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2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

justingarrison.com

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

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they do if they want to build excitement and interest in their niche platform. Money isn't the only reason to brag, attention is critical to a platform's success and Valve's Linux-based platform is starting from behind.

>starting from behind They have 20 years of brand history, what are you talking about?

I'm talking about their Linux platform's position among gamers and game developers where usage & support is scarce, why would I be talking about their brand?

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

#222

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…

> that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full I have the suspicion that this is caused by users who add extra kernels and don't use the system provided ones. Ubuntu retains only a certain number of (distro-provided) kernels. Ubuntu desktop version doesn't even use a separate partition for `/boot`, so there's no risk. I remember this being a problem for Ubuntu Server, but it was long ago (I th…

> In such cases, I actually don't know how Windows works (for example, if they patch the ACPI tables).

It uses Modern Standby (aka S0 Low Power Idle).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

> if there is no S3, it's the producers fault

Or it's Linux fault for not supporting the S0LP? Sure, there are a lot of problems with the S0LP implementation on Windows, but the idea itself is good - that's what all the phones have utilized for at least previous 10 years. Maybe Linux actually could do it better than Windows, if some effort was put into it?

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

#223
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no singular 'linux experience', all the problems you list are expected problems with some software on linux, but work just fine with other software systems on linux. Unfortunately many of the defaults chosen by Ubuntu are very poor and give bad first impressions. I think that recommending Ubuntu is an anachronism from the mid to late 00s. Experience makes it all much easier, simply because you learn which sof…

> I think that recommending Ubuntu is an anachronism from the mid to late 00s. What would you recommend as a modern-day user-friendly Linux experience? I've been looking for something not too demanding to put on an old X220.

I agree with Linux Mint but you can just download and boot off a thumb drive to try it out yourself without actually installing anything.

I would try Mint with KDE but also try a few other desktops. Maybe you will like them more.

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

#224

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…

I occasionally try a Linux distro on a new computer that I'm building, like Ubuntu and Mint, and so far I've never been able to get it running satisfactorily without any major problems. Last time, I was using an Intel barebones NUC for a stepmania setup, and ran into major problems with both audio and display resolution. Gave up and went to Windows 10, no major issues there setting it up, though the occasional boot s…

Random hardware which is designed for Windows typically gets Linux support within a couple years after its release. But if you are actually serious about trying Linux, buy it preinstalled.

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

#225

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.

Linux scrub Q, does NVIDIA not use any Linux for themselves? Or is it a financial reason to ignore Linux?

NVidia makes the best Linux driver + graphics card combination going, and always have. If you actually want to play games on Linux, NVidia cards are the way to go. But open-source people don't like them because their driver isn't open-source, and Wayland people don't like them because their driver has limited Wayland support.

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

#226

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…

[deleted]

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

#227

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…

> 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.

You either have hardware problems, or something screwed up your install; the settings manager for mouse acceleration is available where all other settings are, no scripts or command line editing necessary, just a couple clicks and you're done. Now I'm not exactly a fan of Ubuntu and prefer other distros but software updates do actually work on Ubuntu, and I'm not aware of any problems that could cause random crashes. At least on Debian I lost memory of the last time I had to reset the machine due to a crash. Check your system, it may have software and/or hardware problems elsewhere.

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

#228
post #200

The Linux CLI is a dominate user interface I use at work, it is also just called bash (well, that’s the default shell anyways). I have never tried an actual Linux desktop at work, web and native Mac applications are still dominate there (besides the CLI).

The cli existed when Linus was still in diapers. Even Bash predates Linux by years. There is zero that running a bash Shell has to do with “Linux”

Yes, but it is the desktop I’m used to, and it’s running on Linux.

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

#229
post #210

Ironic for me. 2019, 2021 and half of 2022 were the years that I went all in on Ubuntu for desktop. It was an overall awesome experience as a developer.... and then Zoom and Slack started crashing randomly or having weird bugs where I'd needed to restart the app or even the machine in order to get them working again. 2022 is the year I switched back to windows as my development experience with WSL2 + being able to us…

Note that you don't even need apps, you can just use Zoom and Slack from your web browser. (For Zoom especially, nobody should be trusting their native client in the first place after their security debacles. Your browser is a convenient security boundary.) If your browser locks up to the point where it requires you to restart your machine, that sounds like a much more serious problem.

Came to say that too. Zoom nags you about their app every single time, but it works in a browser.

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

#230
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. Blender is amazing. Pipewire is audio done right. Electron, despite its problems, makes Linux a build target of ordinary apps. Flatpak and AppImage enable simple cross-linux-distro app distribution. Critical mass achieved.

No desktop is perfect, but at least for people with a nominal, base level of experience, Linux is the least bad.

Looking to the future, I hope the Desktop Linux experience improves with respect to memory exhaustion, and I hope a Patreon-like platform gains prominence to enable easily donating to keep projects alive; it's currently cumbersome to find all the different places to donate.

With great gratitude to every free software and open source contributor, happy end of 2022!

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