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2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

justingarrison.com

311–320 of 351 posts

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

#311

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.

Your grandma is a big gamer, right? Or is she into deep learning stuff?

Trying to figure out how being easy enough for your grandma is related at all to nvidia gpus.

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

#312
post #173

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…

My M1 Macbook pro is connected to a Dell thunderbolt desktop docking station. This had caused me so much grief with the screen, that I directly connected the 43 inch monitor to the M1 rather than go through the dock. Moreover, the ethernet on the dock is wonky, often dropping out. This makes the work VPN sometimes ... challenging. Was just as wonky when I had the windows laptop that the mac replaced. BSODs were commo…

My M1 pro is also way fiddlier and flakier with thunderbolt docks than my Linux thinkpad. Just monitor detection and enabling itself seems slower and buggier on a mac.

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

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't MDM very much anathema to the Linux user's philosophy? I've avoided it pretty sternly.

For a personal device. Corporate devices are subject to a whole host of regulations. PCI, HIPAA, etc. You can't even touch fintech unless your engineers work on MDM'd devices. You can't trust every single employee to always keep their machine up to date or be on the up and up. Statistically speaking, you'll need it eventually.

I have worked at 10+ fintech companies in a mix of full time and contract roles and exclusively use QubesOS. No one was able to make a coherent argument how MDM was going to work or help improve the security of a base OS that is not even connected to the internet.

At best I could run something like osquery that sends reports to my sys-net VM that forwards them to to an interested IT group at a set interval, but no one has actually implemented this as I am always enough of an edge case that they can file a special exception for me.

Some fintech orgs do get by with Linux users just using osquery reporting to a central monitoring panel like Kibana or Kolide that can send automated alerts to those not complying.

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

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that I'm no longer forced to use a Mac at work, all of my work happens on Linux. I only marginally touch Windows and Mac for testing and builds. If I can find a good MDM solution for Linux hardware and software, I'll let the employees at my startup use Linux too. I get a sense that corporate MDM is all that's holding Linux back.

This exists: https://drivestrike.com/solutions/business/ But I think your point is sound. Our totally not monopolistic tech giant friends would never dream of colluding to make mobile device management proprietary. To lose hold of MDM would unravel too much. and iStuff doesn't play nice w/ Linux. If there were a decent way to get Messages and SMS on a desktop Linux OS I would be there today.

Messages and SMS work with Matrix which works great on Linux.

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

#315

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…

As a counter example I have helped hundreds of nontechnical people switch to Linux over the past 15 years who prefer it to Windows and can do anything they want via the GUI without knowing how to manage an antivirus.

ChromeOS and Android are also Linux and users seem to get along just fine with those too.

I never experience crashes except when I have maxed out my ram doing something dumb.

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

#316

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

This is a totally legitimate gripe. On the other hand, I like to have the key repeat speed set to higher than MacOS lets me in their menu, so I also need to configure this in the terminal, except the only references I can find for it safe random stackoverflow questions and blog posts rather than official documentation, so the units are unclear (I can't remember if it's the delay before repeat or the actual repeat speed, but I remember being surprised about how one of them worked with regard to needing to modify the value in the opposite direction than I expected), and I need to log out and back in to test it, after which I might need to tweak again due to not really understanding the units and maybe overcalibrating, which requires another logout...etc.

MacOS is probably easier if you don't want to stray at all off the prescribed path, but any time I needed to do something even slightly outside the seemingly arbitrary sanctioned happy path, it ends up being either even more annoying to configure than Linux, requiring some app that inevitably wants to me to pay them for what feels like basic functionality to me, or is completely impossible regardless of how much effort or money I'm willing to spend. Given how much I like the setup I've been using for years on Linux and how rarely things break for me compared to MacOS updates due to functionality being provided by third party apps (e.g. my iTerm shortcut for showing/hiding the fullscreen terminal occasionally not working after being required to a major OS update, but working just enough of the time that I suspect I wouldn't be able to find a fix), I won't ever be running anything else on my personal machine unless something drastically changes.

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

#318

The article is disappointingly short, but at least for me, the title is true; at long last, 2022 was finally the Year of the Linux Desktop. May the YotLD meme live on in spirit. I finally switched my desktop and laptops 100% to Linux. Some games don't run - fine - plenty of other games do. Ableton runs well in Wine, but Bitwig is native, and yabridge runs VSTs. MuseScore was saved. KDE is pleasant and productive. Ble…

Before MuseScore being saved I had to run a Windows VM with Cubase/NotePerformer to get decent mock-ups. I'm waiting Debian Stable to receive a better Pipewire with the next version. Truly a phenomenal year!

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

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the clear problem here is GNOME and it's arrogant disregard for users... Which I guess really is historically in line with Linux culture, unfortunately.

GNOME and Ubuntu are not representative of "Linux culture".

"Linux culture" is whatever most Linux users use. I don't know about Gnome, but Ubuntu is certainly that.

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

#320
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 le…

Unfortunately my example was based on real-world frustration. That conversation was just maddening to read. One person arguing for the end user’s experience and the other one (apparently winning) tunnel-visioned on “pixel perfect”, “well defined”, “guarantees to developers” and “relevant specifications”. Meanwhile, for the last at least five years, I can turn on my Mac, drag windows from one hidpi display to a low dp…

And dragging apps between displays with different DPIs work on Windows too. Nothing more to add, wholeheartedly agree with you.
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