Same here, I ditched Windows, which was becoming increasingly bloated and harder to develop on, in 2004 I think, then I had a few years of FreeBSD (yes, as my main OS and on a laptop at that!), then switched back to Linux (drivers, mostly). Since ~2009, I've been working on Fedora, with a year of (forced) MacOS experience around '17 - I was delighted when the project I needed a Mac for ended, and I could get back to Fedora. Availability of drivers improved tremendously during the 2010s (although NVidia's became... hard to deal with), so much so that I could buy an off the shelf laptop and have Fedora up and running in a matter of minutes. With video codecs, web browsers, messaging apps, office suite - basically all the things you get on other OSes. Even the games I was interested in worked, thanks to Steam (and LD_PRELOAD in one case).

To summarize: Linux was a decent desktop ten years ago, and it didn't get any worse, at the very least, since then.

With Linux, no matter the distribution you pick, you have to be more interested in computers than merely viewing them as an applicane for word processing, video chatting and online shopping.

- Some software defaults to installation as sandboxed packages. Try explaining that to someone who is used to dragging and dropping files from the desktop into their programs to open them.

- Want to watch a movie? Sure, but you won't get vsynced video without opening up a text editor as root to configure your graphics driver.

- Ohh, your laptop has THAT particular Wifi/Bluetooth/PCI bridge/whatever chip? Sorry...

- No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc".

While Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Apple) has gotten a lot of flak over shoddy updates lately, things are, by and large, much more prone to breaking on Linux. And when they break, even just a little, you need to know your way around a terminal to fix them.

I recently had to downgrade my kernel because of the bugs in i915. To do so, I had to first identify the problem by following the syslog and then do some heavy lifting in GRUB to lock my boot process to an older kernel version. The prerequisite knowledge to be able to perform what we might consider a simple task, has been built up during decades of me being a computer nerd.

For someone without a keen interest in computers, Linux on the desktop isn't all that great. The thing is, I like it that way. I want the freedom of choice. I want the level of control it gives me. When (or if) it becomes ready for the desktop, it's probably ready to be abandoned for something else.

> With Linux, no matter the distribution you pick, you have to be more interested in computers than merely viewing them as an applicane for word processing, video chatting and online shopping.

I agree concerning word processing and especially video chatting, I much prefer using these applications on MacOS.

I disagree though about online shopping, in my experience running Firefox under Linux or Windows is pretty much exactly the same.

As someone who has used Linux on the desktop for the last few years, I've never had the first three issues. The last one I believe is the same on macOS which I consider to be a fine desktop OS.

macOS has always supported case-sensitive filesystems, but the default has always been case-preserving, but not sensitive. A few years ago they added case-sensitivity as a format option for HFS+, but it was still off by default.

> No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc"

I'm veering a bit OT here, but is anyone aware of the justification for having a case-sensitive file system? It's something that's always annoyed me about Linux and *BSD, but I wonder if there is any real benefit I've just never grasped?

Linux (and probably also the BSDs) goes beyond "case-sensitive": filenames are a sequence of bytes, giving special meaning only to the NUL byte (as the terminator) and the forward slash byte (as the path separator), and to the "", ".", and ".." filenames. From an implementation point of view, it's much simpler, and makes it easier to have high-performance code.

Case insensitivity adds a whole set of complications. The operating system has to either canonicalize all filenames, or preserve them (case preserving) but have an equivalence class of filenames. Canonicalization can be problematic (like ß -> SS, or perhaps ß -> ẞ? And let's not think of the dotless i), and to make things worse, can change with newer versions of the Unicode standard (as new characters and their case mappings are added); at least NTFS works around that by storing a case mapping table in the filesystem metadata, so a filesystem created by a newer Windows release can have a different case mapping (and you can have different case mappings for each filesystem in the same machine). It can also confuse software: even with a case preserving system, a program can open a file named FOO for writing, and not find it later when listing the directory (because it already existed as lowercase "foo"). This kind of thing has led to security issues in the past.

I've always considered case sensitive file names to be a feature, not a bug. I am personally annoyed by filenames not being case sensitive in Windows. I guess that's just how my brain works. To each their own, I guess.

Don’t know if it’s the real reason, but it’s bound to save a few cycles when doing string comparisons. I guess that would’ve made a difference in a multi-user system on a PDP-11.

The very concept of “case” is locale-dependent. To embed locale-dependent code in the file system is bad design.

> If Linux isn't ready as a desktop system, how is it that I have been using it as such for 15 years?

Obviously the bar for "ready as a desktop system" is subjective and thus will change wildly from person to person.

For me, it's not ready primarily because it lacks any remote desktop solution comparable to RDP. Yes I've tried VNC, X2Go, NoMachines and some others I can't recall (though not ogon yet).

I find it's also a lot more fiddly than Windows, but I could have lived with that.

It comes down to the hardware you choose.

I'm using a 7th Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon. When I got it everything worked out of the box with Fedora.

Without coming pre-installed, I don't see how it can be readier.

Of course if you buy a machine with exotic hardware (cough Broadcom) then it'll be a pain.

You say "exotic hardware", but Broadcom hardware (e.g. NICs) are very common.

Well, my travel netbook came with Ubuntu pre-installed, then I was left without wlan during 2 months until all bugs fixes on the open source driver that replaced the "bad" working proprietary blob were sorted out.

And to this day, the OpenGL and video hardware decoding capabilities are castrated by the open source version of the AMD driver, that did not considered worthwhile to support Brazos APUs to the same level that fxglr had.

So much for coming pre-installed.

> I'm using a 7th Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon. When I got it everything worked out of the box with Fedora

Even the fingerprint sensor? Using a X1 Yoga here, had trouble with it.

Sorry I only just saw this response. The fingerprint reader worked with the latest firmware, installed automatically via fwupdmgr.

https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/com.synaptics.prometheus.firm...

Using FreeBSD + KDE as my desktop (on a PC, not laptop) since early 2000-s as well.

I had Slackware on a Dell laptop in 2003, everything worked like a charm - wifi, graphics, everything. (An attempt to switch to Linux ver. 2.6 broke things, but that's another story.)