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What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

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Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#261

Post by ue_ »

nisa wrote: post #176
AnonymousPlanet wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE has always tried to play catch-up with Windows regarding style, leaving users in some kind of uncanny valley. And I'm not very impressed with what I've seen lately in KDE. That said, I'm hopeful something useful will come out of it.

I know this sounds ridiculous but KDE/Plasma5 is great if you manage to change the style to something else. Numix + icons is a good candidate. You can choose QtCurve for KDE/Qt5/Qt4 apps and skin that with Numix + Numix Colors and GTK2/GTK3 have native Numix widgets. I've made peace with Breeze Dark at the moment, it's not so bad. But optics aside KDE5 is mighty powerful. Dolphin is a great filemanager and I'm missin…

And really don't forget that KDE actually has a file picker that lets you browse by thumbnail, something that has been missing in Gnome since a bug about it was filed in 2005, and it's still not there (yet).

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#262

Post by pawadu »

microcolonel wrote: post #59
lutusp wrote: post #40

Quote: "The only way to fix Linux is to take one distro, one set of components as a baseline, abadone everything else and everyone should just contribute to this single Linux." Essentially the article's point is that technical totalitarianism would make Linux succeed on the consumer desktop, using the successful models of Windows and OSX -- one source, one model, no disagreement. Hate to acknowledge it, but it might…

This is why systemd's natural dominance of system orchestration and device initialization, and PulseAudio's natural dominance of consumer audio configuration could not be more welcome. The big threat right now, as ever I suppose, is fragmentation in consumer desktop systems; the worst problem being Canonical's decision to develop Mir for reasons they later admitted were fabricated. The point is that all major toolkit…

things that have caused problems on my machine lately:

1. systemd

2. pulseaudio

3. avahi

do you see a pattern?

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#264

Post by Jonnax »

Twisell wrote: post #246
bitwize wrote: post #115

What killed the Linux desktop? Not being preinstalled. For a bit of context from PC history, this is also what killed the GEM desktop, killed the OS/2 desktop, and damn near killed the Windows desktop until Microsoft put pressure on vendors to make a 386SX with VGA the entry-level option and ship Windows 3.0 with every unit. Preinstalls are an OS's golden ticket to adoption.

I work on Win 10, I run Ubuntu Server and some Desktop VM, I have an iMac at home. Due to recent lifestyle change I'll soon buy a laptop and I was highly considering buying a Linux laptop because I will mostly use it for coding. After a few search I noticed that the most cited laptop choice was an ugly old Thinkpad. I really don't want to spend 200 hours checking if hardware and drivers will behave rightly and still…

The Dell XPS line officially support Ubuntu.

www.dell.com/uk/business/p/xps-13-9350-laptop-ubuntu/pd

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#265

Post by Samathy »

michaelmrose wrote: post #249
VonGuard wrote: post #6

I think it was the inability for GUI's to stay stable. Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. My opinion, yes, but I always felt the GUI changes in Linux were extremely gratuitous after Gnome 2. Couple this with the fact that for a decade, the actual GUI was tied very, very heavily to the apps. So you had to use Gedit in Gnome, or whatever the…

Your post is a whole bucket of wrong. You have always been able to mix and match apps from a different desktop. Vim and emacs are awesome. Package formats have never ever been compatible, not even all distros that use the same format are compatible in fact. For open source software this is less of an issue than it seems basically the production of a package is 1/100000 of the effort required to produce the program it…

I see an awful lot of posts like OP here where they're for some reason thinking that using a specific distro, or even DE, locks them into using specific packages.

You can literally install anything on any Linux distro. Some things might take a bit of work, sure, but they're all just a Linux system underneath.

Install the right dependencies, get the app somehow (through a package manager, or source),put the files in the right place, and bobs your uncle.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#266

Post by wtbob »

j3097736 wrote: post #140
julian_1 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gnome went off the rails, Unity completely ruined Ubuntu[1], and KDE always felt very cheap and hard to navigate. Completely agree, and as a user of Desktop Linux for a very long time - I always felt that Linux GUI have been inferior to the options available on Mac and Windows. It's not for everyone, but I found a personal solution with tiling window managers (Xmonad, I3) and related tools (suckless' dmenu). They r…

But why switch to a tiling window manager when XFCE + dmenu + custom shortcuts is good enough?

I personally find that movable-window designs are a UI failure, requiring too much user interaction. A tiling WM, OTOH, enables me to do what I want: work with one tool or another, and work with multiple tools when that's what I want (which, frankly, is rarely — other than consulting a browser or info window, it's not often that I need more than one window on my screen at a time.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#267

Post by alias_neo »

Nobody else seems to have mentioned it, but with 2x4K screens, Ubuntu Gnome (16.04) with it's Hi-DPI capabilities is the only thing even close to usable for me at the moment.

I've tried switching to XFCE and a couple of other light weight DEs but when I can actually get both displays to output at once, the text and UI are so tiny or messed up it's unbearable.

That said, Windows 10 does an almost equally horrific job (scaling everything up to a horribly pixelated size but at least a size I can see sitting 2-3 feet away. I only use Windows 10 for gaming so it doesn't bother me.

My go-to for both home and work is Ubuntu Gnome 16.04 right now, sadly even Kali is horrific to use when I do occasionally need it now, but Ubuntu with Gnome has worked close to flawlessly and looks stunning with its crisp clear test and UI elements at 4K.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#268

Post by wtbob »

Kenji wrote: post #42
patrickaljord wrote: post #31

Nothing killed the Linux Desktop. Windows already won that war and it was good enough. Heck, even Apple and its billions couldn't get more than 5% market share worldwide. The next "war" moved to mobile and there linux is not doing that bad.

Windows solved many of the GUI problems 20 years ago that Linux still struggles with today. Windows was and is ahead and this is why it was and is more successful. It is that simple. I would take Windows 95's window manager over Ubuntu's Unity every day of the week.

> I would take Windows 95's window manager over Ubuntu's Unity every day of the week.

And I'd take StumpWM over Windows 10. Honestly, I'd take Windows 95's UI over Windows 10.

I don't actually mind what the Unity guys are trying to do — it's definitely not for me, and is part of why I left Ubuntu for Debian, but I can see that they are trying to do something good.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#269

Post by wtbob »

dcdevito wrote: post #65

The Linux Desktop didn't die, because you simply can't kill something that never had life to begin with. Linux (as in the kernel) succeeds because it's free, flexible, stable and secure. But none of those words are "pretty", "aesthetic" or "powerful". And the DEs associated with Linux reflect this in every nature. OSX became the uber tech junkie's OS of choice, but with Apple's recent shenanigans these savvy enthusia…

> Linux (as in the kernel) succeeds because it's free, flexible, stable and secure. But none of those words are "pretty", "aesthetic" or "powerful".

I think that StumpWM, i3 & dwm are all powerful, æsthetically-pleasing environments. I think that emacs is a powerful, æsthetically-pleasing environment.

> OSX became the uber tech junkie's OS of choice, but with Apple's recent shenanigans these savvy enthusiasts and devs are also starting to use Windows again.

I think anyone who chooses to use Apple doesn't care about his freedom, and anyone who chooses to use Windows doesn't care about æsthetics. With Linux, I have both.

Re: What Killed the Linux Desktop (2012)

#270

Post by alkonaut »

int_19h wrote: post #243
alkonaut wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one Linux with one desktop was widely preinstalled, that would help. That would have made that environment the target for desktop developers, which in turn would have added the pressure for backwards compatibility. Now, as a desktop developer I'm surely not targeting Linux desktop because it's not even a single target.

For all practical purposes, desktop Linux is a single target. Use Qt, statically link everything or install to a folder in /opt, and then the only thing you depend on from the OS is libc... which has been plenty stable for a very long time.

That helps with compatibility, but it does not help deployment. Flatpack-like projects try to solve this, but there won't be a "good" way of targeting linux until one of those solutions is widespread enough that you can just show 3 download links on your page (windows, linux, os x) and it all just works.

As a developer I have zero interest in trying to get my application into the package managers of various distributions,

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