Comment by gf000

The Linux kernel is a beast of an engine at the heart of all sorts of things, from small to large.

But the "desktop" itself refers to the GNU Linux userspace, which has plenty to criticize it for (with that said, I personally find windows to be worse on many counts). Desktop OSs are a generation behind mobile OSs, and they have a really hard time making that jump, with possibly OSX being the closest to it. They have a terribly insecure "security" model (compare the number of vulnerabilities per user for a desktop OS vs mobile - especially considering that they something like Linux desktop is barely targeted compared to the billions of android users) where your user usually runs your applications - this worked in the age of huge servers with lots of terminal users connected, where the number of processes running for=as the user were readily inspectable (due to their low number and being directly started by the user). But with applications we have tens of thousands of threads/processes running simultaneously. The processes are running by me (and thus can do everything I can), but not directly for me. The sane thing to do would be to run them in a sandbox, basically what android does (runs them as generated "system" users, and has a well-defined IPC architecture to cut holes only where necessary).