As someone who has been using and hacking on Linux for pretty long time and doesn't even use Windows, none of what you said is particularly alarming, and I don'

As someone who has been using and hacking on Linux for pretty long time and doesn't even use Windows, none of what you said is particularly alarming, and I don't think there are any significant changes that happened in the last few years to warrant any changes in one's outlook. I heard similar comments from the Slashdot crowd when Windows Vista and Windows 8 came out, about how Microsoft is fucking everything up and this is the end for them. And those products were probably much worse than Windows 11 from a perspective of being bad for the user, and just being bad products in general. But in the end nothing happened. But even if they did fuck up badly, the fact is, the "Linux desktop" is still a bad platform that people don't want to use. The APIs suck and are too fragmented, the developer experience is confusing, the documentation is bad and often missing, the story around packaging and shipping is dreadful, it's just all around not good. There are so many little bits of polish that need to go into something like that to make it really good, and the Linux community has never been able to do that at the scale it needs to be done at to make it competitive with Microsoft. Yes I know there are people working on all of those things but their progress is extremely slow. (I know because I'm one of those people.) You might think I'm being defeatist but honestly this is the way it's always been. Most open source projects are just understaffed and underfunded, and nothing about this has changed in the last 20 years. That's my experience anyway. If you talk to more app developers then you'll probably hear the same complaints.