171–180 of 307 posts
Something killed the Linux desktop? Its usage is growing, while MacOS stagnation causes people to abandon it, yes you guessed it - often for Linux. UPDATE: Oh, after noticing the date and the author, I realized, my suspicions were right. I expected the piece like this to be written by Miguel de Icaza. And here you go, it's indeed his rant. From 4.5 years ago... Just skip it and read something more to the point, which…
The Linux Desktop environment contributed to pushing me to OpenBSD plus cwm, or Windows for when I need to use it for work.
Office. If Linux desktop had microsoft office, I could use it. Libre office is an unmitigated, ugly pile of shit.
True. And I do agree about Libre office, first thing I uninstall on Ubuntu. But you can try and use WPS office. It's made by some Chinese company, it's fast and it is compatible with Office files. I had one of my Linux epiphanies with WPS. I got a Powerpoint presentation by email, I plugged the videobeam HDMI adapter to my laptop, pressed the Fn-F8 keys to change from mirroring to using two separate displays, opened…
It's not enough to be able to open 99% of the files properly, the main problem that makes libreoffice/openoffice unusable for me is that if I open a MS Office Word or Excel file, change a single character, and send it back, the file is likely to have other unintended changes in formatting or layout.
Nothing killed the Linux desktop. At the end of the day, it all comes down to the fact that the masses only have two options: Windows or Mac. People become set in their ways using a particular system either at home or work and there is basically no reason that they will ever be exposed to a Linux desktop, and if they are, they will find it just as impossible to use as any other OS that isn't the one they've used excl…
Not really, CS students have usually been exposed to Linux at the university and very few of them still choose it as an operating system.
In addition to that, some CS students at some schools are exposed to the linux command line, and even less are exposed to linux desktop environments because most CS students have grown up using Windows or Mac and the curriculum is nearly always structured in such a way that it is unnecessary for the student to install a linux DE in order to do their work.
Finally, I'm not willing to blindly accept your claim that "very few of them still choose it", if you have some way to substantiate that claim I'd be interested in the details, but my experience says quite a few of them do choose it, though I'd certainly be willing to yield my anecdotes to some actual data.
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True. And I do agree about Libre office, first thing I uninstall on Ubuntu. But you can try and use WPS office. It's made by some Chinese company, it's fast and it is compatible with Office files. I had one of my Linux epiphanies with WPS. I got a Powerpoint presentation by email, I plugged the videobeam HDMI adapter to my laptop, pressed the Fn-F8 keys to change from mirroring to using two separate displays, opened…
Is it really compatible with Office files? It's not enough to be able to open 99% of the files properly, the main problem that makes libreoffice/openoffice unusable for me is that if I open a MS Office Word or Excel file, change a single character, and send it back, the file is likely to have other unintended changes in formatting or layout.
However, it has been compatible enough for all I have done in the last year and a half.
If some file doesn't open or save correctly, a bug report can be filled here: http://wps-community.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=10
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You forgot KDE/Plasma5. I think the most novel concepts are being developed there
KDE has always tried to play catch-up with Windows regarding style, leaving users in some kind of uncanny valley. And I'm not very impressed with what I've seen lately in KDE. That said, I'm hopeful something useful will come out of it.
I've made peace with Breeze Dark at the moment, it's not so bad.
But optics aside KDE5 is mighty powerful. Dolphin is a great filemanager and I'm missing it on Windows. On the fly ssh/sftp/webdav is also a great feature.
The Plasma NM applet for NetworkManager is also great - especially if you often change settings for interfaces.
The menu works fine, searching is almost instant. I'm using the current KDE from Arch Linux and it's pretty stable for me.
Overall I'm happy and I'm not looking at Unity - that also has it's merits but the whole Nautilus/gvfs ecosystem was kind of unstable for me. YMMV.
What I dislike about KDE are the widgets - besides the essential stuff like time,battery everything feels clunky and slow - the system for adding them is also not so great. I've also never used 'Activities' the whole concept feels pretty much out of place. I'm also setting up my Desktop as background and ignore the "folder in a plasmoid widget" story that is bullshit IMHO.
I'm also avoiding akonadi/kmail/korganizer etc.pp - these might have improved but still felt clumsy last time I looked.
IMHO it's getting better but it's no silver bullet. For most users the default presentation and UI and settings are just confusing and ugly IMHO - if you look past that you will find a lot of good, stable and well thought ideas.
I'm running KDE now on all my Desktop Linux boxes and I can't remember the last time I had some hassle with it. It does what I want, it goes mostly out of my way and it doesn't look too bad.
For all the stuff it only uses 300-400MB RSS memory after a fresh reboot with a few Konsole windows running.
I don't remember the details, but I do recall being flabbergasted that the latest KDE couldn't run the eclipse IDE properly. Dialogs were missing entire fields. It seemed so odd that made me doubt myself and check the same dialog on OS X to be sure. Something to do about Gnome overhauling its style system to use CSS, which affected some other library in KDE that implements SWT via some gnome library, or ... gah who e…
But I feel your pain, it's not new - there is a name for it: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html - it's still true :(
Office. If Linux desktop had microsoft office, I could use it. Libre office is an unmitigated, ugly pile of shit.
I have never had any problems with the word processor and spreadsheet in Libre Office (the only two in the suite that I've used). Sincere thanks to the developers.
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> 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.
Having worked at Microsoft, I'm convinced that, internally, running applications through the Microsoft menu jumbler is the main justification for most upgrades.
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But that means all the software on your system will be 5 years old.
Yes...that's the downside of LTS. You can't get the new features because they may break the old ones. If by "LTS" you simply mean "more backwards compatible" well I agree and pray for the day.
I want to install SomeApp. My options are:
* `apt-get install someapp` and get v0.6.0.1abzrhotfix2 from 5 years ago
* Google to see if a third party repackaging repo exists, decide whether I trust the maintainer of that repo with root access to my machine, `apt-add-repo blah blah`, `apt-get update && apt-get install someapp`, hope that apt works and doesn't spit out a bunch of "Depends: blah blah but it is not going to be installed, you have held broken packages"
* Go to someapp.com, download someapp.deb if it exists
* Try to install it with the GUI, get an error, use dpkg -i instead, find out it has a bunch of dependencies, install them and hope they're abi compatible, also hope I don't get "Errors while processing:"
* Download source code, learn the flavour-of-the-month C++ build system, try to compile, fail, try to install dependencies, some fail because my distro only provides incompatible forked versions for political reasons, have to download the source for those too, have to either build statically or use LD_PRELOAD hacks
Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it. It will probably work even if I have a rather old version of the OS, it almost certainly won't conflict with anything else I have installed, it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate, and I definitely won't need to google any command line flags. And when I do upgrade my OS, I probably won't be forced to upgrade the app too if I've found a specific version that works exactly how I need it to.