There are barely any economic incentives to make the Linux desktop usable. I can't name anyone whose income would be dependent on people being happy with a Linu

There are barely any economic incentives to make the Linux desktop usable. I can't name anyone whose income would be dependent on people being happy with a Linux desktop to any significance. It's a miracle it works as well as it works in my view. Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical make some money off of Linux and sell desktop operating systems, but their customers are the enterprise (their users have to use what they get) and their primary revenue stream is around servers anyway. They finance part of the development of Gnome or KDE, but that's not a lot of money. The Gnome Foundation's total income last year was under $1 million, KDE e.V.'s was under €250k. These are by far the largest and most professional Linux desktop projects. One tiny exception is Elementary OS - which makes some donation money from their community directly to make a usable desktop experience. There you see the difference - it's a tiny project but is being well received for its core experience. Sadly it's too small to have a significant impact the wider Linux ecosystem. If this situation doesn't change, the free desktop will always be viewed as a hobby project for people scratching their own itch. Many like it that way. But vendors will find it hard to take the Linux desktop seriously, and this limits adoption from a wider audience too. The Linux desktop has no shortage of opinions, but a big shortage of money.