Interesting, but as someone who develops on Linux all day long , I run Windows 10, not OSX. It's a much better host OS for Linux VMs.
What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
181–190 of 307 posts
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#182I 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…
Can someone please explain to me why everyone says that Gnome went off the rails? Gnome 3 to me was, except for leaving behind a lot of legacy systems, an extremely usable and downright pretty UI. Menu, search, windows, and virtual desktops all available from one keypress or one hotspot. I thought that was a stroke of genius myself.
My biggest problem with Gnome isn't even the UI, it's their constant attempts to break well-established APIs. Here's one well known instance:
https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685
Note the wording of the bug - they aren't just asking the app to adapt to a GNOME 3 change, they're asking it to do so by removing a feature that remains fully supported on other DEs. And if you read the comments, the justification is, "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately".
It was that incident that made me conclude that GNOME is a destructive force in the Linux (and, broadly, Unix-like) ecosystem these days, at least if you don't like monocultures.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, there is; it's "regular" OS LTS. Ubuntu won't change the GUI during LTS (5 years).
But that means all the software on your system will be 5 years old.
I installed Libreoffice 5.3 on my Ubuntu 16.04 LTS yesterday, from their PPA. I kept up to date with LO for 4 years in the same way when I was on 12.04. Same for PostgreSQL. There are plenty of PPAs maintained by the developers of single applications and they tend to support the LTSrd for a while.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#184The people I know who use desktop Linux love their Linux rigs a whole lot more than my Windows and Mac acquaintances enjoy their computers--which in many cases just borders on tolerance, especially with Windows 10. Maybe software needs something beyond market share, sort of like what Bhutan did with Gross National Happiness. We'll rank products based on how much people enjoy them and then see who's the dominant deskt…
I enjoy having a machine that ultimately I control. You just can't get the same level of control with Windows, Mac, Android or iPhone. You constantly have to wrestle your wants with the wants of the platform venders. A key area where this is most apparent these days is privacy. If you want privacy you have to keep a really close eye on Microsoft, Apple and Google every update. With a Linux Server/Desktop I'm free fro…
Do you trust everyone who contributes to, reviews, and maintains the package management infrastructure you use?
Do you ever find the feeling of control challenged when you want to upgrade an application you use without upgrading the entire OS in lockstep, or vice versa?
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#185I 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…
> I could put Ubuntu on a 2001 laptop and be completely fine, fast enough, usable enough to do just about everything I needed.
This use case is an edge case, and you could still serve it by using a non-default desktop (like lubuntu). Laptops from 2001 have super-weak cpus and gpus, and aren't a representative sample of desktop users.
At one of the two companies I work for, more than half the developers use Ubuntu, and all-but-one (me) use Unity and like it. I use KDE there because of old-school configurability, but after a couple of years of dealing with KDE's bugginess, it's time to move on, methinks.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#186I 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…
I don't think it's the gui. I'm a relatively savvy user running Debian on a Thinkpad for more than five years now. Printing is still touch and go. I spent countless hours to get sleep working correctly. It is broken now and I don't have the energy to fix it knowing that nothing I do is guaranteed to last through the next apt update. Wifi will mysteriously refuse to connect with some routers (a daily struggle at the u…
Just as a counterpoint, I use Debian on a Thinkpad as well, and while I don't print, wifi and sleep work without problems, and so did a SIM card I put into it for 3G - it 'just worked', and the only config I needed to do was pick which one of my ISP's "AP" names to use. That was surprisingly easy.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 would be fine with not getting new OS features. The problem is that the repo system ties application software versions to OS versions. 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`,…
> Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it.
I much prefer the repo system to the Windows "I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe, and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad?"
> it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate,
Yes, because every application needs its own phone-home updater (with questionable security), with bonus "value-add" crapware popping up to remind me it exists.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#188I 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…
> Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. Completely agree, and as a user of Desktop Linux for a very long time - I always felt that Linux GUI have been inferior to the options available on Mac and Windows. It's not for everyone, but I found a personal solution with tiling window managers (Xmonad, I3) and related tools (suckless' dmenu). They r…
That's not my experience. I switched fron XP to Ubuntu 8.04 and I remember how the DE felt much better. I could do everything with half the clicks. Windows control panel dialog were so clunky in comparison. Four years later I discovered that KDE shares that clicks problem with Windows and I went back to Gnome after a few months. I'm on Gnome flashback now and specifically a Gnome 3 tweaked to look like Gnome 2 from 10.04 plus Compiz for the 3D desktop transitions (the cube).
I used Windows 8 and 10 on friends' laptops and I'm not impressed. BTW, everybody hated 8 because of the changes in the UI. They tend to be OK with 10, but it looks so old to me, like a window manager for some 16 colors home computer in the 80s (I used them back then) with 1080p resolution. Control Panel's dialogs in most cases are still the same from XP and I can't understand why they didn't redesigned them. They feel more and more out of place in the UI.
Mac's UI is somewhat similar to Gnome (actually the other way around, I think) but I never liked the menu at the top and the top bar. That's why I removed both from my Gnome and I never bought a Mac since the very beginning (I moved everything from the top bar to the bottom one.) Mac's UI feels zippier though, that's the advantage of building both the hw and the sw.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be fine with not getting new OS features. The problem is that the repo system ties application software versions to OS versions. 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`,…
> Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it. I much prefer the repo system to the Windows "I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe, and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad?" > it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate,…
Yep, it's bad.
On Windows I wind up using http://ninite.com/ for my "package manager" equivalent and hope the software I want is there.
Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's the gui. I'm a relatively savvy user running Debian on a Thinkpad for more than five years now. Printing is still touch and go. I spent countless hours to get sleep working correctly. It is broken now and I don't have the energy to fix it knowing that nothing I do is guaranteed to last through the next apt update. Wifi will mysteriously refuse to connect with some routers (a daily struggle at the u…
Just as a counterpoint, I use Debian on a Thinkpad as well, and while I don't print, wifi and sleep work without problems, and so did a SIM card I put into it for 3G - it 'just worked', and the only config I needed to do was pick which one of my ISP's "AP" names to use. That was surprisingly easy.
As another counter-counterpoint: I use Debian on a T460, and sound and wifi don't work out of the box. While it may be OOTB for some people that doesn't mean it's everyone. I think I've only had one laptop in the past 10 years (~4 laptops) that has worked OOTB with Linux.