Desktop Linux: Free is too expensive

There is an irrelevant history lesson of an experience jumping through distros to start with. Then the main argument of the piece is unclear. It begins with (probably justified) moaning about device drivers, but is followed up with a declaration that Linux's problems are caused by recent UI changes. The author then laments that the update cycle is too fast.

Why hasn't someone told this person to stick to long term stable distros, such as RHEL or Ubuntu LTS?

I only see 4 ways for linux to actually gain on the desktop for the average user. 1) Truly painless cross-platform support for most languages. 2) A huge shift to web-based applications. 3) Microsoft seppukus. 4) Wine magically becomes painless and transparent.

Two is the only alternative that has a reasonable chance of happening.

Um, and the author's solution to this is installing Windows?

I'm sorry, but at least when Linux Mint needs updates I am free to update when I want. Windows will pop up a nag screen and interrupt your work, even threatening to perform the update if you don't delay it. Anyone who has ever done work on a Windows machine has met this inconvenience. On the other hand, Linux Mint doesn't have it.

Also, his complaint is that it's not rolling release? Uh, neither is windows. Lets see, Windows xp, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, yeah, it's rolling release alright. At least with Linux you don't also need to buy new hardware each time you update the OS.

1) Windows releases are much slower. Most Linux distros have a new-shiny problem: I can't trivially (by which I mean, click a button and emphatically not muck with the command line or PPAs or equivalent user-hatefulness) get the newest OpenOffice or Firefox or Chrome or whatever on an older version of Mint (or Ubuntu--and dist-upgrading Ubuntu is a dicey proposition if you like having a working computer).

2) For the most part (there was some wackiness with architecture changes), Windows will do something much, much closer to the Right Thing on a reinstallation. Your data's where you left it. Your applications are still installed and work. It is not, on Windows, taken for granted that you must pave your machine (yes, I know you can put /home on another partition, that's only part of the problem) in order to upgrade.

3) The idea that you "need to buy new hardware each time you update" Windows is just silly. I have a laptop sitting here. 1GHz Pentium III, 512MB of RAM. I use it for playing old DOS games. It runs Windows 7 a lot more pleasantly than it did XP (which surprised me, but there you go). It may be way more pleasant to use on new hardware, sure--but so is Mint.

And by the way--you can set Windows Update to automatically do it when you shut down, and never nag you. (That this isn't the default is probably, on balance, a bad idea, but the capability is trivially there.)

Put your hackles down, dude. The mud-slinging helps no one.