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.
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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.