Linux was excellent on the desktop about 4 years ago. After that we had fedora turning to a big pile of broken packages, ubuntu adopting some seriously broken technologies (pulseaudio, compiz-beryl, tracker, unity, upstart, readahead, ... ).
My favourite anecdote about linux's degradation is this:
Earlier, applications like nautilus , cdburner etc would accurately predict and show the amount of time for operations like copy to complete. Moreover, copying stuff via the GUI was not significantly slower than command line.
With the latest versions of KDE (and even gnome), we've gone back to windows98 levels of inconsistencies (seeing the kde time-estimate bar during a file copy is just painful).
If you want a distro which doesnt take 1G of ram to run a filemanager, the latest one you can try is Ubuntu 7.04 - runs much faster on my 6 year old laptop (with 200MB ram) than my modern desktop (with 1G ram).
I'd be interested to know why you consider upstart "seriously broken". I've just used it in anger for the first time, and it seems like a big improvement on the old, arcane system of alphabetically named init scripts.
The technology is great! I love the launchd/upstart way of doing things. What is completely unacceptable for a core piece of system software is the pathetic level of documentation. I should NOT have to source dive to write an init script! Whoever let upstart out of the door with the piss poor documentation should be lashed repeatedly with a wet noodle.
I migrated from Kubuntu to Xubuntu when Lucid came out, it runs greatly on older notebooks for that matter, even Xubuntu Natty today.
While the issues mentioned in the article are valid, it's still so much easier for me to maintain all family (and several friends) pc/laptops around, after I migrated them from Windows to Kubuntu/Xubuntu. The desktops just work and don't break, which is not something you can say about the Windows tamagotchi thing - you need to care about this one, or keep it restricted.
My favourite anecdote about linux's degradation is this: Earlier, applications like nautilus , cdburner etc would accurately predict and show the amount of time for operations like copy to complete. Moreover, copying stuff via the GUI was not significantly slower than command line.
With the latest versions of KDE (and even gnome), we've gone back to windows98 levels of inconsistencies (seeing the kde time-estimate bar during a file copy is just painful).
If you want a distro which doesnt take 1G of ram to run a filemanager, the latest one you can try is Ubuntu 7.04 - runs much faster on my 6 year old laptop (with 200MB ram) than my modern desktop (with 1G ram).