> It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind

Umm, what? Linux desktop is considered by far to be the most efficient and responsive desktop user interfaces there are. We have DEs that run on 10 year old hardware with no delay and even tilling window managers that are as efficient as you could ever get with todays hardware.

Sure they are not average Joe friendly but to attack it's efficiency and responsiveness is preposterous.

If they are smart, they will have their margins adjusted to support a niche device. There are a few people (including myself) that are willing to sacrifice a beautiful UI for all the good things that go along with a user-respecting OS.

Also, they have a lot of time. I have made a few UI's myself back in the DOS days, before they were always readily available. First I would make it work, then I would make it look good.

> It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind

Behind what? I've been a daily linux user for the last decade or so, I've always felt the desktop experience was superior to to Windows and Mac. At least Gnome 2/3 has been.

I agree that the device looks like trash. But what's wrong with desktop linux? We have compositors, hardware acceleration from nvidia and AMD, and WMs that are just as good, if not better, than windows. What more could you want?

>What more could you want?

Consistent UI, consistent configuration schemes, working suspend-resume, reliable WiFi, reliable auto mount of USB storage, and easy file sharing over LAN for starters.

None of these things was I able to achieve on my ThinkPad even 3 years ago when I last gave Linux a try.

I mean, I’ve been using ThinkPads for years and have always ran Linux on them, and personally haven’t had any problems with them. ACPI, touchpad, screen, audio buttons, all worked out of the box or were just a few package installs away.I don’t like auto-mounting of drives, but I know it’s pretty easy to setup with hotplug. WiFi drivers are very good at this point, supporting pretty much any WiFi cards in any laptops. File sharing over LAN can easily done with Samba or SSHFS.

Linux has pretty good drivers at this point, and in my experience, often better and more complete than Windows.

Not saying you’re lying or incompetent or anything, but I do think you had a very atypical. Maybe you’re not familiar with Linux? Not trying to put you down, but maybe I find that Linux works Because I’ve been using it for over 15 years at this point.

I'm sure I could have got most of those things working by fiddling with fuse or xorg.conf or some other silliness but I don't count that as "working".

The number of times I've had network manager simply refuse to connect after opening the laptop lid makes me think we're just living in parallel universes.

I don’t use a network manager, and I don’t run a DE, I just have a simple window manager and the command line. Btw, I use Arch Linux which is of much higher quality than Ubuntu or whatever.

If we were talking about OpenBSD I would agree with you, but I can promise you all those are functional across many laptops and desktops I've used.

> Consistent UI, consistent configuration schemes

Have you used Windows?

> easy file sharing over LAN

Every install of Ubuntu for years has come with a "public" folder for easy LAN sharing (Samba). https://xkcd.com/949/

> It's one of the reasons desktop linux lags so far behind

You really can' fault desktop linux at least performance-wise. I have ~3ms input latency in vim on xterm. Good luck beating that on windows, or even a mac.

The reason linux on desktop lags behind is simple - 99% of desktops and laptops come pre-installed with either windows or macos.