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What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

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Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#91

Post by yellowapple »

oneshot908 wrote: post #34
VonGuard wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL, I use this very laptop with XP all the time. Yes, it is slow for modern tasks. But the XP OS is responsive! I can move the mouse, navigate menus, open the text editor. I can do this on this 2001 machine using Debian with no GUI, but not with Unity over Ubuntu. This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrive…

I think Microsoft's low-level HW engineering skills are underappreciated. Sure, IOS and Android rule the world, but the responsiveness of a Surface tablet kills them both on that one axis. That said, IMO the problem is not so much that Unity exists, but that they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. To be fair, what G…

> they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines.

They actually did; they just ignored the feedback and insisted that Daddy Mark knows best, completely throwing away all of the reasons that Ubuntu is actually named Ubuntu (namely: they stopped listening to the community).

I was willing to forgive Unity, though (hell, I kinda liked it, at least on systems that could actually run it). It was the combination of repeated awesome-looking but inexplicably-stifled projects (Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android) and the Amazon Lens that resulted in me swearing off the community in which I was once happy to be a part.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#92

Post by digi_owl »

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 wrote: post #5

You reap what you sow – in this case by having people confused over needlessly controversial choice of title for a blog post. Personally I'm not invested in operating systems, so I do not care about their market share or anything of that sort. I have ended up using the dreaded Linux Desktop solely for the last decade, because it's what I'm most comfortable with (also, I can install it on my machine unlike OSX, which…

> You reap what you sow – in this case by having people confused over needlessly controversial choice of title for a blog post.

Never mind that the author greatly contributed to the whole problem way back when...

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#93

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

wink wrote: post #85
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like these really make me believe that it is people like you who are killing the Linux desktop. Of all the window managers and desktop environments I have tried the last years on Linux, Unity, Gnome3, and Cinnamon are the only ones that don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003. Those others might be enough for those people who have stopped adapting and like to be left alone under their rock, bu…

I think the problem here is if people were happy with what they had in 2003, why change it? Not everything UI-wise in 7 or later is better than in XP I'd say. And apparently many people agree. Actually I am still using 7 and all the UI stuff that's nixer than XP or even 2000 is just eyecandy and nothing "I would totally never go back". Because I would - if I needed a stable Windows that only came with XP's UI - so be…

If people were happy with Windows XP in 2003, why change it and install Linux? We deviated from what was good enough 15 years ago! Let's put XP back on the clients and Solaris back on the servers! /s

When I started using Linux, it was about thinking out of the box and about change. It had many exciting window managers that put everything in Windows to shame when it came to customizing and style.

Nowadays I have the feeling, Linux has become the resort of the grumpy and disenfranchized, clutching to whatever was cool when they were young. The levelheaded and progressive jumped ship to OSX and are now probably contemplating switching to Windows 10 after Apple dropped the ball for them. This leaves all Linux progress like Gnome and Systemd maintained by inept pompous hipsters.

/rant

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#95

Post by AnonymousPlanet »

throw2016 wrote: post #72
VonGuard wrote: post #6

I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. Couple this with the fact that for a decade, the actual GUI was tied very, very heavily to the apps. So you had to use Gedit in Gnome, or whatever the…

Curiously my experience of Unity on Ubuntu 16.04 is the exact opposite. It's by far the fastest Linux desktop I have tried and I have been tinkering with Linux desktops since the early 2000s. My experience has been so dramatically different from some of the negative reviews I had read online that I can only conclude these are from older buggy versions or perhaps mis-configured or non accelerated GUI drivers. For me i…

This! The negativity regarding Unity is hurting Linux. So many people I know who tried a switch in the last couple of years were put off Linux because their Linux-friends pushed them to Mate or Xfce, running on Arch, or something similar. Those friends heavily warned against Unity and Ubuntu as if they were the devil. Showing those who were interested in a switch what a modern Linux desktop looks and feels like was a revelation to them.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#96

Post by paulddraper »

VonGuard wrote: post #37
pjc50 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. Yes! Ironically this was what a lot of people hated about Microsoft, and why the XP->Vista and 7->8->10 changes were so unpopular. Everything moves around and works in a different way, imposing a re-learning cost. But the developers like it because they're bored with the old system and think the new one is better.

Exactly! Those keyboard shortcuts and menu positions are part of my daily WORKFLOW! Stop moving them around and changing them! It is utterly infuriating to have to relearn your desktop GUI behavior. Why is there no such thing as LTS for GUI interface paradigms? There should be an LTS interface version of every GUI.

Well, there is; it's "regular" OS LTS.

Ubuntu won't change the GUI during LTS (5 years).

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#97

Post by paulddraper »

aidenn0 wrote: post #63
wolfgke wrote: post #7

Quote from article: "The attitude of our community was one of engineering excellence: we do not want deprecated code in our source trees, we do not want to keep broken designs around, we want pure and beautiful designs and we want to eliminate all traces of bad or poorly implemented ideas from our source code trees. And we did. We deprecated APIs, because there was a better way." The Linux kernel only removes/changes…

The linux kernel is hard-core into not breaking backwards compatibility. 2/3 of Linus's rants targeting a kernel developer tend to be because they broke userspace. On the other hand, there is approximately zero chance that a dynamically linked executable from 10 years ago will run on my current system because the system libraries break backwards compatibility all the time. Drepper takes a lot of flak for this, but gl…

DVDs, printers, and to a lesser extent graphics have more issues for me than audio.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#98

Post by dTal »

jankotek wrote: post #48
blitzd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it works fine with XP, that was the target specs in 2001 when that OS was released. Maybe try a Linux distribution from 2001 and you'd have a fair comparison.

I remember how XP was received. It was slow as hell compared to Win98 and even to Windows 2000. And 256MB RAM is too little for XP, W2K would be probably fine.

I have successfully run XP on 96MB of RAM. It ran surprisingly okay on a fresh install. Multitasking, Firefox and everything. As it aged though it declined badly. XP never was very good at self-maintenance.

I have ironically had similar-to-worse results with running 2015 Android on 2011 hardware, which has 512MB of RAM. The cheek!

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#99

Post by jhoechtl »

AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #84
VonGuard wrote: post #6

I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. Couple this with the fact that for a decade, the actual GUI was tied very, very heavily to the apps. So you had to use Gedit in Gnome, or whatever the…

Comments like these really make me believe that it is people like you who are killing the Linux desktop. Of all the window managers and desktop environments I have tried the last years on Linux, Unity, Gnome3, and Cinnamon are the only ones that don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003. Those others might be enough for those people who have stopped adapting and like to be left alone under their rock, bu…

You forgot KDE/Plasma5. I think the most novel concepts are being developed there

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#100

Post by mos_basik »

mmphosis wrote: post #77

Ubuntu eases the transition because I don't have to think (too much) about partitioning the disk. As a "user", I really don't want to ever see disk partitioning software, ever! Although, now I wish /home was in a separate partition -- why wasn't that the default? I continually trip over the Super key which brings up the Unity version of Spotlight. I killed Spotlight on my Mac a long time ago. I killed whatever Unity…

>now I wish /home was on a separate partition

I feel you there. When I first started dipping my toes into Linux at age ~16, I remember the Ubuntu installer asking me all kinds of questions I didn't know the answer to, like "Would you like to repartition your disk?" "Would you like a logical partition or a physical partition?" "What disk would you like to install your bootloader on?" etc. I had no idea how to answer any of these and I just sort of went with the options that sounded safe to me.

It wasn't until several years and versions of Ubuntu later that I decided I wanted to try a different distro and realized how convenient it would have been if I had put /home on its own partition. The whole concept of "you can swap out your OS and leave your files alone" was incomprehensible to me at that point as a lifetime Windows user. Even if it had been the default to split up the partitions, I probably would have set it to stick with just one, because that's how Windows did it.

(Incidentally, I have vivid memories of my grandfather's Windows hard drive, which he had inexplicably partitioned up to at least G:\ and I think L:\. I still don't know why he did this and since he has passed, I probably never will. Our best guess is that it was a habit he picked up from some pre-Windows OS - he was an early tech adopter, but opinionated.)

>all those startup service managers

I haven't used desktop Ubuntu in a while, but after investing some time into grokking Arch and systemd, I'm pretty happy with my idling process list. I'm pretty sure I know what each of them are and how they got there. I'm young enough that I don't miss init, though, so maybe that's just naivete on my part and malicious gluttony on the part of systemd :)

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