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2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

justingarrison.com

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Re: 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

#91
Until Acrobat, Photoshop, and Illustrator work in Wine, it's a hard no.

Word and Excel are good :) plus there are tolerable replacements. Outlook is buggy as hell, but evolution can do its job.

But when I need to fill out and digitally sign a PDF form - something that should be an easy and mundane task - the entire Linux ecosystem fails me.

Also, task prioritization is still horrible. I fire up a high CPU background task and the mouse cursor stutters? (in GNOME)

Re: 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

#92

Is there any Linux distribution with MacOS levels of reliability, simplicity, and productivity, that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full, random things like thunderbolt docks not working, or sleep states being faulty (or the machine not working properly after waking from sleep), or external monitor resolutions being wrong, and monitor scaling working properly when you have two monitors wit…

> without the boot partition getting full

This is very annoying. Some distributions are able to boot directly from the main partition, without a need for a separate /boot though, even with Btrfs. This is the case for the computer I'm writing this comment with running openSUSE Tumbleweed, I think I had that with Debian or Ubuntu in the past. [a]

> sleep states being faulty (or the machine not working properly after waking from sleep)

> or external monitor resolutions being wrong

Fine on my computers too.

> monitor scaling working properly when you have two monitors with different resolutions?

I gave up temporarily on this. It seems to work well on Wayland but I can't bear the blurry fonts that comes with fractional scaling on Wayland (and this is not just Linux, I think macOS is like this too), and I'm still on X11 the scaling is not very adaptative. HOWEVER KDE is getting proper fractional scaling support just right now [1]:

> “What does this do?” you might ask. It allows the Qt toolkit to turn on its pre-existing fractional scaling support on Wayland that it always had on X11. No more rendering to an integer size and then scaling down! This should result in Qt apps that are scaled to anything other than 100%, 200%, or 300% scale having better performance, less visual blurriness, and lower power usage.

And KDE on Wayland may be usable now, so that might be the thing that makes me switch in the coming months.

[1] https://pointieststick.com/2022/12/16/this-week-in-kde-wayla...

[a] edit: by the way, I just installed Debian on an old x86 tablet that was running Ubuntu (because i386 is not supported anymore, and recent versions of Debian are way better than recent versions of Ubuntu anyway). It had a separate /boot on Ubuntu, I installed Debian in a Btrfs subvolume, its /boot is there so now the separate boot partition is completely useless and I will get rid of it. So I can confirm it works on Debian too.

Re: 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

#94

If I'm honest, Linux is...exhausting. I'm technically proficient, but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script. Software updates rarely work. There are random crashes that take hours to fix. I'm about to give in the towel and get a Mac. I can get it to work because the terminal doesn't scare me, but there's no way I…

>Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script.

I just checked on my Macbook and I couldn't find any option to change scroll speed. So it's more that on Linux you _can_ create a bash script to do just about anything even when it's not a feature the OS has. Unlike others where it's either a simple UI button or you just can't do it.

Re: 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

#95

If I'm honest, Linux is...exhausting. I'm technically proficient, but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script. Software updates rarely work. There are random crashes that take hours to fix. I'm about to give in the towel and get a Mac. I can get it to work because the terminal doesn't scare me, but there's no way I…

If I'm honest, Linux is...exhausting. I'm technically proficient, but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script.

A. I'm looking at pointer speed section in Mouse Preference in Control Center. It's pretty simple. It give acceleration and sensitivy.

B. Just about every GUI aims for decent defaults and doesn't allow endless customization and such customization generally isn't a beginner task.

I've used the Linux desktop for ten years (Mint then Ubuntu-Mate). Haven't customized anything with a bash script for many years. It is currently clearer how to do things than Windows - it's fricken TWO start menus jumping over each other.

Re: 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

#96

Is there any Linux distribution with MacOS levels of reliability, simplicity, and productivity, that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full, random things like thunderbolt docks not working, or sleep states being faulty (or the machine not working properly after waking from sleep), or external monitor resolutions being wrong, and monitor scaling working properly when you have two monitors wit…

I believe the bigger "problems" happen when a random laptop is used instead of the few that are rock solidly supported by major distros. I am the same BTW, I usually buy a laptop that maybe kinda supported and then cross my fingers and hope that it works. Then I start fixing those issues that can be fixed or create little workarounds around those that can't. For my wife I just bought a Dell XPS and that was that, no tweaks or workarounds necessary.

Re: 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

#97

Is there any Linux distribution with MacOS levels of reliability, simplicity, and productivity, that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full, random things like thunderbolt docks not working, or sleep states being faulty (or the machine not working properly after waking from sleep), or external monitor resolutions being wrong, and monitor scaling working properly when you have two monitors wit…

I occasionally try a Linux distro on a new computer that I'm building, like Ubuntu and Mint, and so far I've never been able to get it running satisfactorily without any major problems.

Last time, I was using an Intel barebones NUC for a stepmania setup, and ran into major problems with both audio and display resolution. Gave up and went to Windows 10, no major issues there setting it up, though the occasional boot screen interstitial is very annoying.

Re: 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

#98

Strange article trying to extrapolate a very biased subpopulation and grasping at other aspects to claim this year was "the year of Linux on the desktop". Unix was already dominating anything non-personal and non-mobile. Personal use outside enthusiasts and devs is still a blip on the radar. If anyone thinks otherwise, ask yourself how Windows continues to get away with such consumer-unfriendly practices.

Linux != Unix

While that's true, there is an exception for Huawei EulerOS 2.0 on Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm

I don't think it was renewed, though.

Re: 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

#99

If I'm honest, Linux is...exhausting. I'm technically proficient, but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script. Software updates rarely work. There are random crashes that take hours to fix. I'm about to give in the towel and get a Mac. I can get it to work because the terminal doesn't scare me, but there's no way I…

If I'm honest, Linux is...exhausting. I'm technically proficient, but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script. A. I'm looking at pointer speed section in Mouse Preference in Control Center. It's pretty simple. It give acceleration and sensitivy. B. Just about every GUI aims for decent defaults and doesn't allow endl…

Should have been clearer: mousewheel scroll speed, which there's no way to control from the GUI.

Re: 2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bugs? sounds like they misconfigured their OS Linux is not a commercial product that'll suit everyone all at once, you need to learn about its components, linux is just a kernel If your argumentation is "various linux bugs", then you should stick to Windows, it has nice "various windows bugs", or macos, it has nice "various macos bugs" There must be a reason why linux empowers the world from micro controllers to data…

In principle I would love to use Linux, as the developer experience isn’t great on Windows, and I would rather not be tied into expensive Apple computers. However, I don’t want to learn about components of my operating system, that is below my pay grade. I’m not trying to spread FUD, I’m speaking firsthand on some of the experiences my colleagues have had with their brand new $3000 business Thinkpads running all mann…

I think you have some serious rose tinted glasses on if you are positing that these fixing OS bug scenarios are limited to Linux and do not also commonly occur on proprietary OS. The QA on Microsoft releases has been awful in recent years.
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