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Comment by antouank | Hacker News Reader

I'm mostly sticking with them for the OS as well.

Why isn't someone grabbing the chance to take a linux distro and polish it to get that audience? I would happily pay for that OS so I can use it with any PC/laptop I want.

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Because the moment someone does that, like we have seen before, the voices will rise "why not distribution X?".

Right now I only bother with Ubuntu, because regardless how many in GNU/Linux love to hate them, they are the only ones that seem to bother with a full stack experience.

Still it is quite short of what I enjoy when using either macOS or Windows.

For me being a developer isn't a synonym of UNIX.

Cognitive dissonance is the great problem of UNIX developers. They want a PDP-11 yet don't want a PDP-11.

That's pretty much what ElementaryOS[1] is. It's a polished, simplified fork of Ubuntu complete with a dock and buttons for mix/max/close on the left. But as others have said, UI/polish isn't why linux isn't always a perfect replacement for windows/macos, it's unavailability of major, industry-standard programs.

[1] - https://elementary.io/

Why isn't someone grabbing the chance to take a linux distro and polish it to get that audience? I would happily pay for that OS so I can use it with any PC/laptop I want.

So who is going to ensure a smooth experience when it should support any PC or laptop? Either you have the marketshare of Microsoft and have device vendors care (somewhat) or you can only guarantee a good experience for a relatively small set of hardware (as Apple does).

I agree that driver support is one of the main problems. But someone that will sell the OS can make money to solve that, right?

I'm fine with a small set of HW as well.

One thing I thought about an year ago (but I'll never do it myself) is: polishing a distro tailored to 2 or 3 very good PC laptops, the ones people normally praise as good work machines (back in the days before Lenovo screwed up those would be the Thinkpad line or something alike).

People would still have some choice but at least the OS would be almost tailored to those machines, not as good as macOS yet but much easier than trying to make it work for the whole spectrum of shit hardware there's in the PC laptop market.

Why the OS though? How often do you interact with the operating system compared to the applications? More than half the applications i use most have no alternative on linux. Someone polishing linux is not the bottleneck (for me).

Agree. Linux users tend to be more technical though so they are often the most vocal on the internet.

I don't think I use any macOS specific apps. Browsers, text editors, terminal, email clients, docker etc, all of them exist on Linux.

If that's the case, then Linux is an alternative to you. However a lot of apps people use are Mac OS specific. I know for damn sure I couldn't live without UniBox for email at this point.

what's so greate about it? Can't tell looking at the home page.

Exactly! The (already quite old) Ubuntu 14.04 that I use is reasonably well polished for me. However some of the apps I use/want are missing.

For me its the OS and the apps. I used Linux for years on the desktop, and I loved it, but back then I had time to fiddle with PulseAudio and Nvidia drivers and this and that. Now I'm too busy and when I'm not I really can't be arsed with that sort of thing.

MacOS gets me an environment that requires very little fiddling plus a Unix-y command line environment. I like the hardware too.

I haven't regularly used Windows for a decade and I don't see myself ever going back — so it's the Mac for me.

The new Windows 10 linux-subsystem is really good and getting better with every release.

> Why isn't someone grabbing the chance to take a linux distro and polish it to get that audience?

Isn't that what the elementaryOS [1] [2] developers are trying to do?

[1] https://elementary.io/

[2] https://plus.google.com/communities/104613975513761463450

I wish Adobe would port Lightroom to Linux. I'd jump immediately, at that point.

Exactly. Where's Photoshop or Excel for Linux?

LibreOffice is a pretty good competitor to Excel. Photoshop on the other hand, not really (GIMP can do some stuff but nowhere near)

For casual users, maybe. I deal with documents from legal and accounting departments, and it just doesn't cut it. I have to use MS Office.

What about DarkTable instead?

Side note, I switched to Capture One, love it! Much more intuitive interface over Lightroom, and I think the RAW processing is superior.

I only see Windows and Mac versions on their website. Am I missing something?

Darktable is not there yet but its honestly not bad.

We've been forever waiting for Linux on the desktop! In as much as a very polished desktop distro. Never seems to come along. Even Ubuntu haven't managed it. Given fixed hardware I'm sure it would still be a challenge. Iterations of desktops and window managers pass by, start out glitchy, get polished in time, then are made obsolete. I have seen so many regressions in popular Linux desktops - even core components like panels, and file managers. I'm currently running an older version of Foo, because newer Foo has too many annoying warts. But what I have, just about works. That being said, Windows doesn't seem to progress that much either. Perhaps UI is the hard part. As a dev, I always think that the icing on the cake should be the easy bit. But of course it isn't.

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