, PulseAudio is still incapable of doing its job properly. It's both failed to play the sound its been given without mangling it (possibly a bitrate issue), and then it failed to mix it correctly, with an incoherent staticky jumble as the output. And yet, removing it results in a perfectly functional system! And this is one of the minor issues on a "current" system!