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The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

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Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#71

Post by gnosis »

Stiffy wrote: post #10
Spyro7 wrote: post #3

I feel like I've read over 20 of these articles lately. I have used linux on the desktop in some form or another since 1998. It works, trust me. I find it strange that the author says they should have gone back to FreeBSD. In terms of "desktop" experience, both of these operating systems are somewhat similar. I understand his complaints about the driver situation, but, really, this just means that you need to do some…

The problem isn't Linux. The problem is GNOME, and to a lesser extent, KDE. GNOME is just not a good desktop environment, yet it has often been pushed as "the" Linux desktop by various distros and vendors. New Linux users end up using GNOME, finding that it's a pretty bad experience, and then they blame Linux and OSS as a whole. Had they used XFCE, for instance, they'd probably think otherwise. If recent experience i…

"The problem isn't Linux. The problem is GNOME, and to a lesser extent, KDE."

For those of you who feel a little adventuresome, may I recommend trying a minimalistic, tiling window manager?

I use i3: http://i3wm.org

It's very stable, very simple to use and configure, and doesn't have the bloat of KDE/GNOME.

Some other popular minimalistic window managers:

awesome - http://awesome.naquadah.org

xmonad - http://xmonad.org

wmii - http://www.suckless.org/wmii

Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#72

Post by dkarl »

BCM43 wrote: post #67
jpr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly is different between X11 emacs and win32 emacs? I haven't noticed anything significant.

There are a number of functions that I have come across that only work on the linux version of emacs. I can't remember any off the top of my head though.

Are you comparing Gnu Emacs on Linux and XEmacs on Windows? I found Gnu Emacs so ugly and alien on Windows and XEmacs so lacking in extension support that I gave up on both. Also, it's annoying to switch back and forth between Gnu Emacs and XEmacs. Therefore, my IDE on Windows is Putty. I log into a Linux box and connect to one of my long-running Screen sessions so I can use a decent Emacs :-)

Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#73

Post by reirob »

Spyro7 wrote: post #3

I feel like I've read over 20 of these articles lately. I have used linux on the desktop in some form or another since 1998. It works, trust me. I find it strange that the author says they should have gone back to FreeBSD. In terms of "desktop" experience, both of these operating systems are somewhat similar. I understand his complaints about the driver situation, but, really, this just means that you need to do some…

I do not know why I should install OS X on non-Apple hardware, besides maybe safe some money. But with Linux it is already a pain to buy some basic multi-purpose printer/scanner. I went through this last time and believe me, the cost of the time that I spent on choosing the right printer that will work with Linux was higher than the printer itself. And in the end the printer still was not supported out of the box and I had to download some packages from the constructors web-site. In the end it works now - but my wife would never be able to make it work.

Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#74

Post by dkarl »

ch0wn wrote: post #24
Spyro7 wrote: post #3

I feel like I've read over 20 of these articles lately. I have used linux on the desktop in some form or another since 1998. It works, trust me. I find it strange that the author says they should have gone back to FreeBSD. In terms of "desktop" experience, both of these operating systems are somewhat similar. I understand his complaints about the driver situation, but, really, this just means that you need to do some…

Thank you. I've been using Linux for more than 12 years now and it works. Every user got to make its own choice. I tried OS X, Windows and Linux and I will stick with the latter.

Ditto. I use XP at work, have had a chance to use Windows 7 in the past, and have a Mac at home that I use for Lightroom. Being in regular contact with the competition helps me have a balanced attitude towards the downsides of Linux. Sure, Flash crashes a lot. Sure, you get lied to about the user-readiness of desktop apps and environments. Those things are worth bitching about, but I use Windows every work day, so I know switching to Windows won't be an improvement, at least not for me.

Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#75

Post by reirob »

KonradKlause wrote: post #2

Can we please stop this? When you don't like Linux on your desktop, don't use it. It's that easy.

I really do not think that it is that black and white. First it is not about people who do not like Linux on the desktop but about people who used Linux on the desktop for many years, promoted it at their schools, at their companies, to their friends. And then after many years struggling against the same problems all over again they discover that it is not worth their time.

Then there is another question - does it make the Linux desktop better if people (like the author and me) stop using it?

Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#76

Post by m3koval »

telemachos wrote: post #54
Wickk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>gnome-terminal or konsole? These are my killer apps. And I won't use other platforms because they don't have them. So wait, is it your love of these specific terminal emulators or of the shell? OSX has terminal.app

> OSX has terminal.app In fairness it took until Leopard (as I recall) to support tabs and still doesn't support 256 colors. (It will in Lion apparently.[1]). [1] http://www.apple.com/macosx/whats-new/features.html#unix

Terminal.app definitely still has problems in Snow Leopard; especially the lack of 256 color support. I've switched to using iTerm2, a replacement terminal emulator, and it's solved most of my complaints about Terminal.app.

Hopefully Lion rolls a lot of those fixes into Terminal.app.

[1] http://www.wendymcelroy.com/news.php?extend.4010

Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#77

Post by zppx »

piger wrote: post #25

People keep saying "it works for me, go away", as if other people who care about a DECENT desktop experience are just morons. "Ah! Another stupid windows/osx user!" I don't care about your fvwm desktop with 99 xterms and emacs everywhere, or your fully customized arch linux that "works for you"; I, like many other people, have different needs. And yet the general response from the community is "fuck off". First rule…

Well to be fair I saw a lot of people downvoted on HN because they got valid points criticizing OS X or even Rails, so your first rule applies in some other situations too, at least here, maybe it's a problem about discussions on the internet...

I use a Mac so I understand their criticisms sometimes, sometimes I think they're just whining, as I think of this article.

I think that an article about a switch for Windows would have been much better.

Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#78

Post by wvenable »

mbubb wrote: post #61
piger wrote: post #25

People keep saying "it works for me, go away", as if other people who care about a DECENT desktop experience are just morons. "Ah! Another stupid windows/osx user!" I don't care about your fvwm desktop with 99 xterms and emacs everywhere, or your fully customized arch linux that "works for you"; I, like many other people, have different needs. And yet the general response from the community is "fuck off". First rule…

No - not true. There are glitches but none of them a dealbreaker. I am not a masochist - if it caused me pain I would have stopped using Linux on my laptop years ago. Much of what I do is commandline. So a not atypical work setup is to have some kind of messenger, a browser, a terminal and thunderbird running. That is 95% of my day and it works great. I would switch if it didn't. I am not trying to play the Linux ver…

> You should make it work or go back to your OS of choice.

I'm not sure that's even possible. If the complaint is a lack of drivers and poor support for hardware, how is the average developer supposed to deal with that?

Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#79

Post by wonnage »

pandeiro wrote: post #41
ryan_brunner wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, these complaints usually come from people who WANT linux to succeed on the desktop. I'm certainly one of those people - one of those poor unfortunate souls doing RoR development on a PC. Windows isn't a great option for me because the development ecosystem around Ruby on Windows is still fairly immature. Linux would be a perfect solution, if I could get more than a hour of battery life out of my laptop,…

Give up or don't give up, but agonizing about it accomplishes nothing. 6 months ago I received a new laptop that "just didn't work on Linux." I did a lot of research, tried different distros, hacked on it a lot, and now it is a dream to use, gets excellent battery life, and even suspend/resume work beautifully. Hackers don't agonize over this kind of shit, they get to work. If you don't want to invest the time, your…

Well, you also have the bias of wasting several weeks of your life trying to set up a laptop.

Yeah, I said waste. Most people will counter by saying "but I learned linux!" No, you didn't, you learned to futz around with a bunch of conf files. I remember trying to make Pulseaudio work with my USB soundcard. Several hours of dicking about with asoundrc later and I a. still had a nonfunctional sound card b. still don't know how pulseaudio works

Not that it isn't an accomplishment. Just, while it may be a source of personal satisfaction, don't expect people with less time than you do to feel the same way!

Re: The Linux desktop experience is killing Linux on the desktop, Part II

#80

Post by aristidb »

jarin wrote: post #48
IvarTJ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android seems to be an example of a Linux-based operating system becoming successful partially because of its importance to hardware vendors. Could Linux distributions in general benefit from a hardware vendor becoming the goto vendor for Linux-running laptops and/or desktops?

Android isn't successful because of Linux, it's successful in spite of Linux. Google chose Linux as a base on which to build what is essentially a new operating system (much like Apple chose BSD to build iOS on). This is what a cellphone looks like when it's developed entirely by the open source community: http://www.openmoko.com/

Android certainly is successful _because_ of Linux (the kernel), because that let Google concentrate on the upper layers, being able to use a mostly finished kernel.
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