I used it almost exclusively until 2006, when I finally had enough. At the time I moved to Windows and abandoned Linux on the desktop completely, but I've since switched to OS X.
I can relate to the author. I spent years messing around with my systems, which was fun for a while. Every 6 months I'd reinstall my desktop box with the lastest version of Red Hat (and then Fedora) and spend the next week or two filing bug reports in bugzilla, and patching some stuff.
But after a few years, what was a learning experience, becomes a permanent wound in your sound engineering sense. It just isn't possible that something that has an insane amount of bugs with every new release will ever be something reliable and usable. Not with so many regressions, never fixed problems, and unbelievably in-your-face issues.
I've tried to return, to see if any progress was made. About once a year I install the latest Ubuntu or Fedora, but every time it seems the same, or worse in some aspects.
My last test was Ubuntu 11.04 on an old Toshiba laptop from late 2005 that I still have. It used to work apparently fine with just the LCD brightness control not working, and later with the usual application quirks, bugs and crashes.
However, the latest version has "new" drivers for the ATI Radeon X300 graphics card, which non-working 3D acceleration that makes the default WM hang on login, and not even "glxgears" works anymore. Any attempts to disable hardware acceleration have failed (not only X doesn't have a configuration file by default anymore, but it also segfaults when trying to generate one with "X -configure" and ignores any option I set manually).
Aside from the X problems, stand-by no longer works. The machine just dies never to wake up again.
The problems just go on and on.
It isn't a usable machine for anything other than simple web browsing, and even there it has issues with flash, which stutters playing the simplest of videos, even though it doesn't peg the CPU.
I've used the knowledge I accumulated from these years for my work (where I have a bunch of Linux servers working just fine), but I say that Linux on the desktop won't ever amount to nothing, no matter how much that turd is polished.
It's even more sad if you think that while all this was going on in the Linux desktop, Apple has successfully launched an unix desktop that has been stable and usable for years. So it is possible and in a short timeframe, which means that Linux on the desktop is a failed experience.