Ubuntu tried to make a decent desktop with Unity and failed. Unity was the trigger for me for switching to OS X.

The problem was, they need to put a LOT of polish in to reach OS X levels of usability, and they didn't look like they were doing that, they had some nebulous dreams of making a unified mobile/desktop interface instead.

There isn't anything in particular I'd suggest to them, because they need improvements just about everywhere. Say, is the network manager actually usable these days? When I switched it was easier to just disable it and move along.

And the main elephant in the Linux room right now is systemd. Low level Linux is basically being taken over by an incompetent developer who doesn't understand the Unix philosophy of software design and can't deliver working software anyway. He's the author of the abomination called pulseaudio - back then it was required to uninstall/disable it to have sound again. Now, software written by him is becoming a dependency of almost everything - he is trying to replace all the Linux infrastructure layer with his ideas. Sorry, I see no reason to take a look at Linux on the desktop again.

Pulseaudio in Linux has the same role, as Core Audio in macOS.

Systemd in Linux has the same role, as Launchd in macOS. Some aspects of systemd were inspired by launchd and SMF.

Interestingly, it is a good, useful thing that contributes to polished experience when it comes to macOS, but for some reason, when someone does equivalent for Linux, it is suddenly a bad thing, just because it is different than in the past and moves the polish and experience with Linux to a higher level?

Pray tell, what "polish" is contributed by systemd's binary logs that get lost in case of a crash?

Unix philosophy aside, Pottering can't be trusted to provide working software...

There are pros and cons for binary logs, they get you something (https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1IC9yOXj7j6cdLLxWEBA...), and you may lose something.

If you have such problems, that your machine crashes and loses filesystem data, just redirect it to the syslogd and go on.

Ubuntu took Linux from relative obscurity to being a relevant player on the computer desktop.

Before Ubuntu, if you expected to get a build of a typical popular Windows program/game you would get laughed at. Now it's virtually expected. That's not failure.

systemd is not as much a matter of controversy as people want it to be. If it was, you would see people like Linus rejecting it, but they haven't because it's not a major factor right now.

I know, I've used Ubuntu since it was out. I was very happy that I get a polished Debian. Until they dropped KDE from the mainline and started putting all their resources in Unity...

Some of us don't think init is great either, a mess of shell scripts that individually reinvent the wheel

Irrelevant. Ubuntu, which the other people here are discussing, used upstart before it switched to systemd. For about a decade.

You've just made one of the errors discussed in http://uselessd.darknedgy.net/ProSystemdAntiSystemd/ .

I'm not interested in your appeal to authority, especially as it claims comparing systemd with init is pointless (why?) and contains massive flaws like "Proponents (of systemd) are usually part of the modern Desktop Linux bandwagon"

I only posted about multiple monitor support, I wanted to focus on one specific pain point, and this is I think the worst.

I agree. I've run Linux at home for ages, just not on the desktop. Recently I dabbled with switching over to it on the desktop again to see how far it's come along and was shocked to see the state of multi-monitor and HiDPI support in Ubuntu. I couldn't care less about whether it's using systemd or what format the logs are in. How can we still be struggling with multiple monitors and getting the size of text and mouse cursors wrong?