It's unfortunate the GNOME is still the default desktop environment for most Linux distributions. People give Linux a try, then give up because it's unstable and difficult to troubleshoot. Linux itself is stable (given the right hardware drivers), and provides a solid foundation for a well designed desktop environment. It's GNOME that's a mess.
One of the core strengths of Linux is its modularity, with parts being easily swapped so distro managers or end users can customize what they need. GNOME goes against this by taking on hardware management tasks that are well outside the scope of a desktop environment and munging it all into a giant ball of complexity so everything depends on everything else. If the GNOME project had the resources to hire a massive QA team to catch issues like this, it wouldn't be such a problem. But they don't, so GNOME's shortcomings and poor design choices give desktop Linux a bad reputation.
Could you give examples as to what is messy? I used gnome on a daily basis, as well as Windows 10/11, and occasionally MacOS.
My experience is that gnome is consistent, consolidated and intuitive. While windows is all over the place, with at least two separate UIs with slightly different overlap in functionality.
Gnome seems generally ok, but kind of old school win98 reliability wise. Well it crashed/BSOD, shrug, reboot and move on.
Pretty much once a week I lose the cursor, focus is generally locked onto one gnome terminal, once I find it, I can exist the shell, which kills the window, which doesn't help, but I exit the next window window, and eventually I get my cursor back.
Sometimes whenever I launch anything that uses OpenGL I just get a GLX failure.
Sometimes I go to open a new window and it just won't map.
Granted I open many terminals in a day, but it's still pretty disappointing.
I get the "this application <FOO> has closed unexpectedly" about once a day.
Try opening top and moving your mouse around a lot. For me, CPU usage goes up to ~30%. This is on Fedora with pretty banal hardware. For extra fun, google "gnome-shell high cpu usage". That's just one example.
Nagging update messages which won't disappear after clicking. Random window switch unresponsiveness/delay. Those are in Gnome, I have no such problem in KDE, I have a different set of issues.
As someone who hasn't used Gnome or KDE in some time. The issue I run into all the time has nothing to do with the desktop. It's Nvidia. Sometimes Realtek too.
I'm stuck on a specific release of my current distro because the whole system will randomly freeze forcing a hard reset (holding the power button for it to turn off) because of something I guess Nvidia's driver is doing to the kernel. Happens on any other distro or newer release of my current distro I've tried.
Yeah, that's why I qualified my comment about the hardware drivers. If you can get by on an Intel or AMD GPU, those should be very stable. If you need the power of an Nvidia GPU you're at their mercy, so you will need to track kernel releases and driver versions and so on.
I had that as well. I 'solved' it by downgrading kernel version to 5.15. Perhaps it may work to upgrade it as well but that has other issues on my system.
The bad thing is that it's what people are used to (thanks, Ubuntu. But it's Fedoras default as well)), our KDE systems were met with a lot of resistance and ended up needing to change to GNOME
I tried to install Kubuntu 22.04, the installer crashes every time you set up full-disk encryption. Not doing better with regards to crashes in important settings widgets.
Sway and i3 are excellent, but they're clearly not for everyone and I wouldn't recommend them for people new to Linux, or who just want a normal desktop experience.
For a notion of what GNOME ought to be, I'd point in the direction of lightweight environments like XFCE or LXDE or MATE. None of them are perfect, but in my experience XFCE at least was more stable than GNOME.
Lightweight window managers don't provide things like settings for your wifi card (maybe XFCE does now). The point isn't that desktop Linux users shouldn't have a graphical interface for wifi. The point is that this should be independent of the window manager. Same for power management and mounting filesystems and so on. If GNOME provided a clean framework for these things it would be okay. Instead they've recreated the Windows registry.
GNOME is great out of the box on Fedora. I think a big problem with Linux is users going off the beaten path and using bespoke environments, settings, and software.
GNOME isn't even a fraction of the problem, desktop linux is absolutely unsuitable for day to day use and that's nothing to do with the desktop environments. The foundational design decisions of the way applications are rendered in linux means that every experience is inconsistent, nothing even has the same file picker and it's always a surprise to see which one is thrown in your face in any given situation. This sort of inconsistency is ripe throughout every part of linux, everything works so long as you make it your full time job to work out what the incantation is to enable basic convenience features.
This is a bug. Upstream (vanilla GNOME) fixed it. It hasn't been patched to downstream (Ubuntu GNOME).
Exposure to bugs can be reduced by choosing well maintained software projects, but they are sadly the norm past a certain level of complexity for many desktop environments. I could point to analogously silly bugs in my favourite DE (KDE), or even much more minimal projects like Sway and DWM.
At this stage, users have 4 choices (wow!):
1. Just wait for Ubuntu to port the patch (easiest)
2. Install vanilla gnome on Ubuntu (or use another distrowith vanilla gnome)
3. Install KDE or Sway or whatever you want on Ubuntu and learn that (or, again, use a different distro that has a new DE)
4. Become The Cool Terminal Dude (the custom keyboard layout community would like to talk to you about the word of the holy lord, staggered column layouts)
Personally I like option 2 and 3 because then I get to shill all the nice alternatives out there like Fedora and Gentoo, but you do you.
The so what depends on your perspective. If you think of Linux as a hobbyist's operating system, and you get to join the party and tinker around, well, sure, this is just people's spare-time project, sure it's going to have bugs. I've come to the conclusion that this is the most correct view (as in, matches what the reality _is_).
But don't complain about the year of Linux on the Desktop never arriving, because this kind of bug is not acceptable for a production operating system. In every commercial app I've been a part of developing, a crash is a showstopper bug--we don't ship until it is fixed. In a settings app, it's even worse, because now you've got to research how to do all this stuff on the command line. But my experience is that there is always some major bug like this with the GUI. Obviously the command line is the real interface and the GUI is just to paint the pig. Why is it never the Year of Linux on the Desktop? Because (among other things) the real interface is the command line. Ok, fine, just don't ship hobby-grade system software and expect to be taken seriously, just man up and say "the developers of this OS don't have time to write a real GUI, so it is command-line only, expect a high learning curve."
> But don't complain about the year of Linux on the Desktop never arriving, because this kind of bug is not acceptable for a production operating system.
Are we pretending Windows doesn't exist? In my experience, Windows has been awfully buggy and sometimes downright unusable.
When I used KDE Neon for the first time, the first thought that came to my mind was: "How can a trillion dollar corporation not make this good of a software?" because even after being a Windows fanboy for decades, the bugs on the Windows side compared to FOSS made me realize the reality.
You forgot option 5. Write rants about everything GNOME being bad. If you are high level you might even sneak in some systemd hate. It's important not to do anything constructive though. What would be the point of that?
> It hasn't been patched to downstream (Ubuntu GNOME).
Who know how long until the fix landed on ubuntu stable. I recently submitted a minor patch to a gnome library and it took almost 4 months after being merged to land on Manjaro.
I am not going to bash one distro or another, but I have been using Linux since (literally) 1992, so I have some history with slackware, gentoo, redhat (since the early TSX-11 archive days), ubuntu, mint, MXlinux, SuSE, Debian, and Fedora. I was a real RedHat user for many years, and some of those I listed I was intimately familiar with.
I echo some other comments... I think perhaps 10-12 years ago, I would strongly recommend Ubuntu to new users. I find now I actively try to get people to stop using it. Here at the uni professors blindly ask for it since it is so popular, but it causes more trouble than it is worth. I used to be a very large Mint proponent, but even now I find it harder to recommend that distro.
In an odd twist, my most stable builds are gentoo boxes, which are by no means built for any kind of novice, or heck, even some real linux users have issues with it. I installed and used MX a few times, and perhaps will migrate most to that distro.
Other than moving to Debian, I wonder what is a truly stable desktop distro these days, which someone could recommend for a new user? Might have to break down and start trying some cherry picked ones from the distrowatch list again...
Pop_OS! It's not without its bugs too, what isn't? But I've had far fewer major issues like the one noted in the link. System 76 and community, maintain it specifically as desktop Linux. Unlike Canonical which is much more focused on enterprise, server, these days which is why I think we've seen desktop Ubuntu slide on quality.
Strong but tentative recommendation for Pop_OS! as well.
I don't use it, but a friend who built a PC with a new graphics card recently and couldn't get Windows to boot stably with it downloaded it as a live distro for troubleshooting at the recommendation of a popular YouTube channel.
When he asked me to remote in a few hours later to take a look, he'd already replaced Windows with it and installed his Steam library.
His comments were that "he didn't know Linux was like this", "if he'd known it was so easy he would have done it years ago", "he's so sick of Windows, and now he feels like he's in control of his computer again", and "how does it just work without having to install anything". He's a heavy equipment operator living where there's only cellular internet access, 30 minutes from the nearest grocery store, and this is his first computer since before his children were born.
He was very impressed by the free software catalog and customized his own widget to monitor his hardware after showing him lm_sensors. A few months on, I'm having to remind him I don't know everything when he calls about how OpenRGB or WINE prefixes work.
I'm the pig that enjoys being wrestled in the mud by my projects, so I don't pretend to anyone that my way is the best, but to anyone who is looking for something with support for modern gaming hardware, both in the software and community sense, Pop_OS! is what the Ubuntu Forums were circa 2006.
Being a computer geek, Pop_OS! is not my distro of choice but my girlfriend has been happy with it and runs her online school with it. I had her briefly try the Cinnamon edition of Manjaro (about a month) and so many bugs kept surfacing, that I simply put Pop OS back on. I was a Linux Mint user for a long time, and I can't recommend that distro either because of all the bugs.
Wouldn't call the issue on article major (edit: and it's more of GNOME than Ubuntu issue). Installing Steam removing the desktop environment on the other hand...
i am genuinely interested why you find it harder to recommend mint. I stopped distro hopping a few years ago, all my boxes are setup with mint and run flawless, so I didn't look elsewhere for a while.
I used to use Mint ages ago, but then I switched to Ubuntu MATE because I had some problems with Mint. It's so long ago I can't clearly remember what they were, but it had something to do with the way Mint's package repositories were based off the Ubuntu ones and how sometimes Mint's additions made things inconsistent with each other.
However, I've not had a good time with Ubuntu since I upgraded to 22.04. I normally stick to LTS releases, but I upgraded to 22.10 in the hope it would fix some of my issues. I've switched one of my machines to Mint and it's been pretty good, so I'm thinking about ditching Ubuntu entirely. I haven't really evaluated a the distro space, so I just picked Mint because I used it before and it seems okay.
Immutable filesystem distros such as Fedora Silverblue or MicroOS don't get enough attention in the Linux community but they aim to address this particular issue. If you don't muck around with the "system" partition as I understand it, you can pretty much guarantee a stable UX.
I seriously stopped recommending ubuntu to new users of linux. Some ubuntu based ones are ok (like elementary) but ubuntu itself for years has had myriad issues in stability for a long time.
The only real benefit is since ubuntu is more popular, you're more likely to find getting help for it online, more readme's will have ubuntu specific install directions or packaged binaries, googling for errors and such will be easier, etc.
Thr benefit of being able to find help online is a huge one. I use Ubuntu because ut just works for my use cases (VPS) and I can easily find issues/commands online if needed. Other distros, I m a bit wary. This doesn't apply if you are a Linux expert but most of us are just devs using Linux for hosting, deployments etc.
>The benefit of being able to find help online is a huge one.
Very very true, I'd say that's one of the biggest reasons why Raspberry Pi and Arduino are much more popular then STM32 or other, equality or more capable at an equal or even better price, microcontroller.
I initially had this same concern too about migrating from Ubuntu as well, but for any Debian based distro those same commands are going to be almost exactly the same, and really the main differences are what comes default and package versions.
How Debian feeds into downstream distros is something that Linux novices might not know, but I think that the differences aren't as intimidating as they might seem.
It's called The Universal OS for a reason, and I think if people give themselves enough credit for using Linux in the first place they would be surprised at how capable in using other distros and they can be and how much the skills transfer over.
I think part of that is because if you're used to using Windows you get a sense of learned helplessness because you're taught you're not worthy of learning how the OS works, so if the first distro people use is Ubuntu that same feeling will carry over, and you tell yourself "this is the only Linux I'm capable of using". Also when you've only ever used one distro having dozens of different options makes it seem like every one is radically different, despite having similar conventions and using the same code within distro families.
So never be afraid to "fuck around and find out" and see what else is out there, if you can use Ubuntu you're capable of using many other distros. Ubuntu is geared for enterprise deployments and cloud VMs nowadays, instead of regular people just dipping their toes into Linux like it used to be. So its status as the default user friendliest distro isn't valid anymore.
You can also get the "just works" experience from other distros, and in fact maybe more so because of all the issues with snap based applications that Canonical forces on you that add complexity, makes troubleshooting more difficult and creates a much worse overall user experience.
Also concerns around privacy and similar things which first started to be treated more seriously when it came prepackaged with an Amazon app.
To my knowledge right now they are just that, concerns, no absolute proof, but why risk it when there are so many other distros where those concerns don't exist?
Also theres the whole snap controversy, yeh sadly Ubuntu's issues go beyond stability
So I should have specified, I'm mainly talking about linux for users, not as a dev tool like the first reply. As I hinted to, I do recommend elementary because it uses ubuntu under the hood so most terminal tutorials online will work with it but it's much more polished. I feel like the elementary folks put a lot of effort into the OS.
I've tried Linux (usually Ubuntu) every other year for ~15 years. Weird stuff like this is the norm. You can sometimes fix these things by searching SO + forums, and C+P terminal commands.
>Ubuntu is feeling more and more like Windows every day. There are lots of parts that feel unpolished, and blatant bugs make it feel untested.
That's way worse than Windows. All core Windows GUI components actually work and are stable. GUI wise, my Ubuntu 22.04 provided at work is way, way, more buggy than my Windows 11 Pro install at home. Don't know if it's Ubuntu issues, GNOME issues, GNOME extensions issues, Wayland issues, SNAP issues, pipewire/pulseaudio issues, or a combination of those, but as a user trying to get work done, I don't have time to debug which component of this bazaar engineering laundry list is at fault.
The whole point of Ubuntu is that you were getting older packages and components, but it was bulletproof, battle tested, working and stable. They seem to have lost the plot a while ago.
I can't even disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in lol.
Granted, Gnome has some stellar UX choices though, credit where credit is due, but if I were to recommend someone a Linux distro reagrdless of desktop environment, to it wouldn't be Ubuntu.
Agreed, Ununtu is way worse. Especially when Ubuntu performed a background update, and the NVIDIA GPU stops working properly. It happened several times to me, and a few times the GPU drivers were so hard to update that a reinstall of Ubuntu was quicker/easier.
I’ve had to use a Windows 10 machine in a new job and I am shocked how bad it is! I would have thought they would have made things better since Windows XP but it’s absolutely junk. Restarts, screen flickering, slowness, Dell crap, policy and spyware crap. Just flakiness everywhere. I don’t think anything buggy/not actually functional like this happens though, I wonder how Apple manage to produce such high quality software, the fit and finish really is worlds apart compared to Linux Desktop or Windows.
After having trouble with battery life in Linux I just went back to Windows. Everything works as designed and does what I want. Only problem is some Python libraries dont work so well, but I dont need that much. Most of my time is using IDEs, browser and shells which any OS does pretty well now.
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One of the core strengths of Linux is its modularity, with parts being easily swapped so distro managers or end users can customize what they need. GNOME goes against this by taking on hardware management tasks that are well outside the scope of a desktop environment and munging it all into a giant ball of complexity so everything depends on everything else. If the GNOME project had the resources to hire a massive QA team to catch issues like this, it wouldn't be such a problem. But they don't, so GNOME's shortcomings and poor design choices give desktop Linux a bad reputation.
My experience is that gnome is consistent, consolidated and intuitive. While windows is all over the place, with at least two separate UIs with slightly different overlap in functionality.
Pretty much once a week I lose the cursor, focus is generally locked onto one gnome terminal, once I find it, I can exist the shell, which kills the window, which doesn't help, but I exit the next window window, and eventually I get my cursor back.
Sometimes whenever I launch anything that uses OpenGL I just get a GLX failure.
Sometimes I go to open a new window and it just won't map.
Granted I open many terminals in a day, but it's still pretty disappointing.
I get the "this application <FOO> has closed unexpectedly" about once a day.
I'm stuck on a specific release of my current distro because the whole system will randomly freeze forcing a hard reset (holding the power button for it to turn off) because of something I guess Nvidia's driver is doing to the kernel. Happens on any other distro or newer release of my current distro I've tried.
For a notion of what GNOME ought to be, I'd point in the direction of lightweight environments like XFCE or LXDE or MATE. None of them are perfect, but in my experience XFCE at least was more stable than GNOME.
Lightweight window managers don't provide things like settings for your wifi card (maybe XFCE does now). The point isn't that desktop Linux users shouldn't have a graphical interface for wifi. The point is that this should be independent of the window manager. Same for power management and mounting filesystems and so on. If GNOME provided a clean framework for these things it would be okay. Instead they've recreated the Windows registry.
This is a bug. Upstream (vanilla GNOME) fixed it. It hasn't been patched to downstream (Ubuntu GNOME).
Exposure to bugs can be reduced by choosing well maintained software projects, but they are sadly the norm past a certain level of complexity for many desktop environments. I could point to analogously silly bugs in my favourite DE (KDE), or even much more minimal projects like Sway and DWM.
At this stage, users have 4 choices (wow!):
1. Just wait for Ubuntu to port the patch (easiest)
2. Install vanilla gnome on Ubuntu (or use another distrowith vanilla gnome)
3. Install KDE or Sway or whatever you want on Ubuntu and learn that (or, again, use a different distro that has a new DE)
4. Become The Cool Terminal Dude (the custom keyboard layout community would like to talk to you about the word of the holy lord, staggered column layouts)
Personally I like option 2 and 3 because then I get to shill all the nice alternatives out there like Fedora and Gentoo, but you do you.
But don't complain about the year of Linux on the Desktop never arriving, because this kind of bug is not acceptable for a production operating system. In every commercial app I've been a part of developing, a crash is a showstopper bug--we don't ship until it is fixed. In a settings app, it's even worse, because now you've got to research how to do all this stuff on the command line. But my experience is that there is always some major bug like this with the GUI. Obviously the command line is the real interface and the GUI is just to paint the pig. Why is it never the Year of Linux on the Desktop? Because (among other things) the real interface is the command line. Ok, fine, just don't ship hobby-grade system software and expect to be taken seriously, just man up and say "the developers of this OS don't have time to write a real GUI, so it is command-line only, expect a high learning curve."
Are we pretending Windows doesn't exist? In my experience, Windows has been awfully buggy and sometimes downright unusable.
When I used KDE Neon for the first time, the first thought that came to my mind was: "How can a trillion dollar corporation not make this good of a software?" because even after being a Windows fanboy for decades, the bugs on the Windows side compared to FOSS made me realize the reality.
Who know how long until the fix landed on ubuntu stable. I recently submitted a minor patch to a gnome library and it took almost 4 months after being merged to land on Manjaro.
I echo some other comments... I think perhaps 10-12 years ago, I would strongly recommend Ubuntu to new users. I find now I actively try to get people to stop using it. Here at the uni professors blindly ask for it since it is so popular, but it causes more trouble than it is worth. I used to be a very large Mint proponent, but even now I find it harder to recommend that distro.
In an odd twist, my most stable builds are gentoo boxes, which are by no means built for any kind of novice, or heck, even some real linux users have issues with it. I installed and used MX a few times, and perhaps will migrate most to that distro.
Other than moving to Debian, I wonder what is a truly stable desktop distro these days, which someone could recommend for a new user? Might have to break down and start trying some cherry picked ones from the distrowatch list again...
I don't use it, but a friend who built a PC with a new graphics card recently and couldn't get Windows to boot stably with it downloaded it as a live distro for troubleshooting at the recommendation of a popular YouTube channel.
When he asked me to remote in a few hours later to take a look, he'd already replaced Windows with it and installed his Steam library.
His comments were that "he didn't know Linux was like this", "if he'd known it was so easy he would have done it years ago", "he's so sick of Windows, and now he feels like he's in control of his computer again", and "how does it just work without having to install anything". He's a heavy equipment operator living where there's only cellular internet access, 30 minutes from the nearest grocery store, and this is his first computer since before his children were born.
He was very impressed by the free software catalog and customized his own widget to monitor his hardware after showing him lm_sensors. A few months on, I'm having to remind him I don't know everything when he calls about how OpenRGB or WINE prefixes work.
I'm the pig that enjoys being wrestled in the mud by my projects, so I don't pretend to anyone that my way is the best, but to anyone who is looking for something with support for modern gaming hardware, both in the software and community sense, Pop_OS! is what the Ubuntu Forums were circa 2006.
I haven't upgraded to 37 (which just came out).
However, I've not had a good time with Ubuntu since I upgraded to 22.04. I normally stick to LTS releases, but I upgraded to 22.10 in the hope it would fix some of my issues. I've switched one of my machines to Mint and it's been pretty good, so I'm thinking about ditching Ubuntu entirely. I haven't really evaluated a the distro space, so I just picked Mint because I used it before and it seems okay.
Immutable filesystem distros such as Fedora Silverblue or MicroOS don't get enough attention in the Linux community but they aim to address this particular issue. If you don't muck around with the "system" partition as I understand it, you can pretty much guarantee a stable UX.
The only real benefit is since ubuntu is more popular, you're more likely to find getting help for it online, more readme's will have ubuntu specific install directions or packaged binaries, googling for errors and such will be easier, etc.
Very very true, I'd say that's one of the biggest reasons why Raspberry Pi and Arduino are much more popular then STM32 or other, equality or more capable at an equal or even better price, microcontroller.
How Debian feeds into downstream distros is something that Linux novices might not know, but I think that the differences aren't as intimidating as they might seem.
It's called The Universal OS for a reason, and I think if people give themselves enough credit for using Linux in the first place they would be surprised at how capable in using other distros and they can be and how much the skills transfer over.
I think part of that is because if you're used to using Windows you get a sense of learned helplessness because you're taught you're not worthy of learning how the OS works, so if the first distro people use is Ubuntu that same feeling will carry over, and you tell yourself "this is the only Linux I'm capable of using". Also when you've only ever used one distro having dozens of different options makes it seem like every one is radically different, despite having similar conventions and using the same code within distro families.
So never be afraid to "fuck around and find out" and see what else is out there, if you can use Ubuntu you're capable of using many other distros. Ubuntu is geared for enterprise deployments and cloud VMs nowadays, instead of regular people just dipping their toes into Linux like it used to be. So its status as the default user friendliest distro isn't valid anymore.
You can also get the "just works" experience from other distros, and in fact maybe more so because of all the issues with snap based applications that Canonical forces on you that add complexity, makes troubleshooting more difficult and creates a much worse overall user experience.
To my knowledge right now they are just that, concerns, no absolute proof, but why risk it when there are so many other distros where those concerns don't exist?
Also theres the whole snap controversy, yeh sadly Ubuntu's issues go beyond stability
I had to use Ubuntu for a couple of days recently, and in just that little time I found a handful of glaring bugs. This bug here doesn't surprise me.
So this is what happens when distros become too commercial, huh?
That's way worse than Windows. All core Windows GUI components actually work and are stable. GUI wise, my Ubuntu 22.04 provided at work is way, way, more buggy than my Windows 11 Pro install at home. Don't know if it's Ubuntu issues, GNOME issues, GNOME extensions issues, Wayland issues, SNAP issues, pipewire/pulseaudio issues, or a combination of those, but as a user trying to get work done, I don't have time to debug which component of this bazaar engineering laundry list is at fault.
The whole point of Ubuntu is that you were getting older packages and components, but it was bulletproof, battle tested, working and stable. They seem to have lost the plot a while ago.
I can't even disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in lol.
Granted, Gnome has some stellar UX choices though, credit where credit is due, but if I were to recommend someone a Linux distro reagrdless of desktop environment, to it wouldn't be Ubuntu.
This never happened to me in Windows.
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