Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system

I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for about 15 years, and sound has always been a pain to deal with. I used S/PDIF on my last machine, and it took me months of browsing through endless threads to get the thing to work properly. Skype just won't play any sound as of my last install, I have no idea why, I've given up on it.

To get my last monitor to work properly, I had to manually enter modelines in xorg.conf. If the monitor goes in powersave mode, the full resolution won't be available until I restart X. (It's a Seiki 4K TV, not standard by any means, but hardly "exotic")

Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't recommend desktop Linux to anyone normal, I just tell them to get an Apple computer.

I think he's referring to X? X is a terrible system. For instance, the "screen lock" on X11 desktops is just a full screen window that captures focus.

Unfortunately, no. I use Linux on a daily basis on my desktop, and while it's great for development (if you develop for Linux), it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example).

> Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support Linux.

No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review from Ars: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-si... -- even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows.

> Hardware support is no longer a major issue. You can generally expect all your devices to work out of the box. Even your WiFi.

Not really. AMD GPUs are badly supported -- even the proprietary driver is _very_ slow compared to the Windows version and it has very crude power management (meaning that most of the time, your GPU runs loud and hot). The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or OSX (things like WebGL are not 100% stable). Hybrid graphics is not supported properly, so laptops like my ZBook 15 G2 can't run Linux well (there is no solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor support at the same time).

In general, my biggest issue with Linux on the desktop is stability of things related to graphics/display. My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs) cannot boot with the most recent Ubuntu image. Fedora 23 installs well, then the first software update breaks graphics (it turned out that GDM cannot communicate with X due some SELinux misconfiguration). I could install CentOS7 which is officially supported by the manufacturer but that has crappy font rendering and obsolete packages.

And sadly, the situation in 2015 does not seem better than ~10 years ago, when I was trying to install Linux on my X40. Everything worked well except the graphics. Same in 2015.

Look at what Windows is doing with WDDM and DX12. It's really-really cutting edge. Yes, Vulkan is coming sometime, but MS has actually delivered. But still, as a Linux dev, that's not an alternative.

+1 Exactly this!

While I love (and use daily) i3-wm, I really wouldn't call it a "desktop environment" (and dwm, which is very similar to i3, was already available in 2009).