Yeah, this idea that the Linux desktop experience isn't working out just doesn't make sense to me. I have Arch on almost all of my machines, including the one

Yeah, this idea that the Linux desktop experience isn't working out just doesn't make sense to me. I have Arch on almost all of my machines, including the one at work where I do most of my development, as well as several laptops. Across all of these computers, I've had one driver issue (integrated Broadcom NIC) and one case where an update broke an application, in the four years I've been using Arch. It's amazingly easy to use and completely gets out of my way. Furthermore, at work I'm developing a cross-platform GUI application using Qt, which is great to work with. We have developers using Windows, Linux, and OS X. Now, for all that I like Qt, I've never gotten into KDE because I can't run it without it crashing all the time. And Gnome is a great UI for my pre-literate children, but it's not for me. But the fact that mainstream desktop environments are a bad fit for me doesn't mean I'm having a bad time running Linux on my desktop! My window manager does exactly the things I want it to, and not one thing more. Linux crashes for me less often than Windows, and unlike Windows I can almost always ssh in and put things in order before I reboot. (In the course of developing a GUI application, there are lots of ways to create system instability!) I can't imagine, as a developer, preferring a watered-down Linux running on the Windows kernel to the real thing. It's like saying that Wine is Windows. (Not that Wine is a bad project, just that it's not a great way to have the Windows desktop experience.)