[randallsquared]

In many cases on Linux I just wait until the next OS release to upgrade software - because toying with the huge dependency graph is not worth it. Maybe I should switch to a rolling release distro? I haven't tried that.

When I most recently used Linux on the desktop, in 2010, I finally grew frustrated enough with Ubuntu's screen management setup (there was no way to get it to respect my wishes for it to turn off the screen completely, until I finally killed the power manager entirely) that I switched to Arch. That was superficially better (stuff mostly worked as advertised), but the rolling release means either keeping up to date and dealing with constant breakage ("Oh, look, the new kernel has a broken driver for my audio card", or "Oh, another update, another few hours troubleshooting Wine. Yay"), or waiting a while and having the update become riskier and riskier.

Linux will be ready for the desktop when updating doesn't mean near certainty that something breaks. I realize that things used to be more broken, but when I used Linux as my primary desktop back in 1998-2003, my expectations were lower. Being a Mac user for 5-6 years seriously reduced my patience with troubleshooting random problems just to get all the functionality that the system I'm using claims to provide.

[MatthewPhillips]

You want to use a distro with an LTS release. Switching to Arch and being surprised that pacman -Syu causes occasional breakage is not a failure of Linux at large.

[randallsquared]

I was more resigned than surprised. Annoyed, perhaps. Anyway, an LTS release would be guaranteed not to work with newer software, from my experience with them. Apologetics centering on users being prepared for normal updates to break random things do not forward Linux, in my opinion.

It's not clear to me that there's any way to get the level of polish needed for a major desktop OS without at least an army of (very critical) testers and developers, and maybe without forking most of the packages in the distro. Nevertheless, if OS X continues down the apparent path it's on, I'll be switching back again in a few years.