You won't believe how things changed since then.

You need to install at least dozen applications on macOS to come near to features/capabilities of a run of the mill KDE desktop.

GNOME also improved a ton, it seems, but I'm not using it for a long long time.

macOS is lean, but doesn't have the composability and flexibility of Linux at any level. Things designed to add this composability feels bolted on loosely and limited at utility.

The typical reply from Linux folks, "but things have improved so much", including missing the point I am aware of the current experience.

Most folks don't want a "go fishing experience", they want a prepared meal.

Well, I'm pretty aware that you know current experience way better than all of us, combined.

On the other hand, our parents, partners and non-technical friends use their Linux systems without ever calling us, the venerable yet dumb as a dead tree "Linux folks".

Unless you're speaking about ChromeOS and Android, which take the Linux kernel as implementation detail, and replace the GNU userspace with Web and Java based technologies, I pretty much doubt it, given the 2% market share of Linux Desktop usage across the globe.

Nope. I'm talking about people using GNU/Linux systems. These people are our relatives, and our friends. We see with our eyes, chat every day.

Maybe I'm on an island with everyone which makes this 2%, but these people are real, and they are not compiling things from source or throwing their machines out of windows because of frustration.

They just use their computers, be productive and live happy lives.

> You need to install at least dozen applications on macOS to come near to features/capabilities of a run of the mill KDE desktop.

I can get my run of the mill KDE desktop to hang at startup by dragging a networked folder with a custom icon to the taskbar, then attempt to log in over a flaky network connection. Or if I attempt to drag too many application icons to it in the Wayland session. Don't get me wrong, I like it, I mean, I use it, but Plasma 5 is still, at best, late beta. My only hope is that, unlike its predecessor, it doesn't get abandoned and rewritten when it gets a semblance of stability.

Plasma on Wayland is a late beta yes, because Wayland itself is a late beta. I'd not use Wayland, yet if I want to use KDE, and if I need to install Wayland, I'd use another desktop environment.

I never restart KDE on my system, unless I upgrade my kernel, and restart the whole system.

Yeah, see, the fine print kills it. It's a "rock solid"* desktop, it does everything I want.

* Unless you use large network mounts, as long as you drag icons one at a time, for a fixed screen resolution, doesn't apply to Wayland, only until the next major rewrite...

The fine print can be rewritten as follows:

*:Unless you use with Wayland backend, since Wayland is not mature enough.

Because my installation both has large network mounts, and I sometimes drag tons* of icons around.

Yeah, the fine print also needs a "works on my machine" bit :-).

Actually no. Because of my career, I deployed KDE to some very resource limited thin clients and it worked pretty well.

Also I talk with people who use KDE, and report bugs I encounter, or encourage people to report bugs when people I talk encounters them.

I'm pretty beyond "It works in my machine, so PEBKAC" at this point. I think using Linux for 20 years and managing a large fleet for 15 years helped on that front a lot. :-)

Oh, a milion humble apologies, my liege, I was entirely unaware of your decades of experience. Surely machines work better under your touch, for they can see the twinkle of authority in your eye. I shall revise my erroneous configuration for surely my ability to hold it right is insufficient; indeed, my mastery of software has dwindled since the days when my patches were accepted in KDE 3.1 and I am truly at a loss when it comes to manipulating the advanced software of our days.