It's interesting to see the open contempt towards anything that has to do with graphics and/or multimedia:
No Gulag or lice, just a
future whose intellectual tone and interaction style is set by Sonic the
Hedgehog. You claim to seek progress, but you succeed mainly in
whining.
I'd say most of the complexity of modern OS's comes from handling all those interactive 3D/UI/Audio use cases, an area that desktop Linux is 15-20 years behind it's main competitors. A coherent, robust story is just starting to emerge, but as a veteran Linux enthusiast, I have become wary of the hot new thing just over the horizon that promises to solve all our problems.
It's just recently that the Linux desktop has moved from the weird network-centric distributed architecture of the X server to a modern rendering architecture with Wayland. And still the transition is a work in progress - it's still only production ready with some concessions and a somewhat curated choice of hardware and software.
OS X introduced this in the early 2000s and by the mid-2000s, it was working as intended. Microsoft trailed, with the implementation showing up in Vista, and maturing in Win7 in 2009.
Looking at these timelines, the 15-20 years seems roughly accurate.
On the audio side, it was quite a difficult story as well, where we went from basically no solution for sharing the sound card, to PulseAudio's decade of broken audio, that kinda matured by the end, but still having to have Jack around for high-end audio stuff.
Now PipeWire seems to be a promising comprehensive solution to Linux audio, but it's very recent, and yet to gain traction in Ubuntu-land.
I think there's cause for optimism and the pieces will fall in line, but matching the 'everything just works promise of Windows 7 in 2009 or OS X in 2006 will take a couple more years still.
For most of my years using Linux (mint then manjaro kde, etc)I didn't have a clue whether i was using X or Wayland. Consequently if someone told me how behind the times i was because of that i would have frowned.
Similarly anecdotally my frustrations that were encountered trying to get things to work with linux. (bluetooth is a mess)
Were always matched with the same on Windows from a somewhat laymans perspective.
An old printer that wouldn't work with windows but would with Linux. A playstation 3 controller (i think they were the most common type at the time) which required multiple hoops and then still wouldn't work whilst being plug and play after booting into Linux.
We had a solution prior to pulseaudio, but it was the ALSA dmix option, and anyone who's ever set it up can probably tell you how sparse and cryptic the documentation for it is. If you're having trouble finding anyone that fits that description, check the Slackware crowd; dmix was the norm right on up until the last couple major releases, but it wasn't configured out of the box.
Windows Vista (released in 2006, just about 15 years ago) could survive GPU driver crash with most UI programs intact. I don't think Linux has that capability to this day.
I have been a life long pro audio user on Windows and I must say both jack and pipewire are quite something. I miss those when I am on a Windows machine.
They probably are, but jack is aimed at tinkerers and experts, with no big distro shipping them as default, and pipewire as default is a fairly recent (1ish year old) thing.
I don't know if I'd agree with you about most of the complexity, a lot of it seems nicely modularized off and handled outside the OS kernel proper or by hardware itself. I strongly disagree about Linux being 15-20 years behind though, but only because I don't think progress is so linear. X is old, yes, and missing some things, but it still works fine, and experiences are often no worse than Mac/Windows XP/7/8/10 and frequently better, depending on your needs. Apple in particular has always had bad experiences the moment you step off the reservation, and even sometimes on it (but Apple enthusiasts can make more complaints than me). Audio has been a mess, sure, though there have been periods of stability with Alsa and (though it took them long enough) PulseAudio. (I share your skepticism of the new hotness fixing things, back when it was Pulse and even the upcoming PipeWire. I've always been skeptical of Wayland long term.) For graphics, you can still play your 3D games at 4k@60hz, you can still hook up external monitors (and for years that has had a much better "just works" experience than it once did such that most people no longer need to touch the Xorg.conf file), for weird niches that still complicate the architecture Linux allows you to hook up more GPUs (I think Win10 has almost caught up though recently by allowing up to 12). IME works just fine if you need to type Japanese. You can still remote desktop -- even in the archaic days with X forwarding, but you also had VNC and these days NoMachine is probably the best. None quite as good as RDP, maybe, and that may be a limit of the architecture, but it's not like there's much complete absence of capability that could be used to justify that time gap as a measure of progress or an indication of how much catch-up needs to be done.
Meanwhile there are absences or near-absences when it comes to other things Linux has long had and as far as I can tell aren't really things in Windows or Mac for the most part. Having a window "Always on top" is available as a Windows extension if you know where to find it, but is not out of the box. Workspaces are another thing, very useful if you're on a constrained screen like a laptop, though I think if you know where to find those there's also some equivalent for other OSes. I'm more doubtful if there's an equivalent to anything like Beryl in 2006 (now Compiz Reloaded, sadly on life support for years, but I still use it) for eye candy or other nice window management shortcuts (grid layout hooks without having to use a tiling window manager, jumping windows between monitors or over workspaces, dimming non-focused windows, arbitrary magnification and easy zoom-to-fit-screen hooks, I could go on).
I will grant that HDR support on Linux is missing entirely (I was recently reminded of this when I almost upgraded to a new HDR monitor). Supposedly annoyances can happen when mixing monitors of different pixel densities. But overall, the thrust of my comment is again just that I think it's hard to lay out a flat line of progress where you can clearly say Linux is 15-20 years behind.
Comments
It's interesting to see the open contempt towards anything that has to do with graphics and/or multimedia:
I'd say most of the complexity of modern OS's comes from handling all those interactive 3D/UI/Audio use cases, an area that desktop Linux is 15-20 years behind it's main competitors. A coherent, robust story is just starting to emerge, but as a veteran Linux enthusiast, I have become wary of the hot new thing just over the horizon that promises to solve all our problems.
I hope this was intended as an extreme exaggeration.
It's just recently that the Linux desktop has moved from the weird network-centric distributed architecture of the X server to a modern rendering architecture with Wayland. And still the transition is a work in progress - it's still only production ready with some concessions and a somewhat curated choice of hardware and software.
OS X introduced this in the early 2000s and by the mid-2000s, it was working as intended. Microsoft trailed, with the implementation showing up in Vista, and maturing in Win7 in 2009.
Looking at these timelines, the 15-20 years seems roughly accurate.
On the audio side, it was quite a difficult story as well, where we went from basically no solution for sharing the sound card, to PulseAudio's decade of broken audio, that kinda matured by the end, but still having to have Jack around for high-end audio stuff.
Now PipeWire seems to be a promising comprehensive solution to Linux audio, but it's very recent, and yet to gain traction in Ubuntu-land.
I think there's cause for optimism and the pieces will fall in line, but matching the 'everything just works promise of Windows 7 in 2009 or OS X in 2006 will take a couple more years still.
For most of my years using Linux (mint then manjaro kde, etc)I didn't have a clue whether i was using X or Wayland. Consequently if someone told me how behind the times i was because of that i would have frowned.
Similarly anecdotally my frustrations that were encountered trying to get things to work with linux. (bluetooth is a mess)
Were always matched with the same on Windows from a somewhat laymans perspective. An old printer that wouldn't work with windows but would with Linux. A playstation 3 controller (i think they were the most common type at the time) which required multiple hoops and then still wouldn't work whilst being plug and play after booting into Linux.
We had a solution prior to pulseaudio, but it was the ALSA dmix option, and anyone who's ever set it up can probably tell you how sparse and cryptic the documentation for it is. If you're having trouble finding anyone that fits that description, check the Slackware crowd; dmix was the norm right on up until the last couple major releases, but it wasn't configured out of the box.
Windows Vista (released in 2006, just about 15 years ago) could survive GPU driver crash with most UI programs intact. I don't think Linux has that capability to this day.
I have been a life long pro audio user on Windows and I must say both jack and pipewire are quite something. I miss those when I am on a Windows machine.
They probably are, but jack is aimed at tinkerers and experts, with no big distro shipping them as default, and pipewire as default is a fairly recent (1ish year old) thing.
People just say things. Graphics takes are particularly bad... Here's a modern hot take I just find ridiculous https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385749
I don't know if I'd agree with you about most of the complexity, a lot of it seems nicely modularized off and handled outside the OS kernel proper or by hardware itself. I strongly disagree about Linux being 15-20 years behind though, but only because I don't think progress is so linear. X is old, yes, and missing some things, but it still works fine, and experiences are often no worse than Mac/Windows XP/7/8/10 and frequently better, depending on your needs. Apple in particular has always had bad experiences the moment you step off the reservation, and even sometimes on it (but Apple enthusiasts can make more complaints than me). Audio has been a mess, sure, though there have been periods of stability with Alsa and (though it took them long enough) PulseAudio. (I share your skepticism of the new hotness fixing things, back when it was Pulse and even the upcoming PipeWire. I've always been skeptical of Wayland long term.) For graphics, you can still play your 3D games at 4k@60hz, you can still hook up external monitors (and for years that has had a much better "just works" experience than it once did such that most people no longer need to touch the Xorg.conf file), for weird niches that still complicate the architecture Linux allows you to hook up more GPUs (I think Win10 has almost caught up though recently by allowing up to 12). IME works just fine if you need to type Japanese. You can still remote desktop -- even in the archaic days with X forwarding, but you also had VNC and these days NoMachine is probably the best. None quite as good as RDP, maybe, and that may be a limit of the architecture, but it's not like there's much complete absence of capability that could be used to justify that time gap as a measure of progress or an indication of how much catch-up needs to be done.
Meanwhile there are absences or near-absences when it comes to other things Linux has long had and as far as I can tell aren't really things in Windows or Mac for the most part. Having a window "Always on top" is available as a Windows extension if you know where to find it, but is not out of the box. Workspaces are another thing, very useful if you're on a constrained screen like a laptop, though I think if you know where to find those there's also some equivalent for other OSes. I'm more doubtful if there's an equivalent to anything like Beryl in 2006 (now Compiz Reloaded, sadly on life support for years, but I still use it) for eye candy or other nice window management shortcuts (grid layout hooks without having to use a tiling window manager, jumping windows between monitors or over workspaces, dimming non-focused windows, arbitrary magnification and easy zoom-to-fit-screen hooks, I could go on).
I will grant that HDR support on Linux is missing entirely (I was recently reminded of this when I almost upgraded to a new HDR monitor). Supposedly annoyances can happen when mixing monitors of different pixel densities. But overall, the thrust of my comment is again just that I think it's hard to lay out a flat line of progress where you can clearly say Linux is 15-20 years behind.