Linux on the desktop works pretty well in my experience. Desktops have wired networks, mainatream hardware, mouses, stay connected to the same display all the time, headphones are wired, and power management is nice to have.

Where it gets annoying is "linux on random laptop". Suddenly perfect power management is a must, there's an expectation of sleep instead of shutting down, networks are wireless, headphones snd keyboards and mice are bluetooth, displays change all the time, you have a touchpad to contend with, etc -- all of this is very driver dependent and manufacturers don't care about linux at all.

It's not that linux haven't gotten better - it had, but the problem also got a lot more difficult.

Linux Mint (on an old Inspiron 5530, currently chained to the ground) and the cheapest Ideapad (for travel) works for me. Perhaps there were one or two issues at the beginning? If there were I can't remember. I can keep identical installs on both which means stuff that worked at home will likely work on the road. Mint installation is so straightforward now that, personal data aside, I can consider install almost throwaway - it's just not a big step anymore.

As for the RPi I wish they'd make more effort for it to be a better kiosk or headless device - lack of built in safe shutdown makes me reach for arduino where possible. I don't anyone is going to use an RPi to replace their laptop or desktop anytime soon.

10 years ago, Ubuntu became the Linux on the Desktop for me. I do everything with it. Browse the net, watch movies, play games, develop software. Everything, and I couldn't be happier.

The Linux on the Desktop arrived a decade ago for me, so your assertion puzzles me deeply.

I'm not really sure why there is so much "ubuntu" love. Of the three distro's I run/try out regularly on desktop/laptop class hardware (opensuse/fedora & ubuntu) I regularly find ubuntu to be the inferior choice.

My personal "linux" laptops have been on various flavors of opensuse since the 11.x releases when I discovered for the first time, that linux was actually doing everything correctly (backlight dimming, standby/hibernate, wifi, sound, accelerated graphics, docking/undocking) out of the box. (I've been running linux in various forms since the 1990s).

Opensuse, is not been perfect by any means, I had to hack the bluetooth driver with the latest dell when I initially installed it, but within a year or so that got fixed too.

So, there really isn't any "ubuntu" magic, and I might go so far as to say if you want really good support on the latest hardware you should be running fedora. But in general all the major distros are working roughly the same at this point with one or the other working better on any given piece of hardware.

I'm not saying Ubuntu is the best choice. I used Slackware, Red Hat, Mandrake, and Ubuntu. First Kubuntu, then became disappointed with KDE so went to straight Ubuntu.

I'm not going to argue about distros. I works magically for me. It might not for you, and that's fine.

My point was: my year of Linux on the Desktop arrived 10 years ago.

Things have changed a lot. Over the last year the company I work for has transitioned a couple hundred developers from Windows desktops to Linux desktops and it has been surprisingly smooth. Much better than an experiment I ran myself a number of years prior.

I have seen a fair amount of successful transitions. My company develops open source software and our development team is on Linux/Mac. Works a treat. Sales/Marketing/etc - Windows mostly with some more adventurous users using Mac. Linux is still not there yet, for an end-user overall nice experience.

If you buy hardware designed by the manufacturer to work with linux then most things are just fine.

As a full time linux user, it pains me to say it but there will never be a "Year of the Linux desktop". Not now, not in 100 years. Linux is the weapon of choice for a very small audience and the proprietary giants are simply not interested in a niche market. Some people can get away with using a raspberry pi as a main computer(myself included, given that I only use a browser and vim for work). But again - that's just me. Many of my co-workers rely on heavy IDEs so that rules it out for them.

Default Linux desktop is painful. If you set things up properly and learn a thing or two it can be less painful than the alternatives. I much prefer my custom xmonad setup over mac and windows, which (literally and figuratively) painfully require more mouse interactions and setup that can't be easily captured in config files that I can check into version control.

> Default Linux desktop is painful. If you set things up properly and learn a thing or two it can be less painful

Which is precisely my point. Even default Windows isn't so painful.

There's also the problem of applications. Most of my dev toolkit is available cross-platform, but I do more than dev on my computers.

If you are using a computer as a professional tool why wouldn't you put in the effort to customize it? It's mostly a one-time cost and lasts a lifetime. It's like using a stock car as a race car.

Because it's not really a one-time cost. It's a cost for every computer that you sit down at. If you're only ever at one computer, that's great, but in practical terms, it's more likely that you'll have your home computer (possibly more than one), your work computer (possibly more than one) and your team mates' computers. And if everyone's computer is a little different in some subtle way, that's a big problem. If the default settings, on the other hand are good enough that few if any tweaks are necessary, that means that the experience of moving between machines is less painful.

A lot of strides have been made over the past decade. The ecosystem has had it's fair share of problems, but I've been using Linux as my daily driver for the past 5 years with no major complaints. I'm typing this on a Ubuntu 16.04 install and the only issue I frequently run into is bluetooth which I believe has since been fixed for 18.04 / 20.04.

Dunno.

Linux Mint have been my daily driver for over a year and I see much less issues with it then I had with Win8.

I play games in steam, draw stuff, I even have working VR (HTC Vive), everything works just fine or even with less problems then in win (like bluetooth devices, for example)

This. It's why I spend my entire day on windows even though all my targets are Linux.

I'm running linux desktops these days, but for ~15 years my linux development enviroment was windows+putty+exceed/xming. People would ask me why and for a long time I would close the lid on my laptop and reopen it, or point to my monitor layout.

A lot of that stuff works these days, but there have been plenty of times Ive had issues which burned a whole day fixing. In the latter cases, I've just been left wondering how people who can't fix their own kernel/X/systemd/whatever bugs manage.

Meh, I've gone from doing webdev work on a Linux desktop (Kubuntu) to doing general office work on Win10. The pain is real.

Mind you it's on a Microsoft computer, and with corp IT, but it's always broken and the idiosyncrasies are infuriating.

Gah I feel that. I have resisted corporate IT much to their dismay.