In summary: - Poor modern hardware support. "Linux on the Desktop" is dead in the water without a devoted hardware supplier that writes all drivers and sells c

In summary: - Poor modern hardware support. "Linux on the Desktop" is dead in the water without a devoted hardware supplier that writes all drivers and sells computers running Linux. The kernel itself is perfectly modern but we just often don't have proper driver support. - Some desktop subsystems still suck. Is Audio bulletproof yet? PulseAudio seems too complex, OSSv4 is out of kernel and is not suspend/hibernate aware, Alsa is outdated. - Desktop software is terrible. No office suite that feels solid, apps written with a mismash of backends, languages, and toolkits, everything feels designed by committee. No stationary canonical APIs to build proprietary software on. No commercial software suites (CAD, Office, Adobe, Steam, etc) or free software equivalents. - GTK and Qt do not cut it. They are not attractive, they are not modern, interface design doesn't appear to be a priority, most devs don't want to write desktop software in C or C++. The only way for Linux on the desktop to thrive is under the power of a commercial hardware company that designs systems with Linux in mind, gets the support of commercial 3rd party software companies, and completely eschews Gnome and KDE. That is a massive amount of work/money so I don't expect it to ever happen. I have used Linux on the desktop since 2002 (and will continue to use it) but I'm not delusional. Funnily enough, I've tried going back to Windows 7 (I am dual booting now) but I inexplicably have more driver problems on Win7 than I do on Linux (Thinkpad). I'm not a typical computer user, though. I could survive with only Emacs and Chrome.