What has gone wrong with Linux?

There was a time when Linux was just for geeks. Then the developers sorted things out and as recently as a year ago it all just worked.

Now it seems to have gone bad again. Sound and video are broken, especially in some of the browser plug-in modules, and so Skype doesn't work. Nor does the "suspend to disk" function on laptops. There are problems related to Pulse Audio and Flash player, also KDE4 was released long before it was stable, and even if one selects KDE 3.5, some of the unstable KDE4 components get installed anyway.