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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

#111

Post by Yizahi »

Yizahi wrote: post #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…

Also I want to add a somewhat representative anecdote story.

Preface - my corp issues same laptops to all engineers, including developers actually writing code. Codebase is 100% for Linux, we don't need write anything Windows related. Developers have complete freedom at what to use as a host system on the laptop, there are some guides to help set up host Linux, there are people who already did it and can give advise.

Around half of them just opt to host Windows 10 and run all their tools in the Linux virtual machine. That's a group of people who are second in world most suited to run Linux - actual Linux application devs. (first group would be Linux admins I think)

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

#112

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#113

Post by wing-_-nuts »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #102
wing-_-nuts wrote: post #62

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.

Hey, I have an idea! You can read the rest of what I posted instead of assuming I never did any of those things.

Hey I have an idea, instead of responding with hostile snark why don't you quote the bits where you supposedly did those things? Here I'll quote your message, feel free to highlight anything you like:

>I hate it, which is why I don't use it. Ubuntu got the closest for me, but the owner's refusal to allow users to move that taskbar to the bottom of the screen made me give up on it altogether. And unless it's a supported distro, I don't want it. Been burned too many times by pet projects that end up being abandoned. The other thing is that in all my years of using Windows and MacOS, I have NEVER had an issue where an upgrade borked being able to log into the desktop. This has happened more times than I remember on Linux.

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

#114

Post by mike_hock »

notriddle wrote: post #64
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…

> Familiarity, inertia and monopolistic competition Also compatibility, marketing, and being installed out of the box. In its heyday, Firefox had between 25% and 50% market share, depending on country. Compared to Internet Explorer 6, it was: * More stable. * Less buggy. * More secure. * More featureful. * Usually faster than IE6, though it took a bit longer to start. * Better development tools, which indirectly lead…

> monopolistic competition, marketing, and being installed out of the box

This I believe, and an integral part of "marketing" is a FUD campaign against free alternatives.

> Familiarity, inertia, compatibility

I used to think they were relevant, but it doesn't seem to match reality. Android phones were neither familiar to users of older phones, nor were they compatible with software made for other phones.

Windows breaks familiarity with each major version for seemingly no reason. (Not compatibility, though.)

Apps and websites constantly get redesigned for no reason. Doesn't seem to drive people away.

At the turn of the millennium, the reason Linux desktops were supposedly not accepted by users was the lack of eye candy. Do phone apps today have "eye candy"? Bland-looking single-color rectangular surfaces, absolutely minimal interfaces, a few straight lines here and there and mostly text unless there's photos or videos to show. Looks like OpenBox.

The only common theme is marketing, marketing and marketing. A free, unencumbered platform will never be mainstream, neither on the desktop nor on the phone. Because that will always be an untapped market that one can get into with lying, manipulative marketing tactics and a free platform will have neither the resources nor the gall to employ the same shady tactics to defend itself, but a proprietary platform will, and then it doesn't matter who wins because the challenger is just the same.

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

#115

Post by akelly »

It's not just that fragmentation results in lack of polish. Having many distros means that when I want to figure out how to do something obscure, or encounter an issue, there's less likely to be someone on my distro with the same problem. But more importantly, I often don't get any good results searching "*issue* *distro*", because the issue is at a different layer in the stack. I have to know whether it is a distro issue, desktop environment issue, kernel issue, systemd issue, X11 issue, etc, which is difficult for new users. Compared to Windows and Mac which aren't modular in this way and therefore don't have this problem.

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

#116

Post by dasil003 »

I think all the hand-wringing over fragmentation is misguided. Diversity is good. We have plenty of polished UX provided by big tech, but it comes with intractable downsides related to centralized control. Free and open source software provides a different tradeoff and value proposition, one that counteracts the natural forces towards market consolidation and centralized power that exist for software in a globally networked world. Yes, that means we have to work harder to motivate people to cooperate, but such is the cost of freedom.

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

#117

Post by rozhok »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #71

I've been using linux as my primary OS for over 20 years now. The rough edges are almost entirely gone and linux is absolutely a fantastic OS for everything but gaming, and even there it's getting better. 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…

You can play a huge amount of titles via SteamPlay/Proton: https://www.protondb.com/

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

#118

Post by thereisnospork »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #59
Barrin92 wrote: post #47

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…

Is that really an issue? You want to use Gnome? Use Gnome. You want to use KDE? Use KDE. I3? ditto. Etc. Oh, some random GTK app will look weird on KDE? Tough. Every Windows app looks different, and even MS's apps always felt out of place on their own OS. And with the proliferation of Electron apps, nothing ever looks "native" anymore. > while I don't know if anything that has been built 2 Ubuntu LTS releases ago sti…

>You want to use Gnome? Use Gnome. You want to use KDE? Use KDE. I3? ditto. Etc.

To play devil's advocate:

What do those even mean and why should I care? I want to view my files and folders and click a shortcut to run a program and install steam. And I want that process to be stable and smooth and be both logically transparent and consistent.

There's too much I have to critically compare and understand in my life to want to add 'desktop GUI flavor' to the list.

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

#119

Post by notriddle »

mrj wrote: post #87
notriddle wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Familiarity, inertia and monopolistic competition Also compatibility, marketing, and being installed out of the box. In its heyday, Firefox had between 25% and 50% market share, depending on country. Compared to Internet Explorer 6, it was: * More stable. * Less buggy. * More secure. * More featureful. * Usually faster than IE6, though it took a bit longer to start. * Better development tools, which indirectly lead…

Exactly. It's like saying if only Firefox had gotten rid of extensions so the UX was unified they could have taken over IE.

There is only one extension that ever really mattered: Firebug.

A lot of developers wound up using Firefox to develop web apps even when the web app was intended to be used in IE. That's important because it broke the vicious cycle where nobody used Firefox because nobody developed for Firefox and nobody developed for Firefox because nobody used it.

You might use other extensions, as do I, but this is such a deal-breaker that barely anything else matters. The browser that runs your dev tools will be able to run your app, obviously, so being the browser with the good dev tools is a tactic to make sure web pages will actually run in it.

The constant rhetoric around extensions is an irrelevant sideshow. It's the web pages that actually matter. Nobody would have bothered to use Firefox unless the majority of web pages they use work in it, and Firebug is the primary reason why so many web pages did work in it, along with Google strategically choosing to support Firefox as a way to hedge their bets against Microsoft making adversarial changes to IE to cut Google off.

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

#120

Post by _2paq »

Klonoar wrote: post #107
em-bee wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 different ways half-right is worse than doing it once correctly. The problem with Windows or Mac isn't that it looks, feels and works the same everywhere what's correct for you is not necesarily what's correct for me. the problem with windows/mac is very much that it doesn't work the way i want it to work. why even have multiple oerating systems at all, if we don't need choice? we could all be using windows. i don…

There is no reason there can’t be one agreed upon blessed way of doing things in Linux while still enabling users like you to have choice. Heavily enforced defaults are important for growth.

Yes, let's search for the One True Font, One True Theme, and Unicorns while we're at it. Oh, let's also pretend that we'll give users a choice. Well, technically, we will but we will make it "unsupported" and call it a hack.

Wait, I think that reminds me of a desktop environment.

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