Comment by anigbrowl

What a silly article - after all, Gentoo is the system where tying your shoelaces involves growing your own feet from scratch.

I love desktop Linux (or wanted to) but it hasn't really happened because there's a shortage of application development that suits the needs of early adopters with deadlines. You can use Gimp, for example, but most people want Photoshop. If you're editing audio or video then your options are more constrained, and none of the market leaders have Linux editions. I'm simplifying here, of course, but the reasons have been laid out in more detail time and again.

Round 2000 or so I was sure Linux was going to take over - I was running Gnome with enlightenment as my WM and people would come up and say 'wow, what's that'. And i could run Compiz right now and throw windows around, and people would still be impressed...but once you get past the eye candy, you hit this real functionality gap and have to make a choice between becoming a dedicated Linux hacker who runs experimental software all day, or going with the industry standard and running something industry-standard that you can show to your clients.

There isn't a truly compelling reason to move from Windows or Mac unless you're building your own system for most applications. This isn't a fault of Linux: there just aren't many end-user applications of which you can say 'this is the best, and you can only take part by running Linux', nor any 'holy shit where has this been all my life' for non-programmers.