Ubuntu was very good in 2012 and actually great in 2016 with first class support by manufacturers (Dell, Lenovo) and commercial sw vendors (MS), great launcher/shell app (Unity) but IMO has had too many regressions: broken power management, touchpad, crappy container software just to run the same old software, broken notifications, barebone yet dysfunctional GUIs pointlessly wasting space on notebooks (gnome/gtk 3+), non-competitive power efficiency despite intrusive Windows-y system management monolith challenging the size of the Linux kernel itself and requiring frequent updates (systemd), focus on developer frameworks rather than users (Wayland), yet still multiple/HiDPI monitor support not great either ...
More than any single point of criticism in isolation, it's the feeling of a dying platform (for desktop) past its peak. Doesn't help there haven't been new high profile desktop apps for ages either.
RH definitely won't save the Linux desktop, they've abandoned any commercial interest/offering in that space many years ago. IMO using Fedora is just wasting your time alpha-testing RH's enterprise offerings, like CentOS is nowadays.
Personally, I'm in the process of completely transitioning to Mac OS which I've always used on and off since 2003. Hope to be able to run aarch64-native Linux VMs on Mac OS for development.
The truth is that desktop Linux is a novelty feature of the OS and mostly exists so core Linux devs can dogfood their own changes. Linux is still developed first and foremost as a server/cloud hosting OS. The main players in the Linux ecosystem have either abandoned desktop Linux (Canonical, RedHat) or never cared about it in the first place (Intel, IBM). The ones who remain on desktop Linux are extremely user-hostile and opinionated (GNOME devs) or deeply underfunded (KDE). Many of the people who develop the core desktop Linux projects do their work on MacOS!
Agree with many points, but Canonical very much does care about the desktop, and Linux traditionally always had a home/enthusiast user base; you could say the core Linux devs sold out to where the money is (and finally land in the arms of IBM) but that was 25 years ago. The point is, if nobody cares about the desktop, why didn't they just leave it alone (modulo driver updates) in the state it was in 2016 to make it objectively worse, without a single new app or other capability gained in return?
It maybe a novelty feature as you suggest for many companies; however, this is not universal. There are many companies that use it as a primary desktop operating system Pop!_os, and products released by tuxedo, starlabs, and slimbook. -- these are truly a desktop focus.
that's beyond folks like me that run my own linux desktop on my own gaming pc.
More than any single point of criticism in isolation, it's the feeling of a dying platform (for desktop) past its peak. Doesn't help there haven't been new high profile desktop apps for ages either.
RH definitely won't save the Linux desktop, they've abandoned any commercial interest/offering in that space many years ago. IMO using Fedora is just wasting your time alpha-testing RH's enterprise offerings, like CentOS is nowadays.
Personally, I'm in the process of completely transitioning to Mac OS which I've always used on and off since 2003. Hope to be able to run aarch64-native Linux VMs on Mac OS for development.