The next era will be of Offline Apps because of stuff like this
I don't have a link to that exchange handy, but this for the first time drove home to me the realization that we have a whole generation of people brought up on Internet streaming services, who may not even realize that it's not only possible for the media to be stored locally on their machines, but it's in fact the natural state for data.
That being said, I still think theres more work to do, and arguably the hardest work is ahead.
For example, desktop environments are just wonky and buggy most the time, random games don't work, WINE is the worst piece of software on the planet, drivers suck, other random weird issues.
When was the last time you have tried linux? With exception of wine, which on its pure form is indeed annoying, nothing else is true. Gnome/KDE/Cinnamon are just fine (not my cup of tea but far from buggy/wonky). I have no problem gaming even on i3. For driver on many distro you can check a box to install the proprietary Nvidia driver.
You can use lutris to easy the pain of wine, and if you use proton on steam you are just have to click install like windows. You can check here the compatibility:
Also let's not pretend that windows is walk in the park. I have had my share of problems with drives/games not working on windows as well. That is just the nature of trying to run games on PC. It ain't never gonna be as easy as on consoles.
Of course it depends on the DE ou're using, but I'd encourage you to give it another shot. This was certainly the case at one time, but I tried Fedora earlier this year and was shocked by how stable the UX is. Not even in the "wow, this is nowhere near as buggy as it used to be" way. I can't speak for all distros, and I do know some which are less than perfect, but Fedora at least was certainly an eye-opener.
> random games don't work, WINE is the worst piece of software on the planet, drivers suck
I get why you, as the end user, wouldn't care about excuses, but to be fair none of these are entirely the fault of linux because they're trying to get things to work that the original developer didn't intend to run on linux.
It'd be like blaming Microsoft for MacOS apps not working on Windows, or visa versa. Again, as the end user thats not really your problem, if you need to run a piece of software and the OS doesn't run it, it doesn't really matter why, but I don't think this is an example of buggy software on the side of linux devs.
It's true though. The Steam Deck is amazing, most games just work.
I agree that the GUI part is subjective. I find even the jankiest of Linux DEs to be better than Windows 10 and 11. I still find macOS quite superior, and the one area where this is not going to change any time soon is the cohesion of UI/UX between different apps and the OS.
Performance is unbeatable on Linux. Reliability depends a lot on the hardware and distro. This fragmentation makes it less approachable "on the desktop".
Cohesion is without a doubt better on MacOS, though again linux is getting closer. A small thing I wish I didn't notice as much as I did is the "top bar" on not-so-well built electron apps. Apps like VSCode and Electron handle this really well, but others don't (Simplenote is the only one that comes to mind). On Windows, this results in a really very striking white top bar, fine if you use a light theme, not so much for dark theme. On linux, or at least gnome, the top bar (whilst being a bit too big for my liking) much more seamlessly integrates with the rest of the OS.
and your dangerous general purpose legacy hardware will not save you from that, as it will be impossible to access the internet with a device that doesn't disclose your identity. to combat disinformation and hate speech, of course.
you vill ovn nothing, und you vill be happy.
and prove the software that's supposed to be running is running.