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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?

#211

Post by azeirah »

jcelerier wrote: post #179
college_physics wrote: post #148

No it wasn't. Nor was it needed. Linux is unstoppable. The monotonic accumulation of all that open source goodness is like a giant capacitor taking forever to charge. The result takes a while compared to a well funded commercial enterprise, but it slowly morphs into a super desktop that is basically impossible to compete against. Free, super capable, private by design. You cannot beat that with bells and whistles. Th…

> Make no mistake. Life is not linear. Nothing much happens, it becomes a running joke and then, boom and its not a joke anymore, its the new reality. A data point: today I was talking with a friend who works in a company making a 3D software. Apparently since last year they lost most of their clients to Blender, which used to be the butt of so many 3D software jokes.

Similarly, OBS.

The entire streaming industry uses OBS. Colleagues at work use OBS casually to capture recordings.

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

#212

Post by bootsmann »

pram wrote: post #158
devmunchies wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux scrub Q, does NVIDIA not use any Linux for themselves? Or is it a financial reason to ignore Linux?

I think they don't care about the userspace at all. I assume from their perspective, most (all?) of the Linux use-case is for their expensive cards to be running in servers doing CUDA.

Yet CUDA still basically only runs on RHEL and Ubuntu LTS.

(tbf to Nvidia tho, their support is improving and with big tech putting a lot of weight behind cloud compute the problem will likely resolve itself)

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

#213

Post by aussiesnack »

sophacles wrote: post #206
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…

Observation: I started daily driving linux in the 90s. When I switched to a mac around 2010 if found Mac exhausting. It had different usage patterns than I was used to. Some of my most used features weren't there. Having a reasonably usable shell experience required lots of tweaking and macports then brew. When I switched back to linux ~5 years ago there was a while where getting back into the linux groove was exhaus…

This is something those "defending" the harder-to-use/learn thing always bring up. As if affordances must always be relative to prior knowledge. But they're not (always) - some things just are harder to use than others (at least relative to a specific meaning of 'use').

Programming languages - you could argue Rust isn't hard to learn, by pretending that everyone claiming it is are just having trouble adjusting from javascript. But that breaks down when you realise the Rust learners finding it hard are actually polyglot programmers who are finding it harder than all the many other languages, in multiple paradigms, they have already successfully learned.

Similar with Linux - I find it harder to 'use' in a certain sense (the sense most people mean - which is getting all the ordinary hardware & software stuff working) than the others. You'll tell me it's unfamiliarity, but it's just not - my first Linux was Slackware on floppies, and I've used it alongside Windows and MacOS now for decades. I choose it for my primary OS for other reasons, but ease of use certainly isn't among them. I still have to fiddle more with it .

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

#214

Post by reisse »

ryandrake wrote: post #137
TulliusCicero wrote: post #112

These comments are hilarious. Linux user community: Linux has been fine for casual users for years! Give it to your grandma, it's not a problem! Also Linux user community: Wait, you used an nVidia GPU in your build? What kind of idiot scrub are you? If there's one thing I've seen that's consistent with Linux users over the last two decades, it's been blaming users for all their Linux-related problems.

Or “You mean you want to run two monitors with different DPIs? What kind of oddball user are you, anyway?” Linux display stack’s treatment of monitor DPI is basically “throw our hands up and let apps like Firefox make it work!”

I think you gave this example as a joke, but here is a quote from one of the Wayland developers:

> I would suggest that this setting [UI scale] needs to be a global and not a per-output thing. If it was a per-output thing, windows moving between different monitors would probably have problems (text size changes while window size does not?). It is hard to imagine how it would work as a per-output setting, for me at least.

See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... , the original issue and the discussion gives quite some insights in how Linux developers see the world.

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

#215

Post by rowanG077 »

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 mean no disrespect but Ubuntu really, really isn't user friendly. There is no other distribution that introduced so many headaches for me. I think Ubuntu is coasting on there reputation from years ago.

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

#216

Post by layer8 »

mumblemumble wrote: post #30

If you click through to the link, you'll see that the results add up to 150%. That should be a sign that something odd is going on with this survey result and we need to interpret it with caution. The question was "What is the primary operating system in which you work." (Emphasis mine.) The question itself implies that we should only be able to pick one, and yet the results clearly indicate that more than one was al…

Also, “the primary operating system in which you work” doesn’t necessarily imply desktop. People could be using a Windows or Mac desktop and then primarily work in Linux via remote terminals and/or VMs.

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

#217

Post by jug »

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 have to disagree here and provide another experience.

I regularly revisit Linux for desktop (like every five years) and this time I moved 100% from Windows 11 to Fedora 37 and it's been a delight. It's not only a good desktop OS now: I find it better than Windows. Why?

* Performance: I think it's more responsive, like the file manager. It doesn't have an innate dependency on scanning every single thing for viruses that is hard to disable per design. I think my SSD loves me now.

* Ads integrated in the OS: Well. It doesn't have these.

* Customizability: Even GNOME that is not known for this can adapt to the user much better than Windows 11. Windows 11 is terrible and takes steps backwards in this regard. For example GNOME Tweaks + Dash to Dock and I have a Mac-like dock. It's like the Mac dock but more customizable, and it's easy to customize too. Hell I can even customize FreeType to choose between ClearType style rendering or macOS Quartz-like rendering (respect LCD pixel boundaries vs respect font design - you can only have one).

* Apps: Linux culture is to rely on repositories for apps. Windows isn't. They have winget and Microsoft Store now but it's still an unresolved cultural problem where only a subset of apps are found there, and if they do, they more often than not do system-wide changes anyway. Linux has nice, easy to use, stores like Mac. Linux is also miles ahead with containerized app systems like Flatpak or Snap where UWP support (Windows counterpart) is more than shaky in the big picture, and I'd even say a failure.

* Mouse Scroll Speed: Is set in GNOME settings.

* Software Updates: Have still always worked for the past few months.

* Crashes: None yet! Other than app-specific ones but so far only "silent" stuff that don't really affect me that seems to relate to the file manager and thumbnailing corrupt h.264 videos? (a guess from the logs)

I guess your mileage MAY still vary here but as for me, this is clearly a better and more user friendly OS now than Windows 11. I can't believe I'm saying this. But it just is for me and my hardware + software setup now. I like photography and Darktable is a full-fledged Lightroom competitor too.

I'm not a Linux nut either. I was positively surprised and this is the first time in twenty years I've finally felt fine with moving from Windows.

Games? Yes, at 40+ years of age I still do that, juggling time with family life. I have an Xbox Series X for that, letting me use a tiny Intel NUC as my PC. The Xbox gives me a much more fun experience with gaming than a Mac. Been there. Never again.

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

#218

Post by dinvlad »

Recently, I've been impressed by Intel's Clear Linux project. It really feels like a completely new generation of Linux desktop that's designed from the ground-up to be more performant than even Windows, while still being "turn-key" pretty much, and a bleeding-edge yet stable rolling-release at that.

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

#219

Post by autotune »

QIYGT wrote: post #177
Arbortheus wrote: post #5

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…

It's not exactly a desktop device (though it can be booted into a desktop), but Steam Deck is by far the best Linux experience I've had. It seems what you really need is a company with an incentive to make a good hardware+software package.

Steam Deck is the only way I am going to indulge Linux Desktop long term in the future. Just have to save a bit so I can buy the 512 GB version.

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

#220

Post by eecc »

I’d argue the problem isn’t really with the Linux kernel or the command line.

The UI experience is unfortunately the same coherence of design horror story it has been since forever.

Windows is of a terrible of it's own, but wayland, gtk, the OS services model and user settings are just a horror show.

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