Honestly it's been ready for years on the desktop (of course, this does not apply if you are an expert user in Y software only available on Z platform and need to use it for your job/company, etc...). Ubuntu 16.04 did not bring anything significant on the table, it's just that most people have not noticed. I switched full Linux back in 2009~2010 and I have never looked back since.
As well as giving me a reliable* platform to work on, this had the enormous benefit of allowing me to say "I don't know anything about Windows any more, so if you want me to help you with your computer you'll have to switch to Linux" to friends and family. Many switched, and I must have saved myself months of fixing Windows machines.
So I offer a heart-felt thanks to Linus, GNU and the Debian and Ubuntu maintainers every day.
* Last week my xorg.conf disappeared. After half an hour cursing while I found and fixed the problem, I realised I couldn't remember the last time computer problems had impacted my productivity - it has certainly been several years. I obviously have no idea how Windows runs now, but my recollection is that it wasted several hours a month.
Oh so you mean like folks reinstalling Windows all over again? Seen that happening many times.
Linux is able to get it right in almost every way imaginable, but I can't think of any distro that's as resilient to the user as Windows. Almost all the bloat, crap, and bad decisions seem aimed ostensibly at making it difficult or impossible for the user to ruin their system, and obviously they still are far from impervious.
I installed Ubuntu MATE on my sister's netbook ~2 years ago and when I asked her a few months ago if the netbook still runs the system I installed, she said "yeah, no issues".
I know so many people that use their computers just for web-surfing, image viewing, watching movies and listening to music (+ skype maybe) and since they are (generally speaking) not interested & uninformed in any other things (e.g. Photoshop), Windows OS is even frustrating for them - just because it ends up installing tons of malware through clicking pop-ups while they are web surfing. They have no idea how to get rid of those toolbars and they don't know they can try google for help. Linux is a safe neighbourhood, a peace of mind and ready (at least) for these users - and I guess there are millions of them.
Valve, through Steam, has made monetization of Linux games more viable. So now there are many titles available on Linux compared to years ago.
There's still a gap, but I hope that Vulkan gets traction and becomes the de-facto standard rather than DirectX. DirectX was pushed through a lot of FUD controversy during the evil years of Microsoft (they claimed that in future Windows versions OpenGL was going to be put behind a compatibility layer with a performance hit, and developers freaked out and moved to DirectX. Then it didn't happen).
Btw, I also started with Ubuntu but I'm finding Arch a much better and up to date distro.
Also, how is packaging? With Ubuntu, someone always has a PPA for everything.
What I'd like is a stable base system with cutting edge apps, but I don't know if any distro offers this.
Arch has AUR (http://aur.archlinux.org/) which has probably way more things than PPA have
However, in the one year I have been using Arch as my main distro, I had only two small breakages.
The first was a recent upgrade of openvpn, which required you to move some folder from one place to the other. however this was a known breaking change, so it was announced on the Arch-announce mailing list. :)
The second happened this weekend. I had been using the infinality-font-bundle, which provides a patched fonts set that is beautifully rendered. However it seems that the developer hadn't been keeping up with the new versions of fontconfig and the had been some new options added, and after an update gdk-bixbuf2 needed one of them to function. (which resultet in missing icons) This was fixed after 5 minutes of googleing.
So not something very dramatic.
Packaging:
The package manager is pacman and the standard repos already have a lot of software. And then there is the AUR, where everybody can upload build-scripts for stuff that is not in the official repositories. Most of the time they work great, there hasn't been any software at all that I had to download from a browser.
And ubuntu comes a bit bloated out of the box. At least for a "normal" power user that knows how to install the things he/she needs.
I'm also impressed from the support in the packages. For example, you need a new fancy editor? latest version? Atom, VS Code? sure, just install it from the package manager. Maybe need the latest of node.js? or vivaldi browser? It has them. It's much more complete than I thought. No need to look for .deb packages on anything.
And last, I won't have to change anything in 6-12 months when a new version comes out. There are no scheduled releases from what I understand. You can always be up to date.
Personally, I don't see any single reason to install ubuntu again.
Many arch users often say "you must go through our annoying installation process to understand linux better!" - but that's only true if the person migrating to arch is a linux newbie.
Frankly I've been using linux for 20 years and now that I am older and a parent I have much better uses of my very limited time than going through an obnoxious chroot install and configuring some files in /etc. Antergos is great.
Yeah, setting up the environment is a hassle. Happy to help if I can.
The two biggest issues I've ever had with linux are printer support and modem support. Time solved both issues before developers did, no one uses dial up and I no longer print anything at home.
I love how using an ageing Canon USB-scanner just works without any configuration on any new install of Ubuntu, because the driver is supported by the SANE project. No vendor-specific software needed; just open up Simple Scan and… scan.
My three day old vanilla Ubuntu desktop install completely froze up on me the other day. I wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary - browsing Reddit with Firefox. It was a mostly default Ubuntu install (nvidia and broadcom drivers) and otherwise completely up to date.
I was frustrated enough I haven't bothered to troubleshoot it yet, but my best guess is somehow I ran it out of the 16 gigs of memory in my desktop, and the default install either didn't create a sufficient swap file, or it was not very proactive in swapping.
If I can freeze a basic install by browsing Reddit with the default web browser, there's something fundamentally broken.
I would agree if you could show causation, but this is only correlation. I could tell you how many hundreds, maybe thousands of hours I do exactly what you've described with NO freezing, but so could a lot of others. I'm sure others yet can tell you of freezing.
None of this is perfect. But one anecdata does not a readiness state (nor lack of it) make.
My PC, which runs Windows, does the same thing. I've determined that it's actually an issue with the power supply. It has nothing to do with the operating system.
I guess what I'm saying is, do some troubleshooting first before you blame it on Ubuntu.
Note: sometimes a bad drive works fine under windows but dies under linux simply because windows doesn't happen to use the fault sectors.