Note: I had written this comment before I had read the actual article, so it is only vaguely related to the topic, but it seems wasteful to delete it... This m

Note: I had written this comment before I had read the actual article, so it is only vaguely related to the topic, but it seems wasteful to delete it... This might be a subjective thing, but Linux when I used it in 2008-9 (I was a kid then) was unfriendly. My local community was very unfriendly, expecting you to RTFM three times except often the manual didn't exist or was obsoleted years ago. Linux (Debian was what I used then) was rough. I had standard hardware, but I never got GPU to work without extreme tearing and pink-green lines and artifacts on the display. It was fast, I'll give it that. I often had to solve problems by reinstalling it, because I didn't have the resources (most didn't exist) to fix it "properly". I am not gonna talk about it further, but it was worse than now. Ubuntu's 10.10 "Чиста Десетка" (as we called it here) was a release that started changing things for the better. The purity and exclusive-ness of the comunity was fading, people became more accepting. I attended meetups, met new people, made friends and got a lot of my issues fixed and many things explained. In parallel with the comunity's development, the OS itself was developing and improving. IMO Unity was better than Gnome Shell at that time, and it really gave a friendlier feel to the OS. The kernel got more and more support for things you would expect to "just work" (especially in Serbia where so many people were using HSPA+ USB modems such as Huawei E1550 which had awful support before). GPU drivers got massively improved, new filesystem improvements reduced unnecessary latency, initiatives to prioritize UI-responsiveness and fludity came to provide a more awe-inspiring UX than Compiz cubes... It just became better, and it keeps getting better.