Why Linux is not ready for the desktop, the final edition

> Linux is not an operating system

It is though. Go ahead and find me any distribution of Linux on which this binary of the Zig compiler does not work:

https://ziglang.org/download/0.13.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0....

You can't, because it's a static executable whose only runtime dependencies are a file system.

And if kernel devs would bless us with a stable graphics ABI, then we could do this for games, too. Unfortunately, the way drivers work currently relies on dynamic linking in a way that drags in a dependency on differences in distributions, which is completely unnecessary and maddening.

Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq1XqP4-qOo

P.S. Just bought my wife a steam deck for christmas and she loves it.

An insane amount of applications are webapps nowadays anyway. Linux has chrome and Firefox which means you get 99% of relevant “applications”.

Outside of some games and relatively high-end multimedia apps and maybe some dev tools, basically no one cares about the OS. I probably spend 95% in a MacBook using it as a browser.

Same, well, earlier, but Warty was my first time going all in and not dual booting.

I don't game, so that doesn't bother me, though I read it works pretty well these days.

I've used nothing but Linux since, of various flavors. Use it for work, use it for home. Everything just works.

One thing I will note is that despite my general distaste for Electron, it's probably been the biggest recent accelerant for making this all easier. Slack, VSCode, Teams(yuck), MongoDB compass, Postman, etc all work flawlessly. Prior to it existing, we were stuck with Wine, open source alternatives in various states of disrepair, or missing out. I can't even remember the last time I had to 'miss out' because of Linux, I think it was some proprietary VPN blob around 2010 or so.

  > Compare this to Windows 11 64, where the vast majority of software titles released in the last 30 years run almost flawlessly.

Modern Linux can still run binaries that were compiled in the 90s. You just need copies of the libraries that they use. If it is that old, you probably want to dump all of the libraries into a directory somewhere and set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to it, since you are likely not getting the older versions from your distribution repository and that is okay. Needing to run old binaries is the exception rather than the norm. Keeping legacy libaries around that are not used by modern software just in case someone will try to run a binary from the 90s is a reason why Windows is so bloated.

  > QA/QC, bugs and regressions

Here is one of many examples that show Windows is not a bug/regression free experience:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2020/02/15/micro...

  > Lack of general software and games

There is a huge amount of software for Linux systems. If you want to talk about games, which is evidently what you mean by software, you can even run most Windows games on Linux:

https://www.protondb.com/

  > Poor file and folder sharing situation on the local network
  > Linux doesn't offer a native technology similar to Windows file sharing that is easily configurable, discoverable, encrypted and password protected. What does exist in Linux, Samba, is quite painful to set up shared folders, even more so in distros that use SeLinux (advanced security mechanism), create users, assign and change passwords, and not worry about folder permissions.

There are NFS, SSHFS and others. While I do not use either NFS or Samba, it is fairly simple to setup samba shares or NFS shares with ZFS.

  > Lack of funding
  > Countless software tiles in Linux have a huge number of bugs and missing features. That's because Linux is severely underfunded on the desktop. While Linux is unrivaled on servers and has been the world's most popular operating system for over two decades, the situation on the desktop is quite bleak.

I thought you said "Linux is not an operating system". In any case, if you want more funding going to desktop use cases, use MacOS.

That said, the Linux desktop has been a fairly good experience for a number of years.

  > Especially when it comes to brand new hardware, you may find that your laptop's Wi-Fi network card, webcam, sound, and even keyboard do not work.

I can believe most of those, but not the keyboard outside of truly exceptional situations that are not worth mentioning. As for the rest, issues with hardware compatibility have been rather rare for some time. When I used Windows, you needed to fetch drivers from hardware manufacturers for everything. Off the top of my head:

  * I needed a SATA driver since SATA was made after Windows XP.
  * I needed a NIC driver since my NIC was made after Windows XP.
  * I needed a graphics driver since my graphics card was made after Windows XP.

Things became better with Windows 7, only to gradually become worse overtime as newer things came out that postdated Windows 7. Having nearly all of the drivers in one place is awesome. Even if you need to update the kernel, this is generally fine, since newer kernels are backward compatible.

That said, most hardware is supported by Linux these days. It is a very different situation than it was in the 90s.

  > You will have problems with Linux, I can promise you that.

I can promise that you will have problems with any non-trivial OS. You just learn to handle them over time. Then when you try something new, you will complain about every new problem you face as if there were not any problems in your old OS.