I HIGHLY agree with this article and IMHO all the comments bashing Gnome just don't really get it. For all of it's faults, I still roll with Ubuntu/Gnome every day because it just freaking works, gets out of my way, gets the job done, and doesn't require a weekend of tweaking software to get everything working just right.

I don't care at all for the SystemD/whatever else flame wars. Sure if you work on these systems you probably care deeply about the differences but please realize that most of your end users do not give a shit. The same goes for the various packaging systems, I prefer to still use DEB's when I can but at the end of the day it really just comes down to how easily can I get the apps setup on my computer to get my work done, myself and most other users also don't really care.

What I care about are things like: why is multi monitor support still half assed? why does full screening my chrome window crash my monitor? why is it that half my installed apps don't conform to my theme? why is it that when I switch on X window manager instead of Wayland my wallpaper goes away?

But it seems that the folks that actually work on Linux don't care about these issues because when I ask why VSCode crashes my monitor, all I get is answers telling me to use vim or emacs, or when I complain why the themes look all janky all I get is: "well this wouldn't be an issue if you used <insert obscure window manager that requires a week's worth of configuration to get running and a steep learning curve>.

The vibe I get around these issues is that it's below most Linux developers as they are too busy arguing about some flag in the kernel or whether to use systemd or not. But those same people bitch and moan why "Year of the Linux Desktop" hasn't come yet. Figure out that these issues are not below you, they are the issues that people care about. Fix those issues and I'm positive that adoption will go up.

Sorry for the rant.

Most users who develop on Linux are not really Linux developers in the sense that we just write our own code and don’t contribute anything to the kernel, or to the userland programs that you were trying to use. The people who write the code you actually use are quite busy, so you usually just get random nobodies (myself included!) when you go online to chat about Linux. There’s some possibility that you might get help, because we happen to be using the same program, but that’s all there is to it.

If you want to know why VSCode is buggy, you will probably have to get into contact with Microsoft, I guess. I know this looks like some kind of smarmy sarcastic response, but it really is the truth; the rest of us really don’t know why they put bugs in there.

Yeah the real problem is that the only thing that’s well tested is what devs use. It’s like the FOSS parallel to startups only testing on top of the line MacBook Pros and iPhones (“works on my machine”). As soon as you step outside those bounds, good luck.