As a full-time "linux desktop" (whatever that is) user, all of these problems pain me. But of course the truth is that no other system "just works" either, so it's not as though it's unique. (We have an office full of Macintoshes which cause people endless trouble, so don't go there...)
I do feel that the "linux desktop" has regressed slightly in the last few years however. My transition from a debian wheezy to debian jessie desktop certainly felt like going backwards. GTK3-ified applications have significant focus and scrollwheel problems. KDE4 appeared to have reached a peak of maturity around 4.7/4.8 - jessie's now has notifications that steal focus. Akonadi/kmail2 has made what used to be one of my favourite applications essentially unusable.
NetworkManager continues to baffle as ever.
Systemd/journald, well, it's mostly that I'm not particularly used to them yet, and so tracking down problems requires grappling with a bunch of new concepts every time there is trouble.
It's a chore occasionally, but I still thank god every day I don't have to use macos or windows.
I'm a debian stable user. KDE5 will come to me when it does. Anyway, I'm truly sceptical of KDE's trajectory now I've been burned a bit (and I'm saying this as a sort-of former "KDE person"). It seems like a lot of focus & motivation was lost around the time of the mobile/tablet/vivaldi distraction nonsense.
My main problem with kmail2 is that it feels like POP3/local mail support & local filtering is a (very broken) afterthought, and while being able to do everything on IMAP would be lovely, some of us are stuck on POP3 mail for a little longer...
ive no experience with the POP3 support even in kmail5 (I stopped using my last POP account a decade ago at least ;-) but the IMAP support in in kmail5 has been pretty good (it used to be terrible).
That said, I still prefer Thunderbird.
By using Debian stable you choose to use 1 or 2year old technology - so you'll have what I have in 2 years. Courage, that's just 24 month to wait ;-)
I do feel that the "linux desktop" has regressed slightly in the last few years however. My transition from a debian wheezy to debian jessie desktop certainly felt like going backwards. GTK3-ified applications have significant focus and scrollwheel problems. KDE4 appeared to have reached a peak of maturity around 4.7/4.8 - jessie's now has notifications that steal focus. Akonadi/kmail2 has made what used to be one of my favourite applications essentially unusable.
NetworkManager continues to baffle as ever.
Systemd/journald, well, it's mostly that I'm not particularly used to them yet, and so tracking down problems requires grappling with a bunch of new concepts every time there is trouble.
It's a chore occasionally, but I still thank god every day I don't have to use macos or windows.