Linus Torvalds on why desktop Linux sucks

This is much older than the posted date, so the terrain was way different, and the ecosystem was way different.

Caveat: I worked on the packaging projects he is discussing.

His whole thing was wanting to package things much more like MacOS at the time. It was pretty foolproof from a user's perspective, but terrible for developers.
AppImage at the time was essentially the same thing as he was aiming for, but it has some security drawbacks. He hated them. He wanted to be them.
Post this talk, Flatpak came out, which is an improvement on the AppImage premise, but has layers, so uses less disk...in theory. He hated it.
Once the rise of containers came along, and everyone was (still is) generally using them wrong, he had a fucking meltdown and tried to revive another packaging project which he quickly gave up on.

I mention all of this to say: don't just listen to what he's saying and take it at face value. Sure, he's a legend, but he's just a developer. He wants the unattainable technical solution just like every other developer. There is no ONE right answer here, and things now are way better than when this was recorded maybe 10 years ago. WAY better.

terrible for developers
He brought up specific things from the POV of working on subsurface where Linux made things a lot more difficult for them than every "consumer" operating system.
I worked on the packaging projects he is discussing.
Which packaging projects? I don't even remember him talking about particular projects (aside from Debian itself), just about the general landscape of the problem and the attitudes of distro makers that have created it.
AppImage at the time was essentially the same thing as he was aiming for, but it has some security drawbacks. He hated them. He wanted to be them.
Post this talk, Flatpak came out, which is an improvement on the AppImage premise, but has layers, so uses less disk...in theory. He hated it.
I notice neither of these has made all that much of an impact. I have never in my life used either one of them or been encouraged to by anyone else, it has always been package management, or Docker, or pick your binary tarball, or curl | sudo sh and cross fingers.
He wants the unattainable technical solution just like every other developer.
He attained two totally separate attainable technical solutions which solved massive problems in the tech ecosystem and shape the landscape of computing today (one-and-a-half, GNU deserves quite a bit of credit.) I happen to agree mostly with his judgement on this particular problem, so it's easier for me to see it that way, but I definitely would not dismiss out-of-hand his judgement on the right way to approach significant problems.
- Flatpaks are more common on the atomic distros I guess?
  You also didn't mention Ubuntu snaps. Which is the greatest horror of them all. I wondered why people kept using firefox since it was so goddamn slow. But it turned out to be a snap which just needed 6+ seconds of initial startup time ( every time there was no active browser ). Switching to a .deb installation made Firefox the snappy ( hah! ) program I expected it to be.
  I will never install Ubuntu again unless they completely ditch snaps.
- It's called OnePackage
I just for the hell of it installed and tried the Flatpak version of an MVP player I use daily. The daily started playing a stream in 2 or 3 seconds. After starting the same stream on the Flatpak, it was still downloading after a minute had gone by. Not just FAT but SLOOOOOOw.

Well fuck me for enjoying the hell out of desktop linux.

I do too, clearly as does Linus. He's just talking about some of the issues that prevent it from getting adopted by the normies.
- This was the most confusing thing to me when getting started with linux It was baffling to me that jumping from different distros would completely change how i had to install packages or push me to use flatpak. I genuinely could not wrap my head around how there were no universally accepted binaries between distros. And hes talking about this years ago before recent mass adoption...
  I landed on an arch based distro because it seems like they have the most universal solution after jumping around. Curious to know, what distro In your opinion the closest to "getting it right"? Open to all not just @PhilipTheBucket
- Relevant thread:
  https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

This video is over a decade old at this point. It's even in 4:3 for God's sake. I mean his argument isn't wrong, but with flatpacks and other formats like it existing the relevance changed quite a bit.

We just needed valve to step up (I think he mentioned it in that talk, been a while since I saw it), and for MS to just make Windows shitty enough to at least gain momentum.

For what is worth, as a user I haven't had that experience that it's hard to find apps at all. Quite the opposite. Almost all apps I wanted to use were just in my package manager. I think I have 1 flatpack installed, not even sure...

No matter what, Linux is still better than Apple or Microsoft.

Not for most people, no.