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I appreciate Canonical, but disagree with being called a whiner/complainer. I'll give praise/complain in moderation. Your post sounds too much like "with us or against us" US president comment. On any topic I might like some bits, dislike others. Canonical invited me to (real life) UDS twice btw.

If you complain in moderation along with praise I don't think you are the kind of person who was being called a complainer.

If you switch distributions forever because you refuse to install a single package to get a different desktop, you might be a complainer.

Unfortunately it has kind of gone backwards for a few years.

But, I recently installed the new Ubuntu Mate and it is awesome! Gnome2 with a modern menu, which is probably the pinnacle of free desktops until the newer ones mature, fix their usability issues, and reverse decisions to cripple their interface(s). I mean its a fucking workstation, and they are still chasing the grandma market who moved on to iPads five years ago.

Also, for the first time in years my laptop suspends/resumes perfectly. I've had about a 1/5 chance of crashing during either as long as I can remember. No longer under Wily.

Mate just reinforces why I am bitter toward Ubuntu. Compiz used to be a pretty rad window manager 5-6 years ago. But Ubuntu basically hijacked Compiz as the foundation for Unity, so any Compiz version newer than I think 0.8.x is missing key features and suffering many bugs, if used for any purpose other than to support Unity. If Ubuntu hadn't messed up Compiz so much, then Mate+Compiz would indeed be a viable and happy desktop environment. Fortunately Gnome3 is itself viable now. But I will never get back the many days of really trying to make mainline Ubuntu (and Mint with Cinnamon and Mate) work for me post-Unity (after all it comes with Compiz out-of-the-box! ;) ) and suffering all the stereotypical brokenness for which people deride desktop Linux.

Compiz works with Ubuntu Mate, unsure about specific bugs because I've found I haven't really needed it.

Would you say you use Compiz as a tiling window manager? In the old days it was a totally snazzy tiling window manager. After Unity, many of the tiling features were removed or broken (I waited until 2013 to try this stuff, so I gave the dust a chance to settle).

I do remember the hotkeys to send windows to the side or corners, which I liked. But, so far I am doing fine without them, and appreciating some hard won stability.

You can still set hotkeys (I actually thought they were on by default, but maybe not) via the CompizConfig Settings Manager under Grid.

See I don't even know or remember what Compiz is anymore. My mom doesn't know what Compiz is. I guess that's when Ubuntu switched (12-14 or so release?) to the new start launcher and "search apps by typing their name", and everyone hated that? Yeah I remember being annoyed at that for a while, but then got used to it and now like it more. I don't even remember what old desktop looked like.

But I also noticed at the same time, my hardware on the laptop worked and the UI was smoother and more consistent. So saw enough improvements with each release to keep me happy with it.

Maybe at some point I stopped being a Linux distro hobbyist who was interested in what individual packages were called, and what kernel version each ran. I used to love that stuff. I started with Mandrake Linux, used Redhat, Gentoo for a while. But then stopped being interested in that became sort of an ignorant user that just wants his dev environment, (compilers), language packages, wifi, trackpad to work etc.

Agreed! I was delighted by Gnome2 (Ubuntu) and now I am delighted by Gnome3 (Debian Stable). I don't do anything too custom, just need basic tiling. I recommend Ubuntu to friends and family, it's just not for me anymore. And I have forgotten about Compiz too until somebody brings up Mate: I wasted a lot of time with Mate because Ubuntu screwed up Compiz and now I am a bit spiteful toward Ubuntu.

Agreed - I also used to be "linux hobbyist" until the day I realised I was spending far more time monkeying about with packages and kernels than actually doing anything useful. Thanks to Ubuntu I don't have to care about that anymore.

> But then stopped being interested in that became sort of an ignorant user that just wants his dev environment, (compilers), language packages, wifi, trackpad to work etc.

This is exactly why I have been using Ubuntu for years. If I cared about customizing every little thing and using the lastest packages then I might use Arch. I just don't have the time for that crap any more.

> I mean its a fucking workstation, and they are still chasing the grandma market

Ubuntu's original mission was to make a desktop for the general user, as every other desktop distro out there was already available for the technical user.

Don't confuse low-quality, buggy, and incomplete with technical users. Yes, they are able to work around issues but crap is not what makes a technical workstation. See CADT, https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

Ubuntu has arguably not succeeded at either, except by accident with Ubuntu Mate. It still isn't as cohesive and complete as Windows 2000 was, which was good for technical and general users alike. SGIs were pretty good too.

I'll give you some examples. Since the early 90's NT has supported custom gui themes, you can change colors in a theme in a few clicks. It has had a gui service manager to administer service daemons, very easy to use. (Windows has actually gotten worse also!)

This is the correct level of abstraction for a workstation. The two choices given today between broken/absent and crippled/too-difficult are no choice at all.

These things still don't exist under free desktops decades later! Or they may have existed for a few years until the next CADT wave broke them.

http://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/winnt351

I whined a bit to myself when they switched me away from Gnome but I got used to the new interface. Just takes some time. Now that I'm constantly switching back and forth between Ubuntu, OS X, and Windows, my biggest problem isn't any of their interfaces. Just the fact that they're all different. Switch back from the Mac to anything else and now my mouse wheel works oppositely (and other minor issues along those lines).

You can change the mouse scrolling direction on mac

And in Ubuntu. Although I don't know if Ubuntu lets you specify the behavior based on the type of the device, e.g. trackpad vs. mouse. Certainly you can configure X per-device but that's not just a checkbox in settings.

Happy lubuntu user here. It's small and fast, hardware support is nothing short of amazing. I'm running it on a high-res laptop and there isn't much that I would change.

Agreed.

Year of the Linux Desktop -- such a joke

This has not made sense for over a decade.

The release of RedHat 8.0 in 2002 brought Linux UI up to reasonable standards of general-public friendliness. Anybody shouting this ridiculous canard after that point is likely just shilling for the proprietary industry.

The year of the Linux desktop never happened because by the time Linux became user friendly enough to install on desktops, the market for desktops had been eclipsed by laptops (and their proprietary chipsets, especially for wifi). By the time Linux caught up on laptops, people had moved on to tablets and phones.

The year of the Linux desktop, arguably, was 2011, when Android 4.0 was released, and brought Android up to the performance standards of iOS.

I've never really had much trouble running linux on notebooks. It makes no difference, a notebook is just a slow desktop with a built-in UPS. So the year of the linux desktop was probably sometime around 2004, when driver support got good enough for most hardware. Earlier if you didn't care about working video drivers.

But have desktops really been eclipsed by notebooks outside of my little bubble? I don't know very many people who even own a notebook, and I personally only have one for work.

Almost everybody I know has and uses a desktop computer at home, but I don't think I know anybody who has bought a new one in the last five years or so.

A notebook is just a slow desktop with a built-in UPS, more arcane chipset, proprietary power management systems, and proprietary wifi chipsets.

Yes, it's been possible for quite some time to install Linux on laptops. But to actually use a laptop with Linux on it, things like power management need to work out of the box without lots of configuration by the end user. Linux support for ACPI has only very recently become solid to the point that I don't need to worry about it.

And as far as notebook ownership eclipsing desktop ownership, notebook sales eclipsed desktops long ago, around 2004. For most people, unless they're PC gamers, notebooks have offered sufficient computing power for more than a decade.

Ahhn linux fans, forever moving the bar to try to convince us it's popular.

Last year was my personal year of the Linux Desktop https://jeena.net/year-of-linux-desktop and it still remains that way.

Really? I gave Ubuntu a go as a daily driver a few years back. Getting WiFi working was a struggle, the constant offers to install apps in normal browsing flow was irritating, sound died a few times, and over time my boot partition got filled up with old linux images and had to be cleaned with magical command-line incantations.

That being said, it had less trouble with my network printer than Windows does.

I get the appeal of Linux, but I did not have a grandma-friendly experience.

I haven't had wifi problems with Ubuntu for literally a decade. When there is a problem, it isn't Ubuntu's fault as a distribution but rather has to do with hardware that has no Linux driver or needs a very recent kernel version. But using very recent kernels will also have its own problems.

The only criticism I can relate to in this is the boot partition filling with old linux images, it really doesn't make sense that cleaning those out isn't done automatically by default.

It was pretty simple to get the wifi working, but still - magical command-line incantations I'm copy/pasting from fora.

You can opt-out of the web app install prompts.

Edit: http://askubuntu.com/questions/206710/how-do-i-disable-unity...

Reliable WiFi is hard stuff - but nowadays Linux has gotten to the point where it mostly just works. OTOH I still have WiFi issues on OS X to this day - just recently tried backing up some files over SMB and WiFi choked.

I remember worse days, compiling drivers from source, audio never worked. Wifi support was only for an exclusive set of devices, video drivers were terrible. Because of that benchmark, what I have now works.

> my boot partition got filled up with old linux images and had to be cleaned with magical command-line incantations

???

http://tamaloa.github.io/2013/11/11/ubuntu-servers-most-anno...

Unity is really user-friendly and easy to use for first-time computer users, doesn't matter what people say. Individual apps, not so much...

There are two things I never liked about Unity, the Amazon thing, and the super shallowness when pressing the "windows" button to launch apps. It only works reasonable well on super fast machines with a really good graphics card. I don't understand why it takes up to a second before I can start typing on almost any machine I use. And it is only a overlay which could almost be static.

Gnome on the other hand does the whole live animation thing for every window on every desktop and it is still mega fast even on my oldest machines. I press the button and basically instantly I am able to start typing and launching the app I need.

The Amazon thing can be turned off. Unity2D is acceptable on slower machines. My experience, of course. You have valid points, nonetheless.

If that is like you describe it, it isn't very intuitive to do so. It seemed easier to me to change the distribution instead trying to find out how to make it faster.

You can disable all online features of the dash on System Settings-->Security and Privacy. As for Unity2d it was just sudo apt-get install unity-2d

but it was removed after 12.04 if I'm not mistaken. That is why I still use 12.04 on a couple laptops. I think the time is running out for 12.04 updates, so I will need to change to something else. There is always gnome-session-flashback, I guess. Not sure if the kids will like it/want it, as they're used to Unity and it's their laptops...

How is Ubuntu any more or less user friendly than OSX or Windows? They're all so similar these days..

I would agree. I think the reason why someone can use Ubuntu so easily is the similar UI semantics.

That said, as someone who used Windows 98 through 7 on my development platforms, my WTFs/minutes is very elevated on a Windows 10 machine.

I can't speak for OSX, but Ubuntu beats Windows these days in terms of usability, mainly because the software ecosystem is not polluted with crapware like it is with windows. If I want to find a tool to do x, it is an 'apt-get install' away where as with windows I have trawl through pages of google search results, trudging through trial versions before I find something that does what I want. If you are a developer, even just the basic unix tools are a god send in saving hours every week, on windows you have to deal with cygwin just to get something approximating those great tools.

It also takes ages to set up a windows system relative to Ubuntu. The difference can literally be measured in hours for the average user.

God no.

you spend a couple hours (not even really) setting up a few pieces of software.

Your reward is not to be saddled with unity trash until you realize it's a piece of crap and go back to windows (or OS X).

That's what got me to make the switch. I just wanted a command line without all the crud that comes with Windows. I don't see going back to Windows as long as I'm writing code.

This is not entirely true. As someone that recently switched to Ubuntu from being a long time windows user.

Your apt-get scenario only works if what you're looking for is in the official repositories. If not, you have to add those repositories first. That's a lucky menu find in the Ubuntu installer or some random add repo command with some possibly untrusted domain in it.

Then... You get random install errors. Missing so files or package dependencies etc.

Trust me, I've done more googling trying to install stuff on Ubuntu than I ever did on Windows. At least with windows if you had the exe or msi file you were dons 99% of the time. And you almost always found that file on the site for that program.

Even if you can find your package in the repos, you can always build from source if you like. In that case it a ./configure && make && make install away

I disagree. For most users using a GUI installer will be better 99% of the time.

I use windows, OS X and Ubuntu on a daily basis.

And IMO Unity is the better DE. But I wouldn't say Ubuntu is the better overall UX. OS X has my least favorite DE. But I think it has the better overall experience. I've been using OS X for about 2 years now and I can't remember a time it came out with stuff for me to solve.

On Ubuntu recently I had to change the default kernel it was using and recompile my graphic drivers after an update, not that hard a task but not something an end user should have to go through. I've used Ubuntu 12 and am now using the 14 and it really has improved a lot both on reliability and UX, but it may take a lot of work to get it to be reliable depending on your hardware.

My dream DE would be something like DWM but without the tiling stuff, more features included out of the box and written in a higher level language.