That's the denial there.
I'm a Linux guy. I post this from a linux distrib.
But realistically, we do have a huge amount of technical debt, and less and less incentive to work on them.
Case in point: every time we touch something to improve it, we break things for one year or two. Pulse audio ? Took 4 years to be stable. Systemd ? 3 years at least. Network manager crashed for 6 good years, and still can't work decently with sleep mode.
We manage to provide features because the linux kernel devs are incredibly competent. They also limited the bloat to a manageable stack on their side. But around that it's the far west.
Though non-intel graphics are still shit on it afaik.
Honestly, it seems to me like what you're complaining about is the nature of FLOSS development i.e. we do it in the open and collect feedback from users rather than spending billions we don't have on focus groups.
Also, I remember early PA days and it certainly did not take 4 years to be usable, but it did took Ubuntu about that time to get it right. That's however a problem of holding Ubuntu as the Linux disto, which is honestly a whole separate rant I could get into.
As for systemd and 3 years, I am honestly not sure what you're talking about. I've been on it since 2012 and it has been mostly smooth sailing since the beginning.
Sadly if you work with Deep Learning buying AMD is a surefire way to make most of the work published by others unusable without serious effort.
I made that mistake... https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1562530
That's not right. We all know support for some hardware is spotty and we all have learned to avoid that. My laptops tend to use Intel GPUs, for instance, because I want to work on them, not fix them.
I'm eyeing that new Lenovo thingie with an epaper keyboard, but I know it'll run Windows and probably never be upgraded because nobody will write the drivers to keep that thing alive past Windows 12.
> you have a choice of five different NVidia drivers for the same board, all with different bugs
Stop buying NVidia hardware. They actively sabotage Linux development. AMD is much better in that regard. Buy AMD instead (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=AMD-Hiri...).
> The sheer bloat of Linux has made it unmaintainable.
Nope. It's still moving forward and it's still quite reliable. All my workloads run on it (except my pets that run on FreeBSD and OpenIndiana because I get a kick out of managing different OSs).
> Big chunks of important code are abandonware.
There is a process to move obsolete codebases out of the kernel. That's why you can't use one of those half-IDE CD-ROMs that came with "multimedia kits" of the early 90's.