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What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

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Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#191

Post by CaptSpify »

j3097736 wrote: post #140
julian_1 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But why switch to a tiling window manager when XFCE + dmenu + custom shortcuts is good enough?

I think people often forget: Do what works for you. If XFCE+ is good enough for you, then great! stick with it!

But if you want to try a different experience, or if you think that setup is inefficient (as I do), then try moving to something else!

What works for one person likely won't work for another.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#192

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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…

> 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.

As opposed to, for example, macOS, whose UI has changed almost nothing since OS X launched in 2001, and even then was not a dramatic departure from Classic which dates to the 1980s.

Because it's not broken and change for the sake of change is not an improvement.

There is nothing wrong with creating UI experiments, the problem is that they keep discontinuing support for the existing one which is not broken and people want to continue using. (Microsoft is even worse than Linux in this regard). If you want to create a new UI, create it independent of the old one and let people choose. If more people continue to choose the old one, you have lost. Try again until you have something which is enough better that it actually justifies relearning everything.

An example of this is that a few years ago everyone seems to have decided that 3D transitions are inherently necessary. Not "nice to have but you can turn it off if it causes trouble," but "if you don't have working 3D hardware you can't run this anymore."

Which would be almost excusable if the state of Linux 3D drivers wasn't notoriously bad and installing Linux on older PCs wasn't extremely common.

And they justify these things by pointing to Microsoft and Apple, but those companies have ulterior motives. Microsoft rearranges everything on a regular basis to pressure people to upgrade. Apple increases the hardware requirements for newer versions of their OS because they want you to buy a new Mac. This is not behavior worthy of being emulated.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#193

Post by bobajeff »

pinum wrote: post #184
bobajeff wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm confident the distribution I use isn't trying to collect, catalogue and sell my private info, or lock me into a service or product. So far it doesn't interfere with what I want in any way.

So yes I trust my distribution.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#194

Post by flukus »

feedjoelpie wrote: post #137
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…

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.

I agree. In the past I was always a kde guy but I've been running gnome for the last few weeks with a few tweaks and the dark theme on and I find it really beautiful and simple, especially the fonts. I'm a programmer who normally wouldn't notice if I was using a serif font or not, but whatever gnome uses by default is very pretty.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#196

Post by shp0ngle »

alkonaut wrote: post #118
bitwize wrote: post #115

What killed the Linux desktop? Not being preinstalled. For a bit of context from PC history, this is also what killed the GEM desktop, killed the OS/2 desktop, and damn near killed the Windows desktop until Microsoft put pressure on vendors to make a 386SX with VGA the entry-level option and ship Windows 3.0 with every unit. Preinstalls are an OS's golden ticket to adoption.

If one Linux with one desktop was widely preinstalled, that would help. That would have made that environment the target for desktop developers, which in turn would have added the pressure for backwards compatibility. Now, as a desktop developer I'm surely not targeting Linux desktop because it's not even a single target.

Ooohhh.

I still remember the time when I bought Acer netbook with pre-installed ubuntu.

It worked. Exactly for one day, before I accepted Ubuntu update, that broke my pc, because of some binary graphic driver.

I had to do some kernel magic to get it working again. On a pc with pre-installed Ubuntu, on day two. I wasn't very happy with that.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#197

Post by CaptSpify »

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…

I've had about 50/50 when it comes to sound. I don't know if it's certain chips or manufacturers or what, but I never really expect it to work for me OOTB.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#198

Post by CaptSpify »

ufo wrote: post #149
patrickaljord wrote: post #31

Nothing killed the Linux Desktop. Windows already won that war and it was good enough. Heck, even Apple and its billions couldn't get more than 5% market share worldwide. The next "war" moved to mobile and there linux is not doing that bad.

The Linux kernel is doing well on mobile but GNU/Linux and open source in general is doing terrible. The status quo right now is that mobile operating systems are super locked down and almost all the software you install on it is proprietary stuff you get from an app store.

Agreed. I'm currently looking for a new phone, and everything looks like a locked-down POS. I'd love an open, hackable, "actually linux" phone, but I don't know if one is available.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#199

Post by flukus »

CaptSpify wrote: post #198
ufo wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Linux kernel is doing well on mobile but GNU/Linux and open source in general is doing terrible. The status quo right now is that mobile operating systems are super locked down and almost all the software you install on it is proprietary stuff you get from an app store.

Agreed. I'm currently looking for a new phone, and everything looks like a locked-down POS. I'd love an open, hackable, "actually linux" phone, but I don't know if one is available.

I'm hoping the fairphone (https://shop.fairphone.com/en/) works out well myself, and that I'll be able to install something like ubuntu or sailfish on it.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#200

Post by adakbar »

herbst wrote: post #147
gens wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If XP was secure, performant on modern hardware, stable and supported by new programs i would still be using it. More then that the reason i quit windows98 was that warcraft 3 doesn't work on it. Windows 7 configuration menus are god awful and windows10 ones are far worse then that. You are making a fallacy in saying that old equals bad/ugly. XFCE is keeping it oldschool and can still look amazing (xubuntu looks grea…

Honestly gnome shell is the greatest thing ever. My focus and productivity skyrocketet. I see how people who would prefer to run XP dont like it. But no reason to make it bad.

I can agree on this, the booster was super key to show all window, I've never been this fast to context switch between window.
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