[HN Gopher] I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I do...
___________________________________________________________________
I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its
problems
Author : samizdis
Score : 78 points
Date : 2022-06-09 04:51 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| There seem to be two kinds of "Linux users": those that
| constantly think about Windows, compare their operating system to
| Windows, and seem to think only "Linux" and "Windows" exists, and
| those that forget Windows exists and mostly compare different
| Unix flavors with one another.
|
| Theo de Raadt had some merit when he said that many "Linux users"
| seem to talk more about Windows than anything else and don't
| really like Unix as much as that they hate Windows.
|
| But I also find that the latter group rarely even mentions
| "Linux" that much, which mostly seems to be used as "not-
| Windows".
|
| This article too is mostly about Windows.
| jotm wrote:
| Why would I compare Linux distros? You can literally turn any
| one of them into another, all the packages are there (prebuilt
| or source). With some exceptions, of course.
|
| I had ALL the Desktop Environments I could find installed at
| one point and was switching between them every other day.
| Compiz effects were the shizz! But I don't have the
| time/patience/motivation for that now :D
| AndroidKitKat wrote:
| I think most comparisons between Linux distros comes down to
| defaults/the way it operates out of the box. Sure, both
| Ubuntu 22.04 and Fedora 36 use GNOME 42 (is that the version
| they're on nowaday?), but Ubuntu has a drastically different
| UX (dock on the side, panel-applets, accent color & custom
| theme, the list goes on) compared to Fedora. Additionally, as
| an NVIDIA user, I like how easy and simple it is to install
| the NVIDIA drivers while still maintaining secure boot
| (something Fedora has neglected / informed their users to
| 'just disable secure boot').
| mrj wrote:
| Nonsense. There are billions of Android devices sold and
| customers don't seem too bothered by its fragmentation. They
| continue to buy Android devices en mass.
|
| So it seems fragmentation has many problems but that alone won't
| prevent people from using a device. I think the author believes
| that a critical mass of Linux desktop users will create enough
| interest in polish and solving problems for end users, so
| therefore believes if everybody was using the same desktop there
| would be more polish (or something).
|
| I would counter that the desktops have plenty of polish. He says
| he loves the Linux Desktop and doesn't offer much criticism
| besides there's too much choice. Nah, they're already great and
| we don't need to abandon great desktops.
|
| Instead, I believe other factors are at play. Familiarity,
| inertia and monopolistic competition to name a few. Those are
| powerful factors and much more so than abstract fragmentation.
| notriddle wrote:
| > Familiarity, inertia and monopolistic competition
|
| Also compatibility, marketing, and being installed out of the
| box.
|
| In its heyday, Firefox had between 25% and 50% market share,
| depending on country. Compared to Internet Explorer 6, it was:
|
| * More stable.
|
| * Less buggy.
|
| * More secure.
|
| * More featureful.
|
| * Usually faster than IE6, though it took a bit longer to
| start.
|
| * Better development tools, which indirectly lead to web pages
| working better in Firefox than in IE6 even if that's not what
| management wanted.
|
| * ActiveX, which is clearly the way Microsoft wanted you to
| make "web apps," had to be hidden behind scare prompts, so
| public web pages couldn't use it.
|
| Here's Internet Explorer's big selling points, which allowed it
| to hold onto between 50 and 75% of the market share:
|
| * It shipped with Windows.
|
| Google Chrome only managed to unseat it by paying OEMs, which
| means that, de facto, Chrome now ships out of the box with
| Windows, too.
| mrj wrote:
| Exactly. It's like saying if only Firefox had gotten rid of
| extensions so the UX was unified they could have taken over
| IE.
| notriddle wrote:
| There is only one extension that ever really mattered:
| Firebug.
|
| A lot of developers wound up using Firefox to develop web
| apps even when the web app was intended to be used in IE.
| That's important because it broke the vicious cycle where
| nobody used Firefox because nobody developed for Firefox
| and nobody developed for Firefox because nobody used it.
|
| You might use other extensions, as do I, but this is such a
| deal-breaker that barely anything else matters. The browser
| that runs your dev tools will be able to run your app,
| obviously, so being the browser with the good dev tools is
| a tactic to make sure web pages will actually run in it.
|
| The constant rhetoric around extensions is an irrelevant
| sideshow. _It 's the web pages that actually matter._
| Nobody would have bothered to use Firefox unless the
| majority of web pages they use work in it, and Firebug is
| the primary reason why so many web pages _did_ work in it,
| along with Google strategically choosing to support Firefox
| as a way to hedge their bets against Microsoft making
| adversarial changes to IE to cut Google off.
| mike_hock wrote:
| > monopolistic competition, marketing, and being installed
| out of the box
|
| This I believe, and an integral part of "marketing" is a FUD
| campaign against free alternatives.
|
| > Familiarity, inertia, compatibility
|
| I used to think they were relevant, but it doesn't seem to
| match reality. Android phones were neither familiar to users
| of older phones, nor were they compatible with software made
| for other phones.
|
| Windows breaks familiarity with each major version for
| seemingly no reason. (Not compatibility, though.)
|
| Apps and websites constantly get redesigned for no reason.
| Doesn't seem to drive people away.
|
| At the turn of the millennium, the reason Linux desktops were
| _supposedly_ not accepted by users was the lack of eye candy.
| Do phone apps today have "eye candy"? Bland-looking single-
| color rectangular surfaces, absolutely minimal interfaces, a
| few straight lines here and there and mostly text unless
| there's photos or videos to show. Looks like OpenBox.
|
| The only common theme is marketing, marketing and marketing.
| A free, unencumbered platform will never be mainstream,
| neither on the desktop nor on the phone. Because that will
| always be an untapped market that one can get into with
| lying, manipulative marketing tactics and a free platform
| will have neither the resources nor the gall to employ the
| same shady tactics to defend itself, but a proprietary
| platform will, and then it doesn't matter who wins because
| the challenger is just the same.
| [deleted]
| pjmlp wrote:
| Because Android is the only viable alternative for those that
| either can't or won't buy an iPhone.
| criddell wrote:
| Android is effectively the default choice. If you don't care
| about your phone, you end up with an Android phone. Lots and
| lots of people use an Android phone and almost none of them
| would be called Android enthusiasts.
| [deleted]
| krnlpnc wrote:
| Isn't Android effectively a base level linux distro optimized
| for smartphones though? Providing some level of uniformity
| between devices like package management, etc.?
| pupppet wrote:
| Call me a snob, but I bet no small number of Android users
| would have picked an iPhone if it were cheaper.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Snobbish ones would probably do.
| krnlpnc wrote:
| This sounds right, and also the marketing of Android is
| misleading and hardware focused which leads to false
| comparisons.
|
| "Look the camera has more megapixels than an iPhone!"
|
| Yeah ok, but the stock camera software outputs photos that
| look worse than an entry level iPhone.
| mrj wrote:
| True, cost is also a motivating factor that is much more
| powerful than fragmentation concerns. This is probably why
| Windows is now essentially free or at least a hidden cost for
| the end user.
| hbn wrote:
| The fragmentation issue is with user choice, and the amount of
| learning and experimentation you have to do to make all of
| those decisions. There's no de facto "probably the best for
| you" Linux flavor, or method of installing applications.
| Whereas on Android, generally if you don't know what Android to
| get, you get a Samsung. You want to install an app? No matter
| which phone you have, you tap the Play Store icon.
|
| Plus there's large corporations selling these devices, and they
| set everything up to work for you out of the box. You're not
| gonna run into an equivalent of the experience setting up Linux
| desktop where it's not recognizing your monitor correctly and
| you have to mess with drivers and running mysterious commands
| in a terminal to make it work. Samsung made the phone and
| hardware work, turn it on, and you're good to go.
| corrral wrote:
| Once Windows stopped having shit-tier stability, some time
| around late XP or early Win7, Desktop Linux replaced it as the
| least-stable and buggiest of the three GUI desktop operating
| systems I regularly use.
|
| Even before that, it nearly matched it in instability, if you
| counted X-Window crashes as the same as a bluescreen or kernel
| panic (and if you're doing GUI work, they're close to
| equivalent)
|
| The kernel might be OK. The GUI & multimedia stacks aren't.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| I'm running an MSI laptop on Windows that bluescreens all the
| time for me. I finally figured out it was bugs in the
| USB-C/HDMI hotplugging drivers and I know how not to trigger
| it.
|
| In contrast I haven't had an X-Windows crash in years and
| years. The closest thing I had was on a Dell XPS 13 and it
| wasn't a "crash" per se but the issue was very similar to the
| Windows issue I had with the MSI, the machine just totally
| locked up (ctrl-alt-backspace had no effect) when I plugged a
| USB-C to ethernet adapter into it. Unplug the adapter
| everything was fine.
|
| On Windows I have to kill explorer.exe because the systray
| crashes at least once a week. (taskkill /f /im explorer.exe;
| start explorer.exe is always in my Powershell history.) And
| that's not the only example of more userspace instability, I
| could go on and on. There's instability I run into on Xfce
| but it's usually pretty isolated, this one component has a
| problem, it's not like Xfce is just randomly locking up all
| the time the way explorer.exe is.
|
| For example I have this issue on Xfce with a logitech
| wireless keyboard which starts having input issues but
| unplugging the wireless dongle and plugging it back in fixes
| it. And that sort of thing happens with most peripherals on
| any platform.
| mrj wrote:
| And yet Windows was successful even when unstable. I would
| say that's not a hugely motivating factor for people. Many
| people turn on and off their computer when they want to use
| it and it's fine. Excessive stability isn't a major factor
| for most people and being perfectly stable wouldn't by itself
| make this the year of the Linux Desktop.
|
| For this crowd it is important, of course, and I'd be deeply
| upset if my desktop crashed that often. That's not been my
| experience though.
| 323 wrote:
| > _And yet Windows was successful even when unstable._
|
| Everybody had a friend who knew how to fix Windows.
|
| And it was a literally a job, there were fliers glued to
| lamp posts advertising "I install/fix/devirus Windows for a
| small fee".
|
| Also, during this time of unstable Windows, Linux was even
| worse. It wasn't the nice Linux desktop of today.
| rektide wrote:
| Also posted 9 hours ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31672861 (5 points, 9 hours
| ago, 2 comments)
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| And one day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3166573
| idle_zealot wrote:
| If the Linux desktop consolidates/unifies around one option I'd
| probably stop using it. The primary reason I use Linux on my
| desktop is so that I can use my niche window manager of choice as
| a first-class citizen, rather than hacking reasonable window
| management into the system with scripts on top of a bad-by-
| default window manager. If I can't do that anymore I might as
| well use macOS with yabai and get the broader application
| support.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| I've no idea why so many people expect completely different
| Unix-clones with completely different origins that simply share
| one component between them, which they also all heavily modify,
| to somehow give up their own identity and merge.
|
| It's probably simply because others all call them "Linux", but
| they rarely even call themselves that. One cannot easily find
| the word "Linux" on the websites of "Fedora" or "Ubuntu" for
| instance and they simply call themselves that.
| sushisource wrote:
| I agree that the customization is a huge draw for me.
|
| But... I also want things like hibernate to just work, screen
| tearing to not happen on X11, etc etc.
|
| The _polish_ is absolutely not there, and I agree w / the
| article that's a result of the fragmented ecosystem. If the
| Linux community could agree to invest in the underlying APIs
| for desktop stuff, it seems we'd be in a much better place and
| still have lots of customization options on top.
|
| Of course, I understand that's a huge coordination challenge.
| usrn wrote:
| Hibernate is all in the kernel. You trigger it by writing to
| a file in /sys. Your DE choice has nothing to do with this.
|
| Most things on Linux are actually like this, where everything
| is in the kernel or some other small project and the DE just
| adds a wrapper GUI (or sometimes a management deamon) and
| really has absolutely nothing to do with how the thing works.
|
| And thank goodness for that because all of the popular DEs
| use _terrible_ window managers. I wouldn 't bother with X11
| if those were the only functional choices.
|
| Also some people (like me) really don't mind tearing but
| can't stand an extra frame of latency when we're typing. It's
| nice to have options since no one agrees on everything.
| simoncion wrote:
| > [I want] screen tearing to not happen on X11...
|
| If you have AMD hardware that uses the 'amdgpu' driver, then
| -IME- enabling the TearFree option seems to completely
| eliminate tearing. (Though, I am using KDE, which _also_ has
| a "Make the compositor use vsync" option... which didn't
| actually eliminate tearing, when used by itself. But, there
| _may_ be confounders.)
|
| Anyway. Drop this into a file named "$WHATEVER.conf" in
| '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d' (or into your xorg.conf), and you
| should be good to go: Section "Device"
| Identifier "AMD" Driver "amdgpu" Option
| "TearFree" "on" EndSection
|
| Alternatively, you could enable the setting with the 'xrandr'
| tool: xrandr --output $OUTPUT_NAME --set
| TearFree on
|
| but that only sticks for as long as the affected X server
| stays up.
| wmf wrote:
| What a great example. This stuff should be fixed _by
| default_.
| simoncion wrote:
| FWIW, I assume it adds a (maybe one frame) delay. It _is_
| on by default when you've rotated or transformed the
| output (and for "secondary outputs".... whatever a
| "secondary" output is). From 'amdgpu(4)`:
| Option "TearFree" "boolean" Set the
| default value of the per-output 'TearFree' property,
| which controls tearing prevention using the hardware
| page flip- ping mechanism. TearFree is
| on for any CRTC associated with one or
| more outputs with TearFree on. Two separate scanout
| buffers need to be allocated for each
| CRTC with TearFree on. If this op- tion
| is set, the default value of the property is 'on' or
| 'off' accordingly. If this option isn't
| set, the default value of the property
| is auto, which means that TearFree is on for rotated
| outputs, outputs with RandR transforms applied and for
| RandR 1.4 secondary outputs, otherwise
| off.
|
| Edit: Also, distro packagers are quite able to set this
| on-by-default. It is configurable, after all. If you
| don't like the default that your distro has chosen, go
| chat at em. :)
| foobarian wrote:
| Suggested title edit: "I see the Linux desktop's problems, but
| that doesn't mean I don't love it"
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| More accurate title... I love the Linux desktop, but I just
| want one version of it so that I don't have to deal with
| competition and jobs with different tools. In other words, I'll
| likely switch to Apple.
| akira2501 wrote:
| That, and I don't understand the needless fascination with
| "crushing windows." That's a goal that seems completely
| misaligned with all the features that make the linux desktop
| something I want to use; and destroying competition has never
| been a great long term strategy.
|
| I don't care about your market share.. I care about the
| quality of my own experience.
| squarefoot wrote:
| > I don't understand the needless fascination with
| "crushing windows."
|
| That was the common sentiment 20+ years ago when Steve
| Ballmer, then Microsoft CEO, declared that "Linux is a
| cancer". Today I'd say it's not the case anymore,
| especially so since they were forced by market laws to fake
| some form of friendship with Open Source, not to mention
| having ruined Windows with all versions from 8 on. Windows
| is pretty much crushing itself these days.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| It's because market share is important if you want hardware
| and software support. Right now Linux has terrible support
| VR, for instance, and one can only imagine that would be
| different if it were the majority desktop OS.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _I don 't care about your market share.. I care about the
| quality of my own experience._
|
| Exactly this. I've seen where chasing mainstream usability
| and appeal leads: ipadification. If you want an ipad go buy
| an ipad. I don't care about linux 'winning' because that
| sort of win condition would make linux into something that
| has no value to me. A Pyrrhic victory.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| macOS is feeling too restrictive these days. Windows 11 feels
| restrictive too, not being able to move your taskbar to a
| vertical position is stupid on an ultrawide.
|
| Fedora Workstation is nice, not perfect, but it's nice. Tried
| the KDE spin as well as the usual GNOME one. It's my
| favourite Linux desktop distro FWIW. PipeWire's amazing.
| unsignedint wrote:
| I used to use Linux desktop exclusively but mental and time cost
| of maintaining it just was just too high and eventually gave up.
|
| It actually works great when it does, but more often than not
| something fails after updates. So I felt like a rolling a dice
| everytime I have to go though this.
|
| There were problems with update process itself -- they tend to
| wait for users to confirm configuration overwrite/update/patch so
| when I attempted to perform update overnight, I often find it
| waiting for my input in the morning 30 percent into update
| process.
|
| Ultimately I had enough of the frustration that I've stopped
| using it.
|
| Where I actually need Linux, I can just use WSL. Windows has its
| fair share of the problems but I'm definitely not spending as
| much as time just to keep things running even through major
| updates.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I've been using linux as my primary OS for over 20 years now. The
| rough edges are almost entirely gone and linux is absolutely a
| fantastic OS for everything but gaming, and even there it's
| getting better.
|
| I'm building a gaming computer at the end of this year and I'm
| strongly considering just throwing linux on it instead of windows
| as well, because if protondb is to be believed most games run
| perfectly fine on linux these days.
| rozhok wrote:
| You can play a huge amount of titles via SteamPlay/Proton:
| https://www.protondb.com/
| em-bee wrote:
| even gaming. it's amazing how much progress proton/wine is
| making. i have several games that i didn't dare run on linux a
| few years ago, that now just run out of the box with wine as if
| they belonged.
| mpsprd wrote:
| I strongly disagree. Normal users now do most of their computing
| on a web browser, making most Linux desktop issues less critical
| to adoption.
|
| My personal experience in the last ~5 years or so is increasingly
| reduced friction in adopting a Linux desktop for non-technical
| users as companies go towards SaaS.
|
| Firefox ends up being simply a differently shaped search bar.
| cm2187 wrote:
| I get (and hate) the fact that Microsoft is pushing hard for the
| desktop to become a light client integrated in their cloud, but
| isn't apple doing exactly the same? I don't own a mac but my
| iphone nags me all the time to use apple's cloud services for
| everything and I understand apple is making MacOS converge to
| iOS.
|
| The obstacle to switching to linux for me is not too many
| distributions, it is that I have to relearn everything, from my
| way to the filesystem, how drivers and networking work,
| virtualisation, web servers, etc. And linux is many things, but
| intuitive and self discoverable it is not. I just don't have the
| time for starting from scratch (and it's not related to my day
| job either), until windows becomes really user hostile (I see it
| coming but not yet there).
| night-rider wrote:
| Make the time. It's worth it I promise. The freedom that comes
| with Linux is astonishing. I've been using it for a decade now
| and haven't looked back. 'If you want to move mountains you
| start by picking up small stones'
| fnord123 wrote:
| > until windows becomes really user hostile (I see it coming
| but not yet there
|
| You are a boiled frog.
| pjmlp wrote:
| So now Microsoft gets the hate for reviving the UNIX way of
| working.
|
| How do you think companies were using X Windows?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > How do you think companies were using X Windows?
|
| By attaching thin clients to a server that was still under
| their own control, as opposed to making the whole company a
| serf to Microsoft.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Being a serf of UNIX vendors has always been a thing.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| This is a simple factual account of lived experience by someone
| not, yet, a Linux user -- as such, it deserves upvotes not
| downvotes.
|
| > ... intuitive and self discoverable it is not.
|
| As a multi-decade Linux coder, I fully concur.
| throw7 wrote:
| yeah but microsoft/apple/google are sole owners of the interface
| and dictate the one interface. there is no such thing in foss,
| which is a good thing. if gnome 3 was somehow forced to be the
| gui on linux, I would absolutely stop using linux.
| akelly wrote:
| It's not just that fragmentation results in lack of polish.
| Having many distros means that when I want to figure out how to
| do something obscure, or encounter an issue, there's less likely
| to be someone on my distro with the same problem. But more
| importantly, I often don't get any good results searching
| "*issue* *distro*", because the issue is at a different layer in
| the stack. I have to know whether it is a distro issue, desktop
| environment issue, kernel issue, systemd issue, X11 issue, etc,
| which is difficult for new users. Compared to Windows and Mac
| which aren't modular in this way and therefore don't have this
| problem.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Much of the Linux desktop is balkanized and fragmentation is
| indeed a huge issue. People's obsession with choice is irritating
| given that doing more or less the same thing in 10 different ways
| half-right is worse than doing it once correctly. The entire
| distro-zoo built on top of the same distributions with different
| DE's on top of it is an example. The problem with Windows or Mac
| isn't that it looks, feels and works the same everywhere. That's
| what most people want, they don't want to spend hours tinkering
| with their UIs, they want to get work done.
|
| It's not even right to compare Linux to Windows, or maybe even
| call Linux distros operating systems in a strong sense because
| they don't provide genuinely stable interfaces. People often
| remark on alleged benefits of open source software such as
| compatibility, yet it's Windows where I can click on a 20 year
| old executable and it runs, while I don't know if anything that
| has been built 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago still works.
|
| It's funny that one of the things that has actually driven Linux
| adoption is Proton. As one blogger a few months ago remarked,
| Win32 is basically the stable Linux userland ABI.
|
| https://sporks.space/2022/02/27/win32-is-the-stable-linux-us...
| hulitu wrote:
| > The problem with Windows or Mac isn't that it looks, feels
| and works the same everywhere.
|
| Did you use Win 10 ? One GUI in Teams, another in Office 365, a
| calculator which comes from outher space, 2 interfaces for
| configuration, disable microfon for admin account -> no
| microfone for user account.
| 323 wrote:
| Nobody cares.
|
| People don't care that TikTok looks different than Instagram
| looks different than Gmail looks different than NYTimes.com
| looks different than a flight reservation site.
| simion314 wrote:
| It would be a depressing parallel universe where some God would
| force us Linux users to all run the exact same thing, no
| customization, have updates forced on us and have the latest
| GUI fad change our workflow yearly.
|
| As Kubuntu LTS users I don't feel that I am losing anything if
| someone else uses Arch with GNOME. Also there are distro made
| for children with custom DEs, distros for blind people, distros
| for media etc.
|
| The diversity is not the problem, the problem might be some
| secondary side effects like some developer really wants to use
| some bleeding edge thing but he does not have an easy way to
| deploy it to more stable distros.
| vkou wrote:
| > That's what most people want, they don't want to spend hours
| tinkering with their UIs, they want to get work done.
|
| The people most capable of fixing the problem you describe
| _are_ the people who like spending hours tinkering with their
| Linux UIs.
|
| Besides, Windows usability is rubbish, there's a reason why the
| first thing that I, and, uh, a few other weirdos do on a new
| Windows install, is set up an orthodox file manager. [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Manager
| em-bee wrote:
| _10 different ways half-right is worse than doing it once
| correctly. The problem with Windows or Mac isn 't that it
| looks, feels and works the same everywhere_
|
| what's correct for you is not necesarily what's correct for me.
|
| the problem with windows/mac is very much that it doesn't work
| the way i want it to work. why even have multiple oerating
| systems at all, if we don't need choice? we could all be using
| windows.
|
| i don't see how removing choice solves anything at all.
| Klonoar wrote:
| There is no reason there can't be one agreed upon blessed way
| of doing things in Linux while still enabling users like you
| to have choice. Heavily enforced defaults are important for
| growth.
| ayushnix wrote:
| Yes, let's search for the One True Font, One True Theme,
| and Unicorns while we're at it. Oh, let's also pretend that
| we'll give users a choice. Well, technically, we will but
| we will make it "unsupported" and call it a hack.
|
| Wait, I think that reminds me of a desktop environment.
| robonerd wrote:
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| I think it would help a lot if it were the norm for DEs to come
| with a bunch of prefab configurations right out of the box,
| which the community could then add to. It'd be cool if configs
| could be exported and shared too.
|
| That would give many distros much less of a reason to exist,
| and could instead be configuration profiles for GNOME, KDE, etc
| that could easily be loaded on -any- distro. It would also
| allow the configurations to be iterated on independent of
| distros which would eventually lead to much higher levels of
| polish.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| I think it would help to get an honest ranking of active user
| or community size for different desktop Linux distros. Half
| the strength of Linux isn't the nerdy details, it's the
| community and packaging chops.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The fragmentation peeves me as well. The Linux community is
| like herding cats with fragile egos. One disagreement and a dev
| will go try and make their own thing, further diluting the
| Linux ecosystem.
|
| There are way too many distros that are half baked trash that
| make it into bad listicles returned in search results.
|
| The Linux community sabotages itself.
| robonerd wrote:
| > _The Linux community is like herding cats_
|
| Stop trying to herd people? I didn't sign up for whatever
| agenda you're trying to advance, so of course I'm going to
| spit in your face when you try to tell me what to do.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Exhibit A
| robonerd wrote:
| Proudly. If your agenda is to take away my customization
| and make the Linux desktop into something with broad
| mainstream appeal, then I _proudly_ sabotage that.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's not my agenda.
| twic wrote:
| Putting the whole community's wood behind one arrow would be a
| great idea - if it was the right arrow. But the big teams of
| desktop developers have repeatedly run off and built things
| that they thought were shit hot, but were not what people
| actually needed to be productive (Unity, Gnome 3). It's only
| the "fragmentation" that has meant Linux hasn't ended up like
| Windows 11.
| 3a2d29 wrote:
| To add to this, I think Linus himself mentioned this issue at a
| talk at a Debian conference.
|
| I think he even mentioned maybe gaming would save Linux from
| this, since games will not constantly update to fix
| compatibility issues so distros would be forced to behave.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| Is that really an issue?
|
| You want to use Gnome? Use Gnome. You want to use KDE? Use KDE.
| I3? ditto. Etc.
|
| Oh, some random GTK app will look weird on KDE? Tough. Every
| Windows app looks different, and even MS's apps always felt out
| of place on their own OS. And with the proliferation of
| Electron apps, nothing ever looks "native" anymore.
|
| > while I don't know if anything that has been built 2 Ubuntu
| LTS releases ago still works
|
| Maybe, maybe not. But that's also an issue on MacOS. And while
| Windows prides itself on backwards compatibility (and mostly
| delivers), that doesn't come free.
|
| There's also hardware backwards compatibility. Many devices
| that used to work with older versions of Windows or MacOS just
| don't work anymore. Even those that never required custom
| drivers from their manufacturer. On Linux, if it works once,
| it'll usually keep on working. I have such an issue: a PCIe USB
| 3 card, so it isn't even something that old. Used to work with
| MS Win 10 provided drivers, now (win 11) it's unusable.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >You want to use Gnome? Use Gnome. You want to use KDE? Use
| KDE. I3? ditto. Etc.
|
| To play devil's advocate:
|
| What do those even mean and why should I care? I want to view
| my files and folders and click a shortcut to run a program
| and install steam. And I want that process to be stable and
| smooth and be both logically transparent and consistent.
|
| There's too much I have to critically compare and understand
| in my life to want to add 'desktop GUI flavor' to the list.
| dasil003 wrote:
| I think all the hand-wringing over fragmentation is misguided.
| Diversity is good. We have plenty of polished UX provided by big
| tech, but it comes with intractable downsides related to
| centralized control. Free and open source software provides a
| different tradeoff and value proposition, one that counteracts
| the natural forces towards market consolidation and centralized
| power that exist for software in a globally networked world. Yes,
| that means we have to work harder to motivate people to
| cooperate, but such is the cost of freedom.
| bbertelsen wrote:
| PopOS needs an honorable mention here for the work it's done with
| pop shell for linux desktop. PopOS has been my daily driver for 3
| years, pop shell is icing on the cake. Nvidia drivers baked in
| too!
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| Also on PopOS for a couple of years now. It just works and it's
| pleasant to use.
| bbertelsen wrote:
| https://github.com/pop-os/shell for the unaware!
| glouwbug wrote:
| Pop OS is just Arch Linux
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| I hate it, which is why I don't use it. Ubuntu got the closest
| for me, but the owner's refusal to allow users to move that
| taskbar to the bottom of the screen made me give up on it
| altogether. And unless it's a supported distro, I don't want it.
| Been burned too many times by pet projects that end up being
| abandoned.
|
| The other thing is that in all my years of using Windows and
| MacOS, I have NEVER had an issue where an upgrade borked being
| able to log into the desktop. This has happened more times than I
| remember on Linux.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > but the owner's refusal to allow users to move that taskbar
| to the bottom of the screen
|
| You're going to need to explain that one.
| corrral wrote:
| Guessing it's about Unity.
|
| https://askubuntu.com/questions/360748/how-do-i-move-the-
| tas...
|
| "There is no way to move the 'task bar' to the bottom of the
| screen. You are out of luck."
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| Oh, the thing from ten years ago that hasn't existed for
| five, or something?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >the owner's refusal to allow users to move that taskbar to the
| bottom of the screen made me give up on it altogether.
|
| You ...do know there are countless desktop environments and
| window managers just an apt-get away right? If that's too much
| for you, you could have literally chosen any other flavor. My
| mother has been happily using xubuntu for years. If she can
| manage, I think you can too.
| sky-kedge0749 wrote:
| A while ago when I used Linux I found that installing some
| alternate desktop environment usually messed up some default
| even if you switched back. I don't remember exactly but it'd
| be like, you start on GNOME, install KDE, switch back to
| GNOME but now your file explorer is Dolphin.
|
| Has that happened to you? Is that still a problem?
| corrral wrote:
| On a lot of distros, many DEs or WMs do have worse defaults
| or weird glitches that other, blessed ones do not. The dice
| may come up in your favor more often than not, but you're
| still definitely rolling them when you move away from a
| distro's favored set-up. There's a reason alternate "spins"
| (distro derivates, whatever you want to call them, I think
| that's the Ubuntu term) exist, with different default DEs
| or WMs--just installing those packages on the base distro
| _may not_ provide a great out-of-the-box experience.
|
| And yeah, the way settings work on Desktop Linux can lead
| to all kinds of weird stuff if you start actively using
| multiple environments. Should changing your keyboard layout
| in one DE affect all the others? Well, wait, which of
| _multiple_ ways did you accomplish that change in keyboard
| layout? Should it affect bare terminals, outside the window
| server? Should some of those methods affect all of them,
| but other methods not? Which one "wins"? Was this other
| thing a DE setting, or an X-Window setting? Or neither? Or
| was it Wayland--wait a minute, some of these DEs run under
| Wayland and some under X-Window! Gee, surely that won't
| cause any settings conflicts or surprises.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Hey, I have an idea!
|
| You can read the rest of what I posted instead of assuming I
| never did any of those things.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Hey I have an idea, instead of responding with hostile
| snark why don't you quote the bits where you supposedly did
| those things? Here I'll quote your message, feel free to
| highlight anything you like:
|
| >I hate it, which is why I don't use it. Ubuntu got the
| closest for me, but the owner's refusal to allow users to
| move that taskbar to the bottom of the screen made me give
| up on it altogether. And unless it's a supported distro, I
| don't want it. Been burned too many times by pet projects
| that end up being abandoned. The other thing is that in all
| my years of using Windows and MacOS, I have NEVER had an
| issue where an upgrade borked being able to log into the
| desktop. This has happened more times than I remember on
| Linux.
| hajimuz wrote:
| the hope is ChromeOS...
| hulitu wrote:
| > the hope is ChromeOS...
|
| The hope is that ChromeOS dies. It has nothing to do with Linux
| except the kernel.
| sbuk wrote:
| I thought Linux _was_ the kernel...
| edgyquant wrote:
| Linux is a kernel though. This feels like the opposite of
| Stallmans GNU/Linux rant.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| I hope some ambitious soul can port the Chrome OS window
| manager in some way. Chrome OS is the only non Windows or Mac
| window manager that handles UI scaling correctly in all cases
| and across all displays with differing scaling settings.
| forgotpwd16 wrote:
| >It has nothing to do with Linux
|
| Which isn't entirely bad since it has some good concepts
| regarding security that will make good additions to current
| Linux systems.
| dylan-m wrote:
| I hope not! Outside of the Chrome part, ChromeOS is a mess of
| awkwardly attached virtual machines. If you want a "native" app
| (unless your native app is Steam), your best option is Android,
| which means you're inside an Android VM, your webview component
| is an _Android_ Chrome webview, you can 't see other things on
| the network (because you have a virtual network device),
| permissions are granted via the Android Settings panel which is
| distinct from the Chrome OS Settings panel and an even more
| user-hostile experience than it already was, and your widgets
| are all slightly wrong. It is bloat all the way down. Running
| plain old Linux apps is a similar problem, except it's a
| "developer feature", so you can't expect an end user to use
| your app on their Chromebook.
|
| It is exceedingly difficult for a developer to contribute any
| kind of improvement to this because the bug tracker is a black
| hole and the source code is a gargantuan monorepo with multi-
| page build instructions that basically require you to sacrifice
| a computer if you want to get anywhere.
|
| Sandboxing is great and all, but the thing is a glorified
| hypervisor. It has no vision of its own for app distribution,
| user experience, or developer experience. It boggles my mind
| that they are doing this with _ChromeOS_ : the OS that runs on
| the cheapest, slowest, most under-specced computers on the
| market.
| night-rider wrote:
| Check out Cloudready. I use it for leveraging the Google
| ecosystem.
| xalava wrote:
| As a desktop, Linux is now fully functional for most users. I
| know administrations running on Linux, law firms, and even my
| dad. Beginner users don't care about choices, they get Linux Mint
| or similar with LibreOffice and Firefox and they are good to go
| for most of their tasks. For advanced users, the abundance is a
| key benefit of this ecosystem.
|
| No company is fully focused on the desktop OS, and I don't see
| why they should. This article is contradictory saying "desktop
| operating system will lie in the hands of Apple with macOS and us
| with Linux". It is not because Microsoft prioritize cloud
| services that it abandons desktops, it is not a priority for many
| Linux developers and sponsors as stated above in the article, and
| it doesn't seem a high priority for Apple either.
| voxl wrote:
| I have never had a Linux desktop that didn't eventually go up
| in flames after a routine update.
| night-rider wrote:
| The thing about Linux is that it's hackable and you can
| customise it to your liking. I've been using it for about a
| decade and the only thing it can't do is run iTunes so I have a
| virtual machine for Windows stuff. It's worth having a separate
| Linux box where you can tinker with new software and
| customisations without those changes affecting your daily
| driver OS. I found that over time the more customisations you
| do the more the OS breaks down and starts to get buggy. Having
| a dedicated box for tinkering is essential and you can just do
| a fresh install when you've made many irreversible mistakes.
| jotm wrote:
| What I would love is _easy_ GPU (and other hardware)
| passthrough to the (Windows) VM. You can already use "real"
| partitions on separate drives to maximize performance.
| Graphics is the only thing that's complicated.
|
| Tbh, I only tried it on a laptop and it was hell, it ended up
| needing a mountain of configuration and software just to pass
| an nVidia GPU (fortunately a Quadro, which is _slighly_
| easier) to Windows, which has the software that needs it the
| most.
|
| Is it easier on desktop computers with an IGP and a discrete
| card, or two graphics cards? Or do you still need to fuck
| around with the VBIOS, fight with power management and hybrid
| modes (I guess not?), use Looking Glass/RDP/dummy
| display/DP/HDMI plug and a ton of configuration that
| sometimes fails after updates?
|
| Guess I will try it again on my next computer, which must be
| a powerful Ryzen build.
| 323 wrote:
| Modern Windows is fairly robust and self-repairing, it's hard
| to brick it doing typical user stuff.
|
| Unlike Linux. A few wrong clicks and there goes the GUI.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Linux on the desktop. Where old Mac HW goes to retire when it is
| unloved by Apple. The rate at which macOS Ventura ruthlessly cut
| off 2016 and 2017 Macs shows the need more than ever for Aishi
| Linux.
| sbuk wrote:
| Pay attention. The "ruthless" cut off is in line with how the
| PowerPC to Intel transition happened. It's also following the
| 68K to PowerPC transition. It's like ripping off a bandaid.
|
| See
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_transition_to_Intel_proc...
|
| I'd expect to see no support for Intel by 2027 or macOS 16.
| Yizahi wrote:
| The main problem of Linux on desktop is a severe lack of quality
| control and questionable usability pushed by people not using
| desktop and running mainly CLI. The issues addressed on desktops
| are not in correct priority, you should not polish "happy path"
| in the generalized public system. Corporation can easily work
| with "happy path"-only software because they can afford to train
| personnel, and they can afford to fix mistakes in systemic way.
| Generalized public system should not polish what is mostly
| working. It should eliminate low occurrence catastrophic
| failures, because when scaled to ten of millions those low
| probability failures tend to multiply a lot.
|
| That's why I use console Linux every work day and enjoy it, and
| that's why I wouldn't touch Linux on a desktop with ten foot
| pole, because all my experiments in that area failed sooner or
| later. Also (surprise) shell Linux knowledge almost doesn't scale
| to the debugging GPU drivers, DE and X server issues. This is
| actually rather disconcerting feeling, when you have a decade of
| Linux experience but you look at crashing desktop GUI and
| understand that you have approximately as much understanding of
| the problem as a first time user.
| shiryel wrote:
| > Also (surprise) shell Linux knowledge almost doesn't scale to
| the debugging GPU drivers, DE and X server issues.
|
| You will be surprised on how much Wayland solved those issues.
| At least, in my experience, understanding why Sway crashed is a
| debug flag away. Unfortunately, Wayland is a double edge sword,
| even more if you want to run games with multiple monitors (but
| that is a pain even on Windows in my experience).
| Yizahi wrote:
| Also I want to add a somewhat representative anecdote story.
|
| Preface - my corp issues same laptops to all engineers,
| including developers actually writing code. Codebase is 100%
| for Linux, we don't need write anything Windows related.
| Developers have complete freedom at what to use as a host
| system on the laptop, there are some guides to help set up host
| Linux, there are people who already did it and can give advise.
|
| Around half of them just opt to host Windows 10 and run all
| their tools in the Linux virtual machine. That's a group of
| people who are second in world most suited to run Linux -
| actual Linux application devs. (first group would be Linux
| admins I think)
| 323 wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| I remember when I upgraded Ubuntu 14 to Ubuntu 16 and the GUI
| stopped working and was dumped to the command line. Luckily I
| had a Linux guru around to fix it, because otherwise my only
| alternative would have been to reinstall it - seeing how many
| esoteric steps he did to debug and fix it there is no way I
| could have googled my way out of it.
| NaN1352 wrote:
| Holy crap I never heard of the term "DaaS" before. I wish I could
| go back in time :(
|
| I guess I am thankful that Linux desktops in general I both love
| and hate, are _good enough_ to replace Windows if the needs come
| to that.
|
| Even more so nowadays with Valve setting up Linux as a promising
| "pc gamer" platform with decent usability.
|
| For good or worse the fragmentation is what Linux "fans" want.
| The kind of users who are never happy and want gazillions options
| to make something fit their every perceived special needs. The
| kind of users who think using a mouse is "less productive and
| efficient" than keyboard only... these are the most vocal users
| on Linux discussions it seems.
|
| Oh well like I said I'm grateful Ubuntu is usable enough and
| looks half decent... actually moving back from a M1 MacMini
| soon... but mostly for convenience as I want to keep using my
| "gaming pc".. and I realized i dont actually do anything very
| macOS specific ... plus homebrew and lack of native containers
| feels like a hack. I'llmiss the polish of macOS though.
|
| While I'm at it let's be blunt: is there really any half decent
| looking distro besides Ubuntu? Imho most other distros look like
| they were designed in 1987, and elementaryOS is such a joke.
| Personally I could't see myself using anything else than Ubuntu +
| the fantastic "Dash to Panel" addon as a valid replacement for
| Win10 (the win + number shortcuts are amazing).
| alexklarjr wrote:
| I don't think Android is linux desktop, even not a linux mobile.
| Yes indeed, there is so called _kernel_ there, but it wrapped
| with custom bootloader, custom apis, custom desktop and set of
| apps developed and managed by single corporation. Android of
| course inherit some of linux legacy - instability, inefficiency,
| inflexibility, tivolization. But half-bakeness, because we say so
| approach and 70s legacy are not there, due to market competition.
| When the corporation replace linux /drivers firmware blob with
| their own, Android will remain Android, and not Fuchisa Desktop.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| This article is sort of frustrating, because the issue they have
| isn't like something not working, just that there are multiple
| competing options and they want unity around all things.
| sliken wrote:
| Doesn't seem like there needs to be unity, just that things
| from the OS are handled in an OS specific way, but things not
| specific to the OS are handled in an identical way. Seems like
| container systems like flatpak deliver this. If google chrome
| flatpak was supported on all OSs then it wouldn't particularly
| matter to application developers that there were 200 flavors of
| linux around.
| twblalock wrote:
| Yeah but the fragmentation is the problem.
|
| One reason Windows and macOS are popular is that people know
| what they are going to get. If you've used one Windows 11 box,
| for example, you can get on another Windows 11 box and figure
| out how to use it. It will have the same user interface and
| window management as the other: the Start menu, the control
| panel, the desktop, etc.
|
| That's just not the case for Linux. There are several popular
| desktop environments that are very different from each other in
| look and feel. For an ordinary user, switching from Gnome to
| KDE would be quite jarring and it would take them a while to
| get used to it. For power users and tweakers, that diversity of
| options is an attractive feature of the Linux desktop. For
| ordinary users, it is a deterrent.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Therein lies the conundrum: is Linux desktop for power users
| primarily? Arguably yes. Most people don't know what they
| want/need, and most people don't want/need x features at the
| cost of y compromise, if they even understand what the
| compromise actually means to them as a user. I don't think
| 99% of people care.
|
| Is it for every power user? No, of course not.
|
| Can Linux be made very simple for casuals? Yup, absolutely,
| if all people want to do is browse the web, send some emails,
| the usual stuff, it's fine. The in-between of "can I use
| Photoshop?" and the answer being "yes, but" isn't going to
| fly with most folks.
|
| I use it for what it's best at, and use Windows for what it
| isn't best at, sometimes as a bottle, other times not. But it
| takes experience to know when to use what, which is what most
| users don't care to figure out for themselves as it involves
| trial and error usually. Most folks just want to do their
| work, and their phone or tablet is the "funsies".
| user00012-ab wrote:
| The problem is there is no decent software that runs on
| linux; I'd switch from Mac to linux if I could run Ableton,
| Adobe_products.* or Affinity_products.*
|
| And no, I don't want to hear about the software XYZ that is
| almost just like any of the above, because they aren't even
| close.
|
| If I just wanted to browse the web, and work in a terminal,
| then linux is great.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > If I just wanted to browse the web, and work in a
| terminal, then linux is great.
|
| Or edit video, or make music, or write all the stuff that
| makes this possible.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| > Yeah but the fragmentation is the problem.
|
| Yes, exactly. It's the same problem all over, too - look at
| transport! You shouldn't ride a bike, you should drive a
| massive V8-powered 4x4 like I do. It meets my needs, so it
| must meet yours, right?
| [deleted]
| themitigating wrote:
| I think having too many options can be frustrating for many
| people, especially if they aren't experts in the options.
| jbjohns wrote:
| Well, I think a bigger issue is so many of the options not
| really mattering at all.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| KDE is the most fully featured Linux DE, and it's leaps and
| bounds above Windows's (WAY better file manager, better launcher,
| more features, and even less bugs somehow).
|
| The other day, my Windows 10's explorer.exe crashed when the file
| manager tried to load a directory, which is something that used
| to happen in Vista and hasn't happened in KDE for years IME.
| runjake wrote:
| Every default KDE install I've done comes with a default theme
| that is _hideous_ and looks like it is designed by amateurs (I
| realize this is subjective, but it 's also a fairly common
| complaint).
|
| However, I always hear people sing the praises of its
| stability.
|
| Is there a good theme/font/icon pack that you like that makes
| it look more polished without a lot of fussing on the end
| users' part?
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| > even less bugs somehow
|
| This is very far from my experience. I installed OpenSUSE
| Tumbleweed (recommended as one of the best KDE distros) at the
| beginning of 2022 and ran into a dozen KDE Plasma bugs within
| an hour. Stuff like panel widths resizing just because I
| clicked "customize," or widgets vanishing when I tried to drag
| them onto panels, or the bluetooth icon vanishing from the
| status bar until I restarted my session, or even the settings
| manager freezing up.
|
| The basic desktop worked well enough, but as soon as I started
| customizing it I ran into all sorts of paper-cut edge-case type
| bugs.
| demux wrote:
| Also shout out to KDE connect!
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I've been trying to get kde connect working for about a month
| and I've yet to get to the point where my laptop and phone
| can actually 'see' each other even after whilelisting the
| ports in the firewall (or turning it completely off for that
| matter). FWIW I'm on Endevor OS (arch) with an xps 13 and a
| pixel 5a.
| demux wrote:
| I intend to switch my custom built PC from windows to SteamOS
| 3.0. I haven't been a windows fan since I switched to Manjaro and
| eventually to Arch; the only reason I have it around is for
| gaming. But considering Proton is getting much better (and I'm
| gaming lesser), it seems like a pretty easy sell. In fact I think
| SteamOS has a lot of potential to bring gamers over to Linux; 3.0
| uses arch with KDE so it's not really alien in terms of UI
| compared to windows. The biggest problem, as always, are GPU
| driver issues. But the steam handheld is already a successful
| unit that has seen some good traction, I wonder what a desktop
| version launched by steam would look like (they had the steam
| machines project but it looks pretty dead now).
| naranha wrote:
| I mean in 2022, there are so many options in Linux that may not
| be perfect, but are good enough. Be it
| KDE,Gnome,Wayland,Xorg,systemd,initd,bash,zsh they are fine to
| use. Yeah you'll hit a corner case here or there, but most people
| will find a solution that fits their workflow. Windows on the
| other hand will always be the Gamer or enduser-that-don't-care
| OS, and that's fine too. I'm incredibly thankful that Linux
| exists, because I personally gained so much from it, but I
| understand as well when people don't care about it. Let them use
| Windows and deal with their problems (but don't expect me to fix
| them for you, thanks ;)).
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