I find it less aggravating than other systems. I have a Mac I use every now and again and every update it seems to have lost a feature. And Windows has gotten to the point where it's just a constant battle against Microsoft trying to steer you into their next distraction, and they reboot the computer on their schedule, not yours. If I leave my Ubuntu desktop for a while, when I come back it does some security updates but is otherwise how I left it.
I think when I started using Linux 20 years ago, Wine was already one of the most impressive "feature" of my first Linux distro (SuSE 9.2 from a magazine btw) and I’m still impressed by this project. But Proton, that’s another beast.
>and they reboot the computer on their schedule, not yours
When was the last time you used modern Windows and encountered this issue?
Windows rebooting you by force was an issues in the early days for Windows 10 to the point it became a meme people like to refer back to, but that hasn't been an issue in years.
Quite recently I have come to a machine scheduled to do video transcoding, with a notification "We have updated your operating system" and Handbrake being closed.
Is this finally the year of the Linux desktop? I tried to go full Linux two years ago but gave up and went back to Mac. Between lots of software not available on Linux and weird problems with screens and audio I couldn’t recommend Linux to non tech people. It’s great for dev though.
I think the traditional desktop will go away slowly anyways and most people will use operating systems like iOS and Android.
Laptops are the new desktop, and in those GNU/Linux still has issues with 100% hardware support, even the ones from Linux OEMs still have issues with fingerprint readers, dual GPUs, sleep modes, hibernation.
Where GNU/Linux works just fine are classical desktops, preferably self built.
I'm running a 6.7 kernel on an AMD lenovo and would respectfully disagree that there's a hardware support problem. I have full suspend/hibernate/resume and everything comes back up just like it would in Windows or Mac OSX.
Ever since WSL2, Windows has been objectively the best desktop os (with the only caveat that you have to have the pro version which lets you disable a bunch of the annoying stuff, and disabling that stuff takes a little bit of tweaking).
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under linux, while having a linux dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
Getting WSL2 working just right can still be an unnecessarily complicated process. And the Home versions of Windows do indeed suck for power users.
But Windows will generally support every monitor and resolution/scale well which can't be said of Linux (which struggles with hidpi) or macOS (which can't do fractional scaling and has blurry fonts on lodpi).
Ever since Proton and Wine, Linux has been objectively the best desktop os.
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under windows, while having a windows dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
Slightly less here. Using GNU/Linux on the desktop from 2004 and Athlon 64 release. Just works and respects me as a user and human being, unlike other alternative OSes.
14 years for me since 2010. I was a casual windows user in college so when my first job gave me a bare metal RHEL5 desktop I was very nervous. 14 years later, one of my main criteria when changing jobs was whether the new company allowed Linux machines. The company I joined not inly allows Linux laptops but also allows bringing your own device. I am now running an AMD Ryzen 9 7950x with 128G RAM workstation running Linux. Totally overkill but I love it.
> “I wish we were better at having a standardised desktop that goes across all the distributions. This is not a kernel issue; it’s more of a personal annoyance of how the fragmentation among different vendors has perhaps held the desktop back a bit,” said Torvalds in a TFiR interview in 2018.
Absolutely NOT. I would not use Linux if it forced a desktop environment on me. The whole reason of me not using windows or osx is because they do.
This is the problem with "Linux on the desktop" becoming mainstream. Mainstream users want a company to tell them how to work with their computers. I have my own opinions.
Absolutely, I think most people probably mean Gnome when talking about the Linux Desktop. Which really says a lot about "most people" and how little I give a shit about their opinions.
The benefit however is that more people using Desktop Linux might force Hardware vendors (like Nvidia) to finally get their shit together.
That’s nothing, suspend works 100% of the time when you close the lid if you clicked on Power off before closing.
Ah, the joy of opening the lid the next day to see it waking up on the logout screen, then power off then you discover the battery is empty. Such a hard issue for a 3 decades OS and a quarter of a century on laptops.
Even Linux never ever did that, and I can remember that sleeping haven’t always been a given under Linux.
>“I wish we were better at having a standardised desktop that goes across all the distributions. This is not a kernel issue; it’s more of a personal annoyance of how the fragmentation among different vendors has perhaps held the desktop back a bit,” said Torvalds in a TFiR interview in 2018.
This Torvalds guy is right. If you try to write a tutorial for how to do something in Linux, you will be in a world of pain, because users aren't using Linux, they're using apps that are using Linux.
Can I write "click on the start menu at the bottom left"? I can't. Because first of all nobody even officially calls it the start menu as Windows does. Sometimes the taskbar is at the top, other times it's at the left. Can I say press windows key (I mean, the super key (I mean, the meta key)) to bring up the application launcher? I can't do that either, because it depends on the distro's default configs. Can I say Ctrl+Alt+T brings up the terminal? Who knows! At least, surely, all of these distros are GNU/Linux so I can rely on bash commands being available everywhere, right? But then if I'm writing a tutorial for SSH'ing into a server, and the server is running FreeBSD, now the commands are the same but the arguments are different! And I know FreeBSD isn't Linux but it surely is weird that all these things that are similar but different are different from that thing that is also similar but different.
Meanwhile if you write a tutorial for Windows XP, it still works in Windows 11 because the system GUI and tools barely changed.
This is an advantage in volunteered end user documentation that Linux can't enjoy, because any step-by-step tutorial for Linux would have to be written for every single distro, or become or a ridiculously convoluted mess. And with Waylands that is only going to get worse.
Personally I'm not really counting on Linux desktop gaining popularity because, with all honesty, I found the GUIs of almost every Linux application I tried just terribly poor. Maybe this is because from I'm from XP era when lists and buttons were tightly packed into forms without all this auto-save switches nonsense, but in my mind, if Windows is losing users as they abandon their old GUIs and move into this same waste-of-space-fest (although that's probably not the reason for it), then maybe Linux should just make their GUIs like old windows instead of making them like new windows.
I don't see the reason why so many of these apps lack a main menu, for example. When an app has a main menu, and I can't find a function in the main menu, I just go "well, guess it just can't do that." But now I'm just wasting my time looking around the screen seeing if there is something I can click to do what I want. And right click often doesn't do anything. Where are my context menus? And where are my tooltips? This isn't designed for desktops, is it? It's designed for tablets. I just don't think going from Windows 11 to Windows 8 is much of an improvement. It's like you made a CLI tool without --help. In KDE Discover if I press F1 do I get a manual? No, I get the About screen.
Please do not make applications thinking the user can just Google it if they're stuck when if you Google "how to do X in Linux" you get 99 different solutions that don't work for your distro.
> Please do not make applications thinking the user can just Google it if they're stuck when if you Google "how to do X in Linux" you get 99 different solutions that don't work for your distro.
This is like searching "How to do X in Windows NT" and expecting to get results for Windows 11. Should be no great shock that when you use non-specific search terms the search engine returns non-specific results.
No, this is like searching "How to do X in Windows" because for a normal user it's Windows and Linux, not Windows and Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch Linux, Manjaro, etc.
Edit: I just realized Windows is so obviously Windows I didn't even write Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 11. I just wrote Windows. That's what not being fragmented means.
Readit News
Windows being so bad has pushed people to find a better OS.
I think when I started using Linux 20 years ago, Wine was already one of the most impressive "feature" of my first Linux distro (SuSE 9.2 from a magazine btw) and I’m still impressed by this project. But Proton, that’s another beast.
When was the last time you used modern Windows and encountered this issue?
Windows rebooting you by force was an issues in the early days for Windows 10 to the point it became a meme people like to refer back to, but that hasn't been an issue in years.
And then a month ago, and a few months before that. This is after going out of my way to disable automatic reboots.
Linux Hits 4% on the Desktop (imgur.com) 2024-03-02 | 47 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39576200>
Why desktop Linux is finally growing in popularity (zdnet.com) 2024-03-05 | 40 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39607080>
I think the traditional desktop will go away slowly anyways and most people will use operating systems like iOS and Android.
What a nightmarish hellscape that sounds like.
Dead Comment
the year of the Linux desktop will be once Windows 10 stops getting updates
Where GNU/Linux works just fine are classical desktops, preferably self built.
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under linux, while having a linux dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
But Windows will generally support every monitor and resolution/scale well which can't be said of Linux (which struggles with hidpi) or macOS (which can't do fractional scaling and has blurry fonts on lodpi).
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under windows, while having a windows dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
FTFY
"Works for Me" (TM).
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android/m...
Absolutely NOT. I would not use Linux if it forced a desktop environment on me. The whole reason of me not using windows or osx is because they do.
This is the problem with "Linux on the desktop" becoming mainstream. Mainstream users want a company to tell them how to work with their computers. I have my own opinions.
The benefit however is that more people using Desktop Linux might force Hardware vendors (like Nvidia) to finally get their shit together.
Ah, the joy of opening the lid the next day to see it waking up on the logout screen, then power off then you discover the battery is empty. Such a hard issue for a 3 decades OS and a quarter of a century on laptops.
Even Linux never ever did that, and I can remember that sleeping haven’t always been a given under Linux.
* Only tested on 7 laptop models over the past 10 years. YMMV.
This Torvalds guy is right. If you try to write a tutorial for how to do something in Linux, you will be in a world of pain, because users aren't using Linux, they're using apps that are using Linux.
Can I write "click on the start menu at the bottom left"? I can't. Because first of all nobody even officially calls it the start menu as Windows does. Sometimes the taskbar is at the top, other times it's at the left. Can I say press windows key (I mean, the super key (I mean, the meta key)) to bring up the application launcher? I can't do that either, because it depends on the distro's default configs. Can I say Ctrl+Alt+T brings up the terminal? Who knows! At least, surely, all of these distros are GNU/Linux so I can rely on bash commands being available everywhere, right? But then if I'm writing a tutorial for SSH'ing into a server, and the server is running FreeBSD, now the commands are the same but the arguments are different! And I know FreeBSD isn't Linux but it surely is weird that all these things that are similar but different are different from that thing that is also similar but different.
Meanwhile if you write a tutorial for Windows XP, it still works in Windows 11 because the system GUI and tools barely changed.
This is an advantage in volunteered end user documentation that Linux can't enjoy, because any step-by-step tutorial for Linux would have to be written for every single distro, or become or a ridiculously convoluted mess. And with Waylands that is only going to get worse.
Personally I'm not really counting on Linux desktop gaining popularity because, with all honesty, I found the GUIs of almost every Linux application I tried just terribly poor. Maybe this is because from I'm from XP era when lists and buttons were tightly packed into forms without all this auto-save switches nonsense, but in my mind, if Windows is losing users as they abandon their old GUIs and move into this same waste-of-space-fest (although that's probably not the reason for it), then maybe Linux should just make their GUIs like old windows instead of making them like new windows.
I don't see the reason why so many of these apps lack a main menu, for example. When an app has a main menu, and I can't find a function in the main menu, I just go "well, guess it just can't do that." But now I'm just wasting my time looking around the screen seeing if there is something I can click to do what I want. And right click often doesn't do anything. Where are my context menus? And where are my tooltips? This isn't designed for desktops, is it? It's designed for tablets. I just don't think going from Windows 11 to Windows 8 is much of an improvement. It's like you made a CLI tool without --help. In KDE Discover if I press F1 do I get a manual? No, I get the About screen.
Please do not make applications thinking the user can just Google it if they're stuck when if you Google "how to do X in Linux" you get 99 different solutions that don't work for your distro.
This is like searching "How to do X in Windows NT" and expecting to get results for Windows 11. Should be no great shock that when you use non-specific search terms the search engine returns non-specific results.
Edit: I just realized Windows is so obviously Windows I didn't even write Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 11. I just wrote Windows. That's what not being fragmented means.