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

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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Linux community is like herding cats Stop trying to herd people? I didn't sign up for whatever agenda you're trying to advance, so of course I'm going to spit in your face when you try to tell me what to do.

Exhibit A

Proudly. If your agenda is to take away my customization and make the Linux desktop into something with broad mainstream appeal, then I proudly sabotage that.

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

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the owner's refusal to allow users to move that taskbar to the bottom of the screen made me give up on it altogether. You ...do know there are countless desktop environments and window managers just an apt-get away right? If that's too much for you, you could have literally chosen any other flavor. My mother has been happily using xubuntu for years. If she can manage, I think you can too.

A while ago when I used Linux I found that installing some alternate desktop environment usually messed up some default even if you switched back. I don't remember exactly but it'd be like, you start on GNOME, install KDE, switch back to GNOME but now your file explorer is Dolphin. Has that happened to you? Is that still a problem?

On a lot of distros, many DEs or WMs do have worse defaults or weird glitches that other, blessed ones do not. The dice may come up in your favor more often than not, but you're still definitely rolling them when you move away from a distro's favored set-up. There's a reason alternate "spins" (distro derivates, whatever you want to call them, I think that's the Ubuntu term) exist, with different default DEs or WMs—just installing those packages on the base distro may not provide a great out-of-the-box experience.

And yeah, the way settings work on Desktop Linux can lead to all kinds of weird stuff if you start actively using multiple environments. Should changing your keyboard layout in one DE affect all the others? Well, wait, which of multiple ways did you accomplish that change in keyboard layout? Should it affect bare terminals, outside the window server? Should some of those methods affect all of them, but other methods not? Which one "wins"? Was this other thing a DE setting, or an X-Window setting? Or neither? Or was it Wayland—wait a minute, some of these DEs run under Wayland and some under X-Window! Gee, surely that won't cause any settings conflicts or surprises.

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

#93
I used to use Linux desktop exclusively but mental and time cost of maintaining it just was just too high and eventually gave up.

It actually works great when it does, but more often than not something fails after updates. So I felt like a rolling a dice everytime I have to go though this.

There were problems with update process itself -- they tend to wait for users to confirm configuration overwrite/update/patch so when I attempted to perform update overnight, I often find it waiting for my input in the morning 30 percent into update process.

Ultimately I had enough of the frustration that I've stopped using it.

Where I actually need Linux, I can just use WSL. Windows has its fair share of the problems but I'm definitely not spending as much as time just to keep things running even through major updates.

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

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exhibit A

Proudly. If your agenda is to take away my customization and make the Linux desktop into something with broad mainstream appeal, then I proudly sabotage that.

That's not my agenda.

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

#95
post #60
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…

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…

And yet Windows was successful even when unstable. I would say that's not a hugely motivating factor for people. Many people turn on and off their computer when they want to use it and it's fine. Excessive stability isn't a major factor for most people and being perfectly stable wouldn't by itself make this the year of the Linux Desktop.

For this crowd it is important, of course, and I'd be deeply upset if my desktop crashed that often. That's not been my experience though.

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

#96

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…

> [I want] screen tearing to not happen on X11...

If you have AMD hardware that uses the 'amdgpu' driver, then -IME- enabling the TearFree option seems to completely eliminate tearing. (Though, I am using KDE, which _also_ has a "Make the compositor use vsync" option... which didn't actually eliminate tearing, when used by itself. But, there _may_ be confounders.)

Anyway. Drop this into a file named "$WHATEVER.conf" in '/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d' (or into your xorg.conf), and you should be good to go:

  Section "Device"
    Identifier "AMD"
    Driver "amdgpu"
    Option "TearFree" "on"
  EndSection
Alternatively, you could enable the setting with the 'xrandr' tool:

  xrandr --output $OUTPUT_NAME --set TearFree on
but that only sticks for as long as the affected X server stays up.

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

#97

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…

Putting the whole community's wood behind one arrow would be a great idea - if it was the right arrow. But the big teams of desktop developers have repeatedly run off and built things that they thought were shit hot, but were not what people actually needed to be productive (Unity, Gnome 3). It's only the "fragmentation" that has meant Linux hasn't ended up like Windows 11.

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

#98
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…

Isn't Android effectively a base level linux distro optimized for smartphones though? Providing some level of uniformity between devices like package management, etc.?

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

#99
The main problem of Linux on desktop is a severe lack of quality control and questionable usability pushed by people not using desktop and running mainly CLI. The issues addressed on desktops are not in correct priority, you should not polish "happy path" in the generalized public system. Corporation can easily work with "happy path"-only software because they can afford to train personnel, and they can afford to fix mistakes in systemic way. Generalized public system should not polish what is mostly working. It should eliminate low occurrence catastrophic failures, because when scaled to ten of millions those low probability failures tend to multiply a lot.

That's why I use console Linux every work day and enjoy it, and that's why I wouldn't touch Linux on a desktop with ten foot pole, because all my experiments in that area failed sooner or later. Also (surprise) shell Linux knowledge almost doesn't scale to the debugging GPU drivers, DE and X server issues. This is actually rather disconcerting feeling, when you have a decade of Linux experience but you look at crashing desktop GUI and understand that you have approximately as much understanding of the problem as a first time user.

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

#100
I don’t think Android is linux desktop, even not a linux mobile. Yes indeed, there is so called kernel there, but it wrapped with custom bootloader, custom apis, custom desktop and set of apps developed and managed by single corporation. Android of course inherit some of linux legacy - instability, inefficiency, inflexibility, tivolization. But half-bakeness, because we say so approach and 70s legacy are not there, due to market competition. When the corporation replace linux/drivers firmware blob with their own, Android will remain Android, and not Fuchisa Desktop.
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