After reading many glowing comments, just chiming in with my own anecdote here. As someone who recently gave the Linux desktop a second (third?) chance, my experience seems to match up well with the author's. From what I've seen, the Linux desktop works very well if you have a very "standard" setup - One monitor of average size, one sound output, a very standard network chipset, etc. In other words, a Thinkpad. If you're trying to get everything to work on, say, a living room HTPC with HDMI sound output and an HiDPI UHD display, good luck.

This is of course anecdotal, but my recent experience went something like this:

  - Install Kubuntu for simplicity my wife can relate to. "Oh wow! Most things are actually working out-of-the-box! Even wireless networking!"
  - "Hmm, everything's a little small... Maybe I can just adjust the dpi..." 6 hours of editing config files and restarting daemons later, Qt applications are mostly behaving, Gtk applications are still popping up with random scaling factors between 1x and 3x.
  - "That's funny, the sound is only coming out of the headphone jack..." 3 hours of tweaking settings later, sound over HDMI is *mostly* working, but if I logout and back in then everything believes my audio device has vaporized.
  - Wife walks in and says, "Just install Windows, please."

I know my experience may be unique, but "Just Works" has never been the case for me. I love the concept and ideology of the Linux desktop, but I always end up spending more time editing config files and tearing my hair out than I do actually working. That being said, I'm glad it works well for some of us...