Performance was a bit choppy when I had 4GB ram, and sometimes compiz would freeze my system. However, upgrading to 8GB RAM (costs about $50) totally fixed everything for me. Just upgrade.

I'm sure they could optimize things better, but that would slow down their frantic pace of innovation.

Why? Why should someone upgrade their ram just so the UI works smoothly? We've had smooth UI's for twenty years, even back when 32 MB of ram was the norm - so why should someone upgrade to 8 GB just for the UI? Hell, if I upgrade my ram (I have 8 already, but anway) I'll want it to be to benefit all the applications I like to run and I expect the UI and OS to use as little as possible and still perform smoothly.

My old eee pc was able to run windows xp just fine before I installed Arch with a tiling window manager on it and everything ran well, everything was fast, everything was smooth - for about three years - and then I installed Ubuntu and Unity brought it to a standstill despite not using any different applications than I always used. Even switching workspaces sometimes took 15 seconds or so. Yes, it only has 1 GB of ram, but like I said, I used the same applications that I always did without problems. I struggled with it for a few months and switched back to Arch and haven't had any problems since (though I now use a laptop which does have 8 gigs of ram and rather than using that ram to make unity run smoothly, I'm using it so I can run windows 7 and linux at the same time with VirtualBox).

Maybe it's a config problem. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's sunspots. Who cares? It doesn't JUST WORK and that - more than anything else - is what will doom Desktop Linux.

I run Ubuntu on what essentially amounts to a media desktop. It does work, but that's because I spent hours on researching the simplest, cheapest hardware config that would work seamlessly with Ubuntu without requiring me to compile my own drivers, etc. The fact is that I, even as a power user, really don't want to spend hours messing around with that stuff... so I can't imagine the Average Joe would want to.

Slashdot comments are full of "Works-for-me" replies to real issues with varying levels of "you are lUser" for not being able to make it work.

Actually, back then there was much more reason to doomsay, as there really wasn't a desktop to speak of (CDE on Solaris was far more sophisticated than bare X on Linux), no hardware manufacturers even bothered to provide even closed-source drivers for their hardware, hardware support was miniscule, there was no such thing as auto-detection of hardware, web browsers didn't even exist so apart from a handful of applications with pitiful GUIs by today's standards, every user was forced to interact with the system through the shell. There was no OpenOffice or LibreOffice (ie. no option to use a Word/Excel/PowerPoint alternative on Linux), no web browsers, no desktop environments, no way to configure your system through a GUI. The list goes on and on.

Since those days, Linux has improved by many orders of magnitude. And it keeps getting better every year.

I think most people complaining about Linux these days really don't appreciate how bad and comparatively unusable it was in the old days. Back then you could not even dream of making any kind of comparison between Linux and Windows or MacOS in terms of ease of use for an average non-technical user. Now from an average user's perspective, they're all quite similar, with some minor differences on the periphery.

Sure, Linux still has some problems, but it's not like the competition is without its own problems.

Yes, sometimes a user who bought some obscure peripheral (made by a manufacturer who does not care about Linux compatibility) doesn't bother to check to see if the peripheral was listed as being Linux compatible. So they may have problems getting it to work.

But how do you think the typical Windows user likes using a virus and trojan infested system? Even Mac users are starting to fall victim to this problem. Or how do you think a typical Windows user enjoys having to reinstall the operating system every couple of years because it's slowed to a crawl through Windows-bloat?

"Slashdot comments are full of "Works-for-me" replies to real issues with varying levels of "you are lUser" for not being able to make it work."

Slashdot is not representative of the Linux community as a whole. And my experience in asking questions of Linux users has been quite different from yours. Virtually all Linux users I've encountered anywhere, from usenet to web forums to irc to mailing lists, have been exceedingly helpful. Even on Slashdot, there's quite a lot of help to be found.

And what could be more helpful than volunteering to write whole applications, whole operating systems, and even the documentation to go along with them for free? Countless Linux users have dedicated years and even decades of their life to helping the community by doing this.

The mercenary, closed-source culture that dominates in the Windows and Mac worlds is shamefully lacking compared to the vibrant open-source world that thrives in the Linux community. As a Linux user you are gifted with an entire free operating system, tens of thousands of free applications, hundreds of free device drivers, your choice of free desktops, etc. In the computer world, is this not the ultimate in generosity?

Please stop the "Doom predictions". It won't happen. It does not need to be the MAINSTREAM system to exist.

And that's a shame, because of the wealth of great, free tools (whether it's development tools, photo editing tools, audio editing tools, etc. etc.) in the Linux ecosystem.