Linux was excellent on the desktop about 4 years ago. After that we had fedora turning to a big pile of broken packages, ubuntu adopting some seriously broken technologies (pulseaudio, compiz-beryl, tracker, unity, upstart, readahead, ... ).

My favourite anecdote about linux's degradation is this: Earlier, applications like nautilus , cdburner etc would accurately predict and show the amount of time for operations like copy to complete. Moreover, copying stuff via the GUI was not significantly slower than command line.

With the latest versions of KDE (and even gnome), we've gone back to windows98 levels of inconsistencies (seeing the kde time-estimate bar during a file copy is just painful).

If you want a distro which doesnt take 1G of ram to run a filemanager, the latest one you can try is Ubuntu 7.04 - runs much faster on my 6 year old laptop (with 200MB ram) than my modern desktop (with 1G ram).

It's been a while since I used it in anger, but I would have imagined that the latest release of Slackware is in relatively good shape.

Patrick's emphasis on pragmatism & performance means that he simply wouldn't have incorporated stuff that didn't work if he could avoid it.

I'd be interested to know why you consider upstart "seriously broken". I've just used it in anger for the first time, and it seems like a big improvement on the old, arcane system of alphabetically named init scripts.

The technology is great! I love the launchd/upstart way of doing things. What is completely unacceptable for a core piece of system software is the pathetic level of documentation. I should NOT have to source dive to write an init script! Whoever let upstart out of the door with the piss poor documentation should be lashed repeatedly with a wet noodle.

I migrated from Kubuntu to Xubuntu when Lucid came out, it runs greatly on older notebooks for that matter, even Xubuntu Natty today.

While the issues mentioned in the article are valid, it's still so much easier for me to maintain all family (and several friends) pc/laptops around, after I migrated them from Windows to Kubuntu/Xubuntu. The desktops just work and don't break, which is not something you can say about the Windows tamagotchi thing - you need to care about this one, or keep it restricted.

Sorry, but modern desktops don't have 1 GB of RAM any more. 4 is kind of on the low end, 8 is normal, and 16 or more is higher end.

Also, 2-4 cores are standard these days. 8 - 24 cores would be high end.

GNOME and KDE are monolithic and encourage everything under their umbrellas to depend on everything else. The Linux desktop has fallen into the same pitfall that so many enterprises do: reaction against integration issues in a chaotic environment has led to monolithic approaches that provide uniformity and integration but prevent the mix-and-match flexibility that allows individual projects to fail and succeed on their merits. The monolithic approach, the architecture astronaut approach, means high commitment to each project and leads to projects like PulseAudio becoming "too big to fail" even if they fail at their technical objectives. The next step in evolution is supposed to be a loosely coupled services architecture that provides the best of those two worlds. I won't venture to guess where it goes after that.

however, I've noticed that striving for loosely coupled architecture has often fostered its own brand of, if you like, architectural astronomy, as the architects try to design the ultimate meta-framework that will make it easy to integrate disparate components without the components knowing anything about how they can be used.

The same cycle is of course common in proprietary software too (e.g. Longhorn/Vista/Win7)