131–140 of 172 posts
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> How do you think companies were using X Windows? By attaching thin clients to a server that was still under their own control, as opposed to making the whole company a serf to Microsoft.
Being a serf of UNIX vendors has always been a thing.
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…
They're completely different. Desktop Linux has APT, YUM, Snap, AppImage, FlatPak. Android has... APK. Desktop Linux has x11 vs wayland. Android has one renderer. ALSA/Pipewire/Pulse, what's the difference anyway? Will your favorite sound app work with all of them? Android has one sound API.
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…
>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.
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…
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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 D…
Says he sees the problems with the Linux desktop, and only lists one that isn't a problem to anyone actually using a Linux desktop. What about the herculean task of kernel maintenance? Central repository maintenance? There are tons of real problems we can discuss that aren't mentioned.
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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 D…
Yeah, I'm aware it's in the kernel, but it's only useful for PCs. So effectively it's a "desktop" problem in terms of people deciding to dedicate resources to it. And... hence why it breaks all the damn time.
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…
Exactly this. I remember when I upgraded Ubuntu 14 to Ubuntu 16 and the GUI stopped working and was dumped to the command line. Luckily I had a Linux guru around to fix it, because otherwise my only alternative would have been to reinstall it - seeing how many esoteric steps he did to debug and fix it there is no way I could have googled my way out of it.
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…
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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.
shrug You can have as much snark as you want. I specifically said that Linux should remain the platform of choice, just that the defaults should be stronger so that it's a more consistent and approachable platform for people. GNOME has made great advancements in this regard, which has been awesome to see.
Agreed.
> GNOME has made great advancements in this regard, which has been awesome to see.
I wasn't joking or being hyperbolic in my previous post. GNOME may have good defaults in certain cases but it ends there. User choice and customization are seen as design defects and anti-features. They really do believe that there is a One True Font and One True Theme out there and anything else is unsupported.
Sane defaults shouldn't come at the cost of user choice. If they do, there's little reason to use Linux over a Mac because the former essentially becomes Android style "look but don't touch" open source.