I always have a laugh when I see these types of articles. Most of the time it's because the author had some sort of driver problem that was not fixed in 2 minutes or such or that a gui item is not exactly how they want.

I've been running linux on the desktop since around 95, and it's certainly not dead for me. Like you I have also installed ubuntu on my mothers and a few computer illiterate friends computers and it works just fine.

The gui might change a bit from time to time, but I'm not too young to learn new things yet :)

But it's DEAD! Dead I say!!