“Linux” isn’t a person or a company. Different people contribute to it with different goals.
> 90%+ of work on Linux comes from corporate sponsorship
And approximately 0% of these corporate contributors care about the “Linux desktop” experience. Unlike Apple their goal is not to build a consumer-targeted OS.
Linux on the desktop is very, very niche, and even among the people who do use it, a lot of them will spend almost all their time in just a few windows (e.g. terminal, browser, emacs), not a rich array of desktop applications.
If you haven't used linux desktop for a while, even a year ago, try again. Use a bleeding edge distro like the latest Ubuntu or Fedora ideally running Wayland and you will be surprised how smooth and feature-full it has become, with gobs of high quality apps available with no finicky compile instructions or crazy installation steps needed to follow.
Whatever rough edges you may encounter will keep being sanded down at a speed I haven't witnessed since when linux was the hot new thing in the 90s. Linux desktop felt stale and abandoned trough-out the 2010s but nowadays its pretty marvelous how fast it's becoming a real alternative to windows and mac. I truly believe that if it had the proper developer adoption and first class hardware support from OEM vendors it would already be a true alternative.
> 90%+ of work on Linux comes from corporate sponsorship
And approximately 0% of these corporate contributors care about the “Linux desktop” experience. Unlike Apple their goal is not to build a consumer-targeted OS.
Linux on the desktop is very, very niche, and even among the people who do use it, a lot of them will spend almost all their time in just a few windows (e.g. terminal, browser, emacs), not a rich array of desktop applications.