Seems like parent thread spoke from perspective of developer/tech savvy person.

But even from end-user perspective, maybe its hard to see change when you compare one year or so, but over somewhat longer period I definitely see improvements. Over say a decade or so, wifi/bluetooth/trackpad support has significantly improved. Over last 5 years, I think gaming has become huge and you can actually use Linux as gaming machine. In last 3 years or so, I think I've seen my 5k display using Thunderbolt work much better. Fractional scaling also works much nicer.

NVIDIA GPUs are not shitty to use on Linux, and AMD has been working great for slightly longer. UEFI/TPM works much better now as well, where I don't have to worry about booting in legacy mode when using GPU drivers.

I didn't have to think about any of these above. If I think harder, I can likely come up with many more.

Well ya, it's more useful in observability usecases than desktop ones. But recently I've been using for a consumer desktop usecase. I made a file watcher with it. I'm sure you're familiar with the woes of using inotify/fanotify.

eBPF vfs hooks based watchers are really nice.

[edit] details

- you setup a single `mount` - this is the only part that requires cap_sys_admin - then you run a single daemon, this one only needs cap_bpf, and this runs once at startup and is its own self contained program - this daemon writes events into a ringbuf referred to by a file in that bpf mount - you then read that from your standard user program (this can be done by whichever application needs to consume the events)

the events are create, mkdir, delete. renames are automatically decomposed since we hook at the vfs layer. the hook itself is practically free to run and thus there is no question of a performance impact.

You may know more about what it powers. It has enabled much faster, higher quality, more stable security software on Linux. Many modern security tools are built on top of it. While end users might not know it by name, it has made Linux easier to support in the enterprise.