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Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

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Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

#81

Post by blueflow »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #80
blueflow wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not about competition. RedHat employees pushed their idea of things and the volunteers either ate it up or left. RedHats and Canonicals paying enterprise customers are whats keeping the Linux ecosystem alive. No one else brings the required manpower to the table.

> Its not about competition. RedHat employees pushed their idea of things and the volunteers either ate it up or left. This is a narrow view about how innovation happens in Linux and related software. Yes, Linux-focused companies are driving many of the changes, but there is plenty of exploration of ideas that happens outside of those companies.

I was thinking about maintaining and keeping things running (like you would do with cars and houses and anything else except software) and less about innovation and change. I doubt there is a shortage of ideas that are being explored.

Like, innovative and fresh stuff is cool, but at the end of the day you need to keep your business running and not breaking down.

Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

#82

Post by senectus1 »

skydhash wrote: post #5

Linux desktop has already arrived for me. All the apps and utilities I need is there, all installable via apt. It's not a Linux problem anymore when the hardware manufacturers won't support it. GNOME is nice, KDE is nice, and we have other options for people that don't like the two previous one. The issue we have now is walled garden, when some proprietary software won't support standards and even their own file form…

I'm in a MS centric business and am in the middle of setting up a Linux MOE solution for it.. this is winning in my mind.

Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

#83

Post by extraisland »

takluyver wrote: post #55
ZenoArrow wrote: post #23

This 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…

Generally most Linux distributions are literally the same thing underneath. I have recently done an LFS build (using version 12.3 of the book). The same files were in the same directories in Debian, Arch and LFS for the most part.

I even had a look at source code for makepkgs in Arch and they are literally the same commands in the script that the book has you manually type in.

The packaging critique comes up over the years but it is a bit of an overblown.

Building packages for different distributions isn't super difficult. I've build Arch Packages using the ABS, DEBS and RPMS and they are all conceptually the same. Having a quick skim of the Flatpak instructions it doesn't look that different either.

If you don't want to bother with all of that. You can just have a script that drops the installation either in /opt or ~./.local/. I am pretty sure Jetbrains Toolbox does that, but I would need to check my other machine to confirm and I don't have access currently.

Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

#84

Post by int_19h »

cocoto wrote: post #57
donmcronald wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I very much doubt that they will, because Gnome heavily uses the obnoxious UI paradigm where controls are hidden away, and you need to perform "magic gestures" (like moving the mouse cursor into a corner) to even get them to show up.

I don't even understand why they thought it would be a good idea. On mobile there is at least the justification that it helps keep the valuable screen estate for "important things" (although anecdotally I've seen how much more my mother and grandmother both struggle with button-less iPhones because they can't remember the gestures). But on the desktop, even on laptops, it is a very weak argument.

Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

#85

Post by int_19h »

skydhash wrote: post #54
donmcronald wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now if only GNOME didn't regularly break the more useful extensions...

Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

#86

Post by int_19h »

blueflow wrote: post #3

> While this could absolutely happen, the way that Linux as a whole has been developing over the years isn't always conducive to making the world's Windows and macOS users convert en masse. Its the way Windows is developing that is driving this change. GNOME might be hardly usable but Microsoft managed to top that. Edit: I retract the last sentence. I'm currently trying GNOME and its less usable than Windows.

Stock Gnome is indeed a mess, but thankfully we're not limited to that. KDE, Xfce, and Cinnamon all offer environments that are far more intuitive to use, especially from someone coming from Windows. And there are good distros built around all of these as the primary DE. I usually recommend Mint (the default edition, i.e. Cinnamon) to people who get UX fatigue from the recent developments in Windows land and want something that "just works" and isn't made by developers who have a permanent you're-holding-it-wrong mentality.

Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

#87

Post by int_19h »

CommonGuy wrote: post #63

Developing GUI applications for Linux is also a huge pain. Developers not familiar with Linux need to learn so many things... What is X11, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, d-bus, application ids, portals, etc. Then once you have a working application, users request having it distributed as .tar.gz, snap, flatpak, you name it. Then dependencies are missing on some Linux distribution or there are random bugs with Nvidia graphics c…

> What is X11, Wayland, GNOME, KDE, d-bus, application ids, portals, etc. ... Compare that to developing for Windows, where most things "just work"

This is a weird complaint, and I'm saying this as a mostly-Windows developer. Windows has an insane number of technologies, many of them replacements for older replacements for older replacements ... etc going 30+ years back. Do you know how registration-free COM works, for example? Probably not, yet it is there, and if you go to the Windows section of MSDN and just start reading through the docs, you'll have to read through that too.

You can reasonably argue that it's not a thing that you actually need to know to write an app for Windows, and it's true. But similarly you don't actually need to know what d-bus is, never mind how it works, to write an app for Linux. If you use a reasonably high-level framework such as Qt, it takes care of all that for you. Hell, you can even go for .NET Core + Avalonia to get something very similar to WPF on Windows.

And then there's Electron, which lets you pretend that everything is just a browser...

Nah, writing the apps for Linux isn't difficult at all. OTOH you're right in that distribution is a pain, and end-user support across numerous wildly different distros can also be a pain (especially when they start packaging a patched version of your code in their package repos!).

Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

#88

Post by LexiMax »

alt187 wrote: post #62
takluyver wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you build an application, The Right Way™ has always, and probably always will be a tarball. Leave to distributions the hassle to distribute your software.

This is a complete and utter non-starter for most software developers.

On pretty much every other operating system out there, I as the application author have control over the release cadence of my software. On some platforms, I can simply release an installer and be done. On others, I send the app through some form of certification process, and when it's complete it appears on the App Store.

Linux is rather unique in that it has tasked the distro maintainers to be tastemakers and packagers of the software that appears in their repositories. They control what version is used, what libraries it's linked against and their specific versions, how often it's updated, which additional features are added or removed before distribution, et cetera.

From the outside, this is complete and utter insanity. In the old days, you had to either static link the universe and pray or create a third-party repository per specific distro. Thank goodness these days we have numerous ways to cut distros out of the loop - Docker, Flatpak, AppImage and of course Steam if you're a gamer.

Re: Desktop Linux Keeps Winning the Wrong Battles

#90

Post by takluyver »

alt187 wrote: post #62
takluyver wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

If you build an application, The Right Way™ has always, and probably always will be a tarball. Leave to distributions the hassle to distribute your software.

This is absolutely not a solution. It more or less works for a few big widely used applications like Firefox & Libreoffice, but more niche applications can't realistically get someone in every major Linux distro interested in packaging them. And if someone does take an interest once, there's no guarantee they stay interested to package updates. Distro maintainers need to be highly trusted (give or take AUR), so it's not easy to add many more of them.

On top of that, some of the biggest Linux distros will only release application updates with their own OS releases, on a cadence of months or years. Software developers expect to be able to deliver updates in hours to days (at least in the consumer space - highly regulated things like banking are different).

There are good reasons why RedHat and Canonical, the companies behind some of the biggest Linux distros, are pushing app distribution systems (Flatpak & Snap) which aim to be cross-distro and have upstream developers directly involved in packaging. There are absolutely downsides to this approach as well, but it would be nice if we could stop pretending that traditional distro packaging is a marvellous system.

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