MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power users and regular users alike.
Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and others have mature desktops, solid performance, and fewer design decisions that get in the user’s way.
I honestly cannot remember another moment where both major desktop platforms were being questioned this openly at the same time. If Linux is ever going to take advantage of dissatisfaction at scale, this feels like it.
I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse.
That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to.
An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.
All of these are longshots, but it really feels like we've hit a historic level of discontent.
Really? And windows does?
If you're not convinced: look at the difference between desktop Linux and Android. Although Android Studio seems to be a bit of a disaster nowadays, there's a lot of development support for Android, and it shows in the 1.6 million apps that have been built for it. Android has got what people crave: easy, slick, user-friendly apps, no technical hassle. It's an uphill battle, and at the same time, the focus is shifting away from desktop. So I think the year of Linux for the desktop will likely never come.
It's like the console wars — different camps say "our console is better, it has more teraflops." In reality, nobody cares about that — buyers will get the console that has the games.
Seriously, I think it depends if you're talking about business or home. For business, sure. For home—and this is quite relevant to the rest of your comment—I think it comes down more to gaming.
As for Linux. I also have a Linux laptop with Gnome for light gaming (Manjaro). It's alright. But a bit of a mess from a ux point of view. Linux always was messy on that front. But it works reasonably well.
The point with the distributions that you mention is that they each do things slightly differently, and I would argue in ways that are mostly very superficial. Nobody seems to be able to agree on anything in the Linux world so all you get is a lot of opinionated takes on how stuff should behave and which side of the screen things should live. This package manager over that one.
I've been using Linux on and off for a few decades, so I mostly ignore all the window dressing and attempts to create the ultimate package manager UI, file managers and what not and just use the command line. These things come and go.
It seems many distros are mostly just exercises in creating some theme for Gnome or whatever and imitating whatever the creator liked (Windows 95, Beos, Early versions of OSX, CDE, etc.). There's a few decades of nostalgia to pick from here.
