Once upon a time I thought either GNOME or KDE would win, and we could all enjoy the one Linux distribution, I was proven wrong.
Then again, I have been back on Windows as main OS since Windows 7.
The engineering standards, and churn within the Linux desktop, are hilariously bad.
Nobody who uses it has a right to complain about how node_modules has a thousand dependencies and makes your JavaScript app brittle. Their superior Linux desktop won't even be capable of running the same software build outside of a Flatpak without crashes in three years.
As for lack of documentation, good luck pulling together all the pieces you need to write a fully native Linux application without using Qt, GTK, or a cross-platform solution. Maybe you have your own UI stack that needs porting. A simple request, fairly accomplishable on Mac. The lack of documentation on Linux outside of that privileged route will make Apple's documentation look like a gold standard. Heck, even if you stay on the privileged route, you're still probably in for a bad time.
My Asus Linux netbook, bought with Linux support, never had the same OpenGL support level as on the Windows drivers.
And in what concerns hardware video decoding, it only worked during Flash glory days, never managed to get it working with VAAPI.
Isn't those the native stacks? Unless you're going for system programming. The nice thing about GTK and Qt is that you have access to the source code when you're trying to find the behavior of a component (if the docs is lacking). No such luck with AppKit.
Linux users don't want one to win. As soon as one gained any traction, the users would switch just for the sake of it. It's also crazy how neither ever actually improves because they are so focused on copying whatever windows and mac are doing instead of continuously improving. The linux desktop experience isn't any better now than it was 20 years ago.
You can't say that with a straight face. 20 or so years ago you would barely have hardware support for anything you wanted to use, or have to go trough a battery of guides just to get 50% of your computer working. Nowadays you just boot a live environment and likely 99% of your computer works out of the box, even tough your OEM gave ZERO shits about linux support.
Wi-fi was between impossible or pray it works and use a bunch of disparate of cli commands to properly join a network. Nowadays I see linux being casually used on random machines without a single problem regarding Wi-fi, and the GUIs for managing it are as cromulent as what you get on other OSes.
X kept being patched to make it do modern things it was never meant to do, thus creating a huge technical debt that is finally being payed off with proper wayland implementations.
Linux audio went from a complete turd to best in class with the "merging" (more of a complete rewrite but with full backward compatibility backed in) of pulseaudio and jack into pipewire.
It's now easy to acquire random linux desktop apps, and they keep working between upgrades! What a concept! Developers are actually finally having a decent time developing apps for desktop linux. Maybe it's no WIN32 but hey, you can run those too with WINE and PROTON trough Steam, Lutris, Bottles and so on :)
I could keep going... Honestly, just give it a try if you haven't in a while.
So audio is the best in class, how many industry DAWs support Linux, and are used at any random audio studio? Not that many.
The netboook I had until 2024, never handled our router without issues, rebooting the wlan daemon was a common activity during "heavy" downloads, like e.g. a new Rust version.
What works without issues on my place are Android/Linux, WebOS/Linux, and Sony/Linux (BlueRay).
Proton is Valve's failure to nurture developers to target GNU/Linux, even though Android/NDK has the same technology stack for game development, and Sony's OrbitOS is close enough with its FreeBSD roots, even with its proprietary 3D API.
Sure on weird hardware, but it you had something that was decently supported like a thinkpad, everything mostly just worked, same as now. A lot of your "linux improved..." stuff doesn't matter to end users for the most part. It's nice that they're growing the tent, but it doesn't change the fact that actual desktop experience hasn't improved much, despite it having been "year of the linux desktop" for the last 20ish years.
