Maybe the death watch for the traditional Linux desktop has also started...
Linux distributions have had a decade long slide in their usability and polish. Much of this has been due to an abandonment of its historical UNIX roots in favour of half-baked "modern" replacements.
Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place.
However, it's coming to the point where it's simply getting unusable. And I say this after using Linux on the desktop as my primary user and development environment for over 22 years at this point. If I want actual UNIX, I can run FreeBSD in a virtual machine, or even on the bare metal. Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances.
I come from an environment where we have a reasonable number of Linux workstations; approaching 2000 in the company I work for, and more in the wider field.
> Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place.
Yes, here as well. We have big apps, small apps, legacy apps, remote apps, all doing real work.
For the enthusiast user base, who mainly live within the distribution's ecosystem, this sort of churn in the platform is exciting and interesting, or feels like progress. The platform is the end result.
For us, the platform is just that -- a platform on which sits a lot of vendor applications and custom tooling assembled over decades with its idiosyncrasies carefully accommodated.
This churn isn't good. Anything short of 100% compatibility is going to prompt a risky re-evaluation of what's out there on the market -- risky because Windows is in the strongest position, not Linux.
Linux is already in a weakened position than it once was as a workstation OS. My colleagues will be enticed by a Windows platform which has an emerging Linux compatibility; and a tried-and-tested build of most of the vendor-driven GUI applications and GPU drivers, too.
>I say this after using Linux on the desktop as my primary user and development environment for over 22 years at this point
Five years ago, after 15 years of using Linux on the desktop, I bought a Mac Mini for my daily driver. I have not regretted that decision once. For anything needing more compute power, I can shell into a beefier Linux server without a GUI. I still develop the same sorts of apps that I did before the switch, and am still intimately familiar with the same (application programming) interfaces as I was in Linux, just now my sound doesn't randomly stop working, my disks don't refuse to decrypt, and my video doesn't randomly stop working because somebody at Red Hat decided that the graphics libraries I was using were naughty or that I should have less choice in video cards by excluding support for the most performant video cards available at the time I bought.
> Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances.
I was going to make my own top-level comment, but you've said everything I wanted to say.
The day X dies is the day I switch back to Windows. I can simply use WSL and KDE Applications to get something very close to the parts of Linux I like.
Linux distributions have had a decade long slide in their usability and polish. Much of this has been due to an abandonment of its historical UNIX roots in favour of half-baked "modern" replacements.
Being a UNIX replacement with a full X11 server and all the rest was what made it compelling and practical in the first place.
However, it's coming to the point where it's simply getting unusable. And I say this after using Linux on the desktop as my primary user and development environment for over 22 years at this point. If I want actual UNIX, I can run FreeBSD in a virtual machine, or even on the bare metal. Otherwise, I might as well resign myself to fate and use Windows with WSL or VMs for everything else. If I'm going to be forced to use something I dislike, it might as well be something that properly supports all my hardware and I can be productive with despite its annoyances.