71–80 of 172 posts
I'm building a gaming computer at the end of this year and I'm strongly considering just throwing linux on it instead of windows as well, because if protondb is to be believed most games run perfectly fine on linux these days.
My personal experience in the last ~5 years or so is increasingly reduced friction in adopting a Linux desktop for non-technical users as companies go towards SaaS.
Firefox ends up being simply a differently shaped search bar.
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…
Why would I compare Linux distros? You can literally turn any one of them into another, all the packages are there (prebuilt or source). With some exceptions, of course. I had ALL the Desktop Environments I could find installed at one point and was switching between them every other day. Compiz effects were the shizz! But I don't have the time/patience/motivation for that now :D
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…
Once Windows stopped having shit-tier stability, some time around late XP or early Win7, Desktop Linux replaced it as the least-stable and buggiest of the three GUI desktop operating systems I regularly use. Even before that, it nearly matched it in instability, if you counted X-Window crashes as the same as a bluescreen or kernel panic (and if you're doing GUI work, they're close to equivalent) The kernel might be O…
In contrast I haven't had an X-Windows crash in years and years. The closest thing I had was on a Dell XPS 13 and it wasn't a "crash" per se but the issue was very similar to the Windows issue I had with the MSI, the machine just totally locked up (ctrl-alt-backspace had no effect) when I plugged a USB-C to ethernet adapter into it. Unplug the adapter everything was fine.
On Windows I have to kill explorer.exe because the systray crashes at least once a week. (taskkill /f /im explorer.exe; start explorer.exe is always in my Powershell history.) And that's not the only example of more userspace instability, I could go on and on. There's instability I run into on Xfce but it's usually pretty isolated, this one component has a problem, it's not like Xfce is just randomly locking up all the time the way explorer.exe is.
For example I have this issue on Xfce with a logitech wireless keyboard which starts having input issues but unplugging the wireless dongle and plugging it back in fixes it. And that sort of thing happens with most peripherals on any platform.
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…
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…
That would give many distros much less of a reason to exist, and could instead be configuration profiles for GNOME, KDE, etc that could easily be loaded on -any- distro. It would also allow the configurations to be iterated on independent of distros which would eventually lead to much higher levels of polish.
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…
> ... intuitive and self discoverable it is not.
As a multi-decade Linux coder, I fully concur.
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…
There are way too many distros that are half baked trash that make it into bad listicles returned in search results.
The Linux community sabotages itself.
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…
Call me a snob, but I bet no small number of Android users would have picked an iPhone if it were cheaper.
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…
I think it would help a lot if it were the norm for DEs to come with a bunch of prefab configurations right out of the box, which the community could then add to. It'd be cool if configs could be exported and shared too. That would give many distros much less of a reason to exist, and could instead be configuration profiles for GNOME, KDE, etc that could easily be loaded on -any- distro. It would also allow the confi…