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.
> 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.
Android fragmentation != Desktop Linux fragmentation
They're completely different. Desktop Linux has APT, YUM, Snap, AppImage, FlatPak. Android has... APK. Desktop Linux has x11 vs wayland. Android has one renderer. ALSA/Pipewire/Pulse, what's the difference anyway? Will your favorite sound app work with all of them? Android has one sound API.
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.
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.
Isn't Android effectively a base level linux distro optimized for smartphones though? Providing some level of uniformity between devices like package management, etc.?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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).
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.
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”.
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
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!
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.
"Fragmentation" is a derogatory term that means "people doing what they want with the software that they own." The alternative is some priesthood deciding everything for us. Fuck that. My desktop is perfect.
Says he sees the problems with the Linux desktop, and only lists one that isn't a problem to anyone actually using a Linux desktop. What about the herculean task of kernel maintenance? Central repository maintenance? There are tons of real problems we can discuss that aren't mentioned.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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).
There's a radio station around (one of the 93.9 the rivers):
> Without deviation from the norm, progress is impossible.
Dont get me wrong; Im glad there are enclaves of stability. GNOME changes paradigm every couple decades, kde less so, & they target the kind of easily knowable fixed world this article espouses. They wrap so much. OSDh->alsa->pulseaudio->pipewire, and plenty of users never notice. X->Wayland, same. Great. Most of the churn & chaos isnt visible.
It's wild to me the suggestion that open source should be so focused on winning that it adopts conservative software ideologies. The idea of a static, fixed world, where we normalize all our experiences, for... what... end user convenience, is against the Hacker spirit. Is an anethema.
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).
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.
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 ;)).
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.
[+] [-] mrj|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pupppet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phendrenad2|3 years ago|reply
They're completely different. Desktop Linux has APT, YUM, Snap, AppImage, FlatPak. Android has... APK. Desktop Linux has x11 vs wayland. Android has one renderer. ALSA/Pipewire/Pulse, what's the difference anyway? Will your favorite sound app work with all of them? Android has one sound API.
[+] [-] hbn|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] krnlpnc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmlp|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] vladvasiliu|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] simion314|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] twic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] em-bee|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hulitu|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 3a2d29|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 2OEH8eoCRo0|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] vkou|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] kitsunesoba|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] draw_down|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] robonerd|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] idle_zealot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sushisource|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Blikkentrekker|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xalava|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] night-rider|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 323|3 years ago|reply
Unlike Linux. A few wrong clicks and there goes the GUI.
[+] [-] voxl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Yizahi|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Yizahi|3 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] shiryel|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] 323|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Blikkentrekker|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] bbertelsen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bbertelsen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattPalmer1086|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wing-_-nuts|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] betwixthewires|3 years ago|reply
Says he sees the problems with the Linux desktop, and only lists one that isn't a problem to anyone actually using a Linux desktop. What about the herculean task of kernel maintenance? Central repository maintenance? There are tons of real problems we can discuss that aren't mentioned.
[+] [-] unsignedint|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cm2187|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] alexklarjr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MisterBastahrd|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] NaN1352|3 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] foobarian|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rektide|3 years ago|reply
> Without deviation from the norm, progress is impossible.
Dont get me wrong; Im glad there are enclaves of stability. GNOME changes paradigm every couple decades, kde less so, & they target the kind of easily knowable fixed world this article espouses. They wrap so much. OSDh->alsa->pulseaudio->pipewire, and plenty of users never notice. X->Wayland, same. Great. Most of the churn & chaos isnt visible.
It's wild to me the suggestion that open source should be so focused on winning that it adopts conservative software ideologies. The idea of a static, fixed world, where we normalize all our experiences, for... what... end user convenience, is against the Hacker spirit. Is an anethema.
[+] [-] demux|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throw7|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naranha|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|3 years ago|reply