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> Basically any decent Windows experience — 2000, XP, 7 or 10 — would be far ahead of the current big players for the 99% use case.

I see more and more people - and not just hardcore devs - using Linux.

For me, Linux has been a better desktop experience since around 2005 sometime: faster, easier to configure to my exact liking, easier to install, less hassle to maintain. (Except the time when KDE 4 was new and Ubuntu changed to Unity.)

For a long time I even though it was just a matter of time before everyone would realize but now I have realized that people are just different. Some people actually like Mac and Windows. Some people are driven mad by inconsistencies in my favorite DE (KDE) that I cannot even spot after someone tried to point them out. I however can't stand CMD-tab on Mac but Mac users - like me with the alignment issues on KDE - cannot see how it can be a problem.

Summary: it is not like any of them are way ahead in general. I see more and more people using Linux and expect numbers to rise a few percentage points more.

> it's 2020 and I could list at least half a dozen graphics glitches I've had on Ubuntu 20.04 so far

It depends on what desktop environment / window manager you use.

I don't notice too many weird issues when I run i3 and bsp on my Linux laptop. I think the nice thing about a tiled window manager is if you go down this route, you often hand select a bunch of small components that do 1 thing very well. Even going as far as evaluating and picking a specific compositor (or maybe not even using one at all).

You are right tho about Windows. Its UI is very stable and buttery smooth for actions like moving and resizing windows. It has a level of polish that out of the box DEs on Linux usually don't have.

Maybe they'll "borrow ideas" or "get inspired" by things like LinuxFx etc.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxfxdevil/

https://b00merang.weebly.com/windows-10.html

Leveraging the FOSS work and cutting down on maintenance costs, and focus that only for LSW, to guarantee the functioning of that abstraction layer, and leave the harder parts (hardware support, security etc) onto public to pick up - at the cost of a few coupons, t-shirts, coffee-mugs etc thrown at them via "hackathons". (And even perpetuate the "passion for software" hence "public github contributions". May be give a slightly higher tier github subscription for free, they've bought that org anyway. And people are anyway suckers for Internet points)

Glitching graphics are annoying obviously, but as someone who uses macOS, Ubuntu (Gnome) and Win 10 all quite a bit, I find small UI inconsistencies to be extremely frustrating in both Win 10 and Ubuntu. On macOS, it's 90% likely (not perfect even there) that cmd-w will close a window, and cmd-q will quit an application. On the other two, nothing is certain - I guess alt-F4 on Win 10 is fairly reliable, but an awkward combo, on Ubuntu, it's pretty much different for everything. Personally I'd prefer if the OS enforced that, and required devs to do extra work to change the standard open-close-quit keybindings.

>First we'd need a FOSS window/desktop manager replicating the Windows experience. It would gobble down the market share of existing FOSS WMs/DMs in an instant.

ReactOS has been a thing for 20 years now and it just isn't that popular.