Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 172 posts

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#41

Post by Blikkentrekker »

There seem to be two kinds of “Linux users”: those that constantly think about Windows, compare their operating system to Windows, and seem to think only “Linux” and “Windows” exists, and those that forget Windows exists and mostly compare different Unix flavors with one another.

Theo de Raadt had some merit when he said that many “Linux users” seem to talk more about Windows than anything else and don't really like Unix as much as that they hate Windows.

But I also find that the latter group rarely even mentions “Linux” that much, which mostly seems to be used as “not-Windows”.

This article too is mostly about Windows.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#42

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

bbertelsen wrote: post #24

PopOS needs an honorable mention here for the work it's done with pop shell for linux desktop. PopOS has been my daily driver for 3 years, pop shell is icing on the cake. Nvidia drivers baked in too!

Also on PopOS for a couple of years now. It just works and it's pleasant to use.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#43

Post by Blikkentrekker »

idle_zealot wrote: post #22

If the Linux desktop consolidates/unifies around one option I’d probably stop using it. The primary reason I use Linux on my desktop is so that I can use my niche window manager of choice as a first-class citizen, rather than hacking reasonable window management into the system with scripts on top of a bad-by-default window manager. If I can’t do that anymore I might as well use macOS with yabai and get the broader a…

I've no idea why so many people expect completely different Unix-clones with completely different origins that simply share one component between them, which they also all heavily modify, to somehow give up their own identity and merge.

It's probably simply because others all call them “Linux”, but they rarely even call themselves that. One cannot easily find the word “Linux” on the websites of “Fedora” or “Ubuntu” for instance and they simply call themselves that.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#44

Post by runjake »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #27

KDE is the most fully featured Linux DE, and it's leaps and bounds above Windows's (WAY better file manager, better launcher, more features, and even less bugs somehow). The other day, my Windows 10's explorer.exe crashed when the file manager tried to load a directory, which is something that used to happen in Vista and hasn't happened in KDE for years IME.

Every default KDE install I've done comes with a default theme that is hideous and looks like it is designed by amateurs (I realize this is subjective, but it's also a fairly common complaint).

However, I always hear people sing the praises of its stability.

Is there a good theme/font/icon pack that you like that makes it look more polished without a lot of fussing on the end users' part?

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#45

Post by usrn »

sushisource wrote: post #39
idle_zealot wrote: post #22

If the Linux desktop consolidates/unifies around one option I’d probably stop using it. The primary reason I use Linux on my desktop is so that I can use my niche window manager of choice as a first-class citizen, rather than hacking reasonable window management into the system with scripts on top of a bad-by-default window manager. If I can’t do that anymore I might as well use macOS with yabai and get the broader a…

I agree that the customization is a huge draw for me. But... I also want things like hibernate to just work, screen tearing to not happen on X11, etc etc. The polish is absolutely not there, and I agree w/ the article that's a result of the fragmented ecosystem. If the Linux community could agree to invest in the underlying APIs for desktop stuff, it seems we'd be in a much better place and still have lots of customi…

Hibernate is all in the kernel. You trigger it by writing to a file in /sys. Your DE choice has nothing to do with this.

Most things on Linux are actually like this, where everything is in the kernel or some other small project and the DE just adds a wrapper GUI (or sometimes a management deamon) and really has absolutely nothing to do with how the thing works.

And thank goodness for that because all of the popular DEs use terrible window managers. I wouldn't bother with X11 if those were the only functional choices.

Also some people (like me) really don't mind tearing but can't stand an extra frame of latency when we're typing. It's nice to have options since no one agrees on everything.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#47

Post by Barrin92 »

Much of the Linux desktop is balkanized and fragmentation is indeed a huge issue. People's obsession with choice is irritating given that doing more or less the same thing in 10 different ways half-right is worse than doing it once correctly. The entire distro-zoo built on top of the same distributions with different DE's on top of it is an example. The problem with Windows or Mac isn't that it looks, feels and works the same everywhere. That's what most people want, they don't want to spend hours tinkering with their UIs, they want to get work done.

It's not even right to compare Linux to Windows, or maybe even call Linux distros operating systems in a strong sense because they don't provide genuinely stable interfaces. People often remark on alleged benefits of open source software such as compatibility, yet it's Windows where I can click on a 20 year old executable and it runs, while I don't know if anything that has been built 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago still works.

It's funny that one of the things that has actually driven Linux adoption is Proton. As one blogger a few months ago remarked, Win32 is basically the stable Linux userland ABI.

https://sporks.space/2022/02/27/win32-is-the-stable-linux-us...

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#48

Post by pjmlp »

mrj wrote: post #30

Nonsense. There are billions of Android devices sold and customers don't seem too bothered by its fragmentation. They continue to buy Android devices en mass. So it seems fragmentation has many problems but that alone won't prevent people from using a device. I think the author believes that a critical mass of Linux desktop users will create enough interest in polish and solving problems for end users, so therefore b…

Because Android is the only viable alternative for those that either can't or won't buy an iPhone.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#49

Post by fnord123 »

cm2187 wrote: post #23

I get (and hate) the fact that Microsoft is pushing hard for the desktop to become a light client integrated in their cloud, but isn’t apple doing exactly the same? I don’t own a mac but my iphone nags me all the time to use apple’s cloud services for everything and I understand apple is making MacOS converge to iOS. The obstacle to switching to linux for me is not too many distributions, it is that I have to relearn…

> until windows becomes really user hostile (I see it coming but not yet there

You are a boiled frog.

Re: I love the Linux desktop, but that doesn't mean I don't see its problems

#50

Post by jotm »

night-rider wrote: post #33
xalava wrote: post #19

As a desktop, Linux is now fully functional for most users. I know administrations running on Linux, law firms, and even my dad. Beginner users don't care about choices, they get Linux Mint or similar with LibreOffice and Firefox and they are good to go for most of their tasks. For advanced users, the abundance is a key benefit of this ecosystem. No company is fully focused on the desktop OS, and I don't see why they…

The thing about Linux is that it’s hackable and you can customise it to your liking. I’ve been using it for about a decade and the only thing it can’t do is run iTunes so I have a virtual machine for Windows stuff. It’s worth having a separate Linux box where you can tinker with new software and customisations without those changes affecting your daily driver OS. I found that over time the more customisations you do…

What I would love is easy GPU (and other hardware) passthrough to the (Windows) VM. You can already use "real" partitions on separate drives to maximize performance. Graphics is the only thing that's complicated.

Tbh, I only tried it on a laptop and it was hell, it ended up needing a mountain of configuration and software just to pass an nVidia GPU (fortunately a Quadro, which is slighly easier) to Windows, which has the software that needs it the most.

Is it easier on desktop computers with an IGP and a discrete card, or two graphics cards? Or do you still need to fuck around with the VBIOS, fight with power management and hybrid modes (I guess not?), use Looking Glass/RDP/dummy display/DP/HDMI plug and a ton of configuration that sometimes fails after updates?

Guess I will try it again on my next computer, which must be a powerful Ryzen build.

Post reply on HN