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

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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently posting from a Dell Inspiron 3505 which has an 8-core AMD CPU and 6gb of ram. I got it new for roughly $300 and from quickly looking on ebay can be had for under $200 used. I'm waiting on the mail for a $70 Chromebook with 8gb of ram and a 2-core/4-thread CPU to replace this laptop because of a half-damaged charging port. I picked a Chromebook for the 10+ hour battery life, the same reason you chose a M…

I couldn’t run any decent number of Docker containers on that and if I were doing Android development, the emulator would run like trash. Not to mention how many slow bloated Electron apps or Chrome itself runs on that. I definitely couldn’t do any serious development on a ChromeBook. But you said you care about an ad free experience and privacy and you are okay with hardware and an OS by Google ????

If I just needed to run a suite of microservices in Docker containers on a Chromebook, I would have gotten one for $170 instead of $70.

I'm not the person who posted about privacy - I consider chasing it a dead and fruitless end. Something will always be watching you. It's mere luck that preferring Linux happens to give me an environment that's mostly private by default except for anything involving the web browser.

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

#252
post #81

> Regressions are introduced all the time because Linux developers spend very little to no time checking that their code changes don't cause regressions or breakages outside of the problems they're trying to fix or features they're implementing. Wow. Such sweeping generalizations make me not want to pay attention to anything this article has to say. But let's entertain the possibility that parts of that statement are…

Working for a vendor that ships Linux code, we find regressions all the time. Because we actually test things. We do try to be good citizens, and Linux is the right answer, but it isn't a false assertion on the part of the author at all. In a previous job, 20 years ago, we found that the Linux USB stack was so bad that it was full of deadlocks and unprotected shared memory on 2.6. Just atrocious. And subsequent relea…

illumos is the living and thriving fork of OpenSolaris. I run some customers' private clouds on illumos. There are some contributions we may be able to upstream before 2025Q3.

Looking back on how things panned out, going all in on illumos a bit over ten years ago is something I wish I had done.

addendum: by "all in" I mean as an operating systems developer.

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

#253
post #32

When I see the articles I believe the title should be "Linux is not Windows so I do not like it". I have used Linux for just shy of 30 years. It is different than Windows and far more powerful. It is just that people do not want to learn different things. Plus Linux has no spyware. These days, you can do anything on Linux that you do on Windows, except for some 3d Gaming. And that is because hardware vendors refuse t…

> When I see the articles I believe the title should be "Linux is not Windows so I do not like it". I've used Linux for as much only I'm a tad more humble. Mentioned more than a dozen times in the kernel git log. Not a big achievement but kinda shows I'm not just a bystander. You've never said how much time you've wasted fixing Linux or making software work. Must be a non-issue I guess.

Delighfuly subtle <3

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

#254
post #81

> Regressions are introduced all the time because Linux developers spend very little to no time checking that their code changes don't cause regressions or breakages outside of the problems they're trying to fix or features they're implementing. Wow. Such sweeping generalizations make me not want to pay attention to anything this article has to say. But let's entertain the possibility that parts of that statement are…

“it's a miracle of modern software engineering and a testament of the power of collaboration and the free software movement that the Linux ecosystem works as well as it does” It can be a miracle, and yet still not be good enough. Even as a business user, knowing that if I build an app and it probably won’t work in 5 years, is all I need to know about this hobbyist toy. Linux is fundamentally not ready for anyone who…

> and it probably won’t work in 5 years

Containers have been around for over a decade now. This "no backwards compatibility" meme is utter horse shit.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean exceedingly rare apps that use it? Yeah. And they weigh in hundreds of megabytes, right, because they come with all the dependencies starting with glibc. Yeah, that will totally work and has been a smashing success. Except it never has.

Drawio, Session, and SimpleX are three that use AppImage, just off the top of my head. > because they come with all the dependencies starting with glibc Good, because my system doesn't have glibc, by choice. > Yeah, that will totally work It's already working. > And they weigh in hundreds of megabytes My home connection is 2-gigabit symmetrical and the internal NVMe in my laptop is 4TB. So cry more poorfag.

I'll just leave this here, please argue with it:

https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future

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

#256
post #81

> Regressions are introduced all the time because Linux developers spend very little to no time checking that their code changes don't cause regressions or breakages outside of the problems they're trying to fix or features they're implementing. Wow. Such sweeping generalizations make me not want to pay attention to anything this article has to say. But let's entertain the possibility that parts of that statement are…

“it's a miracle of modern software engineering and a testament of the power of collaboration and the free software movement that the Linux ecosystem works as well as it does” It can be a miracle, and yet still not be good enough. Even as a business user, knowing that if I build an app and it probably won’t work in 5 years, is all I need to know about this hobbyist toy. Linux is fundamentally not ready for anyone who…

At one time I was a big advocate for Unix/Linux on the desktop, but I think that ship has mostly sailed.

But, it seems that FUD about what it is capable of is still actively here, which is good to know. With frameworks and libraries, there is a 0% chance you don't have SOME update for your Windows app in a couple years, forget 5.

Now, there are lots of headwinds against Linux -- Windows is a known quantity, everyone knows the MS Office suite, people hate change and don't want to learn new stuff.

But to pretend that Linux is a house of cards because there are sometimes issues that cause troubles is not being honest. Even Windows can have big issues, or have we forgotten the CrowdStrike outage earlier this year?

All OSes have always had issues; that's why all of them have patches and updates.

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

#257
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It can be a miracle, and yet still not be good enough. "Good enough" is highly subjective. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but millions of people also think otherwise. > Even as a business user, knowing that if I build an app and it probably won’t work in 5 years, is all I need to know about this hobbyist toy. That ultimately depends on your tech stack and app features, much more than your OS. If you bu…

> “Good enough" is highly subjective. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but millions of people also think otherwise. Ironically, I might as well point out that billions of people think otherwise of Linux. In some countries, a few trees is “good enough” as a bridge. The IRS, of course, says COBOL is “good enough” to use as a web backend for the moment. The weirdest thing is how people complain that engineeri…

> I might as well point out that billions of people think otherwise of Linux.

These same billions, sans a very small fraction, don't even have "operating system" in their vocabulary. And as far as they are concerned, Chrome browser on one operating system is just as good as Chrome/Chromium on another operating system.

> Try installing a Linux program from 2005 with a UI made in any toolkit of your choice.

Personally I would not have difficulty doing this with containers. But there is no reason to do this at all. No sane and sober person wants this.

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

#258
It could use taking a real good look at the "user journey". How would one even get to having linux on their desktop? It seems like it still overlooks some basic stuff. Like, having a website that's straightforward and doesn't bury how to get a distro. Instructions that'd be written with clarity and wouldn't just drag on for dozens of steps (and even if they do, that's just the stuff that should be written smarter, not in a way that'll just overwhelm someone and just make them check out). Granted, even just putting install media together in the first place might be enough to make some people check out already, but still.

There are things like fedora's media writer, which is good, but even that is kinda needlessly buried under several clicks, because their website just isn't regular user oriented, I guess (which is a real common thread) - there's server and enterprise stuff, which is just a distraction and would be irrelevant to such user, so why is it even there, or why isn't there a "consumer" fedora website...and it's just stuff like this. Take a look at ubuntu's website, and you'll see a similar (but also worse) situation. Just literally, where would a regular person even start there? They'll see all this enterprise stuff and just leave. Debian, there's a huge download button - great! that just downloads an image and uhhh...what one is supposed to do with it? there's bizarrely not even an 'installation instructions' link next to it on that page. there's a "help" link, but it doesn't lead to installation instructions, which are actually under 'other downloads' link, and buried under several overcomplicated pages, with the manual itself being so overly long it'll make anyone give up on using it, simply because it has a poorly usable interface.

It falls apart before someone would even get on, cause there kind of isn't a solid path for them. Like, back to basics. How about making stuff easier to get, really basic stuff like unburying download links and making stuff easier to understand...well, that is, if those distros and companies are even interested in 'consumer linux' anymore, which barely seems that way sometimes. Maybe a user friendly way isn't to just throw an iso file at someone (if they'll even find it) and have them go figure. Maybe that's exactly why linux user base is not growing substantially.

Also, just try to not even tell people to use terminal. Like, don't even start with 'you can apt get anything'. They won't. Just say 'get apps from an app store'. That's actually user friendly, and it already just exists in distros. As a further challenge, one might wanna consider any time a user has to use terminal and/or blindly copy some commands they don't actually understand in order to do or fix something, a usability failure. (cause it is.)

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

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean a page without 30MB of JavaScript dependencies, 50MB of images, 10MB of fonts and not sucking all your private data is "low quality". Yeah, you're absolutely right, I'm going for quality content, not shiny crap.

The content is total garbage, which is where the problem ultimately lies.

The garbage is a result of me using Linux for almost 30 years and also being an active Linux maintainer.

I can vouch for every word in the article except maybe the last section but this discussion alone speaks for itself, so even that part is not totally wrong.

Here in this discussion we've got all the falsehoods that I've heard a billion times already: * It works for me it must work for everyone else (never mind other people have different hardware and use different software) * I've not had any issues it's all made up (the same) * I can show this, that and that exception (yeah, exceptions normally prove the rule).

Have fun with a no-os. I mean your specific distro version with a specific set of libraries and applications that you're using today that is not compatible with anything else under the sun.

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

#260
post #81

> Regressions are introduced all the time because Linux developers spend very little to no time checking that their code changes don't cause regressions or breakages outside of the problems they're trying to fix or features they're implementing. Wow. Such sweeping generalizations make me not want to pay attention to anything this article has to say. But let's entertain the possibility that parts of that statement are…

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues Just check this bug tracker. Just this one. Bug report on top of bug report caused by a fix which was caused by another fix. Sadly it's not just one bug tracker, I keep an eye on many of them. Of course in the magical Linux land if "It works for me", then the author is lying. Never mind that the author of this "click-bait" article is a ... Linux kernel bugzilla maintain…

>Sadly it's not just one bug tracker, I keep an eye on many of them.

How many Microsoft or Apple bug trackers do you have access to? The fact is that we have to consider that open-source work is largely done by volunteers and commercial developers with their own use cases in mind, and we only know about the drama because it's out in public. The drama inside big tech firms could be worse and on a larger scale and we would likely not know about it. Even if an insider told you something, it would be only a small part of a bigger picture you can't see.

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