To be fair, even now, in 2020, even with something user friendly like Ubuntu, on desktop, the win10 experience is way smoother and less liable to crash.
The problem with windows for personal use is that it gets in the way too often with pop ups, notifications and crap ads inside start menu.
Modern gnome is quite good already, though our team is using older hardware that's well supported on Linux. New team members get familiar with the gnome desktop quite quickly and with a dedicated app store installing apps has never been more easier on Linux.
We do still use windows but only inside a vm for office and outlook mainly because we have to
With many people using browser based tools there is simply not much of a difference in people's workflows across desktop oses.
I think the change has to start at the enterprise level, once companies start using linux then it's simply a matter of time before people switch their personal computers to linux.
It's no less a problem for enterprise use. On my Windows 10 work machine I constantly get pop-ups begging for credentials and attention for stuff that I simply don't care about or that doesn't need the credentials. Some of these are particularly aggressive and will always steal keyboard focus from any window, while daring to put up another pop up notification near the systray (which are so extremely important according to microsoft, that these notifications have even higher priority than the pop-up menu of the systray -- what'cha thinking Microsoft, do I wanna interact with the thing I just clicked on to open, or with the thing you pooped up over it under my cursor?!) when I dismiss them. I made a spreadsheet once and got about two dozen work-interruptions from Microsoft popups.
Not to mention the absurd aggressiveness of Microsoft Teams notifications. I avoid the app when I'm not actively participating in a call (it randomly uses too much CPU and is also obviously tracking everything you do on the PC), so I usually have Teams quarantined in a Firefox tab. Other software manages to have hit-me-once notifications, but not Teams. Somewhere someone writes a message? Let's put multiple notifications on the screen and start bleeping away. What, you didn't look at the message? Let's send a reminder email!
Modern Microsoft software would make Kafka cringe, for we are morons allowing this.
I installed it on my work phone which I don't use to make it stop.
At another point during an upgrade from one LTS edition to another, the DWM was switched out but something happened during the transition and the logon screen booted up to the old, unusable DWM/interface. Had to boot at a different runlevel and point the boot config at the correct DWM.
These are the kind of issues which keep Linux on the desktop limited to enthusiasts only. I have worked professionally with Linux for many years, but at home I just want shit that runs itself. I can recover from these kinds of problems but that's my leisure time shot to shit for the evening and that's a very different equation to fixing issues on the clock (or in leisure time where I'm specifically electing to tackle something tech-related e.g. in the homelab).
Then I discovered my ageing Windows 7 licenses on the machines would still upgrade to Win10 just fine and that was the end of Linux on the desktop for me for a while.
$ ls -1 /boot/
grub
initramfs-linux-fallback.img
initramfs-linux.img
intel-ucode.img
vmlinuz-linux
It's a hard problem to tackle since distros don't have the huge telemetry data that Windows has to diagnose and fix these issues.
This is primarily why I suggest to people to buy hardware with a special focus on Linux support.
Companies are now offering linux laptops, Dell with developer edition XPS and lenovo think pads. The Linux experience on these will be vastly superior.
On the other hand, my Ubuntu mountain lion desktop so far:
1. Died because somehow kernel upgrade failed and I had to manually roll back
2. Had a weird interaction with vscode causing a system freeze where I had to figure out what to manually modify in config.
3. Occasionally dies when browsing some js heavy pages on chrome
I definitely prefer Linux as a dev environment and want my backend apps deployed on Linux servers, but the desktop experience is just not smooth. I can’t imagine my elderly dad dealing with the Linux issues I’ve had so far.
I turned those off within a day after I installed it and haven't had those problems in years. I do recommend getting the Pro version as it makes that stuff more easily configurable. Some people will take issue with that, but for me as a power user it's worth it to have that additional control over something I use all day every day.
ETA: I use linux and MacOS at work, and linux is quite good for that. I find MacOS infuriating though - worse than Windows even for basic window and file management functionality, and worse for configurability.
Also I can't remember the last time Ubuntu crashed on me.
Sure, I've messed up configuration and myself broken pieces of it, but I could do that on Windows too.
But memes won't die, arch is unstable, Linux is hard and for nerds only.
(I should add that I'm not even a careful Arch user - one probably should check news before upgrading; I've never bothered.)
Windows makes me restart just to update .Net for Christ's sake.
Somehow you've got decision about Linux from Ubuntu. There are not as much changes on rolling release though I had once similar problem on Arch Linux in a decade. I've heard it is impossible on Nix (easy rollback).
There are 443 Canonical employees [2] and 13400 Red Hat employees [3]. I've heard "Red Hat" a lot in presentations of core stack - X, Cairo, Pango. Linux kernel contribution by company — Red Hat 8%, no Canonical [4]. Ubuntu made upstart, mir, unity, now snap. Red Hat made systemd and flatpak.
Ubuntu experiments with users more than Arch Linux does. It is among the first on pulseaudio, systemd, wayland. Some reverted, some lived through. It is not stable. So why is Ubuntu user friendly?
[1] https://canonical.com/careers/marketing
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat
[4] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2016/08/the-top-10-deve...
It used to work out of the box and look great at that.
Ubuntu actually made Gnome 2 look and work so well that for a few years that was my favorite.
Red Hat always was a hassle to install for end users and their default Gnome was dated and at times poorly configured.
It is 2020 — live USB, graphical installer, video review on https://manjaro.org/download/
I have not heard of this ever happening with macOS or Linux.