Actual quote from Linus as opposed to the click-bait title:
> I still wish we were better at having a standardized desktop that goes across all the distributions. There's been some progress there. I mean, this is not a kernel issue, so this is just more of a personal annoyance how the fragmentation of the different vendors have, I think, held the desktop back a bit. But there has been some progress on that front too with Flatpak and things like that, so I'm still optimistic, but it's been 25 years. It's going to be another few years at least.
Considering what KDE has achieved with Plasma 5, I am really happy. I use Plasma 5 on all my machines that are capable enough to handle it. Gnome 3, consequently, has never found a place. On old machines, I use Xfce only. Xfce is, in no way, for the masses. Plasma 5 could easily be the Desktop Environment that everyone loves, if they continue to improve.
I have helped people migrate from Windows to Plasma 5. They loved it. However, getting\installing software and general system management is still not straightforward enough. We also need system management tools that are solid. No terminal gymnastics at all for the common user on distros targeted at the masses.
Flatpak is all cool, but we need core user-space applications to be standardized. LibreOffice, for example, needs to become the industry standard office-suite. How can we achieve that? People I know just do not want to move away from MS Office. Even government agencies invest heavily in MS Office. This might just be the most important impediment.
I think, the Linux ecosystem shows us what a real "free market" looks like. Lots of small players and no monopoly. People love choices and they have. You want a minimal Window Manager, you got many to choose from. You want a full-blown Desktop Environment, you are spoilt for choice. Not a bad thing in an ideal world, but...
He is right with that. There is a few desktop environments that are quite good like: KDE (Plasma), Gnome (with enough options tuning & customizing) and maybe pantheon (see elementary OS)
We'd need something more smoove and better over-all integration because there is still too many shortcomings and tiny bugs that could annoy a day-to-day user that doesn't want to know anything about config files or extended menus with special settings.
It should be a great thing out of the box with sane defaults. That includes the icon set as well as a decent file browser and terminal emulator experience (iTerm2 on mac is THE REFERENCE here, I wouldn't want anything less).
Next comes workflows like office /graphics /audio stuff. I like how OSX handles PDFs etc and would love to see that on linux as well.
But I'm afraid this scattering is one of the biggest enemies of adoption and maturity of open source software. There is so many OSes and tools that you often have to research stuff for hours before you start off with a shitty tool that get's the job half done and then you recognize you can start from scratch because it doesn't work as you expected.
Instead many open source projects could live up to their potential if they'd combine efforts to merge the best they did and create ONE super awesome tool.
The reallity is that very often projects are just abandoned because adoption / donations etc. are too low or the 2 maintainers are tired after years of working on a project only 100 ppl on the globe are using.
Unite! At least converge to 2 big streams: Pro-Users (the ppl making jokes about shellscripts) and People (your mom)
Just focus on delivering for these 2 groups and I think most ppl would be glad about the end product. I for myself will try to do my best in putting efforts into projects I hope will have the biggest adoption.
Very heavy headline for a very nuanced position by Linus.
It's an open secret that the ideal of choice fragments the focus of creating a tight UX on the desktop. You have to understand when you watch this video though that all Linus and the kernel team can do is make the kernel itself. The community is what will end up driving the desktop UX, and they haven't done a great job creating something that can capture the average PC user.
I am not sure if this is even a bad thing. My daily driver is a Dell laptop running Fedora and I don't think I'd change a thing aside from some minor UX gripes about Cinnamon. ChromeOS really is the best hope for mass Linux adoption, and I personally know people who hate the Linux desktop experience but use a Chromebook daily.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here other than my personal opinion that desktop Linux has found a local maximum and I think only the distros themselves can push DE volunteers to find something that has wider appeal (I'm not sure if that is even desirable, because again, I'm personally very happy with my experience).
Fragmentation is one thing, but I don't think it's the main point. I've tried Desktop Linux many times. Mostly to avoid paying for Windows. And every time, there is something that I would like to do that I can't do, and then I'm back to Windows.
Whether it's some kind of website addin (things like video conferencing, or offline video player with DRM that require you to download an app), or some development tool (Visual Studio!), or some game, or my printer.
The issue is a catch 22: because Desktop Linux is not well adopted, companies don't develop for it. If companies don't develop for it, then there are things you can do on other systems that you can't do on Linux. And so Desktop Linux does not get more adoption...
The amusing thing is that Microsoft blew it. Windows 7 was generally considered good, but Windows 8 and 10 are widely acknowledged to be awful. Windows 8 tried to make a desktop
work like a tablet. Windows 10 has intrusive ads and data collection. Most of corporate America would rather stay on Windows 7.
Linux on the desktop works just fine. I've been using it almost exclusively for five years now. I also have several notebooks using it. It's less trouble than Windows. This should be Linux's moment on the desktop.
Some of my friends ended up trying Linux in the Vista era. What happened was interesting.
I don't think any of them became full-on Linux users, but some of them continued to use Linux alongside Windows. What this signifies to me is that Linux has some strengths that people really want, but it doesn't do a great job of replacing Windows in its current state.
I find this to be my exact problem, too. Windows does a lot of things right that Linux may never, and the app library on Windows is probably going to be the best on the desktop for at least another 10 years if not longer. Linux, however, has a beautiful experience for developers and sometimes even for power users. You can turn on and off almost any feature you want, there's a ton of alternative setups. You can even run a different libc if you really want to.
I still use a Linux desktop as my primary, but I have never managed to escape dual booting or virtual machines entirely, and I'm not sure when it might be possible.
I wouldn't say it's less trouble than Windows, just different trouble that people are not used to. Trying to get my 2013 Brother printer/scanner to work in Ubuntu involved tweaking and running shell scripts found on Stackoverflow. Desktops should just work, yet sadly none of them really do.
I am really curious about the end of life for Windows seven. I understand Microsoft wants to push the OS as a service, but I dont see that widely happening in a lot of corporate environments. For liability reasons alone.
Maybe $YEAR_OF_THE_LINUX_DESKTOP isn't 2018, but I don't think the clickbait title saying that desktop Linux has failed is fair. We're light-years ahead of where we were in 2011, let alone 2007. The majority of users who now try Linux desktops do so without any real workflow-breaking issues.
Graphics card drivers and printer drivers often work out of the box for me. All things considered, I think desktop Linux is doing very well.
Not only that. I'd venture to say no desktop is near as good as the Linux desktop. (For a certain type of user, I should qualify.)
Don't get me wrong; there are issues. X is a system from a different era. (Graphics) Performance is pretty bad, the effects are janky, the primitives disparate.
But! As a "power user" I dread having to use any other system. On Linux, there is an incredible variety of window managers, file navigators, terminal emulators, etc. The whole gamut.
My workflow revolves around i3 and my i3 configuration. I have sworn off macs, and when I use windows, I have learned to press Super+1 for Firefox and Super+2 for Steam. Beyond that is a dark forest which I refuse to explore!
As has been already pointed out, this isn't really what Linus said.
And, in any event, fragmentation has nothing to do with it.
Ordinary users (and even many advanced users) don't install operating systems. And one has to go out of their way to buy a machine with Linux pre-installed (and ordinary users don't go out of their way, certainly not for something that they know little or nothing about).
If real (decent) machine with Linux on them were sold in Best Buy etc. there would be substantially more users of desktop Linux. Let's not pretend that multiple distributions is the reason.
I think that's a convenient ego-saving scapegoat for the Linux Desktop. Chrome was never pre-installed and people went out of their way to get it because it was a better product.
This is true, but a good chunk of marketing will also be required as, by default, people will instantly believe the "alternative" to Windows is a worse imitation. After all, if it's the same as Windows, why not just run Windows?
So, it would have to be spun in the right manner as an upgrade as opposed to an alternative.
The whole concept that "Linux is just a kernel" sounds like some kind of whining pedantic hair splitting, unless you understand that almost all the stuff that ships in a Linux distribution including all the FOSS stuff we call "the desktop" runs perfectly well on all modern Unix-like systems like FreeBSD et al. xorg, Firefox, Gnome/KDE/foo/bar, yada yada. Admittedly there are fewer and fewer Unix-like systems left (I cut my teeth on OSes that are now dead and buried), but it's a massive disservice to all these wonderful projects that we don't have a better ways to describe this stuff so that we don't have people talking about "the Linux desktop". Get off my lawn, etc.
It's worse, things like the Gimp and most most other major user facing linux applications have a history of also being built for windows and mac os. E.g. I regularly use Darktable on my mac and with the last release they also started supporting windows builds. Why not? The more users the better from their point of view.
Linux has a software packaging issue. There are several so-called package managers and they basically have overlapping goals and they all suck from an end user perspective. On Ubuntu when you do an apt-get install darktable, you pull in a gazillion of packages. Everything and the kitchen sink, basically. On a mac, I drag the darktable.app file to the applications after I download it. And it runs. Exact same software. It's a 217MB self contained package. There are no software conflicts. Apple designed the way that stuff works last century when they were designing OS X and wanted to keep the simplicity of how software installations worked on OS 9. The disk usage is a non issue There are no dependencies to manage. This stuff works across major versions of OS X even. Package managers don't solve a problem real users have.
The existence of package managers led to what we now call distributions, which made a lot of sense in the early nineties when slackware came in the form of 27 disks (been there, done that) but not this century. No two distributions are the same. They each need to test and integrate the same software to work in their ecosystem. Even major versions of the same distribution tend to be very different. I personally think Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. have no business whatsoever acting as a gatekeeper here and I tend to think of them more as an obstacle then as an enabler. E.g. I know the Darktable people are preparing a 2.6 release (awesome stuff). I'd like to get a binary package from them as soon as they release it. I don't see what value Ubuntu doing the same months (optimistic?) later adds. Why wait? Their need to test before they can integrate is self inflicted. It's a problem they have yet to solve.
Flatpak and similar solutions are sort of aiming to solve this for linux. But standards are lacking, progress is slow, and this stuff is nowhere close to being standardized. So, again fragmentation. Compare that to the docker eco system. Most custom stuff you deploy to a server comes as a docker image. And you can run those on many different operating systems. This kind of OS neutral way of packaging software needs to start extending to desktop software. We need Docker for end user applications.
I am missing an important part in this discussion: The absolute lack of a stable API for GUIs.
Command line tools, web servers, ... are easy: Take POSIX and be a bit conservative with the edge cases. It will work with a recompile for most linux distros,BSDs, OSX and if you're willing to look at e.g. cygwin, even windows. I had to compile an ancient linux 1.x program last month, and it works.
The GUI world however is a different beast. There is X11 which only offers the most basic of primitives for drawing and pointing, nothing decent for text, and the API designers want to take away even that with wayland. There is GTK that actively does not want to provide any form of stability. There is QT which has a hard-to-interop C++ API and every major version breaks everything once more. And i haven't said anything of the licenses
This means no community investment can be made in Linux GUI's: Every year or so, you have to do serious upgrades or a GUI application simply perishes. Which is basically insane. It means that whatever Linux GUI exists today is temporary for everything but the biggest applications.
Ironically, win32 is the only reasonable option on Linux: wine will provide a good enough environment, and as they are anchored API-wise to microsoft, they can guarantee they'r there for the long term.
But how I dream for a posix-like API that both GTK and QT could provide.
Android shows how you do it. You get a big company with tons of money that wants to seriously build a working platform from end to end. If a company with pockets deep enough had stepped up to create a 3rd viable platform for consumers based on Linux, we'd have it. Mark Shuttleworth's pockets were not deep enough. System76's pockets aren't deep enough. It would have to have been a company like HP or Dell. Dell played with consumer side Linux but never found it lucrative to go all in.
Isn't android heavily fragmented? There are hopes they will get better, for sure, but there is a marked difference between Samsung and other phones. I don't see that going away anytime soon, sadly.
In the early days Android had a very poor user experience, and Google didn't put much effort into changing that for the first few years. If you wanted a useable Android phone you'd buy from HTC or Sony who had a more user friendly UX, so in a way fragmentation helped there.
Nowadays the experience is more mature, but even so a Samsung device has a very different feel from a Pixel or Xiaomi device, even though under the hood they can all be running Android Pie.
Linux desktop has not failed and desktop environments competition is a major reason why it is getting better and better. Many people love GNOME3 (and it is a de-facto standardized desktop) but I hate it and love KDE5 (and so do many other people). I hated Unity at the beginning and switched to XFCE when it was introduced but once Unity got improved I've began considering it a perfect desktop. Tiling WMs are awesome (pun intended) for particular tasks on particular display configurations. I also hope somebody is going to implement a Haiku-like WM on Linux or invent something entirely new. Diversity is good!
For existing Linux users, the situation is indeed fantastic. We have lots of choices and we're aware of this.
But if you think of "Year of the Linux Desktop" as the point in time where you can get the Windows-using masses to switch, diversity is a big problem. People don't want to be told that they have to make umpteen choices about what software to use if they want to use a different OS, they want a cookie cutter experience.
This is why "Windows like" is a selling point for many DEs/distros. It's the McDonald's principle: everywhere you go a Big Mac is a Big Mac. You don't have to worry about figuring out what appeals to you in the local cuisine.
Tiling WMs really are awesome. After I got the hang of i3wm, I immediately wondered why this whole paradigm had been hidden from me, and why it wasn't integrated more in the bigger desktop environments. Being able to move window focus and windows themselves from the keyboard is fantastic. Having things resize neatly instead of having to manually do it yourself is great too.
Really, the reason desktop Linux isn't popular is:
1) A few things still don't work. Vanishingly few now but still a few.
2) Linux can't be simply as good as Windows or MacOs, it would have to be better for people to make the effort. And it's not going to be better. I don't think "better" is possible now (not in a fundamental, decisive way. Lots of little ways sure but, again, I don't think that's what people care so much about). An Os is just a way to launch apps and we've kind of a limit on such goodness. My desktop Linux launches my apps, especially my browser and that's about it. I like being independent of the corporate megamachine but most people would not spend the hard two hours required for this.
> I like being independent of the corporate megamachine
You aren't, and you won't be. Companies did an end run around user freedoms by turning everything into a service. You neither own nor control the software you run in the browser, and neither do you own the data. Replacing an OS won't help you if it's only serving as a bootloader for Google Chrome; if you want independence, you need to prefer locally executable software (which is becoming harder by the day).
I guess each person's usage would change their view on this, but I actually do think it's better. You've got the rock solid shell that Unix popularized, repositories of software that's just a command away to install, dependencies handled for you across all your packages, and things are generally able to work together better due to software freedom and a community of tinkerers. If you're running firefox and an office suite, maybe you don't care too much about your operating system, but I definitely think there is some importance to it. Maybe something like a shell and the tools you run in it would be counted under "apps" for you, but to me it feels a little different.
> Linux can't be simply as good as Windows or MacOs, it would have to be better for people to make the effort.
I really don't think this is the reason. Pretty much anything is better than Windows, but defaults rule supreme and Windows is what you get on your computer until you pay extra for MacOS. Ordinary users aren't likely to change the OS on their computer any more than they are to swap the engine on the car.
A good start would be implementing flicker-free boot on Linux. Windows and macOS had it for a long time. On Linux, it takes 5-6 mode changes before the system actually boots. It doesn't make a good impression on users, especially ones unfamiliar with Linux to see the system constantly go dark, make some noises and switch from text mode to graphics mode constantly. Same thing for shut down, most Linuxes when shutting down flash text mode for a bit with lots of messages like "trying to kill xxx unsuccessful". To an average user that screams "this software is unfinished and can break any moment", which doesn't inspire confidence.
I think the best chance for unification was Ubuntu and Unity. I use Unity on Ubuntu 18.10 because I don't like the GNOME interface (and it's much slower on my low-end laptop too). Unfortunately, the community seems to enjoy reinventing things. Implementing new stuff is exciting, fixing bugs isn't :(
In my experience the real barrier to regular users adopting Linux has been Microsoft Office. The UI is not a big impediment but when it comes to "How do I send and receive word/excell documents?" That's where the wheels fall off.
Sure there are work arounds and other formats etc but for most people that is just too much hassle.
This is mostly a non-issue with LibreOffice, unless you work with the advanced features of the Office programs (most people don't). Sure, the UI isn't as good, but I don't think that's the biggest barrier to adoption, or even close to it.
The idea of a Linux Desktop is about 10 years too late now and fading fast.
I'm using Windows 7 on a desktop built in 2012 and I have no impetus to change. My wife has abandoned her desktop for an iPad Pro, which she uses at work extensively. The only thing she needs a desktop for is Excel, which she uses hardcore.
The only application I run on my desktop these days is Chrome/Firefox. Other than that I'll run Sublime because I'm a programmer, but there's nothing else I really need. Everything else is on my iPhone.
I have used Linux Desktops for about ~15years and involved in the Development community it astonished me how frequent the APIs break specially at Desktop Application/libraries level. I remember several libraries, like GTK+ deprecating often APIs even during stable releases. The consequence of this is that the main application developer spends a big part of its time constantly updating its application instead of developing new features and make it feature rich.
The same can be said in order parts of the Desktop like the transition from X11 to Wayland/Weston and all the Desktop Environments that some years ago fragmented and decreased their quality. Unity, KDE and GNOME all failed in producing a Desktop that really appealed to all users.
Finally for me another failure is the package management. For the App developer he needs to get his app packages for all major distributions and imagine the effort of the App developer and App maintainer to support different libc and userspace tool versions.
All in all the Application developer has such a huge burden that he is most of the time updating his app to new apis/tools than actually developing new features.
And one of the biggest reasons here is package management - the rpm, Deb , Pacman split is one of the biggest divides. I don't know if I should add APK to this list.
We had a chance to fix it in the new world, but it's gone back to a zeroinstall versus flatpak versus snap vs Deb vs rpm vs Pacman ecosystem.
Lets see if Docker CNAB and systemd push this ecosystem forward.
I think Nix and Guix are going to solve this problem better than snaps and flatpaks. Not only are they really good package managers, but they were made to work on other distros.
The average professional website /web application looks more visually consistent and appealing than any Linux desktop, ever. No matter what desktop they always end up feeling weird and like the spacing is wrong or the fonts don’t match or something.
Put another way, it’s no longer hard to design brautfinand consistent User interfaces but for some reason that’s never been possible on a Linux desktop.
Linux desktops have always had a sort of Frankenstein feeling to them, clearly made up of a hodgepodge of boys that just don’t quite fit together.
I think it failed not because of some wrong technical setup or fragmentation but because nerds generally don't care about the novice user experience, it's near the bottom of the list of priorities. For profit companies don't care either but are instantly rewarded for it financially so those that get it done increase their market share. It's a sad dilemma that I have no idea how or if it can be fixed because I would love not having to use a mac and use Linux as a desktop instead.
I don't think the Linux desktop has failed. If popular adoption is the standard then MacOS is also a failure of sorts. At the end of the day, there was just no reason for anyone except enthusiasts to end up with linux on their machine since with rare exceptions you literally couldn't buy it anywhere. If you don't build software, you have pretty much zero incentive to use a linux desktop, especially when factoring in the monumental software compatibility hurdles for non-technical users.
>If you don't build software, you have pretty much zero incentive to use a linux desktop
I've heard this before, but I never really understood why people think it. I've always had an interest in computers, but I think there's a huge jump in difficult and complexity from using a less popular operating system to creating your own software. I consider programming to be extremely difficult. Using GNU/Linux is just something new. Once you overcome the initial discomfort of it not being like whatever you're used to, it's just fine. It's fun, even.
> If you don't build software, you have pretty much zero incentive to use a linux desktop, especially when factoring in the monumental software compatibility hurdles for non-technical users.
I respectfully disagree. Ubuntu really works well for a lot of non-technical folks. A few of my non-technical family members run Ubuntu variants and have remarked at how much better it is than their old Windows 10 install. I don't think they'll be going back.
Unless you've got strange hardware like a Mac, Linux for the most part "just works" these days.
The biggest barrier to desktop Linux for your average citizen is that the advantages of FOSS, stability, and cost just aren't enough against the disadvantages of Windows. If Microsoft started charging people $1500/year to run desktop Windows, you'd see a lot of people look for alternatives.
[+] [-] schizoidboy|7 years ago|reply
> I still wish we were better at having a standardized desktop that goes across all the distributions. There's been some progress there. I mean, this is not a kernel issue, so this is just more of a personal annoyance how the fragmentation of the different vendors have, I think, held the desktop back a bit. But there has been some progress on that front too with Flatpak and things like that, so I'm still optimistic, but it's been 25 years. It's going to be another few years at least.
[+] [-] msiyer|7 years ago|reply
I have helped people migrate from Windows to Plasma 5. They loved it. However, getting\installing software and general system management is still not straightforward enough. We also need system management tools that are solid. No terminal gymnastics at all for the common user on distros targeted at the masses.
Flatpak is all cool, but we need core user-space applications to be standardized. LibreOffice, for example, needs to become the industry standard office-suite. How can we achieve that? People I know just do not want to move away from MS Office. Even government agencies invest heavily in MS Office. This might just be the most important impediment.
I think, the Linux ecosystem shows us what a real "free market" looks like. Lots of small players and no monopoly. People love choices and they have. You want a minimal Window Manager, you got many to choose from. You want a full-blown Desktop Environment, you are spoilt for choice. Not a bad thing in an ideal world, but...
[+] [-] smacktoward|7 years ago|reply
Don’t worry Linus, with Snaps and AppImages we’re hard at work fragmenting that front too!
[+] [-] VvR-Ox|7 years ago|reply
We'd need something more smoove and better over-all integration because there is still too many shortcomings and tiny bugs that could annoy a day-to-day user that doesn't want to know anything about config files or extended menus with special settings. It should be a great thing out of the box with sane defaults. That includes the icon set as well as a decent file browser and terminal emulator experience (iTerm2 on mac is THE REFERENCE here, I wouldn't want anything less).
Next comes workflows like office /graphics /audio stuff. I like how OSX handles PDFs etc and would love to see that on linux as well.
But I'm afraid this scattering is one of the biggest enemies of adoption and maturity of open source software. There is so many OSes and tools that you often have to research stuff for hours before you start off with a shitty tool that get's the job half done and then you recognize you can start from scratch because it doesn't work as you expected.
Instead many open source projects could live up to their potential if they'd combine efforts to merge the best they did and create ONE super awesome tool.
The reallity is that very often projects are just abandoned because adoption / donations etc. are too low or the 2 maintainers are tired after years of working on a project only 100 ppl on the globe are using.
Unite! At least converge to 2 big streams: Pro-Users (the ppl making jokes about shellscripts) and People (your mom)
Just focus on delivering for these 2 groups and I think most ppl would be glad about the end product. I for myself will try to do my best in putting efforts into projects I hope will have the biggest adoption.
[+] [-] marmot777|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chomp|7 years ago|reply
It's an open secret that the ideal of choice fragments the focus of creating a tight UX on the desktop. You have to understand when you watch this video though that all Linus and the kernel team can do is make the kernel itself. The community is what will end up driving the desktop UX, and they haven't done a great job creating something that can capture the average PC user.
I am not sure if this is even a bad thing. My daily driver is a Dell laptop running Fedora and I don't think I'd change a thing aside from some minor UX gripes about Cinnamon. ChromeOS really is the best hope for mass Linux adoption, and I personally know people who hate the Linux desktop experience but use a Chromebook daily.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here other than my personal opinion that desktop Linux has found a local maximum and I think only the distros themselves can push DE volunteers to find something that has wider appeal (I'm not sure if that is even desirable, because again, I'm personally very happy with my experience).
[+] [-] vorticalbox|7 years ago|reply
Google nailed that UI and everything just works.
Settings are just bundled in with your browser settings, no cli anything to run.
[+] [-] wmf|7 years ago|reply
In some sense that's a self-imposed limitation. Linus could have chosen to create an OS (like BSD) instead of a kernel.
[+] [-] d--b|7 years ago|reply
Whether it's some kind of website addin (things like video conferencing, or offline video player with DRM that require you to download an app), or some development tool (Visual Studio!), or some game, or my printer.
The issue is a catch 22: because Desktop Linux is not well adopted, companies don't develop for it. If companies don't develop for it, then there are things you can do on other systems that you can't do on Linux. And so Desktop Linux does not get more adoption...
[+] [-] Animats|7 years ago|reply
Linux on the desktop works just fine. I've been using it almost exclusively for five years now. I also have several notebooks using it. It's less trouble than Windows. This should be Linux's moment on the desktop.
[+] [-] jchw|7 years ago|reply
I don't think any of them became full-on Linux users, but some of them continued to use Linux alongside Windows. What this signifies to me is that Linux has some strengths that people really want, but it doesn't do a great job of replacing Windows in its current state.
I find this to be my exact problem, too. Windows does a lot of things right that Linux may never, and the app library on Windows is probably going to be the best on the desktop for at least another 10 years if not longer. Linux, however, has a beautiful experience for developers and sometimes even for power users. You can turn on and off almost any feature you want, there's a ton of alternative setups. You can even run a different libc if you really want to.
I still use a Linux desktop as my primary, but I have never managed to escape dual booting or virtual machines entirely, and I'm not sure when it might be possible.
[+] [-] pandemic_region|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cf498|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eindiran|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahmedalsudani|7 years ago|reply
Don't get me wrong; there are issues. X is a system from a different era. (Graphics) Performance is pretty bad, the effects are janky, the primitives disparate.
But! As a "power user" I dread having to use any other system. On Linux, there is an incredible variety of window managers, file navigators, terminal emulators, etc. The whole gamut.
My workflow revolves around i3 and my i3 configuration. I have sworn off macs, and when I use windows, I have learned to press Super+1 for Firefox and Super+2 for Steam. Beyond that is a dark forest which I refuse to explore!
[+] [-] xyproto|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _emacsomancer_|7 years ago|reply
And, in any event, fragmentation has nothing to do with it.
Ordinary users (and even many advanced users) don't install operating systems. And one has to go out of their way to buy a machine with Linux pre-installed (and ordinary users don't go out of their way, certainly not for something that they know little or nothing about).
If real (decent) machine with Linux on them were sold in Best Buy etc. there would be substantially more users of desktop Linux. Let's not pretend that multiple distributions is the reason.
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rocky1138|7 years ago|reply
So, it would have to be spun in the right manner as an upgrade as opposed to an alternative.
[+] [-] macdice|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|7 years ago|reply
Linux has a software packaging issue. There are several so-called package managers and they basically have overlapping goals and they all suck from an end user perspective. On Ubuntu when you do an apt-get install darktable, you pull in a gazillion of packages. Everything and the kitchen sink, basically. On a mac, I drag the darktable.app file to the applications after I download it. And it runs. Exact same software. It's a 217MB self contained package. There are no software conflicts. Apple designed the way that stuff works last century when they were designing OS X and wanted to keep the simplicity of how software installations worked on OS 9. The disk usage is a non issue There are no dependencies to manage. This stuff works across major versions of OS X even. Package managers don't solve a problem real users have.
The existence of package managers led to what we now call distributions, which made a lot of sense in the early nineties when slackware came in the form of 27 disks (been there, done that) but not this century. No two distributions are the same. They each need to test and integrate the same software to work in their ecosystem. Even major versions of the same distribution tend to be very different. I personally think Ubuntu, Fedora, etc. have no business whatsoever acting as a gatekeeper here and I tend to think of them more as an obstacle then as an enabler. E.g. I know the Darktable people are preparing a 2.6 release (awesome stuff). I'd like to get a binary package from them as soon as they release it. I don't see what value Ubuntu doing the same months (optimistic?) later adds. Why wait? Their need to test before they can integrate is self inflicted. It's a problem they have yet to solve.
Flatpak and similar solutions are sort of aiming to solve this for linux. But standards are lacking, progress is slow, and this stuff is nowhere close to being standardized. So, again fragmentation. Compare that to the docker eco system. Most custom stuff you deploy to a server comes as a docker image. And you can run those on many different operating systems. This kind of OS neutral way of packaging software needs to start extending to desktop software. We need Docker for end user applications.
[+] [-] hyperman1|7 years ago|reply
Command line tools, web servers, ... are easy: Take POSIX and be a bit conservative with the edge cases. It will work with a recompile for most linux distros,BSDs, OSX and if you're willing to look at e.g. cygwin, even windows. I had to compile an ancient linux 1.x program last month, and it works.
The GUI world however is a different beast. There is X11 which only offers the most basic of primitives for drawing and pointing, nothing decent for text, and the API designers want to take away even that with wayland. There is GTK that actively does not want to provide any form of stability. There is QT which has a hard-to-interop C++ API and every major version breaks everything once more. And i haven't said anything of the licenses
This means no community investment can be made in Linux GUI's: Every year or so, you have to do serious upgrades or a GUI application simply perishes. Which is basically insane. It means that whatever Linux GUI exists today is temporary for everything but the biggest applications.
Ironically, win32 is the only reasonable option on Linux: wine will provide a good enough environment, and as they are anchored API-wise to microsoft, they can guarantee they'r there for the long term.
But how I dream for a posix-like API that both GTK and QT could provide.
[+] [-] mevile|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fyfy18|7 years ago|reply
Nowadays the experience is more mature, but even so a Samsung device has a very different feel from a Pixel or Xiaomi device, even though under the hood they can all be running Android Pie.
[+] [-] dschuetz|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qwerty456127|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kungtotte|7 years ago|reply
But if you think of "Year of the Linux Desktop" as the point in time where you can get the Windows-using masses to switch, diversity is a big problem. People don't want to be told that they have to make umpteen choices about what software to use if they want to use a different OS, they want a cookie cutter experience.
This is why "Windows like" is a selling point for many DEs/distros. It's the McDonald's principle: everywhere you go a Big Mac is a Big Mac. You don't have to worry about figuring out what appeals to you in the local cuisine.
[+] [-] opan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe_the_user|7 years ago|reply
1) A few things still don't work. Vanishingly few now but still a few.
2) Linux can't be simply as good as Windows or MacOs, it would have to be better for people to make the effort. And it's not going to be better. I don't think "better" is possible now (not in a fundamental, decisive way. Lots of little ways sure but, again, I don't think that's what people care so much about). An Os is just a way to launch apps and we've kind of a limit on such goodness. My desktop Linux launches my apps, especially my browser and that's about it. I like being independent of the corporate megamachine but most people would not spend the hard two hours required for this.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|7 years ago|reply
You aren't, and you won't be. Companies did an end run around user freedoms by turning everything into a service. You neither own nor control the software you run in the browser, and neither do you own the data. Replacing an OS won't help you if it's only serving as a bootloader for Google Chrome; if you want independence, you need to prefer locally executable software (which is becoming harder by the day).
[+] [-] opan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _emacsomancer_|7 years ago|reply
I really don't think this is the reason. Pretty much anything is better than Windows, but defaults rule supreme and Windows is what you get on your computer until you pay extra for MacOS. Ordinary users aren't likely to change the OS on their computer any more than they are to swap the engine on the car.
[+] [-] skocznymroczny|7 years ago|reply
I think the best chance for unification was Ubuntu and Unity. I use Unity on Ubuntu 18.10 because I don't like the GNOME interface (and it's much slower on my low-end laptop too). Unfortunately, the community seems to enjoy reinventing things. Implementing new stuff is exciting, fixing bugs isn't :(
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sunstone|7 years ago|reply
Sure there are work arounds and other formats etc but for most people that is just too much hassle.
[+] [-] RussianCow|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] docker_up|7 years ago|reply
I'm using Windows 7 on a desktop built in 2012 and I have no impetus to change. My wife has abandoned her desktop for an iPad Pro, which she uses at work extensively. The only thing she needs a desktop for is Excel, which she uses hardcore.
The only application I run on my desktop these days is Chrome/Firefox. Other than that I'll run Sublime because I'm a programmer, but there's nothing else I really need. Everything else is on my iPhone.
[+] [-] aussieguy1234|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GordonS|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnIdiotOnTheNet|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmedinas|7 years ago|reply
I have used Linux Desktops for about ~15years and involved in the Development community it astonished me how frequent the APIs break specially at Desktop Application/libraries level. I remember several libraries, like GTK+ deprecating often APIs even during stable releases. The consequence of this is that the main application developer spends a big part of its time constantly updating its application instead of developing new features and make it feature rich.
The same can be said in order parts of the Desktop like the transition from X11 to Wayland/Weston and all the Desktop Environments that some years ago fragmented and decreased their quality. Unity, KDE and GNOME all failed in producing a Desktop that really appealed to all users.
Finally for me another failure is the package management. For the App developer he needs to get his app packages for all major distributions and imagine the effort of the App developer and App maintainer to support different libc and userspace tool versions.
All in all the Application developer has such a huge burden that he is most of the time updating his app to new apis/tools than actually developing new features.
[+] [-] sandGorgon|7 years ago|reply
We had a chance to fix it in the new world, but it's gone back to a zeroinstall versus flatpak versus snap vs Deb vs rpm vs Pacman ecosystem.
Lets see if Docker CNAB and systemd push this ecosystem forward.
Reposting http://0pointer.net/blog/revisiting-how-we-put-together-linu...
[+] [-] opan|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hguhghuff|7 years ago|reply
Put another way, it’s no longer hard to design brautfinand consistent User interfaces but for some reason that’s never been possible on a Linux desktop.
Linux desktops have always had a sort of Frankenstein feeling to them, clearly made up of a hodgepodge of boys that just don’t quite fit together.
[+] [-] atlih|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] root_axis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opan|7 years ago|reply
I've heard this before, but I never really understood why people think it. I've always had an interest in computers, but I think there's a huge jump in difficult and complexity from using a less popular operating system to creating your own software. I consider programming to be extremely difficult. Using GNU/Linux is just something new. Once you overcome the initial discomfort of it not being like whatever you're used to, it's just fine. It's fun, even.
[+] [-] rocky1138|7 years ago|reply
I respectfully disagree. Ubuntu really works well for a lot of non-technical folks. A few of my non-technical family members run Ubuntu variants and have remarked at how much better it is than their old Windows 10 install. I don't think they'll be going back.
Unless you've got strange hardware like a Mac, Linux for the most part "just works" these days.
The biggest barrier to desktop Linux for your average citizen is that the advantages of FOSS, stability, and cost just aren't enough against the disadvantages of Windows. If Microsoft started charging people $1500/year to run desktop Windows, you'd see a lot of people look for alternatives.
[+] [-] shaan7|7 years ago|reply