Ubuntu shipped its new release this week and it is, by any reasonable technical measure, a genuinely good operating system. The installer is straightforward, hardware detection has improved to the point where most laptops just work, and the desktop is fast and coherent in a way earlier Linux distributions frequently were not.
None of that is the reason desktop Linux is still stuck around one percent of the market, and I think people who keep predicting this will be the year it breaks out are answering the wrong question.
The technical quality argument has been essentially settled for a while now. What has not been settled is what happens the first time somebody tries to open a file a client sent them in the proprietary format their office actually uses, or install the specific piece of professional software their job requires, or play a game a friend recommended. At that point the operating system’s quality stops mattering, because the operating system is not what they needed. They needed a specific piece of software, and it does not exist for this platform, and no amount of desktop polish changes that.
This is not a chicken-and-egg problem in the usual sense, where either side moving would fix it. It is closer to a standoff where neither side has a reason to move first. Software vendors will not build for a platform with negligible market share, and the platform’s share stays negligible partly because the software is not there. Somebody has to absorb a loss to break that, and nobody currently has an incentive to be the one who does.
Where this genuinely does work is the machine that only needs a browser and an email client, and there are more of those machines than the enthusiast press tends to admit. A netbook, a family’s second computer, a school lab. For that narrow but real category, today’s release is close to ideal, and I would recommend it without reservation.
For anyone whose work depends on a specific piece of commercial software, the operating system quality was never the obstacle, and this release does not change the actual constraint even though it changes almost everything else about how good the experience is once you get past it.