Then, in just some years, everything changed: Wireless drivers became flawless out of the box (it could take a day to make WiFi work in 2007). Unity emerged, took some years to mature and Linux has became really like Mac but even better in many aspects (and slightly worse in some small details advanced Mac users can miss). Windows 7 came and prepared the Windows population for the Unity panel. Then Unity died making the desktop experience slightly worse again but KDE finally matured enough to achieve even more (except I still miss Unity HUD with menu search). Today I just use XFCE with Chicago95 on Manjaro for my own hot-meets-retro pleasure, give others vanilla Ubuntu (with "restricted extras") and everybody is happy. Also Pop_OS with its user-friendly tiling integration is insanely cool (but it fails to install on some laptops where Ubuntu doesn't).
Nothing really changed. Linux on the desktop is still pretty much relegated to people who develop for Linux. ChromeOS is probably the closest Linux will ever come to desktop success.
When a company rolls out Linux desktops it's a news story because it's unusual. There are killer apps for Windows and Mac. How about Linux? What application is going to have my uncle calling me asking which Linux machine he should buy?
> Nothing really changed. Linux on the desktop is still pretty much relegated to people who develop for Linux.
I can only attribute this to marketing as I can see no single humble thing (except lack of MS Office (which is being phased out by MS favouring Office 365), MS VS, Adobe CS and the NumLock bug) in which Linux actually is worse than Windows. And I can see many in which it is better. Even the very user experience is better - Linux feels faster, is more reliable and can be customized to whatever you want (if you do) with relative ease. Lack of some specific apps is not a flaw of Linux. Whoever doesn't need these specific apps can use Linux comfortably.
> What application is going to have my uncle calling me asking which Linux machine he should buy?
What apps does he need? If he doesn't need the apps I've mentioned I would insist he uses Linux if I were you - so I won't have to fix it next time it breaks, gets slow or infected by something nasty.
> When a company rolls out Linux desktops it's a news story because it's unusual.
I have alone rolled out (and never wanted that to be in any news) Linux in a number of companies (~20 desktops/laptops, Browser+Office+Skype+Samba+RDP+OpenVPN workflow, one also needed a Windows GUI CRM client which I configured to run with Wine flawlessly). This worked fast and reliably forever ever since. I wouldn't, however, agree (unless paid extremely well) to become in charge of a Windows system of the same or bigger size as that would mean much more work regularly.
