Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

itvision.altervista.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 472 posts

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

#451

Post by ghaff »

ryao wrote: post #450
ghaff wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're violently agreeing with the parent. I worked for an open source company for over a decade. But, although things improved over time, within about a week of joining I went out and bought a MacBook to use (for the first time) because it was more politically acceptable than Windows but I didn't want to deal with either a locked-down corporate Linux distro or an unsupported free Linux.

My neighbor is a photographer. He uses photoshop on MacOS. It works for him. Until Adobe ports Photoshop to Linux, the “must have Photoshop with no issues whatsoever” demographic is better served by MacOS.

Yeah. I was hired to do a job and didn't want something that would really piss people off (Windows). But Macs were increasingly acceptable and that seemed a comfortable middle ground at the time. (And became increasingly so over time and I really grew to like a lot.)

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

#452

Post by t_mahmood »

itvision wrote: post #444
t_mahmood wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, still a hater. > Takes roughly 2 minutes, ok. Sure, then after 2 or 3 days it pops up again. Do you want to use OneDrive? > No Oh, too bad, You should turn it on, I will remind you in a few days. > 3 days, 5 days Oh, Sorry, never is NOT an option. How can that be acceptable! At least you know where your configuration might be! On Windows, You don't even know where your apps configurations are. Is it in some dee…

> Sure, then after 2 or 3 days it pops up again. Citations needed. Doesn't happen to anyone else but you. > Oh, too bad, You should turn it on, I will remind you in a few days. > 3 days, 5 days Oh, Sorry, never is NOT an option. Again 5 minutes of Googling disables it. > On Windows, You don't even know where your apps configurations are. In Linux they can be in a dozen of different locations as well. And Gnome even h…

If you're approach to fix things in Linux like the way you talk about Linux, no wonder you spent hundreds of hours fixing it. Work smarter not harder.

It's neither about if it works for me, it works for everyone, nor it should be, if it doesn't work for me then it doesn't work for everyone.

You're making some points, that most of us Linux users knows to be wrong, and pointing it out.

You're just a hater, with some outdated information about Linux. Obviously Linux is not for everyone, no one is saying it is. But it provides a open, no bullshit, interruption free, environment, that I own, not some corporate doing business with my data. That is alone enough to me, and many other

Please don't let the door hit you on the way out

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

#453

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

jpc0 wrote: post #359
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And because every Linux distro uses a different theme and one of a dozen UI libraries/DEs/etc. the downloaded GUI application will look bad because it won’t fit in. As opposed to, say, Windows, where there is only one GUI and one theme by one company so everything is perfectly match- wait, no, they have bits and pieces running every GUI they've every invented all the way back to the 90s ( https://www.dvhardware.net…

The reality is I can just target winforms on windows, or GDI if I need that. To open a window there is exactly one way if I want it. To open a window on Linux do I call into X11 or wayland? Do I need to also provide a DRM layer for incase it needs to be run directly ontop of DRM because BIG_USER_WITH_MONEY wants that. Should I use QT to get a decent UI library, or GTK, or one of the many other less popular ones. As a…

> The reality is I can just target winforms on windows, or GDI if I need that.

And the reality is that you can just target GTK on Linux. That you happen to have picked a single option on NT doesn't magically make it different, it just means you already made the decision.

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

#454

Post by edoceo »

foobiekr wrote: post #447
edoceo wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've lost context and appear to be going after a weak interpretation with the implication I don't know how to sysadmin. The context was the sweeping generalisation that Linux devs and that they don't care about regressions, see up thread by @imiric. In that context I've not had regressions. More explicitly, for this narrower context, I've not had regression bugs in ext3/ext4. I'm not making a claim that I've not ha…

I think you’re missing the point. Unless you were actually measuring the content of your file system with a reasonable quality hash function, you likely had actual data corruption that Fsck will never see. Fsck can’t check data on ext*. Unless you were routinely running mtree or something similar, you’d honestly have no idea. My point here is that software can appear to be fine when it’s actually shit because most pe…

Cool

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

#455

Post by tuna74 »

foobiekr wrote: post #448
tuna74 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you report a regression within an -RC series it will be fixed or the commit reverted. Of course, that requires actual testing.

I am very familiar with reporting bugs on the Linux kernel, as you may imagine from the previous comments. But you’re just reiterating that the kernel development itself lacks sufficient testing which necessitates this. Everyone is a volunteer; the result is as you’d expect. Look, there’s nothing wrong with this. In reality all the people who are electing to run Linux without it actually having sufficient quality for…

I am going to assume that Lenovo, Dell, nVidia, AMD, Intel etc actually test Linux (or farm that out to RedHat etc) actually test Linux on the hardware that they support. But I could be wrong of course.

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

#456

Post by jpc0 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #453
jpc0 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is I can just target winforms on windows, or GDI if I need that. To open a window there is exactly one way if I want it. To open a window on Linux do I call into X11 or wayland? Do I need to also provide a DRM layer for incase it needs to be run directly ontop of DRM because BIG_USER_WITH_MONEY wants that. Should I use QT to get a decent UI library, or GTK, or one of the many other less popular ones. As a…

> The reality is I can just target winforms on windows, or GDI if I need that. And the reality is that you can just target GTK on Linux. That you happen to have picked a single option on NT doesn't magically make it different, it just means you already made the decision.

Which version of GTK should I pick since you seem so confident?

And should I target X or Wayland? Which Wayland extensions are ubiquitous enough so that I don't need to manually reimplement things in my app? Should I target pipewire for audio? Pulse?

If I pick a modern stack like Wayland + GTK 4 + pipewire it might not work on older linux distros. Maybe that's fine for my needs, maybe it's not. If I pick X + GTK 3 + pulse I might end up reimplementing half of the desktop manager in my app and need to constantly rewrite my app.

Do I distribute deb/rpm or do I distribute a flatpack/snap... Actually which one.

And don't bring up that GTK abstracts Wayland/X because if I target Wayland I have access to a ton of Wayland extensions which aren't there in X so I do need to make that decision the moment I need to get access to that stuff.

So even just picking GTK I now have a matrix of 9 different configurations. GTK is not the defacto framework on linux. We now need to add QT to the mix and the whole collection of things there.

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

#457

Post by nairadithya »

rbanffy wrote: post #413
pxoe wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome tries to focus on UX and does a pretty good job at it. But they're yet to make a regular user oriented distro, which I think could be a better bet at realizing that 'mainstream linux' idea, because at least they'd care enough to try and figure out the things that get in the way of users having linux running.

Some standard, good enough, apps would help further this idea. Right now, I can’t find a mail client for Gnome that’s as comfortable to use as Apple’s Mail app. I use Mailspring, and it comes really close, but still could be nicer. It’s also not part of Gnome. Gnome is a very well managed project, but its resources aren’t infinite.

Thunderbird seems to be getting there.

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

#458

Post by lousken »

There's one answer that I would give that's not present on the list - Linux is free, so you don't get to complain if there's something not working properly. You did not pay for it.

With windows, that's a completely different story and yet you can't even complain, my tickets to Microsoft were resolved in ~2% of cases.

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

#459

Post by kelnos »

pshirshov wrote: post #72
t-writescode wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NixOS is certainly the most obvious design paradigm with the most confusing integration / implementation I've ever seen. It feels a bit like "Emacs is my favorite operating system, if only it had a text editor" NixOS's philosophy? amazing . Actually trying to use, install stuff to, make changes to, etc. NixOS with the currently existing tools? horrible .

The benefits outweight the issues.

For you, perhaps, but not for me.

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

#460

Post by kelnos »

pshirshov wrote: post #324
layer8 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This subthread started with “When you start installing software and drivers, the OS gets totalled, sooner or later.” Then came the objection that one wouldn’t do that with Nix. Then that yeah, but Nix is too difficult to use. Then that no, it isn’t that difficult after you spend a weekend or two learning it. Which isn’t for the average user. Now you say there are plenty of other options, presumably non-Nix. I feel we…

There was no "average user" constraint specified. Works on my desktop.

"Works on my desktop" is about the most useless thing you can say when comparing good and bad experiences that different people might have.
Post reply on HN