All decades have been rough decades, from modeline generation, to the switch to PulseAudio to Wayland. There is always a construction ground in desktop Linux. That's the sad story of the Linux desktop. It's really a hard problem to crack, it requires vast amounts of manpower, a lot of coordination between various parts of the ecosystem and it doesn't help that most hardware vendors are not cooperative. Go back ten or twenty years and you'll find exactly the same message as yours "it used to be bad, but most problems are solved now, really".

Desktop Linux will always be in a state where it is great for technical users who have the expertise and time to fix and work around things. Because once you've done so, it is infinitely malleable. It will always be a miserable experience for non-technical users or technical users who don't have the time to fix the issues. Linux on the desktop only really excels when one party polishes the experience to be great and makes all the bit work togerther. E.g. like Google did with Android and ChromeBooks or to some extend Red Hat with Fedora (which is the best and most consistent Linux desktop experience).

Outside the desktop, little software is as successful as Linux. It's the substrate of the modern tech world.

Linux fails because it's not a product. Ironically that's the exact reason why it's a breakaway success in the server world, but gets no desktop market share. When you turn Linux into a product and market it (a-la Android, FireTV, Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, Tesla Car™, et. al), it's successful all of the sudden again.

Desktop Linux' success is like a hedge bet against Microsoft and OSX. It's just capable enough to be dangerous in a Mexican standoff between the three OSes.

The Nintendo Switch is not running Linux. There is Android and FreeBSD code in there, but at its core its a rewrite of the 3DS OS. it's not like the Steam Deck at all.

When you turn the Linux kernel into a product and...

Sinking a lot of time into Wayland (via Sway WM) around the pandemic is what finally got me off Linux on my Mac laptop (yes I've worked around the usual issues, it was an arbitrary switch). It's a solid operating system and the configuration can be powerful, but having to mess around with per-monitor screen scaling, installing extra software to get screen sharing to work, learning way too much about pulseaudio and the bluetooth stack to route audio around correctly, I decided it was not worth the effort to get what comes out-of-the-box in commercial operating systems. Modern software is complicated and we really expect so many things to somehow work correctly that it's any wonder that things work at all (and they often break in unexpected ways anyway).

Starting with Sway is not going to give you anything out of the box. Both KDE and GNOME will give you nice settings for display scaling, screen sharing, networking and pre-configured audio.

Not to accuse you of shooting yourself in the foot, but a lot of these things are much nicer managed by complete desktops.

I did try to switch to GNOME 40+ but, as a sibling comment says, fractional scaling did not work, and I found GNOME to be even more difficult to tweak precisely.

Wayland only added support for fractional scaling a couple months ago, it will be a while before we see it standardized in desktop settings and app libraries (maybe longer for Electron).

GNOME is certainly a tweak-lover's nightmare though, I'd recommend giving KDE a spin if you're brave. Qt applications and KDE should recieve fractional scaling support much sooner than GNOME (patch is already written/submitted), and generally the settings menu on that desktop is much more granular.

Fractional scaling does not work at all in GNOME. There is an experimental hack to enable it, but all your X11 applications will be blurry. Screen sharing and Bluetooth doesn't properly work half of the time when video conferencing.

FWIW as much as I want Wayland to become the norm already, I still run into bugs when I try to use it. My latest issue is that Firefox somehow stops responding to mouse clicks after I interact with a certain element (I still don't know which one). I'm sure this is an addon or plugin or extension or whatever causing issues, but even for me as an enthusiast, X11 Just Works (TM). My experience trying Wayland on Nvidia, the most popular GPU brand for PC gamers, is also not exactly great. Could just be my hardware though and I'll admit I'm due a reinstall after brute forcing system config files.

On the other hand, Pipewire has fixed so many small audio problems for me that I didn't even know I was having that I'm glad I switched over.

My biggest issue with Linux for mainstream is not Linux or its distros, but the guides online who are outdated, tell people to open a terminal for every little thing, tell people to add random software repositories that will definitely break something about the system within a year as a workaround without listing the implications, or are extremely condescending towards users.

Microsoft Certified Technicians and user forums will usually tell you to reinstall your OS every time an error shows up but at least they don't give detailed instructions on disabling all security on your computer, fucking up your bootloader config with a oneliner from 2009 that doesn't even solve anything or tells you to modify UEFI settings (like secure boot) for no reason at all.

People with no knowledgeable friends and family will find they get little support from help desks and other paid service centers and that's a big problem. Many normal people rely on external parties to help them with their computers when their printer decides to show some kind of error and computer service employees seem to only know Linux from their community college OpenSUSE server management course.

Back when I did helpdesk for a small ISP I had the occasional Linux user (often installed by friends or family because Windows XP stopped getting updates) and the problems I helped fix were all solveable by GUI settings and were documented in the internal IT knowledge base but still I got to do every single call because I "knew Linux". They did the same for OSX, whose users I also gladly helped to the best of my ability, but that's only because I bothered to Google and try because I'd never even seen a Mac. I've been gone for years but I don't think you'll get any support if you try to call that company with a Linux device today.

Strangely enough, this wasn't a problem for my coworkers when Windows released a new overhaul of all systems and settings. I remember when Windows 8 hit and everybody managed to sort out the terribly unintuitive GUI in a week.

My conclusion from this is that people have a very strange view of what Linux really is, based on something they've seen someone else do years ago. It's like basing all your opinions about Windows on someone managing a barebones Windows 2012 install through PowerShell. Several people were amazed when I showed them a screenshot of Linux running a GUI and the fact you could download Discord from a built-in software store blew their mind.

> My latest issue is that Firefox

Firefox defaults to XWayland - you need to edit a setting to switch it to Wayland (MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1).

Thanks for the suggestion but I've already tried that. It didn't really change much for me.

X has worked great and continues to do so and is far more feature rich than Wayland will likely ever be. As long as X is available, I will use X. I can do remote desktop with X and I can so "ssh -X hostname" to run an X app.