I love Linux, and I use it daily for software development and gaming, but I am often exasperated by the Linux community. There's a strange combination of newbie-friendliness combined with gaslighting; if you're completely new, you'll get tons of enthusiastic help, but the moment you experience genuine frustration, you're castigated or told that your preferences are inherently wrong. I think that many hardcore Linux users don't get that some people will never grok the command line, or do not intrinsically enjoy tinkering with their OS. Luckily, I do, but I am hesitant to recommend a Linux box to just anyone.
Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
51–60 of 99 posts
Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
A random macOS binary is more likely to run on another macOS install from anytime in the last half decade than a Linux binary on the same distribution. Even Apple’s famously fast deprecation is like rock by comparison.
... which is much less of a problem for Linux than closed source ecosystems.
I don’t know; you don’t think having Win32 be the unofficial API is a problem?
It literally means Windows will always exist - as the preferred IDE and Reference Spec for the Linux desktop. It also means all evolution of Linux will be ironically constrained by Win32 compatibility requirements.
Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
#53Most of the uses for a casual computer user have been replaced by smartphones and tablets.
Then you have walled gardens like the Apple ecosystem where interoperability is superior among Apple products which cross sell each other. If you got an iPhone, now get the Apple Watch and a Macbook and all integrate well.
Then you have games, where consoles will give you a decent experience for less money.
Then you have professional users where the most common use case is office documents. This remains contentious but there are more alternatives now like web apps, MS Office clones like Libreoffice, Softmaker Office/FreeOffice, WPS Office.
Then you have specific desktop apps for specific OSes and there you are tied to an OS. This is one of the few legitimate uses for Windows I can think of.
Otherwise Linux is king.
Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using a computer take training. Look at a windows user switching to macOS. It's not intuitive for them either. GNOME is actually nice, even if it's less customizable than KDE.
MacOS has some really clunky stuff. I hate finder. I like Gnome once I add dash to dock, tray icons, and window manager tweaks. I’m just saying the defaults are a bad choice if they want adoption.
I use GNOME without extensions. The default are fine by me.
But your use case is why GNOME have extensions. To alter the defaults and add stuff that they don't care about, but you do. In macOS, you have to basically reverse engineer and use private APIs.
Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
#55This article is full of nonsense. The Linux desktop push isn't failing because it has experiences and apps that are similar to Windows and macOS. Being able to run Windows apps on Linux is a benefit, not a failure. As for religious wars over init systems, desktop environments and package managers, competition is making the options stronger, not weaker. Competition is a reason why package management on Linux is far be…
> As for religious wars over init systems, desktop environments and package managers, competition is making the options stronger, not weaker.
Competition can definitely improve things, but it's not universally positive. In particular, endless competition in parts of the operating system makes it hard to build anything on top of them. E.g. if you want to distribute an application for Linux, do you build a Flatpak, or a Snap? Or take a more traditionalist approach and make RPMs, DEBs, etc.? You either pick your favourite and leave out a large fraction of Linux users who disagree, or you have to do more than one of these. This is definitely a drag on the ecosystem.
I agree that most users don't care about the OS, though.
Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
#56It's 2025. The "year of the linux desktop" has been a meme for years. No one says it in earnest. No one is having init or DE wars. And while there is plenty of healthy discussion about flatpak and other alt forms of software distribution, this is exactly the kind of innovation and experimentation that leads to the usability improvements the author wants to see. Linux is doing just fine, and I'm glad there are multipl…
Linux becoming better than Windows to run games is the sort of thing that should actually scare Microsoft because it can lead to non-engineers installing linux because game go fast. The people spending a grand on gpus will put up with real hassles to that end.
Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
#57> The problem is that these are "wins" because they bring Linux closer to Windows or macOS. I disagree that this is an issue. The main advantage of Linux for me is that I have choice (including using various desktop environments that the author is annoyed by; I used GNOME for years and eventually had too many problems with it so I switched to KDE), and those choices are not controlled by one entity which, in the case…
One of my complaints with Gnome is that I can’t hand it to a normal person and let them use it because it’s not obvious how to use it. The entry point to everything looks like a horizontal scroll bar in the top left corner and basic actions take more clicks than Windows. The biggest battle desktop Linux is losing is the one where a minority of devs are dictating their preferred compute paradigm to a majority of users…
Gnome is way simpler to use than Windows. If you let grandma or a kid with no prior Desktop experience, I’m pretty sure they will find Gnome more intuitive. The problem is that it is too different for a Windows user, so the switching cost is high.
Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neither has Microsoft, Google nor Apple.
A random macOS binary is more likely to run on another macOS install from anytime in the last half decade than a Linux binary on the same distribution. Even Apple’s famously fast deprecation is like rock by comparison.
I'm not sure why you think this is a good metric; the space of "random Mac binaries" is far smaller. There's probably something to be said for this "curation," but you pay for it, both literally with money and in limited selection.
Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
... which is much less of a problem for Linux than closed source ecosystems.
I don’t know; you don’t think having Win32 be the unofficial API is a problem? It literally means Windows will always exist - as the preferred IDE and Reference Spec for the Linux desktop. It also means all evolution of Linux will be ironically constrained by Win32 compatibility requirements.
It isn't and won't be. So no.
Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles
#60This article is full of nonsense. The Linux desktop push isn't failing because it has experiences and apps that are similar to Windows and macOS. Being able to run Windows apps on Linux is a benefit, not a failure. As for religious wars over init systems, desktop environments and package managers, competition is making the options stronger, not weaker. Competition is a reason why package management on Linux is far be…
> Being able to run Windows apps on Linux is a benefit, not a failure. It is a massive moral failure though. It shows that after two decades of work, the Linux community has been unable to build a simple sane functional stable development environment better than Win32.
Meh. It shows a good part of software (namely, games) is written for Windows, because the userbase is Windows, because Windows is the lion's share. And it shows people on Linux want that software to run. It's an admission, but not a moral failure.