It's been ready for over ten years. I switched in the early '00s.
As well as giving me a reliable* platform to work on, this had the enormous benefit of allowing me to say "I don't know anything about Windows any more, so if you want me to help you with your computer you'll have to switch to Linux" to friends and family. Many switched, and I must have saved myself months of fixing Windows machines.
So I offer a heart-felt thanks to Linus, GNU and the Debian and Ubuntu maintainers every day.
* Last week my xorg.conf disappeared. After half an hour cursing while I found and fixed the problem, I realised I couldn't remember the last time computer problems had impacted my productivity - it has certainly been several years. I obviously have no idea how Windows runs now, but my recollection is that it wasted several hours a month.
I would argue that your asterisk means Linux is nowhere near ready for wide use on the desktop. Non-technical users can wreak all sorts of havoc with an OS setup, and it needs to be somewhat hardened to that (my personal favorite story is having to fix a friend's Windows install that somehow associated .exe files with Word, so Word became the shell and displayed the unicode garbage representation of explorer.exe).
Agreed, I think it's less about being able to get it right, and more about being unable to get it wrong (because users can and will get it wrong in every way possible).
Linux is able to get it right in almost every way imaginable, but I can't think of any distro that's as resilient to the user as Windows. Almost all the bloat, crap, and bad decisions seem aimed ostensibly at making it difficult or impossible for the user to ruin their system, and obviously they still are far from impervious.
As well as giving me a reliable* platform to work on, this had the enormous benefit of allowing me to say "I don't know anything about Windows any more, so if you want me to help you with your computer you'll have to switch to Linux" to friends and family. Many switched, and I must have saved myself months of fixing Windows machines.
So I offer a heart-felt thanks to Linus, GNU and the Debian and Ubuntu maintainers every day.
* Last week my xorg.conf disappeared. After half an hour cursing while I found and fixed the problem, I realised I couldn't remember the last time computer problems had impacted my productivity - it has certainly been several years. I obviously have no idea how Windows runs now, but my recollection is that it wasted several hours a month.