I agree with you except for "Linux has been rock-stable for a very, very long time". This depends on what you mean by "rock-stable" but things begin to get really annoying really quickly once you move on from relatively simple tasks. Even basic stuff like getting good battery life on laptops, or waking up from sleep/suspend/hibernate, using >1 monitors can be flakey or unpredictable. If they've worked fine for you then congrats, but when they don't it can be infuriating.

This is not to disparage the kernel developers, package maintainers or the distributions themselves - there's a lot of people doing excellent work without being compensated at all. However let's not kid ourselves - linux can still be tough.

I run Ubuntu 14.04 as my daily driver on a custom-built PC. I agree with you that Linux is not necessarily rock solid, but I would instead suggest that the compelling difference these days is that it can be if you put in the work. In years past, that wasn't even the case.

Unless you buy something from System76 or do very meticulous research on hardware support and build your own, Linux is not going to be seamless out of the box. But the real highlight is that it can be seamless at all these days.

My PC has four GPUs, 128GB of RAM and a deca-core CPU. I have four monitors, a bluetooth mouse, and I almost never turn it off. Instead, it automatically suspends. When I'm away from home I can ssh into my computer if needed. I have daily backups that are essentially seamless.

Now, it was difficult to get to this place. I would say that Linux is, and has for a long time been, rock solid if you're not using a GUI. In my opinion, the single greatest impediment to "Linux on the desktop" is xorg, which is terrible (to put it mildly). Nouveau is absolutely crap, especially since Nvidia puts out its own drivers. But my point here is that after a few days of careful installation and setup work, I have had a seamless desktop experience for something like eight months.

What needs to happen for Linux is a software company that takes something like Debian, fork it and dramatically bring it up to wider compatibility with modern hardware across the market. In some sense that's Ubuntu, and it shows in how easy my daily experience has been.

Well, let me rephrase- Linux is as stable as you want it to be. If you want an ideal linux laptop experience, you need to do the research and get a model made with linux in mind. Otherwise, you're just rolling the dice.

That being said, I only use Linux for server-side work, and I can easily say that it is every bit as stable as any other server OS I've used, and has been for a very long time. There are plenty of weedy areas to play in if you want to, of course. But if your goal is It Just Works, you can do that, too. Perhaps most importantly, you can do it easily, with just a little foresight during the spec stage of planning your project.

> Many switched to Surfaces

They switched to Surfaces because they wanted power-user hardware?

They switched to Surfaces because they saw what I was doing with mine, wanted to be able to do the same, and Apple had no comparable answer. Simple as that.

But that is just people in your surrounding. Anyone amazed by Surface (tablet and touchscreen things) switched but that is ok, it is not so much of Apple's loss as of MS's gain. I do not want touchscreen, I don't need it, I need classic laptop and many Apple MacBook users want just that, a laptop, no touchscreen.

For what it is worth, I used to feel exactly the same way until I got a machine that had one. Now I miss it when touch is unavailable. Being able to use touch, mouse/trackpad, & keyboard all at the same time is, perhaps surprisingly, a very pleasant way to work.

To pick one example: being able to flick through long documents with a finger while keeping focus on other parts of the screen alone has been a huge productivity booster, and I do not say that lightly.

How is this different from being able to flick through long documents with a finger via a touchpad (aside from not having to reach up to the screen)?

It turns out that it is less effort to flick/move directly on the item you want to adjust than to do it via proxy on the touchpad.

Like I said before, I was firmly in the "touchscreens are a waste of time for me" camp until I actually started using my Surface. Not trying to sound like an ad, it just has been my actual experience.

Touchpad gets that for me. Only way I can find what you saying more "comfortable" if you hold it in hand or horizontally on table while reading.

Most of my "work" time I spend in terminal. White text on black background, keeping my fingers on home row. I cannot see scenario where touchscreen makes me more productive except in some edge cases, and btw they don't gain over what I already have now. But that's just me. Each to their own, that is only fair thing to say.

But making assumption and claim based on your own point of view is not best thing to do. With Apple, especially it is always the same story, customers leaving and rarely satisfied (it was period around Snow Leopard, IIRC 2009-2010), but still I can't find anything better than MacBook. Dell and Lenovo came close, but when I install Linux on them I make few more sacrifices, summing everything up, Apple just works for me. (I won't even mention Windows. 100% not my cup of tea)

I have yet to meet a developer that hasn't said he's jealous of me being able to sketch on my sp4.