When you write "whatever sound system they're using this week", I know what you mean. There's terrible fragmentation, and buggy libraries get rewritten and replaced by some other buggy thing instead of fixed. That's definitely a pattern. From 2007-9 I even fled to OpenBSD on the desktop to get a more stable OS.

But for the past two and a half years I've used Ubuntu with Xfce, and those problems have become a distant memory. Nothing breaks, nothing gets changed on me (Xfce has moved a few things around, but nothing too terrible). No one forced me to switch to Unity, so I didn't. For me, Linux is more usable and stable than it's ever been. I also seem to see more people running it on the desktop than ever before, and in fact stats from Net Applications show a 50% rise in market share in 2011: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/is-the-linux-desktop-a...

Inside the Apple-centric echo chamber of HN, it's easy to believe that all the developers have moved to OS X and desktop Linux is dead, but I disagree. Despite its problems, desktop Linux is secure in its (small) niche.