As a long time Linux user I am so proud that we're comparing free Linux distros with commercial OS' like Mac OS X and Windows 10.
As probably an even longer time Linux user (used it back in 1997 to 2004, used classic unices previously, use mostly OS X since and Linux on vms and servers), I can't share that pride.
Back in 1999 or so, the slogan and the idea was that Linux will soon prevail "on the Desktop". Every year since then, until the idea died out, has been touted as the "year of Linux on the Desktop".
And not in the same of some people happily using it either. Those existed back in 1999 too, heck I had a KDE based desktop and used Konqueror as my main browser.
It also wasn't about "this phone runs the Linux kernel with some custom company frontend, but otherwise there's nothing especially Linuxy about it, and you couldn't tell it from a QNX or iOS phone with a similar facade". So, no Android is not that dream fullfilled.
"Linux on the Desktop" meant undertaking Microsoft (OS X was negligible or not still existing then) at their own desktop/office desktop game, and for if not the majority, of a huge share (30% or more) of users.
Which basically means: a stable desktop OS, with a suite that covers all the basics. And what we have?
- Basic things like sleep, working touchpads etc are still issues on many installations.
- On the 3D compositor/desktop front-end there are still messes for users to deal with.
- Desktop environments go here and there, all over the place, sometimes mimicking Windows, others mimicking OS X, progressing and regressing, rewriting things for no good reason, etc. Perpetually less capable and/or stable than both Windows and OS X.
- Gimp is also perpetually less capable and/or stable than Photoshop (and still people promise it will all change with the new pipeline, that's close to a decade in the making)
- OpenOffice (and it's various forks) are still not as capable as MS Office and full of quirks and slowdowns, plus the bizarro old-school UI.
And tons of other things besides...
My team and I routinely use google docs to write multi-million dollar proposals. We use gmail, github and everything else the cool kids use and we all use Ubuntu on our desktops. A tiny fraction of people gets paid to use whatever gimp is used for, those people can and should buy the best tools for the job, and make the rest of us pay for that by claiming the cost back from tax. Same for Office, of whatever variant. If you spend hours a day doing work in whatever Office is good for, acquire a word processing appliance and be done.
Desktop environment envy is a silly human affliction easily cured by using a tiled window manager, I use i3, and so should you.
And lastly, where has this nonsense of everything on this one laptop came from ? Have a laptop for each of your major tasks. For cutting code, nothing but Linux will do. Getting paid to 'shop putin and trump in various man-love positions on top of a horse ? Have yourself a recent mac with elements.
No, they really aren't. Let's see:
#Basic things like sleep, working touchpads etc are still issues on many installations
That's not an issue at all on Windows or Mac.
#On the 3D compositor/desktop front-end there are still messes for users to deal with
Again, not an issue at all.
#Desktop environments go here and there, all over the place, sometimes mimicking Windows, others mimicking OS X, progressing and regressing, rewriting things for no good reason, etc. Perpetually less capable and/or stable than both Windows and OS X.
Both OS X and Windows change their desktop GUIs, but nowhere to the extend that Linux does, and without the resulting breakage (e.g. from Gnome 2 to 3, KDE migrations (and changes to QT) etc), and all for really ho-hum changes. When Apple makes a ho-hum change to OS X desktop (Cocoa UI, the Finder, etc) (which they do frequently) all the rest works just fine, apps don't need to be migrated, whole classes of things (e.g. stuff like Gnome Panel widgets) aren't suddenly dead, etc.
>Granny browses midget porn on her Chromebook just fine, thank you very much.
And then Granny wants to produce her own senior-porn, or edit her grandaughter's birthday video, and finds out that multimedia support on Chromebook is crap, and switches to Windows.
>Gimp is also perpetually less capable and/or stable than Photoshop (and still people promise it will all change with the new pipeline, that's close to a decade in the making)
Well, it's still unusable for professional printing use.
>My team and I routinely use google docs to write multi-million dollar proposals.
Well, that's a moot argument. Doesn't mean Google Docs is "as good as MS Office" for that, just that multi-million dollar proposals can also be written with very basic features. Heck, one can write multi-million dollar proposals in Notepad too. On the other, for industries and documents with more dedicated workflows (e.g. legal documents, etc) that wont do, as wont be as efficient.
>And lastly, where has this nonsense of everything on this one laptop came from ? Have a laptop for each of your major tasks. For cutting code, nothing but Linux will do
Actually there are more Windows developers than Linux ones. In the enterprise space it's mostly all Windows (with C#, Java, etc). And even tons of Linux targetting devs use Windows or OS X and just run a vm, docker or connect to a remote server (which is cleaner anyway: reproducable, exactly same as the deployment environment (of which they might have many), with snapshots and all, and doesn't mess with their main desktop machine for testing server tasks).
Is that the OS's fault? Manufacturers supply drivers for Windows, but Linux is left to just figure it out by itself.
If your gripe is with the slow progress of Linux development; we're talking about a completely free operating system, that also tries very hard to be open in source code. Those two things combined with community effort is bringing us an OS that I'm using right now and use daily for my work.
You're covering some pretty advanced topics, that are all good goals but Gnome has just barely started standardizing APIs and systemd is brand new so I think we're still learning to walk after having crawled for many years through the desktop market.
My main problems with Linux, I've recited these countless times in countless fora already. :)
* EWS support * MS Office support
And those are issues only because of my work environment.
Of course I'm viewing Linux from a power user perspective. I can also step outside of myself and see that it takes too much experience to solve issues in Linux.
Thinking back to the last problems I've had on my fedora laptop, I have to think really hard first of all but they all seem related to advanced usage. For example getting Juniper VPNs to work or troubleshooting EWS issues in Evolution.
It's a bit like being proud that someone compares your Lada to their Bugati :-)
Obviously developers try to support as much hardware as possible with varying degrees of cooperation from the manufacturers but its not reasonable to expect support for every device under the sun. Developer hours are expensive and finite the logical solution is to buy machines with linux in mind if you want to run linux.
This is probably why I've been running Linux for 13 years with limited difficulty because I take responsibility for making reasonable choices instead of complaining.
The current state of Desktop Linux is the same as Desktop Linux 15 years ago, and it will never change. I still use it, because I like all the control it gives me, I just don't like having to exercise said control so often.
Admittedly, "day one" was not when Ubuntu switched to PulseAudio well too soon. It was around 2012, and it was just magical to have the whole network transparency of audio devices just work.
The worst problem is, almost always someone would come up and reply with one standard answer : "Oh, that's because you're using distro <x>. Had you used distro <y>, this problem would never occur!". More than two decades, and Linux hasn't got the basic things right, and still remains a Nerd only OS (and it's coming from a nerd).