Every time I hear people complain about how Linux is going downhill, I'm reminded of the first time I tried to use it as a daily driver in 2006, and had to inject Windows wifi drivers into a wrapper to get wireless networking to work, and how I had to deal with Xorg safe mode to get Nvidia graphics set up.
I can understand the semantic arguments about where GNU/Linux falls short, and I enjoy exploring the promise of new systems that take different approaches...but, for all the crap, it's actually pretty decent for the most part.