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What killed the Linux desktop

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Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#131

Post by farinasa »

sjs wrote: post #128
wheels wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. [...] In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work. Just because it's never happened to you on OS X or Windows doesn't mean it doesn't happen. OS X 10.6.7 broke the output on my 13" Macbook for either of the two external displays I own. Both worked fine previously, when booted from the install CDs, or from Linux on the same…

> It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters. Straw man. Nobody said OS X was perfect. > In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all. I used Linux on my desktop for several years and have now used Macs as well for several years. I won't say this is bullshit because I don't think you are lying about your experience, but I think you are extrapolating way too far. > An…

Genius bar solution: Wipe device.

Every time.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#132

Post by justincormack »

_delirium wrote: post #104
cletus wrote: post #97

This is the money quote: > The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use. Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and philosophy . Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need. I like OSX. Out o…

Among non-ultra-geeky Linux users I know (mostly part-time users), "Linux" does seem to be reasonably standardized as far as desktop components go, because by "Linux" they mean "Ubuntu". It's possible the Ubuntu desktop dominance came a bit too late, though, and still isn't entirely complete. My own experiences aren't great with Windows, though they're smoother on OSX than Linux. The problem I have with Windows is th…

Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed. Linux (Ubuntu in my case) and OSX just work sanely mostly, but OSX is a horrible dev environment, so I moved back to Linux.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#133

Post by brudgers »

>"is not a sexy problem."

This pretty much describes the root cause of nearly all the impediments to the adoption of FOSS in general and GNU/Linux in particular by the general public. It touches everything from backwards compatibility to documentation.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#134

Post by graue »

wpietri wrote: post #113
graue wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you write "whatever sound system they're using this week", I know what you mean. There's terrible fragmentation, and buggy libraries get rewritten and replaced by some other buggy thing instead of fixed. That's definitely a pattern. From 2007-9 I even fled to OpenBSD on the desktop to get a more stable OS. But for the past two and a half years I've used Ubuntu with Xfce, and those problems have become a distant…

Honestly, I like Unity. Or more accurately, I like where they're going with Unity. And I would like the thing itself if it actually worked reliably. But here I am, running the stock version of the biggest Linux distro on popular hardware, and I have to log out and in or reboot roughly daily. I don't really believe developers are moving to Apple gear because of HN. I believe it because last time I went on a hiring spr…

> I like where they're going with Unity

Fair enough, but why not wait to use it until they get there? Daily reliability problems seem like a lot to put up with just for some cool ideas.

Also, I'm not sure how your interviewing experience supports the conclusion "Linux is dead/dying". What it does seem to suggest is "Linux is unpopular", but that has never not been true (on the desktop).

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#135

Post by seabee »

derleth wrote: post #119
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maturity is the driving factor. Linux has a lot of immature attempts at a desktop. OS X has one but not a lot of time or manpower spent perfecting it (XCode sucks, Core APIs are weak/incomplete, OS support lacking for fundamentals). Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools.

> Windows is nothing but mature. Billions of hours running, automated bug reporting, millions of developers, nth generation tools. And yet it still BSODs on me too often to be actually usable.

Bad hardware/drivers are more likely to be the culprit...

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#136

Post by freyrs3 »

lazyjones wrote: post #111
freyrs3 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Design is about usability and understanding the user Here's the point you're missing. The overwhelming majority Linux users don't give a flying hoot about the average user or mass adoption. They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. Linux succeeds and excels at this because it is precisely designed for that niche and curated by its end-users. There are however people…

> They just want a system that gets out of their way and let's them do their technical tasks. That's precisely what Linux fails at. Most minor UI/desktop-related tasks that are hassle-free with Win7 or OSX take far too much time. Time that most people don't have and don't want to invest. Example: doubleclicking on a .ttf file in the Xfce file manager (plain Debian Xfce) does nothing. Right-clicking offers various unr…

And for every anecdotal UI problem you bring up I could also come up with a corresponding anecdotal pain point with Cygwin on Windows or BSD/GPL header file craziness on OS X.

Personally manually rebuilding a font hash doesn't irk me so much as not having the ability to rip the guts out of my system and fix things when doing low-level system development. Messing with virtualization and vendor enforced settings seems much worse than Googling for a shell command or manually fixing a package.

> If you think Linux on the desktop hasn't failed for and abandoned by most technical users, you're delusional.

Yeah, I'm not delusional. I have a niche, Linux fills that niche. I have a lot of other colleagues who also fit in that niche. It's fine if you don't want to use Linux, I don't care in the slightest. But making broad sweeping statements about what "most technical users" do or don't need just makes you come off as uninformed.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#137

Post by ZeroGravitas »

The first comment explodes this piece:

"I mean, look at OS X itself. Sure it's doing fine, but powered by iPhone and iPad, not by people wanting a new desktop. And it still has minority marketshare despite being from one of the most profitable companies on earth and despite Microsoft's repeated weird Windows-rethinks."

Basically, path-dependant lock-in means we're lucky not to be using x86-based wPhones that don't even have web browsers. The linux and open web communities have achieved amazing things, enabling Apple's comeback along the way.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#138

Post by Derbasti »

masklinn wrote: post #95
Derbasti wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely agree. I actually prefer the graphical shell of Windows 7 to the one of OSX Lion. But Windows does not have a Unix terminal. And I think that is the main point here: Linux might lack design graphically, but the Linux command line is about the most beautiful thing out there. There is an abundance of elegance there is probably only rivaled by some Lisp machine. Who knows, maybe, I will switch from OSX to L…

> I actually prefer the graphical shell of Windows 7 to the one of OSX Lion. Explorer? Versus finder? That's a pretty low-hanging fruit, I can't remember ever preferring finder to explorer and I've been using OSX as my main dev machine (and Windows mostly for the game box) for 6 years now. I prefer OSX overall, but the finder still isn't a good shell.

I was going to leave a snarky comment with just a list of awful OSX applications here. But then I looked at a list of the applications I have installed and... Well, while many of them might be bad, their usual alternatives on Windows aren't exactly better.

But Finder really is bad. Then again, I wish ANY other OS would implement the column view Finder has. As bad as Finder is, column view is awesome.

But many of the great things on the Mac have been subverted in the last few years.

Have you tried dragging a proxy icon from the title bar of an OSX application to an external disk lately? It creates a new alias there. An ALIAS. On an external disk.

Or HFS+, which still has a global lock whenever ANY application wants to write to the file system. A GLOBAL lock. No other program may access the hard drive while one is writing. Insanity!.

Or the complete lack of uninstallers. I am continuously baffled by that. How can you have a "modern" operating system without uninstallers?

Desktop apps are really fine though. It's just the foundation that is getting rusty. Not a good thing, that.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#139

Post by to3m »

slogdrat wrote: post #90
stevencorona wrote: post #11

In like 2006 I switched from Windows XP to Linux. This was before Ubuntu was what it is today. I learned using Slackware and eventually switched to Gentoo. It was cool and gave me nerd cred when I went to college. I switched to OSX for exactly the reasons the author mentioned. The fact that I have an awesome UI + ability to use the shell all day is a huge win for me.

The machine that ran Windows XP can run Linux ( http://wiki.debian.org/Hardware ). So you can switch to Linux any time. However, people cannot switch to OSX. The machine that ran Windows XP and Linux WILL NOT run OSX. So, no, you didn't switch to OSX, you purchased new hardware that is strictly controlled (motherboard, video card, etc). Then, in an incredible blunder, de Icaza said, "Many hackers moved to OSX... work…

I installed this thing called "EEE Ubuntu" on my little EEE PC a few years ago. That "EEE" in the name meant, or so the website very strongly implied, "specially designed for the EEE PC". I think there were just 2 fundamental models of it at the time, both very similar in terms of underlying hardware.

Needless to say, the sound didn't work. And the wireless didn't work. When I clicked "suspend", it said it was out of swap space. When I closed the lid, it crashed.

Re: What killed the Linux desktop

#140

Post by Devilboy »

jrockway wrote: post #9

I've used Linux for years and have never had these problems. I think the issue is that getting everything working requires a deep understanding of each component and the system as a whole. If you just follow advice on forums, you will make things worse because you're doing things you don't understand to a system that you don't understand. That's not going to lead to success. You need to be able to think critically ab…

CLOSED: Works on my computer
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