[fao_]

> I work in enterprise Linux.

I don't see how you could even compare enterprise linux to home linux. Enterprise linux not only has a different userland (i.e. it's designed for LTS setups -- stability, not usability), but almost all enterprise places run 20 versions behind anyway. Not only that, but you're facing peculiarities of your setup that no sane home user is going to face in a billion years. The entire experience is different.

Go pick up Linux Mint's Cinnamon distribution, then see if you have the same complaints.

[sgroppino]

Linux Mint 18.3 is amazing. People should really try it out... I recently got a new Lenovo 120S, replaced its Windows 10S with Linux Mint and everything worked out-of-the-box. CPU @ 2-3%, RAM < 550MB on a 11.6" laptop for £129 with zero issues restored my faith on Linux as a viable desktop OS.

[ncol]

Of course my experience is different. If you want browse the web, do some development and stay within those confines it can work. But that has been true for probably at least a decade and is true for any other mainstream operating system as well. If that is what you want you should probably go with Chrome OS. But people usually expect to be able to do more than that.

Quality isn't an absolute measure. If you were to plot the security holes in the Linux kernel on a timeline you will most likely find that there is at least one the majority of the time. Security is essentially a percentage of how hard something is to discover and exploit. And you don't know what that percentage is until someone go looking.

The same is essentially true for the rest of the the operating system. Your average user can be perfectly happy e.g. clicking on random links and executing random code without apparent consequences. They will rave about Linux until reality catches up with them. Whether that is software conflicts, (lack of) backups, security or just maintenance in general. Usually at that point they get disillusioned and switch to something else. That is why we have the perpetual "year of the Linux desktop". Because people leave at a similar rate that they join.

By working in enterprise Linux I, involuntarily, get to see all this at different points in time. Not just from my own perspective as someone who has largely accepted these problems, or from the perspective of a user that is excited about Linux until they aren't. It is from this perspective, and because I know how hard it can be to do things that are outside of the default, that I say that the other big operating systems are better overall.