I've experienced more crashes and behavioral bugs with KDE than I have ever in either Windows or macOS. I also tried Unity (Ubuntu), and it too frequently had userland services crash and burn. Now, Enlightenment / GNOME / LXDE / Xfce / Xmonad / etc, might be more stable. But I decided I would rather have the richer and far superior UX of KDE (i.e., in my personal opinion) and take the hit of its relatively high bugginess, rather than leave KDE for another (likely less nice UX) desktop environment.
But in terms of actual day-to-day usage, Linux + KDE has worked out pretty well. Every application I care about runs on it:
* Firefox
* Google Chrome (allows me to watch Netflix)
* Spotify (<- this one's critical)
* Most IDEs: Android Studio, IntelliJ, PyCharm, WebStorm, RubyMine, Eclipse, NetBeans, Qt Creator, etc.
* Most GUI text editors: Sublime Text, Atom, Visual Studio Code, etc.
* Practically every commonly used dev tool (gcc, clang, python, java, ruby, etc, etc.) & less common dev tools (e.g. GitKraken).
* A lot of Steam Games + Humble Bundle indie games
* Microsoft Office (works perfectly and easy to install with PlayOnLinux)
Everything that matters to me runs perfectly on desktop Linux. I literally can't think of anything that I need that only runs on Windows or Mac. And Linux is so much more configurable than any other OS, which comes handy for certain things.
It's by no means a bad platform, but its not for me. I want a system where I need to do as little as possible to configure it, an I just want it to work. On my windows and macOS systems, I can completely wipe the machine, and be back up and running in a few hours.
Never did figure out what happened, I ended up just hopping over to a debian laptop and doing it there and it worked fine.
maybe you would had been better off with some flavour of Ubuntu, Debian is cool and all but it's not for beginners, although if you read into it first - it's one of the most stable systems you could use.
Still, worrying about reading guide after guide before installing routine software from a standard repo is not something I want to do in my desktop software.
On a non-corporate Windows installation, that would just be the beginning, where I would be hunting for chipset drivers, graphics drivers, HID drivers, network drivers and any other devices I need, each needing separate hands-on installation.
Thank goodness that there's Ninite available now, otherwise all the basic apps that make up a Windows install would then still be another few hours of manual downloading and installation. And then there's restoration of your old Users directory, which is still a fraught process if you don't have a pretty good understanding of windows.
You haven't installed Windows in a decade.
Some devices that worked out of the box on Linux but required drivers on windows, just off the top of my head: Bluetooth USB dongle. USB wifi module. Logitech webcam. Focusrite audio interface. HP printer (actually this one required firmware on Linux too, so that's a draw). XBox 360 controller (required a driver on Windows 8.1. Maybe that's changed in the last few months with windows 10).
I admittedly don't use Bluetooth and every time I've tried it's been a horrible experience.
> USB wifi module.
Mine works fine, no driver download.
> Logitech webcam.
Mine works fine, no driver download.
> Focusrite audio interface.
I don't have one.
> HP printer (actually this one required firmware on Linux too, so that's a draw).
I haven't used a printer in probably 10 years.
> XBox 360 controller (required a driver on Windows 8.1. Maybe that's changed in the last few months with windows 10).
Nope. Not on 8.1. Not on 10. There may be an optional driver for it (may be-- I've never seen it), but it's certainly not required. This one I can firmly say you're wrong about. (Unless you have like a Chinese knock-off Xbox 360 controller-- the brand-name ones work.)
I had a great experience the other day when I plugged in my ancient CanoScan LiDE 200 scanner I bought back in the Windows 2000 days, and it worked flawlessly in Windows 10, no drivers or software needed.
The wifi modules were a generic device with a Ralink/Mediatek chipset, and another TP-Link branded device. I don't recall the specific webcam verson, it's an older Quick series one that really should have worked.
> I had a great experience the other day when I plugged in my ancient CanoScan LiDE 200 scanner I bought back in the Windows 2000 days
In general this is a situation where Linux shines, because hardware tends to remain supported much longer as long as there's someone willing to keep the driver compiling. With TWAIN scanners it's a lot easier of course.
There are a lot more foot guns in Linux, but the ease of wiping and reinstalling makes those less problematic
Next, there are a bunch of reasons why Linux distros run games slower than Windows. Most games are made for Windows in mind in the first place, so unless someone does a whole conversion of the graphics code base to optimize it for OpenGL, DirectX ends up wrapped or translated with loss of performance. This has nothing to do with how much the desktop feels "responsive", and it completely off topic here.
Wayland is not the Messiah and is not going to provide massive performance improvement. Already confirmed with the alpha/beta out. And it brings a ton of problems too since each application cannot access information from other applications (screensavers, screen capture programs would not work in Wayland). That's why they have the XWayland project.
And X11 is not a dog. That's a lot of history in it, nad it may be bloated, but it can still perform very well - there are a few games ported from Windows that run faster on Linux (Dirt Showdown is one).
BTW, X11 with DRI3 has the same performance as Wayland.
The Linux kernel is, I'm sure, just a stable as the Windows NT kernel and all that-- but the desktop applications are fragile as heck, and I know exactly what the grandparent is talking about.
(I am not and never will be a CLI user, and I don't like tinkering with bullshit-- I want my computers to just work the first time. To pre-empt some of the obvious replies I'm likely to get.)
According to DistroWatch, the top 3 right now are Mint, Debian, or Ubuntu. I would pick one of those (probably Mint because it's #1) and install it leaving everything set to the default setting.
ElementaryOS would let me leave it at the defaults for just about everything.
Even when I do use Linux without the internal keyboard, I am surprised, for example, how the wifi connections don't fickle out. It makes you really wonder what Mac OS is doing under the hood.
The trouble with Windows is that there is just so much crap available for it. Everyone is trying to get market share and sell licenses, show ads or co-install crap from other people, who are also trying to get market share, and the cycle continues.
On Linux this could never happen because that kind of software wouldn't make it into the repositories. So while I know what you mean about Linux desktops being less stable than the two most mainstream operating systems, there are a hundred other things that can't go wrong on Linux, making it a lot more "foot-gun safe".
As a concrete example, on stock Debian stable, uninstalling LibreOffice and then updating and upgrading will result in the package manager cheerfully offering to uninstall most of the Gnome desktop. This is because of LibreOffice being a dependency of the gnome-desktop meta-package. There are ways around it.
My personal experience is that if I stay with the default desktop packages and just add things I need, the stability is quite good.