I was an early desktop Linux user 1996-2004, before switching to the Mac.

I think I've heard "you should give it another shot" every single year since.

Kiosks or super locked down experiences like ChromeOS have a decent chance at making an impact for some use cases (especially less technical/senior users)

But as a general purpose desktop OS ? Still no, thanks. It's not just the lack of major commercial desktop apps (especially in the creative space, where browser apps won't take over anytime soon)

It's also the fact that desktop Linux's priorities still largely mirror those of its left-brained developers, who don't value good design and human interface guidelines nearly as much as they should. Or as another commenter has put it : they have no taste.

To be fair, I'm sure (well, I hope) there are now some professionally trained UX/UI specialists at Canonical and other places, but by and large there's still this mentality that it's a soft skilled task that a dev is perfectly capable of doing if need be (and yet, devs are horrified when a web designer quickly cobbles some PHP snippets together and calls that development, as ops people are generally horrified when they see servers set up by developers :) )

The last and maybe most important issue is that good design is necessarily strongly opinionated, it needs a leader to make hard calls so that the user doesn't have to, and this is completely at odds with the Linux/OSS philosophy. And why Apple became so good at it, having a (not always benevolent) dictator at its helm for so long.

It's just a friendlier way of saying 'you probably weren't doing it right'

these are operating systems that reward expertise - it takes time and patience to get your workstation the way you want it. It's a time investment to learn it, to some it's worth the effort, to others it's not.

edit* and I will concede that the various linux desktop environments have learned a ton from apple's design and UX concepts, and some of them have branched off into very interesting directions.

Are you happy?

Nice UIs won't fix people's broadcom wireless cards.

Responding snark with snark: Then don't use them.

Most wireless cards out there work just fine. When I had to use a laptop with a Broadcom chip for uni I used my Android phone as tethering (charging it as a bonus) and the guy sitting next to me just used a dongle smaller than his thumb.

Most people (even developers) aren't willing to open up their laptop to replace their laptop wifi cards or to have to use dongles to get on their wireless or to play endless hardware roulette.

OSX doesn't work on all windows-only hardware either. You have to buy something with Linux support.

I have linux distros running on 3 of my apple laptops with broadcom cards - it just meant using a nonfree firmware

I even have problems with Intel card from time to time.

I am legitimately excited for Ubuntu 17.10, the GNOME theme looks great.

Looks have improved a fair amount. The normal user still wouldn't know how to install any software they know on it, however. And I'm not talking about an open-source alternative from apt.

Also, touch screens <3

for some users, half the fun of switching to linux is realizing there's open source versions of all the software they used to pay for.

Why bother, when in most countries they can just pirate it?

I find no need to pirate software using linux, everything I need is available for free. Pirated software that goes un-updated is a huge security issue anyway.

So around many universities around the globe, specially in poorer countries and see how many care about those security issues.

Or many street bazaars around the globe.

pirated software with a bunch of malware in it?

It is sad, but many people don't care about it, hence why malware is so rampant.

For what it's worth, for software installation there's now "snaps," the new "universal Linux package" format that Canonical has been pushing.

Yet another package format...

Obligatory XKCD : https://xkcd.com/927/