| I have been using it full-time circa 2006-2009. I guess that counts as "past decade". 1. There was no out of the box support of my particular NVidia video card, so I've had to build the driver from source and fiddle with my system to install it. 2. I've had userspace processes freeze on network activities and become impossible to kill, because of a kernel deadlock in my wireless driver. 3. Proper smooth fonts required work at the time (freetype did not ship with good subpixel hinting). 4. Proprietary media codecs did not work out of the box and required a third-party repositories. 5. The whole KDE four-point-not-really-zero debacle. A minimalistic XMonad+Vim+terminal setup was decent and worked for me, but eventually I got sick of desktop Linux and moved to OSX. I realise that many things have been fixed in the meantime, but it was not a flawless experience back then. If I was to give desktop Linux another shot today, I'd be cautiously optimistic, but not expect a miracle. |
1. Not an issue anymore in most recent distributions, and Nvidia is now supporting even the latest graphics cards on Linux. 2.3. I can't comment on that. 4. On Ubuntu and many other distros they now work out of the box.