I liked OpenSUSE a lot, I used it for almost 10 years between 2002 and last year. It was on my computer at work for 5 years, and at home the entire time.

But the article has a point, and it is something that made me switch to Windows last year. The problem is that it never works perfectly. I am not so much talking about the desktop, although I have suffered through my share of broken Gnome and KDE desktops. The problem is the driver situation.

I started my own business last year and needed a computer to work on. The Dell laptop I purchased is great, except

- The wireless network did not work - Bluetooth did not work - The video camera did not work - The mic did not work - The SD card slot did not work - The touch pad's scroll area did not work

I worked on these problems for a few months, and I fixed many, but finally I had it. My conclusion was that while much of the software in the Linux ecosystem steadily improves, other parts continuously breaks, and it will remain that way. The experimentation with the desktops I could live with, but the driver situation is another matter. I am too old to spend hours and hours patching the distribution to support the hardware I have.

I love Linux - and my intent was to use it in Virtualbox under Windows. I reasoned that Windows will have the driver support, and Virtualbox will deliver a sane hardware interface for Linux. But Windows 7 works well enough for me, so in practise I don't start Virtualbox often at all.

I don't think I will return to Linux running on the bare metal. But I will always bring the skills I learned with me, and I expect them to last me for decades.