Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

Two major things:

X11, although at least Xorg doesn't run as root in modern distros any more. Wayland is the replacement but isn't there yet.

Linus hates security people and refuses patches that improve security within the Linux kernel. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/11/05/net-of-...

The ISA's are more or less open AMD's are available for download, to get the ISA from NVIDIA you need to register and get a rubber stamped NDA.

But still there isn't any one capable of writing a modern GPU kernel driver and a shader compiler for GPU's. The driver is doing a billion and a half optimizations, and fixes tons of errors that were left in the code during development at this point most AAA developers say "fuck it" let NVIDIA/AMD handle the performance and that's the best case, there have been cases where AAA titles were shipped with code that can't even initialize the display driver properly and it had to be fixed in the driver.

Both AMD and NVIDIA pretty much keep their compiler and driver locked tight as a trade secret because it sort of is, the driver is what gives them to competitive edge and not in a million years would an FOSS team would be able to keep up with the release cycle for new games and new hardware.

And for people that say well Vulcan will fix it, i highly doubt so, while Vulcan gives you very low level access to the GPU it's not the first API that did so, and it's very likely that developers will still continue to make the same mistakes as they did with DirectX which has by far more internal sanity checks and strict requirements than OpenGL.

Valve might want to see Linux gaming and while they will be most likely able to compete with consoles they have very little chance of being able to compete with Windows based PC's unless there will be a cross platform unified driver architecture or NVIDIA and AMD will decide put as much development resources into their Linux driver as they invest in the Windows one.

I have to agree my XPS15 from Dell isn't viable for native Linux installs (NVIDIA Optimus not supported on Linux, cannot connect external displays, can't really use the discrete GPU).

The mouse pad works kinda funky, touch display bugs out, scaling doesn't work well in Gnome/KDE (works sorta well in Unity) since it doesn't have 1:1 pixel doubling due to the resolution Dell chose.

Battery life is considerably poorer on Linux, i might need to play with Intel's AMT but I really don't feel that for a desktop distro I should be recompiling my own kernel with various modules and flags, the fan control is pretty awful and has 2 modes silent and jet engine and nothing in between.

On the software side well 3 major pieces of software missing Office which can be mitigated with Office 365 (sorry folks OpenOffie/LibreOffice isn't there yet for actual work), Exchange client and non-browser / SSL extender based clients for enterprise grade VPN's (Checkpoint, CISCO, Juniper etc.).

For me this presents a huge problem when I actually need to use my computer for work, this pretty much gives me 2 options either do all the technical aspects of my work on a VM or do or the non-technical aspects (office, communication, reporting etc.) in a VM. Considering that VM Workstation works better for me on Windows (better performance, no compatibility issues) than Linux and some software that actually needs things like 3D acceleration like Office 2013 onwards runs very poorly in my Windows Guest on a Linux Host (due to lack of support for the OPTIMUS "chip") it's a no brainier for me.

Other things that make me stir clear of Linux as the primary OS are the simple little things that while might be trivial are very important things like connecting to a projector or using what ever magic wand HID the client might have during a presentation I just don't want to have to be in a position saying gosh sorry the display port to VGA adapter isn't working or i can't use that mouse because it just looks horribly unprofessional and yes I know I could solve these issues but in many cases there isn't an easy way to solve them universally and wasting 10-15 min on finding some config file to edit and then restarting the xserver to make it work will just make one look bad.

That said if you want to utterly stick to Linux as a desktop today it's very possible if you A) don't need to use most commercial enterprise software B) have complete control over your hardware selection and C) don't need to waste much time doing non-technical stuff on your machine.

Sadly I haven't found many places that would enable at least me to do so so Windows/OSX is the only way to go for me.

I think Arch does that fairly well by always having the most recent software available. Did you try it and see whether you liked that?

Every touchpad I had worked with was much better on Linux, touchpads on Windows were too laggy to even work with (if you are used to OSX) Fonts... I still haven't figured out how set up Windows fonts on 14" full HD to be readable -- small are small , large fonts are blurred.