I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.). Have you tried something else than xfce or unity?
You're missing the point, GP is talking about a level below the DEs, namely the graphics stack, which if unavailable or inefficient makes any discussion about the DEs moot since the GUI may very well be unusable at all in practice.
In that regard the "Windows desktop" has plenty of favorable points and "macOS desktop" is just stellar because it has had a comparatively perfect track record of driver support including a compositor since forever.
With a VESA/OPenGL/Quartz software render fallback many people on the Hackintosh crowd have been using OS X on unsupported cards via software fallback and not even notice they weren't getting the full Quartz QE/CI, which is nothing short of astonishing.
This is the signature attitude that points to the point being missed, what good is conky or awesomewm or ratpoison or xmonad or openbox if I can't make tearing and rendering artifacts disappear nor get proper colour management or sane HiDPI support? (PS: Xinerama, I hate you)
As for the DE experience on other platforms, Windows has had a kinda-tiling WM that regular people do use in the form of AeroSnap, while macOS is now getting tabs-in-the-window-manager, and Exposé+Spaces that evolved into Mission Control has been a positively brilliant experience for years.
Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder).
> Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder).
And then again, after using almost 10 years xmonad at work and at home for everything, using Windows or OS X is definitely not a nice experience. I don't really care about GUI tricks or clutter on my desktop. I just want my terminal, my editor and my browser to appear when I press the key combinations and I want my desktop to manage the windows so that they're always in the right place.
The other thing I don't miss from the Windows and OS X world are the updates. I don't want to spend one work day to update my system to the next version and possibly fixing things because something changed in the xcode and I need to reinstall it to get my toolchain to work, or something changed in the Windows Linux subsystem and again I'm spending time fixing stuff.
I like things to be simple and a very basic Linux installation with a good wm which you know by heart is miles ahead of everything else. And it doesn't change so you can focus on your work.
There are a million and one ways to use your graphics. Be it watching videos or gaming, which while you might have a problem with that, is actually done by people. It can also be used to smoothly decode and render a training video, or to make spreadsheets more pleasant to crawl through without the screen tearing and making everything look like a mess. There are even more minuscule applications you can do with graphics hardware and the software to drive it: transparency to subconsciously still remember what you're returning to when you click on another window, for example.
As nice of you as it is to warn the parent about their information-action ratio, you could use this opportunity to appreciate people's freedom of choice as well as understand there is more to Windows and Mac than Netflix and Call of Duty.
You're not adding anything to the discussion.
Most PC gamers will tell you that the experience usually sucks and is often poorly performant.
With my arch/xmonad laptop I can handle everything else, except that damn Witcher 3 :)
Wayland is on the way, which may bring Linux graphics into the 21st century, but I haven't been following that very closely.
Apple's way more on the ball about GUI stuff. While OS X lags behind in OpenGL support, which sucks for games, they nail everything their desktop environment needs to function. But notably, they don't use something like X. They have their own software stack.
If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Certainly right there with Windows or OSX or anything else. In a lot of cases you don't even need to be very selective, you just need to have a modern machine.
"If you select your hardware," you can definitely have a decent time. But I don't know many people for whom the operating system is more important than what you can do with it, and part of "what you can do with it" is "use your hardware."
Having had an issue with Ubuntu and nvidia in the past, you might want to google NOMODESET and setting it at boot, which should let you boot into X/Unity and get the latest drivers.
> But I don't know many people for whom the operating system is more important than what you can do with it, and part of "what you can do with it" is "use your hardware."
Absolutely. But if OSes aren't directly equivalent (and the hackability of a nix gives it more power than Windows can ever have), then it's worth sorting out those hardware issues (as frustrating as they are).
Thanks; I later ran into something that hinted at that. Frankly, though, at this point I don't care. I have something that works and will be patched until 2019. I don't care about my desktops. Every second I spend debugging something stupid on a desktop is a wasted second. This is bad for me and I resent it.
> and the hackability of a nix gives it more power than Windows can ever have
Ehh--if you have to use that "hackability" to get something that is minimally usable, that's kind of a push. (Or, when you consider OS X, a serious negative, because the only thing I have to do to get OS X to where I want is install Homebrew and a short list of packages, none of which require configuration.) I don't care about desktop environments or tiled window managers, the extent of my interaction with my WM, which I could not name, is a sort-of reimplementation of Aero Snap. Again, if I wanted to throw a bunch of time away on an operating system, I would set up a Hackintosh and actually be able to use Photoshop. Which, in keeping with the theme of "Linux desktops are a fractal of unusability", would be a significant improvement. I tried to avoid a reboot and use the GIMP yesterday for something. I think I need counseling now. I ended up using Pinta, whose layered image format ("OpenRaster", which wants to be a standard but it seems like nobody uses it?) is so bonkers and edge-case that ImageMagick doesn't even support it, to say nothing of Photoshop or even Paint.NET.
It turned out, kind of to my surprise, that Linux on the desktop offers very little to me as a Linux developer, sysadmin, and long-time entrails-reading "power user". That's pretty damning, in my book.
Another ocean boiled, courtesy of the Free Desktop Project.
And this isn't a "rant". I promise you, when I'm ranting, you will know.
As I understand it, installing macOS on non-Apple hardware is a license violation. Your employer is okay with that?
Maybe the fact that I have to give them time is one of the major problems? You know how much time I invested in getting my Windows and OSX desktops to work flawlessly? Zero.
Intel chipsets and their graphics drivers have excellent support out of the box. That goes for everything from refurbished Thinkpads to Chromebooks to used Macbook Pros to new desktops.
Network drivers are almost always missing. Looking at the device manager, about 5-10 different devices fails to auto-install, all part of the motherboards. The default graphic drivers tend to "start", but is limited in refresh rate and resolution, and moving around windows shows a noticeable stutter until I install some official drivers from the graphic card manufacturer. Sound normally works without issues.
On linux, the problems are almost the reverse. I have yet to have network problems on a fresh debian installation. Graphic is a all-or-nothing deal, which means either x-server starts up normally or it refuses to start completely. Sound is normally a pain, but looks to have better default behavior in the last 3 years or so.
What are you reinstalling, Windows XP every time?
Newer versions of Windows are getting better at finding and installing sane drivers for the hardware. It’s still not perfect, Windows Update doesn’t have all the latest drivers and OEMs ruin everything especially on laptops, but these days I install the latest Windows and everything usually just works.
But if you don't believe me, and choose to believe those reporting issues with Linux, just do a google search on windows install and network issues. There is plenty of people reporting the same issue. to cite windows own support page:
"If Windows can’t find a new driver for your network adapter, visit the PC manufacturer’s website and download the latest network adapter driver from there. If your PC can't connect to the Internet, you'll need to download a driver on a different PC and save it to a USB flash drive so you can install the driver on your PC"
A few months ago I bought a gaming laptop on release date. Guess what, network worked without issue. X-server did not start until proprietary drivers were installed. Sound worked.
Windows release schedule do not match Debian's release schedule. Each year after a release, the default drivers will get worse, but the general experience can still be obtained by people who experience the install process. The experience I have endured with windows is issue with new motherboards and especially network drivers (and built-in raid cards for the installer... good grief, that was a wasted afternoon trying to get the installer to accept the raid drivers). Second to that, the fall back graphic drivers look crappy and is bad in every way except that its slightly better than a basic command prompt.
I think a modern Ubuntu 16.04 Unity desktop for instance is actually a bit of a revelation for long time Linux users because it just works out of the box. I didn't have to install a single package or fiddle with anything for a change. It's fast, smooth, robust and works exceedingly well out of the box and wait for this it's even a delight to use.
It's another thing I am a long time Gnome user and won't even have tried Unity because of the now I think inexplicable bad press Unity has got but it's been quite a revelation. I urge those who have not tried it yet due to bad press to give it a shot and prepare to be suprised.
I compare it to my Windows machines and OSX laptops and do not feel a particular difference apart from preferences and of course once you get into specific use cases like adobe apps or gaming there is still ground to cover. But for a general productivity desktop with full acceleration I think it's there in many ways. If you need a rich ecosystem of dev tools it goes to the top. There is of course always scope for improvement architecturally and other things and I think that is happening with mir, wayland and Vulcan.
Upgrading these are hit and miss, and it's more common than not that third party drivers do not support newer versions of the operating system.
Linux, meanwhile, integrates all of these components. As long as you stay away from non-supported third party drivers it just works, and upgrades are painless. (Until some desktop developers change the GUI again, but that's another story.)
DRI2 is an improvement over DRI, of course (which was already about five to eight years behind SOTA for GPUs when it came out), but it's still a rickety, insecure mess--for one, any application can fire messages at any window in the X environment and read input sent to any window, which has some obvious implications for the usefulness of containers on the desktop--that is sorely in need of replacement. This isn't to criticize X when it was developed, mind you--it was fine then. It should have been defenestrated by 2002.
Full disclosure: I get the feeling from your posts that you're looking to win an argument, rather than learn anything, so I'm not likely to respond to you further unless your tone changes. HTH. HAND.
For your disclosure - don't be too lofty with me - I'm trying to understand your problems because I've a very different experience.
This is mostly because X11 sucks. (It's also partly because the proprietary nvidia drivers sucks). Nowadays I reboot on windows to watch netflix or play games (even linux-compatible ones) because the experience is just much better. Linux has been constrained to work stuff.
Now wayland is coming (apparently. NVidia is still trying to pull some shit[0]) and should fix all that. That's great ! I tested wayland a few months ago though, and my GPU's proprietary drivers weren't supported. So still no games, still no movies. :(.
0: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NVIDIA-Wa...
For example, I tried watching TNG from my external drive the other day (Using the latest VLC for both). On Linux this isn't a problem, the quality is good and there's no stuttering. On Windows it was hellish: The quality was extremely poor and it froze every (literal) 10 seconds to grab more data from the disk.
In other words, your browser can snoop on what passwords you type into an X terminal if it wanted to or is compromised.
(Of course, the Dockerfiles were also running apps--like, say, Chrome--as root, with no user namespaces, so it wasn't exactly great anyway.)
It's only bad advice if you're relying on Docker to provide security against targeted threats. Know your enemy.
But in Linux, I can run application in container or VM and then use VNC, RDP, or Spice to connect to it in secure manner.
No, it's not. OS X has GUI isolation, an application cannot read keystrokes or read other application's contents, unless you explicitly give permission to do so. This is the reason why applications that can do more, such as Alfred, require you to explicitly enable these rights in the Privacy section of the Security & Privacy prefpane.
Windows also has GUI isolation (UIPI), but it's a bit murkier. As far as I understand, lower-privileged applications cannot read events from higher-privileged applications.
So while it's possible for a program to listen to keyboard events for other non-administrative windows (such as the password for a browser), it isn't possible for a non-administrative window to grab keyboard input for stuff like windows password prompts, or information typed into administrative console windows, etc.
[0] - http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3169675/how-to-use-setwin...
https://www.acsac.org/2006/papers/epstein-paper.pdf
One from 2005 that I sent Joanna in gripe about Qubes not having a trusted path:
https://www.acsac.org/2005/papers/54.pdf
Good to see she added a better graphics system at some point. I suggest looking at prior work, though, as it's by security engineers with knowledge of adding it to every aspect of lifecycle and intent to minimize TCB. For example, GenodeOS is using Nitpicker + a microkernel. The abandoned EROS OS, whose site is still up, combined a different windowing system with a capability kernel and new networking stack. All to minimize risk in system in fine-grained way.
How are you supposed to run Adobe inDesign on a Linux desktop?
Or any other useful application, really.
Linux should just kill off its desktop. Mac OS X won the Unix desktop wars, and has the expected use models of a desktop, with a proper modern GUI API as well, instead of the ancient X hacks.
Mac OSX won the "desktop wars"? That's not even funny - it's one of the most awful DEs. You people have clearly no experience with any other OS besides the one from your favorite brand. "Hacker news"... more like "Noob Army News".
With wine...
> Or any other useful application, really.
You search in the software center or in your menu and start the app. Simple. FUD elsewhere, apple-noob.
Gnome 2.x is a dead-end - it was buggy and ugly. Gnome 3.x is far better. Unity is just another canonical-outrage.
> For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far.
Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize.
> And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system.
But we should talk about it if we're here...
After watching the "we're the only ones who know best, so shut up"-antics of the Gnome developers, I can understand that canonical got cold feet.
> Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize.
In my experience, setting up multiple monitors was much less of a hassle under Unity than under Gnome. I don't have any recent data on the resources use, but I wouldn't run either Unity or Gnome on a low memory setup. Firefox and Chrome dwarf any RAM use for compositing anyway.
>But we should talk about it if we're here...
Ok, gladly. In Gnome 3, a lot of functionality comes from extensions. Even changing the theme (from a black top panel) needs an extension. Installing extensions is done over the web using your browser (this works to a varying degree out of the box). I don't know of any recent changes, but about a year ago I had a look under the hood, because I wanted to make my own extensions, and was shocked by how they work.
First of all, there seems to be pretty much no integrity checks, signing, hashing to prevent malicious extensions. That's pretty much a no-go if you want to use Gnome in any kind of industrial setting (you will have to maintain them offline and manually on the file system level, sidestepping the supported way).
My second gripe is the stability of extensions. Since you're downloading from a website, the currently offered may not fully support your slightly outdated Gnome install. However, if you keep your Gnome up to date, expect random failures of your extensions.
From http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ about the reasoning behind sidestepping distro packaging (emphasis mine): "The second reason is that extensions are not working with a stable API, so have very specific version requirements that don't really fit into the normal assumptions packaging systems make. If a packaged extension says it works with GNOME Shell 3.2 only and not with GNOME Shell 3.4, then that will likely break the user's attempt to upgrade to the next version of their distribution. We'd rather just disable the extension and let the user find a new version when it becomes available."
So, you just updated your Gnome and your productivity extensions fail. Now you have to search replacements and, should you find them, configure them anew. Sometimes extensions just randomly fail. This was the main reason I finally gave up on using Gnome for work.
And speaking of stable APIs: another shock was to see that extensions don't operate against a plugin API but are basically Javascript code smudged into the existing running code. This makes gauging the effects one extension has on another pretty much impossible.
My final conclusion regarding Gnome 3 was that it is a wobbly work in progress, less configurable than Compiz (there just aren't that much extensions to choose from in the end), based on questionable design principles and taste. It's okay for hobby use, I guess. But I have yet to find a distro that provides an as polished DE setup with Gnome as Ubuntu does with Unity.
Don't get me wrong, I want Gnome to be great, since many distros use it as default DE and I want an alternative if Canonical mucks up Unity with their Mir transition and their focus on smart phones. There's also Cinnamon wich I kind of like, but it has the same problems regarding extensions as Gnome. I will give KDE a closer look in the future.
If only we could exile the GNOME devs, Canonical & the systemd devs to a desert island, the state of the Linux desktop would be … well, probably not as good but at least it'd be a much more collegial community.
To get back to the original topic: the attitudes of the GNOME devs, Canonical & the systemd devs reminds me of that of the OpenBSD devs, with the exception that the OpenBSD guys are generally right, just socially inept in how they convey their message.
I wouldn't judge them that harshly, but the kerfuffles had the effect of splitting the Linux community into those who embrace progress and those who shun it. Sadly, most of the experienced went the latter way because the progressive path was full of cranks.
> To get back to the original topic: the attitudes of the GNOME devs, Canonical & the systemd devs reminds me of that of the OpenBSD devs, with the exception that the OpenBSD guys are generally right, just socially inept in how they convey their message.
Most of this, in my experience, comes from sticking to a very strong opinion that is heavily based on ideals. The further apart from the real and existing world these ideals are, the more caution should be taken when implementing them. Otherwise you will be placing a huge turd on someone's desk. During work hours. On a deadline.
I think this is the main problem with the attitude that the Gnome and systemd devs have. The Canonical devs took their ideals at least closer from a working model (OS X) and they were (I assume) motivated by pragmatism.
The OpenBSD devs base their ideals probably closer to their own experience. That makes it more likely to be right.
Aside from a lot of other very good wms, there's always mate if you really like GNOME 2.
Even better, none of those wms will go away just because Apple decided to change things.
In retrospect, a Mac Pro would probably not be that much more expensive than the time I spent getting this fairly minimally demanding environment set up, though on the other hand I did re-learn a decent bit of stuff about Linux in the process. On the gripping hand, things related to X aren't particularly important to my life, so that's kind of a push.
I don't know what's going on with the Gnome guys, but KDE is flat-out the best desktop manager I've used, and I'm including Windows and OS X in the comparison. It's not without glitches, but the glitches are mostly of the "Google can't be bothered to make Chrome cooperate, and no-one has updated Emacs' DM support in the last ten years" sort.
Meanwhile everything went down the path of compositing and otherwise burning way too much CPU to do not a whole lot extra.
I switched over to a tiling WM years ago, and have been extremely happy since. It does exactly what I want; I can connect to a running instance with my editor and reconfigure it, as well rewrite it while it's running. It's pretty great.
* Finder is garbage (alt tab is broken and non configurable. I can't figure out how to convince it that the built in display is always the primary display. It seems to struggle with nfs mounts which Gnome doesn't at all. I've had just as many, or more issues with OS X and projectors as I have with Gnome). Where is the centralised location for Finder extensions to tweak it to my preferences?
* The default command line tools that come with OS X are old and basic (reminds me of Sun's tools) and have a death of a thousand paper cuts (e.g. top defaults to sorting by pid, lol; they still ship bash 3.5.57, locales are all fucked up).
* brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. But that's Open Source people trying to shore up OS X deficiencies so I won't call it "garbage". (F)OSS people put in a lot of effort to keep it running and they deserve praise.
* The programs from Apple are all terrible. I literally don't use any except Safari sometimes since it allegedly doesn't use as much battery as Chrome or Firefox. I guess I sometimes copy paste stuff into Textedit and I sometimes use Calculator.
It's all certainly usable but there is no consensus that OS X is the best. YMMV. My feeling is that each time there is an OS X release, it jumps ahead of Gnome; but Gnome usually trundles along and surpasses it and maintains a lead most of the time.
Try PathFinder: http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/
It can be used for free until you decide to buy it.
> alt tab is broken and non configurable
Cmd+Tab? What exactly do you find annoying?
Try Missing Control (F3, or set a mouse hot corner in System Preferences -> Mission Control) to quickly see all windows (for all process, or Ctrl+F3 for current app, Cmd+F3 for desktop) and just raise the one you want.
Also try TinkerTool: https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
> brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good.
Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/
> The programs from Apple are all terrible.
Which ones, and how, exactly?
Cmd-` to change between windows within an Application is a behaviour I don't like and prefer Cmd-tab to cycle through all windows. Gnome defaults to the same thing as Finder but it's possible to change the behaviour.
>Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/
I've taken a look at guix and it's promising.
> Which [of Apple's programs are terrible], and how, exactly?
Well since I stopped using a lot of these programs where possible, my opinions may be out of date. But Quicktime player doesn't play most files. It's slow. It hangs. It's all around worse than VLC and MPV. And you used to have to pay to upgrade it to do things that other players do for free. And why can't it play DVDs? Or can it? If so, why is there a separate DVD player? (Rhetorical questions; I don't care since I don't use either program).
App Store is outrageously slow to do anything. 14 seconds to check for updates? wtf? (server backend and not gui issue, but part of UX). I had XCode update fail at downloading the 3 or 5 GB ball of mud. Instead of resuming the download or checking the hash of the file to make sure it wasn't corrupt, it just tried to download 5GB again.
XCode takes up 5GB and seems to be required for some particular development work. It's not really appropriate for Mac Book Airs with their small ssds. So I just don't do that work or try to use a Linux VM.
Facetime just doesn't work 3/5 times.
Preview is alright for reading PDFs, but you can't look at an image in a directory and press a hotkey to see the next image in the directory (as least, I haven't seen how); eog does this.
Mail is an absolute pile of garbage. The threading is confusing as hell. It's soooo slooooooow. Then it hangs when pulling in sysadmin style alert folders (with thousands of mails). Deleting mails is also very very slow (i.e. cleaning out said mailbox takes days). Instead of pushing operations to a background thread it where you can see the progress like in Thunderbird or whatever, it just beachballs. And for some reason, if you want to attach Calendar to an online account you have to do it through Mail (wtf) and if you don't want Mail to be used for the Mail then you have to configure the account correctly. Some people may be tricked into subjecting themselves to the pain of using Mail. :(
With Mail being so terrible, one ends up using Thunderbird or Outlook which have Calendars integrated. So Calendar becomes superfluous. Which is a shame because it works alright with online calendars, but it doesn't seem to have the integration to help plan anything with people.
I don't understand why Notes, Reminders, and Stickies all exist. Reminders should be rolled into Calendar. Notes allegedly integrates with Google but I don't see anything from my Google Keep account in my local Notes hierarchy. And is Notes supposed to compete with OneNote? They've a lot of catching up to do.
Then there's a lot of programs that I haven't opened in a decade since they used to be terrible (iTunes can't even play ogg out of the box, wtf) or I just don't have a use (photobox, game center, imessages). I used to have Pages and Numbers but I don't remember being impressed with them. From what I read, I haven't missed anything by not using them. But if they're free now, why aren't they installed by default for people who might want to write a document?
And if I've signed on to App Store with my icloud id (which needs a credit card to get the free updates, wtf!?), why is there no single sign on? Why do Game Center and Facetime and iMessages prompt me for iCloud credentials? I guess so I can sign in with different accounts (corp vs. personal?) But keychain access doesn't prompt me. So maybe keychain isn't backed up automatically to the cloud... :(
- random failures to mount network shares,
- drag-and-droping files between Finder windows suddenly stops working,
- the file rename edit widget appearing in random part of the screen
that are bugs, that should not appear in the supposedly best desktop OS.
I recently set up Ubuntu and Mint computers for some folks, and can report that Mint is not bad, but Ubuntu is dreck (seriously, the change-user-password dialogue hangs: do Ubuntu users never change their passwords‽).
I've been running Debian with stumpwm for years now, and am convinced that this is the way of the future: a tiling window manager, extensible in a real language, capable of performing literally any task I ask of it. Most of the time, my main window is full-screen — that's odd to someone used to a classic desktop interface (as I used to be), but it's actually very much like a modern tablet or phone.
I love Linux as a developer platform and that's why I'm staying here. But if I could give up the shell, package management, understandable system architecture and the like, I'd move to Windows in a jiffy. Its desktop works flawlessly on my PC.
Maybe you should buy a dev computer instead. Gnome consumes far less memory than the average DE. I always try every DE at every release and as far as I've experienced gnome-shell and cinnamon are the best at customization/plugins/performance.
Edit:
> I'd move to Windows in a jiffy. Its desktop works flawlessly on my PC.
I'm currently at work and I've a windows and an ubuntu on virtualbox - gnome-shell is pretty smooth while windows appends the "Not responding" text to every window's title, the search in the menu is much slower than it should be and the apps are often frozen - it is far from "flawless" for me.
For example, pulseaudio works fine for me for at least 6 years on 6 notebooks and 2 workstations of various vendors (HP, Dell, Acer, Medion). But if it will work badly under heavy load, then obvious command will fix that: `sudo renice -n -10 $(pgrep pulseaudio)` .
The solution that worked for me was getting an SSD.
Now, I always have a debian VM working in seamless mode. Ctrl+alt+t opens a terminal window, all linux dev tools work without a flow.
With an SSD there is absolutely no lag. Virtual desktops in Win10 and snapping with win+arrow keys, eliminate the need for a linux DE.
Plus you can use Adobe products, Visual Studio etc. at full speed, without hassle.
Tell me more. Which one?
Usually that's not a problem, because I only have emacs and/or a terminal session running. With the control key on the right, you switch back to your host os.
To switch to a windows program from linux you simply press RCtrl+Alt+Tab.
Virtual desktops in Win 10 are very handy while using a VM. Ctrl+Win+d opens a new virtual desktop. Ctrl+Win+Arrow Keys switches between them.
I could care less about games, MS Office, a d a lot of other things that are deal breakers for some, but I have tried Linux on the desktop and it is still lacking.
You can change|install fonts on linux.
> and even with patches there are still problems with Java, old GTK libs, etc
What kind of problems?
> but I have tried Linux on the desktop and it is still lacking.
Can you tell us what do you miss?
My latest try with running Fedora 23 on my laptop outside of the VM seemed okay... until a recent Kernel / X update turned it into a hot mess - fan constantly running, processor overheating warnings in the logs, etc. Maybe it was my NVidia card or something. The problem is that I have a Dell Precision which is one of THE few models (along with Thinkpads) that are well supported on Linux.
But I just don't have time to deal with these things anymore. If Windows 10 doesn't clean up its act, I'll probably be moving to a MBP, even though I haven't had good luck with them in the past.
Honestly, I'm at the point where I'd pay serious money to RedHat or some other company (maybe Dell or Lenovo) to put out a well supported laptop / Linux combo: nice fonts, supported discrete video, working ACPI, upgradable parts, and no spying or trying to monetize the OS user nor dumbing down the interface a la Apple and MS.