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Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#131

Post by throwaway82652 »

smoldesu wrote: post #100
kaba0 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t really claim that Wayland has been in the works for x and x years, when such a hugely critical piece of the ecosystem needs network effect to strive. And I believe wayland has just recently got the critical mass to become the next X, but not getting it sooner is not due to its lack of technical merit.

The issue is that Wayland isn't a replacement for X. It's become it's own thing entirely, with it's own goals and conflicts with the xorg ideology. On top of that, it doesn't have feature parity with the window server on Windows and certainly doesn't approach the capability of Quartz (and likely never will, judging by it's core values). This puts it in an awkward spot: certain developers are begging users to switch t…

You will be miserable and waiting forever because what you want is impossible for all practical purposes. Feature parity is a red herring when some newer features just can't be done properly on X. The "xorg ideology" is to basically not have security on anything and to consider GPUs to be an afterthought, as stated by a parent comment. From a user perspective, this situation is untenable and yet will never actually improve because doing so would break the protocol and all the clients. I've spoken to some of the other DE developers and pretty much all of them have said to me the only reason they don't want to move away from X is because they lack the manpower to do it.

Also, the reason there's no "politics" anymore is because most of the developers have moved on to Wayland. There were quite a few flame wars on the X mailing lists back in the day. You can probably blame some of that for the existence of Wayland, which should actually have less politics because multiple groups are no longer fighting for what to put in the one centralized X server. The one area where there was activity, and arguments were popping up again was... you guessed it, Xwayland, but they solved that by bring it into its own release cycle away from the rest.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#132

Post by throwaway82652 »

hans1729 wrote: post #30
daneel_w wrote: post #20

To people commenting how "well if you install Linux the right way on the right hardware like this here purpose-built laptop, it also 'just works'", what the OP is trying to underline isn't just the technical aspect of the OS booting flawlessly and recognizing its periphery, but also the whole experience that comes after. One special part of this, which is easily overseen, is the fact that Apple has poured hundreds of…

Highjacking your comment to add a functional answer to ops question: because the reward incentives in open source environments are simply not aligned with the required workload. Prove me wrong, go coordinate a deep ux-strategy in git issues, let's see how far you get until you grasp the absurdity of the idea.

You can actually do it (and some projects have managed to do so) but it requires having really good fundraising and admin staff and organizational support. Most people in open source with a couple of random projects on github aren't good at that.

And if you were a capable and well-connected individual who can consistently solve the funding problems, a lot of companies would be lining up to hire you and I doubt you'd be wasting your time with a bunch of volunteers moonlighting on hobby projects.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#133

Post by throwaway82652 »

Someone wrote: post #118
moistly wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing a guideline is not quite the same as investing several million in the development and testing of proven-effective design. Back in the day Apple did the right thing and rigorously tested its design hypotheses: there was a specific, fact-based reason behind each important gui design choice beyond “it looks good.” I say back in the day, because IMO Apple no longer makes purposeful UI design choices. For instance…

Sun did tons of research on Gnome usability. Microsoft did tons of research on MS Office, for example to design the ribbon. I also am not sure having that iOS button on the top right is bad. It’s inconsistent, yes, but when that screen opens, your finger is at the top right of the screen. Putting them in the top right corner moves them closest to your finger. I don’t know whether it is, but Fitt’s law predicts that’s…

The Sun research is pretty outdated, that was probably around 20 years ago that happened. I don't think any of it is relevant anymore.

There are still ongoing user studies happening in GNOME and KDE. It's probably not anywhere near as rigorous as at Apple, and I doubt you can easily assign a dollar value to it, but it does happen.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#134

Post by throwaway82652 »

rvz wrote: post #52
develatio wrote: post #35

It really depends on what exactly you're looking for in the "it just works" experience, but since you mention "screen recording" and "external devices" I'll assume that you're specifically asking about the modern gamer-streamer (w/ mic, hardware-based sound control, multiple inputs, ViV, etc...) setup and not a basic-browser-and-mail setup. Linux, as in "in the desktop environment", has a HUGE (a can't highlight and…

> Linux, as in "in the desktop environment", has a HUGE (a can't highlight and stress enough the word HUGE) technical debt. Well that is what makes defining official Linux Desktop support something of folklore. You can predictably support and target Windows and macOS users all the time with your app working on those systems for it being all taken care for you. But as for Linux, you will always need to exclude and dra…

That's an area where the community has consistently failed. There's clearly desire among companies to rally behind just one distro (in most cases this is Ubuntu, like it or not) and so if the community was thinking ahead, they would be using that as the standard and aiming for compatibility with it. Instead you get a countless number of distros taking pride in how they're not Ubuntu and they carelessly break Ubuntu software for no reason. In some ways Ubuntu is also part of the problem here by taking actions to make it more difficult for the community to engage.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#135

Post by throwaway82652 »

kaba0 wrote: post #95
develatio wrote: post #35

It really depends on what exactly you're looking for in the "it just works" experience, but since you mention "screen recording" and "external devices" I'll assume that you're specifically asking about the modern gamer-streamer (w/ mic, hardware-based sound control, multiple inputs, ViV, etc...) setup and not a basic-browser-and-mail setup. Linux, as in "in the desktop environment", has a HUGE (a can't highlight and…

You can’t really claim that Wayland has been in the works for x and x years, when such a hugely critical piece of the ecosystem needs network effect to strive. And I believe wayland has just recently got the critical mass to become the next X, but not getting it sooner is not due to its lack of technical merit.

To add to this, there was a pretty large consensus among X developers probably 10-15 years ago that X was not a viable future direction and it needed to be abandoned. The alternative to Wayland (or Mir, or whatever) is not going back to X, the alternative is do nothing and bitrot sets in and you just don't have a functioning desktop anymore after a while.

I wouldn't even say the network effect matters that much, a huge part of the work has been disentangling the drivers from X. It's not very visible work to userspace developers but it's probably even more important than any work on the window system. The DRM/KMS/GEM subsystem is now widely adopted for kernel drivers, that work took a long time but doing it correctly means userspace is now freed up to implement any windowing system they want without having to deal with the driver mess caused by X.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#136

Post by rbreaves »

croutonwagon wrote: post #83
veqz wrote: post #15

My personal experience is that it's been like this for years already. I'm mostly using laptops (Dell XPS at the moment) with some Ubuntu-derived distro with KDE Plasma on top, bluetooth peripherals, external monitor, and external USB-connected drives, and it all just... works. Other people are reporting less good experiences, of course, so anecdotes aren't worth too much. I think the real answer is that macOS runs on…

And even then they struggle. macOS has plenty of bugs. It’s nowhere near as stable or reliable as say IOS.

It used to be.. 10.4-10.6 were amazing. No question better than any Linux desktop at the time.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#137

Post by rbreaves »

derekp7 wrote: post #116
deng wrote: post #24

As many are already saying, it pretty much depends on hardware. If you carefully select it, you won't have much issues at all with a distribution like Ubuntu, which actually lists "certified" hardware here: https://ubuntu.com/certified I recently installed Ubuntu on a certified Dell Precision and was impressed how smooth that went, even with stuff like full disc encryption, secure boot, docking station support, NVidi…

It's the same with MacOS. It runs best on carefully selected hardware (i.e., you will have difficulty running MacOS on a Dell)

Entire processor classes ignored, gpus, & now all of Intel will lack support. Not the same really. Even vm acceleration sucks for no real reason.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#138

Post by rbreaves »

daneel_w wrote: post #98
raverbashing wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What matters is that they put the combined product through mostly the same testing. No. Not even close. You'd be surprised at the level of testing most OEMs do. It is not zero but at the same time it is not at the same level as Apple. Apple controls the SMC and Firmware/UEFI. Dell, HP, etc buys the one that comes with the board. Apple "hand picks" most of the components. Few PCs are custom designs, most are OEM des…

Please stop making this sound like OEM PC laptops are "in the wind" and almost to the point of just getting lucky with the final platform. It's an absurd discrediting of the decades of experience and work going into them.

But that’s a true assessment despite all that’s on paper there’s a lot left to chance in actual use. Will the trackpad use Windows Precision or won’t it?

Will the screen be decent or won’t it? Will the battery life suck or won’t it? There’s numerous quality of life question any Windows will have to ask before even getting to the actual specs of CPU, RAM & GPU.

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#139

Post by rbreaves »

ggm wrote: post #4

Mac owns the hardware. If you run a hackintosh, you will discover just as many oddities as any Linux distribution does on variant hardware to the spec of a PC or laptop. Try a Linux in system76 or some purpose built hardware, or the vendor installed Linux on a system. BTW osx on my m1pro has its oddities with non apple external Thunderbird, displayport, Ethernet..

Why I built sorunme. Linux w/ all of the look & feel of a more usable desktop.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/

Re: Ask HN: Why is there no Linux distro that “just works” like macOS?

#140

Post by rbreaves »

yokoprime wrote: post #67
gregopet wrote: post #39

Please stop using "it just works", you're not Apple's marketing department. Sure it just works for some people, but Linux distros and Windows also just work for some people. I've had and I've experienced a fair share of Apple WTFs and some stuff I could never get working properly. Computers are hard, "It just works" is a marketing slogan, nothing more.

Im currently a mac user and I can't say I've heard many saying macOS "just works", but it's less hassle to set-up and use day-to-day than Windows, and I don't really find comparing it to Linux is entirely fair. It's like comparing a high end drone with a custom made drone. Both are incredible powerful, but the latter requires more work and you have to mostly maintain it yourself. Linux is fantastic when you've found…

Why I’ve made sorunme.. so all my efforts can be enjoyed by others & not just me. People can contribute to my GitHub link for it as well.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sorunme/files/

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