Actually they don't. I use Linux Mint Cinnamon for 5 years and find it a very convenient operating system, better than Windows (at least 7 — I hear nothing good about Win7 except its Linux support) and OSX (at least Snow Leopard) in almost every respect, except commercial app support. I very reluctantly reboot into Windows for things like Office, Lightroom and CorelDraw. Maybe Visual Studio.

edit: btw, I agree with you on the "attitude" thing. There should be more commercial options on Linux desktop.

It was a subjective assessment to be sure, but one shared by many. You can tell because of how few users it has, though I'm sure someone will pop up and blame the fact that it doesn't come pre-installed on PCs as the reason, without consideration for the concept that if people actually wanted to use it, it might.

eh, i disagree. even if linux distros were objectively better than windows in every possible way (not speaking to the truth of that claim) if computers shipped with windows the vast majority of people would use windows.

The vast majority of Windows PCs do not ship with Chrome.

But the vast majority of internet users do use Google search and other Google products like Gmail. That's how Chrome became popular — because Google will spam you with ads for Chrome at every available opportunity.

And how did Google get popular despite Microsoft owning the OS? And for that matter, IE? My point is, people tend to use software they like. The reason Linux Desktop, despite decades of evangelism, hasn't taken off is that people don't like it. It's that simple, but the evangelists keep deluding themselves because making it better will require them to do hard things, like work together.

Wait, some of us are trying to change that.

affiliation: tech lead for the snapcraft tool and linux user since 1999.

To my knowledge, there have been at least 4 other attempts to have sane application distribution on Linux over the years:

Application Bundles (GNUStep), AppDirs (ROX), Flatpak (formerly xdg-app), and AppImage (formerly Klik).

But Canonical invented a fifth anyway. Forgive me if I'm skeptical that change will actually occur this time.

Also Nix and Guix.

Those are just package managers trying to be less crap than currently existing package managers. Vendors still aren't expected to create and deploy the application directly to the user.

Also, in that category, you forgot Gobo.