At the turn of the millennium when I got my first Linux, SuSE Linux 6.x IIRC, I was a teenager who thought Linux was the coolest thing in computing, and tried m

At the turn of the millennium when I got my first Linux, SuSE Linux 6.x IIRC, I was a teenager who thought Linux was the coolest thing in computing, and tried my hardest to find a Windows-like distro for my father, an electronic engineer that realistically only needed his Microchip IDE (MPLAB) to be able to switch. He passed away in 2006, and he was still on Windows XP at the time. I am pleased to see that MPLAB now runs on Linux. Now we also got Windows gaming on Linux. The Linux desktop is still a bit of a rough experience, but how things have improved over the past few years... Windows shitting the bed and macOS becoming more and more iOS-like probably are making Linux look better than is actually is. The issue that WinLinux 2000 & co. tried to focus on was creating a Windows-like GUI. That was never the problem; macOS thrives and it's very different than Windows. The issue always was applications, and a custom skin on a custom distro was not enough to convince the ones on the fence like my father. -- Please allow me a small rant: Valve has done an outstanding job with Proton, but I have never been very pleased with the state of Wine, since its inception. It feels it always falls short on usability, that running even trivial applications requires jumping through obscure hoops. (case in point: some Windows app wants to run as Administrator. Good luck doing so in Wine today. You can find 15-year out of date wikis referencing incantations that do not work anymore.) Many applications would run on Wine, but require a particular option or library, that if you don't know about and can't parse the verbose output, you are out of luck. They have an AppDB, but it's out-of-date and pretty much nobody uses it—I'm not even sure regular users can contribute to it. I don't know if it's a governance or funding problem, but it's not like Wine feels incomplete because it's following a moving target; it instead feels like it's limping along, underdocumented, fragile, which makes Valve's work even more impressive.