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Comment by IshKebab | Hacker News Reader

> Before I did manage to install a fresh system on my laptop I had to disable UEFI, create valid partitions with special flags etc. it took me a while to figure this out, yet it wasn’t that difficult.

Ha, right here is why "the year of the Linux desktop" will never happen. It's basically a kit car. Some people may find it "not that difficult" to weld a chassis together and rebuild an engine, but it's never going to be mainstream.

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I fail to see why snark is warranted here. Linux should not have to conform to Microsoft anti-competitive practices.

UEFI is a mess to deal with because Microsoft wanted to lock users. Yes, this will prevent Linux on the desktop. That doesn't mean it will never happen.

I don't even understand why this bloody "desktop" paradigm has to be maintained.

I think it can be hard for us (people who get a lot of screen time, spend a lot of time coding in 2D) to imagine that the "desktop" paradigm is already dead. Mobile/voice/AR is killing it. Granted the desktop UI metaphor will probably never die, just like the command line hasn't. But the front-and-center desktop is fading away...

I'm not so sure. If you took a drink every time you read "sorry for the short answer, I'm on mobile, I will edit it when I'm back on a real computer" on HN or reddit, your liver would die faster than Windows Phone. There's still a place for devices with lots of screen space and real input devices, and not just in the IT community (unlike with command line interfaces).

Command line interfaces are making a comeback. They are called "bots" for some weird reason, and all I've used so far are remote -- but it's still a cli.

I suppose I'm hoping for a point in the near future where AR/VR type glasses (or something like that) can be used with high enough fidelity and resolution to replace my desktop, physically. Coupled with virtualization and a good keyboard, I think the PC form factor could be fully obviated.

Waiting for Apple or someone to introduce "Retina VR"? The issue is, if you double the pixel density you quadruple the amount of work on the GPU. Few current graphics cards would be able to smoothly render content that high-res, yet.

Even if they were (2D rendering isn't that bad), we'd struggle to transmit it (neither HDMI nor DisplayPort could handle 16K or whatever we need for crisp enough VR rendering).

I don't think much work is done or will be done on mobile. For consumers perhaps. As soon as you need to do anything serious with a spreadsheet or code, you can forget the mobile. It's not a iOS vs Windows functionality thing. It's a form factor problem.

Mobile yes, but virtually no one uses voice commands once the novelty wears off (same as in the 90's) and AR is still incredibly niche.

It's always not Linux' problem.

Can you clarify this statement?

Well, take any problem from a user regarding Linux - and it will not be Linux problem.

No hardware support? Not a Linux problem. Crappy drivers on Linux? Not a Linux problem. No Photoshop on Linux? Not a Linux problem.

But it isn't. Hardware and software support for a platform is decided exclusively by the hw/sw vendor. That's why I support the ones who do.

Does Linux make drivers harder to write than Windows or macOS? No. In fact there are many, many spaces where development is by far the easiest on Linux. Yet those companies choose that part of the market is irrelevant to them.

You might not care why there's no drivers for your joystick and use Windows, but it is 100% the blame of those companies, there's no debate about it.

I wonder what he fucked up to make this necessary. Modern Linux distributions work fine with UEFI and create the necessary EFI System Partition itself.

UEFI support is relatively new for Linux and there are still a bunch of guides floating around that tell you to disable it, more than likely he followed one of those but didn't really need to disable it.

UEFI support may be new to some major Linux distros, but all the necessary components have been lying around for years. I booted Linux on my Mac through EFI before UEFI support was common on PCs.

Most of those guides you mention were half-assing it at the time of writing. There have been good reasons to still boot through the BIOS CSM even when a system has EFI, but for the most part those reasons have faded or been entirely eliminated over time: older graphics cards that lack the necessary firmware are less common, 32-bit EFI on 64-bit hardware is extremely rare and since kernel 3.15 isn't a problem any more.

His UEFI might have "secure boot" locked. I've heard that's an issue with some laptops.

Obligatory Wikipedia reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

All major distributions ship with shim enabled IIRC, so should work with Secure Boot.

Doesn't matter. Secure boot just requires that the bootloader is signed with an approved key. Most major distros already have this down as Microsoft will happily sign any bootloader that isn't a glaring hole for a small sum of money.

Unfortunately not on every UEFI implementation ...

> Ha, right here is why "the year of the Linux desktop" will never happen.

I've been using Linux desktops almost exclusively for more than a decade. Both my PC laptops have UEFI enabled and both installed Linux (Ubuntu and Fedora) off a USB stick with no tweaking, so, it may be too complex for you, but most developers I know don't share the same personal issues.

I believe you and your parent are talking about different categories of users.

>> but it's never going to be mainstream

My mom uses Ubuntu (but, in all fairness, I installed it for her)

Which is only fair, Windows comes preinstalled also.

My mom uses Windows. In all fairness, it was pre-installed by HP.

I don't know any non-technical consumers who installed Windows themselves in the last 15 years.

I work in IT, exactly 0 of my users could pull off a Windows install and if they could they could they also probably would be able to install Centos or Ubuntu. Both have wizards that make it just as easy as Windows.

I have to disagree on this one. Installing a mainstream Linux distro is really easy these days, far easier than installing Windows. With Windows, you have to go hunting around for device drivers for anything that's not included on the stock Windows install disc, you have to reboot lots of times during the install, it takes a long time, and that's just for the bare-bones OS: installing extra software means running around and downloading stuff (or using install discs--how quaint), running lots of "installers" and rebooting many more times. With Linux, I can have a fully-functional system, complete with lots of software, within 20-30 minutes and just one reboot.

Saying that installing Linux is "just as easy as Windows" is like saying "moving a mountain of dirt with a bulldozer or earthmover is just as easy as doing it by hand with a shovel".

My Year of the Linux Desktop was 1999, when Win98 OSR2 died and I had to pick between my Red Hat Linux 5 CD, or waiting a week and a half to get another windows disc. Took about 3 hours to get online over PPP (their configuration manager didn't work, but all the docs were included!), and I was installing Enlightenment 0.14 before the end of the night.

UEFI is painless on every distribution but vanilla Arch/Gentoo/Debian installs. Anyone using (k/x/l)ubuntu probably didn't even notice UEFI just works.

"The year of the Linux desktop" already happened, but in the meantime desktop got so small that you can put it in your pocket. It never would have been happened without commercialization of the Linux desktop (Android), so your kit car analogy holds.

Good luck running desktop GNU/Linux stuff properly on Android/Linux.

The set of APIs exposed to the NDK is so constrained that Google can replace the Linux kernel with something else and only OEMs writing drivers will notice.

Funny you mention that. Fuchsia seems to be the replacement for Linux.

Check also Brillo.

Brillo uses Linux.

It's really not too bad with root. Although the permissions and selinux stuff will trip you up a lot.

Yes, but those aren't the devices normal users get on the store.

Yes they are. However the rooting process isn't something normal people do with their normal devices.

It happened when Windows XP got discontinued.

I'm not even sure why he did this, the Ubuntu installer took care of this for me when I installed Xubuntu in UEFI mode this morning.

Is the Mint installer unable to deal with UEFI?

I've read numerous posts on support forums about Mint's UEFI support being broken. I have a friend who recently experienced it as well. I turn off UEFI and SecureBoot in my BIOS so I don't have to deal with it, though Slackware does support it if I needed to leave it on. So far Windows 10 hasn't complained about it being turned off on my gaming PC either.

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