That's the joke. It's been the 'Year of The Linux Desktop!' at least since my senior year of high school, which was all the way back in 2002.

Strongly disagree. The experience of Linux on desktop computers has never been better, and has been steadily improving for years. ‘Year of the Linux Desktop’ is of course a meme so it doesn’t really matter how long it has been current year, the fact is that every DE is improving and it has never been easier to be a Linux user.

If there is any criticism that can be made, it’s that the amount of choice can be overwhelming - there are dozens of highly polished, functional distributions - but once you get past that there is no practical limit except the way that Microsoft products like Office are locked away (even this is improving, since you can use Office online).

Give KDE a try on Opensuse Tumbleweed or perhaps KDE Neon. Desktop on linux has improved a lot.

I understand that there are still some pain points for casual users. I first started using Linux on a daily basis in university in the mid 2000s. Back then, even distributions designed for casual users like Ubuntu had problems with everyday tasks like configuring multiple monitors. These days, I don't see any of those problems. I'm pretty confident I could give my parents a computer with Ubuntu 20 on it and they could probably figure out how to do their everyday tasks without any issues.

For a developer / power user Linux Desktop is years ahead of Mac OS. I recently bought a Macbook for testing and given how shiny it is, I had the thought to consider using it as a daily computer, but I could not switch because of the obstacles below and I continue being a happy Linux user:

1. Security. On Linux you can setup mandatory access control - i.e. AppArmor, SeLinux, and even if you don't want to fiddle with that, you can create mutliple users for multiple purposes to sandbox your data from untrusted apps. Running a program as another user is no problem on Linux - try it on Mac OS... (I did try it and it almost worked but things like select file dialog won't work, which makes it useless). By the way, Apple introduced some sandboxing capabilities in Catalina, but it's almost insulting because it only allows to restrict Desktop, Downloads and Trash directories, and not allowing the user to restrict other custom directories to certain apps only. And even for Desktop/Downloads it does not work reliably - i.e. I could not isolate a web browser from accessing desktop.

2. Privacy. I accidentally came upon article from a few years ago where it was revealed that Mac OS sends usage data to Apple or a third party on an unencrypted channel. Then there's the recent issue with client side scanning.

3. Desktop experience. This may be cosmetic but I don't like that Mac OS forces a slow 200ms fade animation when switching between desktops. You can't even switch back and forth too fast because the switching mechanism won't catch the hotkey if the slow fade animation is in progress.

The hardware is good though. Really hoping M1 on Linux will become a thing.