> They are, here. For BT, Wifi, graphic cards and printers at least, I attest that I most of the time have less features and/or stability using Libre drivers.
Wonder what bt, wifi, graphic cards and printers are you using. Realtek and Intel are fine, so Broadcom? So are AMD and Intel, so Nvidia?
Yes, you have pick your hardware, you cannot throw Linux on random garbage and expect it to be perfect. You would not expect it from MacOS either.
If your vendor didn't do the integration needed to run the system you want, it means you will have to do it. Yes, it takes time; I prefer the vendor doing it too.
> Does it work well enough for day to day use? Certainly. Can I use my "scan" button on my Epson laser? Absolutly not.
So Epson it is?
I have a Samsung MFP in my office that cannot scan in color with Mac (the result is corrupted file). It scans fine with Linux (needs binary-only driver though, uld) and Windows (which cannot find it on the network half of the time I need it). So you can always find some wrinkle, on all systems.
> Most the time is not enough for sometime like suspend.
I always wondered, what is the use case for hibernate. You have to dump the entire RAM on your SSD, and then read it back on resume. Incredibly wasteful and slow, if your RAM is 16GB+.
Suspend is something else; but I haven't seen it fail in years. Thinking about it, the last time I've seen it fail, it was a Mac.
Anyway, both suspend and hibernate is what the firmware is responsible for; the host OS just calls the firmware and it does the job. So contact your system vendor if it doesn't work for you.
> X is largely outdated.
Yes it is. But did you tried to discuss with some people, that X11 is dead and Wayland is the future, and the sooner the switch is done, the better for all? If they cannot hack in their spacebar room heater (ref: https://xkcd.com/1172/), it is not ready.
> That why we still have flickers when booting a linux desktop, which means you will never ever make a Mac lover use Linux because they will not trust it.
X11 has nothing to do with flickering at boot; it is not even running yet. Anyway, the user-friendly ditros do use BGRT nowadays (Ubuntu starting with 20.04, Fedora for some two or three release cycles). So unless you configure Plymouth to use something else than BGRT, or you are not using UEFI, you should have flickerless boot on a recent distro.
But while we are talking anecdotes, I do have a machine that flickers at boot with Windows 10. Do I blame Windows 10 for that? Does that make Windows 10 unsuitable for a normal user? Of course not, it is UEFI GOP on the graphic card that sets up the 1024x768 mode, despite the native being 4K. No OS is going to do anything with it, it can only read EDID and set different mode for itself, which means it will flicker (btw, thanks, Asus, for never updating the firmware for your card, that AMD did release).
> It IS harder to dev a desktop app for linux, because you have to support a HUGE diversity of configurations: distros, versions, desktop managers.
No, you don't. Package it in flatpak, done. If, for some reason you don't want flatpak (why? do you like going against the grain?), pick a distro that most of your customers are using and do QA on them (most pick duo of Ubuntu and RHEL); if it runs on anything else, it is a nice bonus, but unsupported. If someone is trying to make it run on riced out Gentoo with i3, let them, it is their time and effort.
Do you do QA of your app on all possible Windows releases combined with all possible Citrix releases? We don't either.
> Want to add a system tray icon?
Don't. You are not in Windows 95 anymore. Do exactly the same thing you would do in Android: background service + notifications + frontend. The frontend runs only when it has any window open. When the user closes it's windows, the frontend quits, no remnants running in background. When the user stops the service, your app is down, nothing keeps running. There's nothing more annoying that trying to close an app and it thinking it knows better and keeps running and hiding in systray.
> Want to use QT4? Not installable from the official repos in the last Ubuntu LTS.
Being obsolete has something to do with it. If it was available, would you wonder why it doesn't support HiDPI? You don't target PowerPC Mac either, do you?
> Meanwhile, apps that worked in Windows XP often still works on Windows 10.
Might work on Windows 10. There's a chance, that it will, or it might not. I've seen few of them...
> I love Linux, but being in denial doesn't help getting it in better shape.
It is not denial; it is using same standard for all systems. I run all three desktop systems: Windows, Mac, Linux and all of them have their strengths and warts. Each of them is more suitable for some purposes more than the other two. If Linux users are in denial, so are Windows and Mac ones.