An Ode to Linux Desktop Users Everywhere | Hacker News Reader

An Ode to Linux Desktop Users Everywhere

levlaz.org

194 pointslevlaz128 comments

Linux as a desktop has come a long way. Most things Just Work now. I actually enjoy the experience a great deal more than either Windows or Mac at this point, and I'm no Masochist.

Windows, Mac... plug a device in, install the driver through some lame wizard.

Linux... plug the device in, it Just Works.

Windows, Mac... software is out of date, go through dozens different wizards and CLI tools to update all your stuff.

Linux... run a yum/apt/pacman/whatever update, everything is good to roll. If your using NixOS you even get a complete system rollback, with configurations, feature without any disk snap shotting required.

No microscopic close button. No spying on my desktop activity. No expensive custom hardware required.

About the only downside is the lack of Adobe, which I personally don't use but I know it would continue to be a blocker for many. Dear Adobe, get your shit together.

I'm not sure we have the same experience on Mac. Everything I ever plugged in there works, from Arduino to Androids to USB sound cards, DVBT/SDR tuners, webcams, or USB ethernet adapters, even my little USB scanner. I migght have had problems with Wifi, but it was usually the same in linux with the ndiswrapper dance. I even plugged a Social Security card reader (Frenchman here) in there and it was detected correctly as a serial adapter.

Oddly, the number one "I can't believe this doesn't just work category" is printers.

It is frustrating that I can just start printing from my ubuntu machine, but have to figure out how to get the right drivers for my other machines.

As a standard caveat, I don't actually use that many devices on my network. So, YMMV. A lot.

To contrast, IME, CUPS is a pain. Absolutely awful. Printing Just Works everywhere except Linux.

And I'm using an EPSON printer, too.

Funnily, macOS uses CUPS internally, iirc.

I'm pretty sure if you are ever at a point where you know the name of a service implementation, it likely forced you to use it in anger.

Which is to say, I had forgotten printing was with CUPS since it has been a long time since I had to mess with it. Hate to hear it went so poorly for you.

Here is a guy also being terribly disappointed with Linux about CUPS to the point that he said he will stop using it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0chgyL7u4Qs

For me personally, I would rather buy a new printer, the freedom of being able to change the software to run the way I want it is worth so much more.

Anecdotal support: after Vista broke printing for half of the world's terrible cheap inkjets, I spent nearly a decade using terrible cheap inkjets I picked up for next to nothing on craigslist. They almost universally had Linux drivers, and when the ink ran out I would get another one.

Same on Windows. A device is quite unusual if it doesn't fit into the existing USB device classes. The only drivers I've needed to install are video drivers, and even then it's only to fully use that shiny Nvidia chip to its fullest. I didn't spend $500 to only push 2D.

Every time a friend of mine updates his Mac's operating system, a piece of his music equipment stops working.

"It just works" isnt that accurate. Personally speaking, I recently upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04 ubuntu on my desktop only to have it stuck in some strange errors. 16.04 network manager is also quite a nuisance. On some networks it only provides a few http calls and drops everything else.

I still exclusively use linux os on all my computers because I am do ised to it now. Perhaps just ubuntu is poor quality nowadays (at least with 16.04) but linux desktop still has some ways to go

> Linux as a desktop has come a long way. Most things Just Work now.

I said that in 2006.

But now (about a decade of using Linux on the desktop down) I don't believe it was true then, nor will it ever be.

What are the things you consider broken?

The last thing that happened before I gave up (around 2010) was purchasing a laptop with entirely open source drivers (ie, low end hardware I wouldn't have otherwise purchased), and compositing still didn't work on an external monitor.

You'll probably say that's fixed now. I'm sure it is. I'm also sure it's been replaced by something else - I recall someone on HN saying one of Dell Linux laptops (ie, which are actually sold with Ubuntu) still has driver issues.

I switched to OS X for few years and now use a Surface Book mainly for shell reasons.

I reckon the Dell laptop you're referring to is the old XPS 'Developer Edition'. I used one at work and it was ok, didn't have any driver issues from memory, but they no longer sell them to the public with Ubuntu. It was the same as a regular XPS but with Ubuntu 14.04 pre-installed.

I don't believe they offer Ubuntu as an option with the current generation of XPS's, it dropped off the list of supported OS's. It's a shame really because it was nice to have a premium laptop, with Linux, and with on-site manufacturer support.

What I recall was someone on HN saying the 11 inch Ubuntu model wasn't actually that Ubuntu compatible and to buy the 13 inch instead. But I can't remember was the specific HW was.

Compositing as a concept has always been an abusive hack sold by way of excessive eyecandy.

Its basically the DEs way of endrunning the X11 efforts because CADT.

I agree on the hardware side. However, more times than not I have to fight with the video playback tearing or dropping frames. I've had least amount of problems with ElementaryOS, but that distro has stability problems that counteract the better video playback.

Most things on osx/macOS "Just Work". I still use Linux, and have been a linux desktop user for 15 (ish) years, and to this day I still don't even have any hopes of installing any distribution and having one of the following not being an issue:

- Multiple monitors

- Printers / cups

- Suspend / hibernate

- Mounting USB sticks / drives.

- Breaking my system during an upgrade (I've mostly had this issue in deb/rpm systems though, and gentoo, but not so much in arch). You say "run a yum/apt/pacman/whatever update, everything is good to roll"... I'm not sure if you actually believe this.

Im right there with you, been on the Ubuntu and Debian train since 2004. Still not giving up though :)

I use Fedora, basically as it comes out of the box, with only a couple of Gnome shell extensions to make it nicer. My computer is a ThinkPad X230.

- I've never tried external monitors, so I can't say anything either way about that one.

- Printers/CUPS: always worked flawlessly (except for one single HP printer that just wouldn't). Autodiscovered network printers, USB printers, network printers have all "just worked" without an issue. I don't print that much though.

- Suspend/hibernate: I always suspend my laptop when I don't use it. That has worked flawlessly every time without any power management issues, sleep/wakeup issues or anything to complain about. I haven't tried hibernating though.

- Mounting USB sticks/drives: Never had a single issue relating to this. Every single time has worked flawlessly, exactly the same way: plug in USB, open it in the file manager, do things, eject, unplug USB. With both FAT32, NTFS and ext4 file systems, on USB drives, external hard drives, and SD cards.

- I've done two OS upgrades on this (Fedora 23 -> 24 -> 25) the normal upgrade way. Not a single thing broke in either of the upgrades. Both times the upgrade went literally like: start the OS upgrade, reboot to install upgrade, reboot after upgrade is finished, continue using computer without any problems. (By the way, Fedora 24 was the one that made Wayland good for use as daily driver for me, and 25 was where they made it the default.)

I realize that my comment is the definition of anecdotal evidence, and I understand that there are laptops with less fortunate hardware (Nvidia, some WiFi cards, some CPUs, etc.). But what I've realized during this year is that if they have a laptop with good hardware, then the common computer user can just install Fedora on their computer and get the same experience that I had, and that means Fedora is indeed in a very good place among the various desktop operating systems on offer today.

It's been a couple years, but it used to be my hobby (after a Linux user told me their Linux laptop "just worked") to reach over and hit the mute button on their keyboard, which rarely worked.

Not sure if that trick is still effective. But the Linux definition of "everything works" is a little different than the Mac or Windows definition. It's more like, "everything a CLI-using geeky developer cares about works."

> It's more like, "everything a CLI-using geeky developer cares about works."

Totally. Which is cool sometimes.

Everything "just works" in the sense that Linux is written in a Turing complete language and at the end of the day we are just moving memory between registers.

> Most things Just Work now.

I would definitely agree this is true compared to "before". I remember fooling with Linux in the late 90s and getting graphics to work at a native resolution to my monitor and sound was a big accomplishment. In comparison to now, where out of the box on my slightly aged thinkpad I could use my touchstick, touchpad (with two finger scroll!), volume/brightness/media keys, etc.

However, I think the goal "just works" is not necessarily the right one, at least not for Linux. It "just works" is kind of like a two way street, the computer won't throw you any curve balls as long as you don't throw it any curve balls, either. Toying with Linux on the desktop for the last few months, I've seen a lot of "it just works" type solutions which become a complete disaster when things break -- and things _always_ break -- because figuring out how it works, what went wrong, and how to fix it is not intuitive. Trying out KDE Neon, I had my screen just go black on login. Booting into the terminal and clearing the cache fixed it, but then later it happened again. I don't like the culture of copy-and-paste witchcraft, if something breaks, I want to know why it broke, and what steps I can take to deal with it.

Trying to make things automatic often means making things complex -- you have to include the baggage to cover every possibility and the logic to identify what's happening. Making things easy often means making things inflexible -- you remove what's not necessary from the main use case. Instead, I'd like to see a focus on goals like simple, direct, and transparent, so it's attainable for someone to observe and learn to understand how their system works and to work with it to accomplish their goals.

I believe the problem is that you can either get something that works, or you get something that is very open to tweaking. Systems that are very open to tweaking and changing things around just don't work as smoothly and easily as systems that "just work". And I think that's the reason why so many people are put off using desktops that aren't Windows or macOS.

My computer is a tool, which I happen to use to develop software and do some schoolwork on. I didn't get my computer for the sake of examining how the operating system works or for the sake of changing around things in config files and changing my DE, I got it for the sake of actually using it as a tool to do other things.

So I got this laptop and installed Fedora on it, almost a year ago now. Not once has anything in the OS spontaneously broken, even after two OS upgrades, never have I been forced to go into config files and muck around, no tweaking necessary, using this computer is a breeze. I've never been happier using a computer, because at last I'm using a setup which is stable, never breaks on its own, and which I also know is safe, FOSS, and not full of NSA backdoors or whatever.

The thing is, Windows and macOS separately worked to expose a consistent model/metaphor of how your computer works for users to learn and understand. This model is an abstraction (and thus leaks), but they had a lot of time, money, and smart people to take a crack at it and it works pretty OK. Also, the model they've built is visual which has some benefits like discoverability -- for example, I learned about computers growing up essentially by clicking every button and seeing what what happened.

It's hard to really do that in Linux. It's functional because so many people can contribute all those little pieces, but that comes at a cost of consistency and often complexity. There are a lot of opaque moving parts in a Linux system, and I don't think that's a good thing. When I decided to use Linux on a personal computer, I tried a lot of different ones until I decided to use Void Linux. runit was a big part of that -- all the init systems I've touched over the years, nothing was as immediately simple and obvious to use or observe as runit.

I disagree, at least for laptops. Desktops are mostly fine with Linux. Laptops... even certified ones, they suck. While battery life is decent, sleep and hibernate support has random issues, and external monitor support is awful. Try using a 4k external monitor when your internal display is not 4k, or viceversa. When the external monitor gets recognized at all (and its relative position is not forgotten).

For anyone who misses it, this is a reference to Apple's 1997 Think Different marketing campaign. The original ode is here: http://www.thecrazyones.it/spot-en.html

I'd forgotten about this campaign, and I would have missed the reference myself, but I just happened to listen to an audiobook chapter from Steve Jobs' biography yesterday.

> For anyone who misses it, this is a reference to Apple's 1997 Think Different marketing campaign.

Yes, thank you! This post was careful crafted trolling. I am glad the not so subtle plagiarism was completely lost. ;)

As a happy Lubuntu user, I interpreted it as an homage to the original Think Different quote.

On a related note, the Atlantic has an interesting article on the Think Different advertising campaign: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/12/true-...

I'm so glad this one reached the top page in HN. It's our chance to talk about it.

I've been using Linux on my personal and professional desktops since 2006. I really enjoyed when Ubuntu got its presence and relevance in the scene, and I didn't mind when they decided to adopt Unity. KDE has always been my preferred option until I read an article where Linus T. said he used Gnome. So by the time I moved to Gnome I also doubled by RAM and swapped to a SSD. Those were the happiest days in my life. Using a computer was a real joy mainly because of response times brought down to nearly zero. OpenOffice, Files, browsers, and IMs were loaded before you could notice you had released the mouse button. I even started to advertise this terminology among friends and family: "instant computing experience". It was my own way to describe experience to Windows users who still had to wait seconds for things to load on their screens.

Those were the gold pre-UEFI days. Machines were shipped OEM with Windows 7, which you could swipe out and replace with your favorite Linux ditro. No strings attached, no major headaches etc. Of course, some would have to struggle to make some hardware work, but once those things were sorted out and optimized, again: pure joy.

I'm writing this because I hate UEFI. It made my life difficult because I have a hard time whenever I decide to install Linux on any new machine. Double or single boot, it doesn't matter.

Today the so-called "instant computing experience" is just as a memory in my head. I'm stuck with Windows 10 and trying to get used to the fact applications take time to load. I wave to wait. I wait for the OS to start up. I wait until it resumes from sleeping mode. I wait for everything.

I'm waiting for a definitive solution to the UEFI problem either from Ubuntu or from the community. Desperately!

Dont know what issue you had with UEFI but these days it should be possible for you to install Fedora / Ubuntu on a UEFI machine without any issues.

Maybe rEFInd[1] can help!

UEFI has some cool things, like you don't really need a bootloader if you don't mind switching kernels. Just tell the bios which partition you want to boot.

[1] http://www.rodsbooks.com/refind/

>Just tell the bios which partition you want to boot.

That would work! Thanks a lot.

In case of, I found that tool when I was searching for something just like efibootmgr (it might help too).

Have fun, you don't have to wait.

Ah, rEFInd, I have it along with a debian image on a USB drive I labeled 'magic stick' because when all else fails, it will work.

The only "trouble" I have had with UEFI was when I moved my wife's HDD from the old to the new Laptop (a Tuxedo btw that ships by default with some Linux). A live usb repair distro (I don't remember which one, I started from looking at SuperGrubDisk but ended up elsewhere) dealt with that quickly. She, not a computer person, is using Kubuntu for years.

Later, I got also the same laptop and moving my drive with an (fresher) install of Antergos went without any issue at all.

I don't know what problems UEFI has caused (you didn't mention any actual problems?). I have Fedora on two computers with UEFI firmware, and it runs flawlessly on both of them. Installing produced no difficulty at all: the installer automatically installed the bootloader and set it up perfectly on both of the machines.

I even disabled the CSM (legacy BIOS compatibility) on my machines because I want to embrace EFI booting, since I feel like it's such an immense improvement over the old BIOS days. Now the bootloader just goes in a file on a partition, no need to ever do anything with the Master Boot Record anymore.

I've been back on windows for ~10 years, mostly for gamin and work (.net dev). but I've always stayed away from SSD's because the get filled with so much bloatware on windows and the larger ones get very expensive very fast.

I just realized how effective smaller SSD's could be if I'd installed linux and avoided the bloat.

> How else can you stare at an empty screen and know that you have to blacklist your video card driver? Or sit in silence while tweaking alsamixer on the command line? Or write bash aliases to reload your network driver kernel module each time your laptop resumes from suspension?

The good old days! I've been a desktop Linux user for going on a decade. Yes, it used to be a mess. Something only someone with technical acumen, enormous amounts of free time, and an endless supply of patience would subject themselves to. It's amazing how much has changed. Maybe I was lucky. I transitioned from 'student with plenty of time to mess around with my computer' into 'adult who actually needs to get work done' at around the time that Linux desktops were becoming mature. I've been using Ubuntu for the last two years and rarely have problems. Granted, I'm not a typical computer user. I don't need everything dumbed down and made pretty. I need a stable and reliable system that I have complete control over. It doesn't hurt that any software I need is an 'apt-get install' away as well.

So thank you Linux, and thanks to all the developers that contribute to the ecosystem.

I regularly have to $sudo systemctl restart NetworkManager.service after suspend on Ubuntu LTS :(.

16.04 or 14.04? I have to do the same after suspend on 16.04 gnome ubuntu, on my personal laptop. Network manager is such a shame on a system that otherwise gives me no trouble. I stay in the terminal and the web browser the vast majority of the time, so I don't need tons of fancy desktop stuff, but if it stays out of my way? Meh, sure whatever.

At work, I have a RNDIS USB network device I need to connect to (work laptop, not personal) and Network Manager is just insane, I don't even know what its trying to do. It only works if I delete the connection every time it boots, and re-add it. I just wish I could figure out where to add it in a config file and never touch it, but all the documentation seems out of date.

Ubuntu is trying to do so many changes in such a short period of time I guess they were bound to have some difficulties but it does seem like Network Manager is the worst of the bunch, otherwise everything else seems great.

Hey,

You can make a oneshot systemd unit that's WantedBy=suspend.target that just restarts it for you.

It should look something like this(didn't test because I'm not on my laptop right now):

    [Unit]
    Description=Restart NetworkManager after resume from suspend.
    After=suspend.target

    [Service]
    Type=oneshot
    ExecStart=/usr/bin/systemctl restart NetworkManager.service

    [Install]
    WantedBy=suspend.target

I'm afraid hardware support is still all over the place linux. I also had the same experience that everything just works nowadays, but a lot of that is because I buy laptops from well known hardware manufacturers and my current computer is 7 years old. I was surprised to hear from a friend that he had a lot of trouble getting linux recognize his brand new nvidia video card.

> So thank you Linux, and thanks to all the developers that contribute to the ecosystem.

Amen!

At least half, or more, of that "crap" also gets done in Windows. Only diff is that is is masked by binary-distributed third party drivers.

The rest is because the udev/systemd devs are in a bikeshedding war with the kernel devs because the latter ruffled the formers feathers at some point.

This brought back memories, but I haven't had to do any of those things for ten years or so now. I've been careful in my hardware purchases, yes, but I've been running mostly Fedora on a couple of ThinkPads and it almost always just keeps on working. Especially the last four or five years, which is about how long it's been since I last had to switch to Ubuntu because Fedora was too broken.

The latest shock was upgrading to Fedora 25 and finding out the Wayland session was running and I could barely tell the difference. All that extra time before making it the default was definitely worth it! Most impressive.

Sure, desktop Linux isn't for everyone and it's not for every workload (I'm a .NET developer, I more or less have to use Windows at work; and I do have a big Windows box at home for gaming) but it lets me do my web browsing and my artwork and my hobby development stuff in great comfort and mostly just stays out of my way.

I'm running Fedora 24 on my laptop and just installed 25 on a desktop, and I can't tell any difference in user experience. They did a great job indeed!

I've switched to running Linux full time on my work desktop or laptop around Ubuntu Lucid, and then switched to Fedora around 18 or 19. I'll run some Ubuntu desktop VMs from time to time for certain things, but for most things I prefer Fedora.

I can't wait for the Dell XPS 13 DE that my wife just ordered for me for Christmas to arrive in the mail.

My wife is on KDE, kids are on KDE every day (although they spend their time mostly inside firefox). I use openbox exclusively. It's debian stable (testing was a bit too stressful to update every week, I'm getting old :-))

Everything works : printing works (provided the driver is flawed); network works, cd burner works, Nvidia card works. electronic ID card works, USB stuff works. I even use a pretty old scanner and a pretty old drawing tablet; both work.

The PC is 7 years old. I've added hard drives, changed video card and moved to SSD drives.

The only pain point is that somehow, sometimes the PC doesn't shutdown because it has received a wake-on-lan packet.

> sometimes the PC doesn't shutdown because it has received a wake-on-lan packet.

you should be able to fix that through the bios

How about *nix desktop?

I miss the days where a TWM was "enough". I started with TWM on Xterms and DECstations, moving up to CTWM on DEC alphas. I finally switched away from CTWM around the year 2000, due to it not supporting some kind of modern nonsense that web browsers wanted. Thankfully, KDE let me configure most of the keybindings in my .twmrc file & retain my muscle memory. Gnome rejected a patch that I sent them to allow the same config there, so I've been using KDE ever since.

I ran FreeBSD for years as a desktop and always thought Linux was the gold standard for things like KDE. First FreeBSD/alpha in the early 2000s, and then FreeBSD/i386 on a P4. I remember getting sick of things "not working", switching to Ubuntu, and realizing that things were just as flaky there. So after ~6 years on a linux desktop, I'm back to FreeBSD.

Which desktop technology though - at one point (~1990) I had a login menu that prompted me to select Sunview, X or NeWS.

TWM was the first X window manager I used, I remember spending ages getting it just so - just in time for a newer fancier one to come out (probably olwm in OpenWindows) - liked mwm for a few years as well.

Must be something that I grew out of as I don't spend that much time personalizing computing environments these days.

> Must be something that I grew out of as I don't spend that much time personalizing computing environments these days.

I've had the same experience. I now find it easier to adapt myself to the defaults than to change the defaults every time I'm somewhere new.

The Sun NewS stuff was some kind of postscript based rendering system that ran in parallel to X with an X server sharing the screen -- kind of like how X works on MacOSX today). I stayed away from it because I used mostly X windows terminals & DECstations. There was very little Sun hardware I could sit in front of in my formative years as an undergrad in the late 80s / early 90s.

I kept the same basic customizations for years, mostly around focus-follows-mouse and what mouse buttons + key combos moved, resize, iconify windows. My problem was that the key things my muscle memory depended on were fairly hard to configure in most things, and by that time, it was too late to change my muscle memory.

Eg, I have this hard-coded in my brain:

Button1=m :w|f : f.function "move-raise"

Button2=m :w|f : f.resize

Button3=m :w|f : f.iconify

(this means alt with mouse button 1 = raise window to front, and move it, alt+mouse2 = resize, alt+mouse3 = iconify)

So changing to anything else that didn't easily allow this customization was painful. I used a Mac for almost a year, and lived in the X environment so much that I went back to a *nix desktop. I kept doing crazy thing when I moved my mouse to another window, and the focus did not follow the mouse. So I'd start typing code in an Xemacs window, and i'd be deleting or forwarding mail. Argh.

Sorry - wasn't meaning to imply that you had those options merely that some of us were daft enough to work with multiple graphical environments at the same time.

NB Subsequently OpenWindows came along and actually (AFAIR) supported client applications from all three platforms at the same time.

I remember starting TWM when I had to use some Java program that was so bloated that I literally couldn't keep my usual desktop in RAM.

Someone write an ode to CDE!

CDE always felt incredibly organized to me. Fond memories.

Last fall I bought a Thinkpad T540s that came with Windows 10 + Lenovo Crapware and a sound driver that did not work out of the box. I installed Ubuntu on it and everything, including multiple displays, just worked. I didn't even have to recompile the kernel to get WiFi running.

This "Linux has too many issues on the desktop" thing got old already. To be precise, it is as old as Ubuntu 12.04.

I have more than a handful of people that had PCs that "got too slow" and wanted to get a new PC or a Mac. I'd tell them to get an SSD. When they did, I'd go take a look at their computers, install the SSD myself and in less than an hour I'd guide them (not do it myself, guide) how to install Ubuntu and set up printers, scanners and which programs could substitute whatever they were used to use on Windows. The hardware was never a problem: HP printers, Canon all-in-ones, onboard wi-fi, you name it.

The one thing that is still sub-par on Linux is power management, so batteries do suffer some abuse compared with other OSes. But for slightly older laptops with removable/replaceable batteries and desktops, I fail to see how Windows or MacOS is better in any way for the casual PC user.

I think the ones complaining about hardware/configuration issues with Linux today are the ones pushing the envelope and trying to do things that will be tricky even on Windows/MacOS.

> To be precise, it is as old as Ubuntu 12.04.

I see what you did there. :)

Maybe, if you pick the right hardware life is good. I picked up an Acer V3 which is an awesome machine except the network dies when you resume from suspend (which then prompted this troll-ey blog post :))

After reading many glowing comments, just chiming in with my own anecdote here. As someone who recently gave the Linux desktop a second (third?) chance, my experience seems to match up well with the author's. From what I've seen, the Linux desktop works very well if you have a very "standard" setup - One monitor of average size, one sound output, a very standard network chipset, etc. In other words, a Thinkpad. If you're trying to get everything to work on, say, a living room HTPC with HDMI sound output and an HiDPI UHD display, good luck.

This is of course anecdotal, but my recent experience went something like this:

  - Install Kubuntu for simplicity my wife can relate to. "Oh wow! Most things are actually working out-of-the-box! Even wireless networking!"
  - "Hmm, everything's a little small... Maybe I can just adjust the dpi..." 6 hours of editing config files and restarting daemons later, Qt applications are mostly behaving, Gtk applications are still popping up with random scaling factors between 1x and 3x.
  - "That's funny, the sound is only coming out of the headphone jack..." 3 hours of tweaking settings later, sound over HDMI is *mostly* working, but if I logout and back in then everything believes my audio device has vaporized.
  - Wife walks in and says, "Just install Windows, please."

I know my experience may be unique, but "Just Works" has never been the case for me. I love the concept and ideology of the Linux desktop, but I always end up spending more time editing config files and tearing my hair out than I do actually working. That being said, I'm glad it works well for some of us...

I don't think anything on HN has ever made me as happy as this. Really captures the experience - both the frustrations and the joys.

Wow, thanks so much for this amazing compliment. :)

Related to Ubuntu's Unity (might apply to other environments):

I remember last time I switched from Windows (~3 years ago) it was once again harsh on my eyes. The way things (fonts?) are rendered is just different.

What made me survive the first days was switching the default font to Roboto Condensed (of Google fame) [1] with:

  sudo apt-get install fonts-roboto unity-tweak-tool

I wouldn't want to trade it for any other OS currently. It just looks so good. But I guess it is more because I got used to it than anything else.

If you find what works for you (right hardware, right kernel), issues can be minimal. I definitely don't consider it to be buggy. Maybe the way sound output switching works is a bit awkward, but that's about it.

[1] http://pasteboard.co/6zgtPnMb7.png

Curiously for me it's the opposite, I like very much the default Unity (14.04) font / anti-aliasing / rendering, I find it is much easier/pleasant to read that the default in Windows (Segoe UI?), bolder and "smoother", so to speak.

I've tried calibrating the ClearType features and it's better, but still way worse than the Ubuntu default. Has anyone felt the same and/or found any solution?

First time I hear something other than praise for Ubuntu fonts. Bodhi Linux was the only distro I tried that had terrible fonts, all others were good or very good and I tried about 10 of them.

I definitely didn't want to say they are bad.

For me, personally, the switch from Windows was rough. Not because I consider any of them to be superior, but because the way things are rendered is just so different.

A more compact font (the 'Condensed' part) helped me a lot.

So many other things (window animations, shadows, straight borders,...) I really love. And the compact font is the finishing touch for my untrained eye.

Running kali and then mint is when I first had to experience all this hunting down the nomodeset option, ubuntu was fine but can flip out on wifi after standby which I think my first goto fix was Sudo ifconfig wlan0 down then Sudo ifconfig wlan0 up. Cheers to the crazy ones running a low ram hogging distro and less background processes so they can carry on a $200 i3 cpu / 4gig ram laptop for many years beyond windows and Mac users.

Heh, i think the motherboard in the desktop i am typing this on is 10 years old soon. At least that seems to be the case based on the copyright year given for the bios on each boot.

I install Linux for impoverished, computer-illiterate old ladies. Debian, with the Mate desktop, specifically.

They like it because it's free, it just works, it never breaks, it runs fast on your old machine, it never gets malware and it doesn't waste your time and money with bullshit like Windows and Mac does.

I've recently switched from MacOS to Linux. After trying lots of distros and desktops, I went with Ubuntu MATE. Other than needing to plug into ethernet to get the (Broadcom) wifi driver, it was an 100% automatic install, and I configure and tweak a new MacOS install more these days.

For me Kubuntu was the one that finally stopped giving me grief with dual monitor support (also, I miss ALT+Space Bar whenever I'm on another computer now). I suspect which distro works best also really depends on your hardware.

Funny but really out of date. :-)

I used to do some sysadmin stuff a long time ago, but am losing my UNIX/Linux skills -- because the Ubuntu (and follow ups) desktop just works with very little trouble, since lots of years. It seems I only use apt-get these days.

Maybe I am just careful when I buy hardware, I don't know.

That said, right now I am irritated and will soon have to download and read sources, because of problems getting an ipsec configuration to work on Mint 18. (It worked copying it from Ubuntu to Mint 17.3).

But I really can't remember the previous time I broke out the source.

Edit: It seems most people have the same experience as me. (I should also add to my claims of only needing apt-get, that it often work better if I get printer drivers from the manufacturer and not from the distro.)

I'm using Arch with the i3 window manager for the last 8 months. I've run pacman -Syu (equivalent of apt-get dist-upgrade) probably once a day that entire time. I've had exactly zero problems. It is amazingly smooth.

The setup was a mild chore and yes the laptop is UEFI and I am dual booting. But I can't remember the last time I used Windows, though I do remember it seemed insanely slow.

I often find myself doing something in the Terminal thinking: "This is objectively easier than filling in an online form". And when I see teenagers and geriatrics behind the counter at Dunnes Stores (Irish thing) using Terminal based stock control with flying fingers, I do think we've chosen a strange path. Then I shake my head and move along.

As a fellow Arch i3wm user I completely agree. I love i3's simple and readable config.

It's odd that in Windows I dread updates, but using Arch I love to go home and see how many packages are ready to be installed and I usually end up running Pacman -Syu when I'm bored heh.

Same, Arch and i3. I keep my hands on the keyboard, mouse for input is worthless except for games and many web sites.

I use desktop linux on my work computer, it barely works and I have some issues. Although it's red hat enterprise which is running a lot of old shit.

I think using a friendlier distro like Ubuntu or Fedora would probably be a lot better and give a much better experience.

I have Centos on my laptop and the Nvidia drivers work, steam works, 3 displays run flawlessly, SELinux is enforcing (!), but I'll be damned if I ever get the network printer to work.

I use Ubuntu on my work PC.

- had to buy a 2nd GPU to get 3 monitors to work

- GPU driver won't drive my 2560x1440 monitor at the max res

- popup volume control pops up every minute or so (and sound pops and stutters a bit each time this happens)

- when waking from sleep, TTY works immediately, but GUI takes about 30 seconds to appear

- something crashes on every boot, but it doesn't tell me what (I dutifully submit a crash report)

- any time I drag something in Firefox (text, image, tab, etc.), Firefox crashes

USB throughput and FS performance are very good though, and 3d, wifi and suspend-to-disk do work!

(Whatever the root cause of all of these things, be it Linux per se or some other issue, the fact remains that I don't have any of these problems on Windows. Of course, I don't get the smashing filing system speed either...)

Sounds like problems with the video card drivers. In Linux, it pays to research how well hardware is supported before you buy it, especially for video and wifi. Even then, you may still benefit from looking at alternative drivers or seeing if there are xorg.conf or kernel boot time options that resolve those issues.

Whether it's worth the trouble of tracking down arcane options to get your system working optimally is up to you. For most people it's not worth the effort, so there are relatively few of us running Linux on the desktop. If you're willing to put in the time and effort (and you happen to have compatible hardware) it is possible to get a system that matches or exceeds proprietary software desktops. Just be prepared to start all over again when you upgrade to the next version of Ubuntu.

It always pays to research if your hardware is supported on given OS, whether it's Linux, macOS or Windows.

Yes, but we usually run MacOS on Apple hardware and we get Windows on the PC we buy, with drivers tested by the manufacturer, so we can trust the hw/os combination. Instead I always researched how Linux would run on my computers. No major problems but some little issues that a manufacturer would have fixed before going to the market.

We have to check MacOS and Windows compatibility only if we do strange things, like hackintoshes or installing Windows from scratch on a different generation computer. I must admit that installing desktop Linux is always a strange thing, because very few manufacturers care of testing any distro on their hw. Quite the opposite for server Linux.

> - GPU driver won't drive my 2560x1440 monitor at the max res

Might be a lower refresh rate (49.9 v 59.9) will behave.

> - popup volume control pops up every minute or so (and sound pops and stutters a bit each time this happens)

Likely pulseaudio shit itself and got restarted by systemd...

> Because they ship your bug fixes.

Sadly they often don't. Especially on the desktop most open source developers seem to be doing the work for free and it's totally understandable that they prefer playing around with new features rather than fixing bugs.

More and more these days it feels like the big DEs operate much like Microsoft, as the response all too often is "its not a bug, but a feature".

Sorry maybe I said this wrong.

A lot of developers that I know run Linux on the desktop. They don't necessary ship bug fixes for desktop linux but they write code for Google, Facebook, Some other Startup, etc.. "shipping bug fixes" may not have gotten that point across but my point is "Hackers make the Software that we all enjoy".

Thank you OP for recognizing us. I have been rocking a Ubuntu on desktop for over 10 years. My 10 year old desktop boots up faster that my new windows laptop at work with all the security anti-virus etc. crapware.

I do love this. It's an enjoyable humorous piece. And it's just a little cathartic for those of us who remember when running a Linux desktop wasn't as easy as it is now.

But nowadays, everything Just Works, modulo the occasional kernel/driver version bump that needs a reboot, and the irritations of running systemdless.

I wasn't around when running Linux on the desktop was that bad, but I do remember the insanity of Linux Gaming between when Loki folded and when Valve took the mantle. It was... bad.

Unfortunately, this is true, we have all been there.

I started writing a post about the latest addition to my ~/.bash_profile file:

``` # Restart Network Driver alias n="sudo modprobe -r ath10k_pci && sudo modprobe ath10k_pci" ``` And ended up stealing the Apple ad instead. Much more fun. :)

does stuff in ~/.bash_profile also get executed when you return from suspend/hibernation or rather just at first boot?

Oh no, this is just an alias called `n` that I execute when the drivers are borked. Every other time that my laptop resumes from hibernate my wifi doesn't work. There is probably a much better solution here, but this one works for me.

i went through the same pains with my hp stream 11

this helped: http://askubuntu.com/questions/632719/my-wifi-drops-the-conn...

the fwlps=0 option disables the sleep feature altogether which might reduce battery life, but installing tlp gave me ~2 hrs extra per charge

Nice! Thanks for sharing that. I think that AskUbuntu thread is a living testimonial to what I am trying to express through my trolly blog post.

I am honestly proud to be in a community of users who would read that thread and not reinstall Windows. It takes a special breed.

i'm reading your "about" page and thinking... what have i been doing all my life?

i've followed you on twitter. keep writing good content!

Wow thanks so much! Best compliment I've received on HN :)

Cheers!

I had a similar alias in my eeePC (broadcom wifi drivers, which needed to be restarted after every boot). And I remember days of printing out xorg.conf documentation and random help threads at the library, in the hopes that I could finally convince nvidia drivers to give me graphics again. That said, I'm glad that nowadays my Linux problems tend to be more along the lines of "notifications aren't making noise when a video is playing" and not system-breaking bugs.

I'm running OpenSuSE Leap 42.1 on my ThinkPad x131e (Intel).

I've also added the repositories that give me the latest Qt, KDE, and KDE Applications. The net result is that I've got a stable base and a rolling release of the desktop environment.

The only "issues" I've had are:

- Needed to add a repository to get the Broadcom wireless driver.

- Sometimes the network status applet gets "stuck" with the progress indicator spinning even though the network is actually connected. It's like part of the applet knows it's connected, but the icon state didn't get updated. A logout/login fixes this.

- Sometimes I have to toggle the Wifi on and off to get it to reconnect after a wake.

- Sometimes if I close the lid too quickly after shutdown it decides that it wants to reboot.

Honestly, these are the only real problems I have with the machine and they're very minor. For the most part, the machine performs exactly like you'd expect a small low-end laptop to perform.

My wife is not a computer person and she has been using Linux exclusively for about 15 years now. I help every now and then.

KDE Neon user here. As long as I work at a place that doesn't care then I guess it will be KDE for the next few releases.

Have left a partition with my Windows installation but as much as I think Windows 10 is a step forward, lenovo drivers or something still manage to drive me mad.

Build now takes 22-25 seconds compared to > 45 seconds.

Edit: Neon gives me the stability of Ubuntu as I remember it together with the beauty and (power user at least : ) usability of KDE 5.

Perfect? No.[0]

Nice? Fast? Easy to use? Yes, yes and yes.

[0]: (I sometimes run a sudo service networking restart or sudo service network-manager restart, but Windows used to either refuse to sleep or somehow restart in my bag, which destroyed my display last year.) Fast

Too late to edit but it should be "...but Windows sometimes used to...".

I'm a very happy Xubuntu user. Have been for about 5 years, and even switched my partners laptop over to it a few months ago, after her win10 borked itself. Previously I used to dual boot windows and Slackware, but after 10 odd years on Slackware I wanted a Linux system I could just use and not spend every minute tweaking.

I must be getting old.

But I still have fond memories of plugging into Ethernet to get online with lynx and try to find out how did I manage to fuč up WiFi and Xorg by editing and completely unrelated (or so I thought) file.

Ah, good times.

I'm using xubuntu for years now, but I have the feeling it got heavier every year.

Now I'm searching for a better alternative

Xubuntu user for years also. I still find it pretty zippy and everytime I go out looking at alternatives I always come back.

Same here. But I must confess that I do get a new laptop every 2-3 years, so maybe it is getting heavier, but I don't notice it.

But I was surprised recently when win10 killed my ssd, so I installed Xubuntu on the spinning disk. And it runs as fast as win10 did on the ssd. The only thing that does take longer is booting up, but I always had the feeling that windows was cheating somehow, it would boot to the desktop really quick, but it was not a usable desktop. That still took a while to become responsive.

I’m a very happy user of Lubuntu on an 8-year old Dell laptop – with a modest Celeron 550 processor (I only recently got around to upgrading the RAM from 1GB to 2.5GB) and intend to follow it up with an SSD.

I’ve stuck with Lubuntu for the past 5 years or so after experimenting with briefly with Elementary OS and regular Ubuntu. I’ve never had any issue installing it and/or configuring it.

I am a Linux fan since ca. 1993. Yesterday I tried once again to give a chance to ubuntu desktop on my dual boot Lenovo P50 with a docking station and two screens. Complete failure, the screens were not recognized, the cursor was leaving a trace, etc.

A complete failure.

So while Linux as a server is a dream came true, I will stick to Windows as my desktop OS.

I current use Unity on Ubuntu 16.04 as my main system and I prefer it to my macbook pro and Windows desktop. Its smooth, fast and minimal.

For someone who has used Linux desktops for more than 15 years it has come a long way. Gnome and Kde are both good but Unity provides a rare minimalism and polish on Linux.

But for those who need specialized apps that app determines their work machine.

If you're after minimalism, you should take a look at /r/unixporn (kinda SFW despite the name).

Not necessarily the most efficient DEs or WMs, but it looks damn good. Some people seem to get a sharp looking Unity.

I use bspwm on ArchLinux myself.

I bought a $250 chromebook and a new SSD just to run Ubuntu as my daily driver and it's been great! Of course I've written scripts to reload network-manager on wake, add the keyboard backlight driver back into the kernel after updates, and I can't let the battery dip below 2% or everything will be erased...

I bought a Dell Chromebook 13 with an i5 processor and I upgraded the SSD. In the end, I might have been better off getting a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition, but I am somewhat smitten with this pretty amazing little machine. I am worried about flashing the BIOS and bricking it, but that seems to be the only way, apart from constantly charging it, to avoid loss of data.

Why flash the BIOS? I have a Dell Chromebook 13 (i5/8GB) and I upgraded the SSD to 256GB. I installed Linux Mint 18 (Sarah) on partition 7 which I can dual-boot into and I have several crouton chroots installed to run with CrOS. I find this a perfect setup for my needs.

I think status quo is a good thing. Linux users don't want stuff to break for no good reason.

I say this after reading the article, then hoping that the new kernel install doesn't bring back the video tearing/blinking when moving the mouse from screen 0 to 1.

At least we can downgrade our kernels without re-install-and-recover-from-time-machine though, but otherwise yea :)

Speaking of Time Machine, I use Timeshift to do backups on Ubuntu. It's a GUI rsnapshot-based tool, and will backup/restore the full system, including boot sector, so it's perfect for a desktop user. Backing up your machine(s) regularly is important, regardless of the number of kernel images you have available. Because sh*t happens. :)

> I think status quo is a good thing. Linux users don't want stuff to break for no good reason.

Sadly Linux (user space) devs are stuck in CADT mode.

So while the kernel may behave, anything above is a constant, relentless, churn of code.

As an avid Linux user I used to be troubled by people claiming the utter unusability of Linux as a productive desktop environment. The thing that brought me some peace was the realization that a lot of the users that complain about desktop linux being broken want the computing equivalent of a Toyota Camry - something that takes them from point A to point B with a minimum of fuss. I would like to think of the Linux desktop environment as being closer to a Miata - something fun and enjoyable for those that are willing to accept different tradeoffs and enjoy being closer to the road.

> I would like to think of the Linux desktop environment as being closer to a Miata - something fun and enjoyable for those that are willing to accept different tradeoffs and enjoy being closer to the road.

I really like this analogy.

my ThinkCentre home desktop runs on Ubuntu for 3 years, my Dell laptop runs on Fedora for 1 year. All smooth ;)

and my Vaio laptop runs voidlinux for 2 years, after arch for 4 years and fedora for 3!

Still booting in less time than the bios needs to. :)

I've been Linux on the desktop since 93' and especially since VMWare came out.

Do you mean you're using Linux as guests on another host OS ? Or do you mean you're using Linux as hosts for other machines ?

I've been using Linux as my desktop for 10 years now. I really love it and can't imagine how people (especially devs) make do with Windows or Mac (To be honest I've never used a Mac).

But here's to Linux on the Desktop!

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