If you're still interested, I would try again now. The experience has come on in leaps and bounds in the last 5 years. I haven't had a WiFi issue since 2018
The thing about long-time Linux (on the desktop) users is that they've got so used to how bad it is, they think it's good.
Install Ubuntu/Mint/Pop/etc on a 3-4 year old laptop and.. Great, it probably works now! That is better than things were 10 years ago. It'll even connect with your Google account, etc. Wow! Looks slick.
Close the lid. Open it again. Hmm. Blank screen. Fans going crazy though. Wait a while. Hold down the power button, start it up again. Spend 3 hours googling and trying things (and in the process, 'sudo'ing all sorts of stuff which appeared to do nothing but may be breaking things even more). Give up. Try to remember to power down instead of expecting sleep/suspend to work.
Let's listen to some MP3's.. Oh.. Sound doesn't work!
[Spend all night trying multiple ways to make sound work]
Yay, sound works, unless it doesn't, in which case reboot. Good enough for now.
Time to do some actual work. Plug in a couple of monitors. Hm, resolutions are a bit weird, let's go and change those in the easy GUI config screen and whaaaAAAT?!
No, I haven’t, and it would only be anecdotal evidence anyway. The issue is that there’s still the same mix of “it works without issues for me” and “I gave up making it work” comments as there was 5/10/15 years ago. I certainly believe that some things have improved, but it appears that in practice it’s still a gamble and heavily depends on one’s particular requirements and use cases.
KDE isn’t exactly new, so I’m not sure what you’re referring to here.
I'm explicitly referring to Proton, a Wine and DXVK project from Valve that now means that many games now work on Linux [0][1].
KDE has had a similar level of investment and polish and I believe has now crossed a threshold where it is comparable in usability and smoothness to Windows or Mac. It now uses Wayland which means that it solves a lot of the janky issues inherent to X. KDE is not new, but it is much better to the point where I feel unless you've used it in the last 2 years you wouldn't be able to fully appreciate.
I think the article linked and my original comment both take issue with the number of negative comments here. People like yourself seem to be taking them as a general barometer at best or at worst a complete indictment, when many of them see to be citing issue that haven't been seen for years.
Specifically, my OP was complaining about how people are so free to spin off these lists of issues without any qualifying context which I believe leads to this misleading representation of the current state of things.
