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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?

#121

Post by cdfuller »

Gigachad wrote: post #94
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #39

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.

I was able to find it on the latest macos by opening up preferences and searching for "scroll". It's under Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad/Mouse Options

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

#122

Post by ckolkey »

Gigachad wrote: post #94
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #39

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.

You definitely can for both mouse and trackpad

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

#123

Post by LarryMullins »

JadeNB wrote: post #85
LarryMullins wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no singular 'linux experience', all the problems you list are expected problems with some software on linux, but work just fine with other software systems on linux. Unfortunately many of the defaults chosen by Ubuntu are very poor and give bad first impressions. I think that recommending Ubuntu is an anachronism from the mid to late 00s. Experience makes it all much easier, simply because you learn which sof…

> I think that recommending Ubuntu is an anachronism from the mid to late 00s. What would you recommend as a modern-day user-friendly Linux experience? I've been looking for something not too demanding to put on an old X220.

To techies who are interested in using Linux, I personally recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it has up-to-date packages and is relatively stable. Debian Stable is a good choice if you're insensitive to outdated packages. Debian Sid is alright, but in my experience has more breakage than Tumbleweed and recovery from that breakage requires more expertise (Tumbleweed automatically creates btrfs snapshots before and after every package manager action, making it easy to roll back any mistakes or bad upgrades.)

To the average Joe Blow, I don't recommend any Linux distro. I only give recommendations about Linux to people who already want to use Linux for their own reasons; I don't evangelize it to people who are already content with Windows or Macs. For such people, Windows or Macs are a better choice.

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

#125

Post by fearface »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #39

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…

I fully agree to that experience. Next thing I tried was to have three screens with different DPI’s. It’s possible (that’s a lie, since you can’t adjust DPI and scaling properly in Linux at all, you’ll end up with a half working ugly system and irrational behavior when you move windows around), but sadly my notebook needs to work in more than one place…

I’ve invited a a long time Linux user who claimed to never had any problems whatsover to have a look. His verdict was that I should have only one external screen and use the same screen in the different places.

This stuff works with Windows and Mac out of the box.

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

#126

Post by iforgotpassword »

taurath wrote: post #107
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #39

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…

It always feels like a build-it-yourself vehicle. Using it as a daily driver when you need to get to work on time is not advised. Even when you get it running for a while, the breakage is inevitable, and you'll be under the hood. It is really cool if you love to tinker. Its an OS with a lower level of abstraction, and one that is less productive overall for most users, especially anyone who needs things to just work…

I work on Linux for Linux. All I use is terminals, jetbrains and Firefox, plus a million command line tools. And maybe the occasional gimp or VLC. Nothing ever breaks for me. I've been dist-upgrading the same install for over ten years now.

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

#127

Post by aussiesnack »

LarryMullins wrote: post #109
hyperpape wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no singular 'linux experience' True, there’s two: 1. Complaining about your experience, only to be told that someone else doesn’t have problems because they’re better at it than you. 2. Being the guy who says he’s better.

And then there's this guy, who gets mad at people who share positive experiences because he thinks the discussion is the rightful territory of those who want to complain.

The apparently innocent "sharing" of positive experiences - so sweet! so nice! - is from Linux self-identifiers all too often a very crude backhanded "you're wrong about the problems you claim to have with Linux, and if you're not wrong, then you're at least thick or lazy".

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

#128

Post by Gordonjcp »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #39

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…

Exhausting compared to what?

If you think that Ubuntu has poor user-friendlyness wait until you try this new "Windows 10" thing everyone seems to be on about.

You have to click through about ten pages of menus just to set up the network, and if you get anything wrong the error message is just along the lines of either "Sorry, that didn't work. Please try again!" or "Error -X8004a119af3c occurred", neither of which are particularly helpful. It doesn't come with a usable shell. It doesn't even come with ssh, or zip, or Python.

You're expected to interact with the entire thing by clicking on page after page after page of little coloured squares that aren't meaningfully labelled. Why is a user interface designed like a 1980s "My First Video Game" project supposed to be good?

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

#129

Post by joe_the_user »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #99
joe_the_user wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure, but that is a fairly obscure setting that I don't think merits your earlier build-up "Something as simple as...".

On the one hand, I'd certainly admit Linux has "warts". It's GUI is perfectly usable and clear - it's more now what one is doing than the horror that is Windows 11 imo (and I'm working on that occasionally now). But the warts of Linux are accentuated by the OS attracting a certain kind of "OCD" user who will tell you how terrible it is for lacking X utterly obscure feature.

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

#130

Post by compumike »

Out of curiosity I just pulled User-Agent stats from my “Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns” post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081943 that was #1 on Hacker News on July 13, 2022. Of 38595 clicks that day from news.ycombinator.com total:

    30.8% (11868) Macintosh
    22.7% (8745) iPhone
    21.7% (8356) Windows
    15.7% (6065) Android
    8.5% (3284) Linux (!Android)
That implies a 61%/39% desktop/mobile split.

Mobile: 59%/41% iPhone/Android split.

Desktop: 50%/36%/14% macOS/Windows/Linux split.

Personally I switched back from macOS to Linux (Pop_OS!) as my primary desktop operating system in 2020.

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