I hope Microsoft stops with auto-update, otherwise the alternatives are also catching up fast if you are not a gamer.
I hope Microsoft stops with auto-update, otherwise the alternatives are also catching up fast if you are not a gamer.
Linux on desktops is fine (except from a physical security standpoint), but primitive in terms of UX. And it's still dependent on Mozilla or Google for its browsing experience.
And if you want a portable computer (which by the way are demonstrably more secure in the face of physical tampering) you basically relegate yourself to terrible battery life, poor display support, dicey sleep support, and the fixes for these often compromise performance.
I really wish Linux users would stop softballing their desktop vendors and kernel maintainers so much. It's just not competitive!
http://askubuntu.com/questions/752743/ubuntu-16-04-skylake-6...
Apart from the above points that you mentioned its definitely not getting you the out-fo-box working functionality that windows gives. But i think i am willing to suffer that much to have a system with more control and an OS which doesn't installs random apps without my permission like Windows 10 does[1].
[1] http://winaero.com/blog/fix-windows-10-installs-apps-like-ca...
But: The time I use up in Linux to configure various things like that I easily waste on Windows while downloading/installing all the tools/graphics drivers I need by hand. The fact here is that Windows' tooling - if not entirely absent - is horrible. And although there are always alternatives that are easy to come by (sysinternals tools, 3rd party tools like Voidtools' Everything, Putty, DisplayFusion, Notepad++, a decent browser, etc.), the fact that their functionality is still not integrated (or there is at least a simple way to bulk-install them) still boggles my mind.
So, railing on about "out of the box" performance from a windows perspective seems a bit off to me. Windows as a blank slate is horrible.
Oh come on, windows distro doesn't even have coreutils in it.
That said, keeping said system running, when an update causes a regression for your system seems to happen to me far more on my Ubuntu system than my windows or osx ones.
I think that's where this sentiment often comes from: people who cut their teeth on XF86Config tweaking and compiling NVidia kernel modules from source and shopping for just the right PCMCIA wireless adapter are now amazed when a fresh Ubuntu install has working 3D-accelerated graphics, 802.11n (with GUI for configuration), Bluetooth, etc. (And yes, we have Freedesktop.org/systemd/NetworkManager and friends to thank for a lot of this.)
Maybe the bar was just really low, and you've got a strong argument if you say it shouldn't be anymore, but we are making progress...
I was one of those people for longer than I can remember. Last year I decided that it was time for me to make this argument. I don't regret the time I spent learning, tinkering, and sometimes wrestling Linux into working. However, while Linux has made a ton of progress, the gap between what "just works" and what users expect has only grown. My time and needs are just too valuable to me now to be messing around with Linux.
In the mid-90s I remember endlessly fiddling with CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT to squeeze out that extra 30kb of conventional memory to run some game. Buying peripherals was such a crap shoot that 'Plug and Play' was something that needed to be advertised, and much of the time you were still stuck manually juggling IRQs, moving cards to different slots, etc.
Nowadays, one can buy any Windows or Mac computer/peripheral and generally expect it to work, with some bare minimum of reading reviews.
So while Linux has made tremendous strides in terms of driver support (you mean my wifi actually works now?), things are still very far from zero conf that users have become accustomed to.
Time is valuable, and 2-10 hours spent experimenting with various driver packages, editing text config files, recompiling the kernel, etc. is literally money out of the user's pocket, not to mention the learning curve if you don't already know how to do all these things. That doesn't include the time for extra research to see what hardware is well supported.
Here's an example of install instructions on a pretty well-supported laptop that does Linux [1]. I'd guesstimate an hour of time if you've already done this before, and anything up to 10 hours if you run into unexpected difficulties or are totally new to this.
Looking for directions for that laptop on Ubuntu returns a bunch of frustrated users and rather conflicting testimony:
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...
Disclaimer: not an Arch user myself
I'm a big fan of Arch myself, but if you look at the distro's philosophy, manually installing it is actually the point. There are enough other distros if you want to avoid that.
The main problem that the article presents is that windows acts like malware which brings a new element to your desktop. I remember getting a popup notification from facebook, this after I thought I turned off all of that stuff. You don't face that in linux. You did with some earlier versions of Ubuntu, but not anymore.
No doubt, windows brings computing to people who aren't technical and makes it easy, but anything beyond the most simple configuration will take a lot of time as well.
In the end, I find I have to spend far more time tinkering with my HTPC box running Ubuntu, then I ever really had to with windows. I know there are other distros, but Ubuntu is pretty much king of desktop linux here. I have considered switching to Debian proper, or an Ubuntu derivative, but haven't done so.
Oh, and don't get my started on the pain of getting an MCE remote working halfway properly under Kodi... that was a real painful experience. I'm just glad that suspend/resume has hdmi audio after now, where it lost it before some recent changes (daily intel driver ppa).
This depends a lot on how well supported your hardware is. I run Linux Mint (MATE) on a Thinkpad T430 and have had 0 issues with displays, sleep, battery life, you name it.
Not having issues means that you arrive at the hardware (which you may have never seen, e.g. at a customer's site), plug the wires, and it works immediately.
More importantly, not having issues means that you can rely on being able to just plug the wires and have it work, and that you don't have a risk of being unable to make it work immediately even if you forget the right invocations and are offline and can't look them up.
How does it work immediately? How does it know of I want to clone or extend the display? If I extend, do I want the same resolution on both screens, or different? You'll have to set that somehow, and whether it's a GUI or a CLI tool doesn't matter.
Forgetting the invocations aren't really an issue anymore either, my shell (zsh) has autocompletion of xrandr outputs, modes and resolutions.
Requiring a CLI to connect a monitor/projector is a UX fail.
None of this is new, and the whole point of this discussion is that Linux desktops are much better than they were ten years ago. It is that old state that many folks have in mind when criticising Linux distros' usability. It's just not a very interesting discussion to have.
It even worked on the first try from the X220's DisplayPort through a DP-to-HDMI-cable onto a TV.
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I've never had to use xrandr or any command line tool to select displays – on Xubuntu, there's this little graphical dialogue: http://netupd8.com/w8img2/xfce-mini-displays.png that pops up (or you can force it to show by hitting that key on the Thinkpad keyboard with the picture of an external display).
OTOH, I did just a month ago for the first time actually use xrandr, but this time it was because I wanted to write a script that set my windows and monitors up "just right" for how I like it when I'm at the office. I love how easy Linux makes it to do that stuff when I find I do want something automated.
And you're right, linux does sometimes require fiddling during installation to install drivers to make hardware work... because as we all know, windows requires no drivers at installation time! All hardware 'just works' without drivers on windows, right? And you never have to be on your toes lest your driver installer sideload some shovelware you didn't want - what a 'modern' UX experience! Yes, please, my mouse driver needs to have it's own service visible in the dock that also phones home separate to all the other items I install. How very modern!
Every desktop env has something that sucks about it, and windows has plenty (remember the clusterfuck that was 'removing the Start button'?). Similarly, if you don't like traditional desktops then there's plenty of alternatives in ^nix-land, like tiling window managers.
The point about portable computers is also false. You just need to pick a machine with hardware manufactured by friendly vendors who help write drivers. Why would you want to support anyone else?
Battery life? My x230 with tpm installed gets 6 hours of battery life on the stock battery.
Display support? I'm using a 2560x1440 monitor with the mini displayport on my x230 right now and have had no issues with it whatsoever. Plays Quake 3 great too, no tearing. Debian Jessie.
Sleep support?
/etc/systemd/logind.conf
HandleLidSwitch=suspend
Performance issues? My system idles at 200mb. Good luck getting macOS or Windows to do that. And to preempt the bias card, I use a Mac for work and love it to death. I think most of your points were applicable in 2005. The terrain has changed and the mainstream Linux distributions are now very stable and usable daily driver systems.
Linux is more than competitive, it's just not targeted at inexperienced users. Which is fine. Not everyone has the need or want to configure their computer to suit them. Some people just need a computer that works. That's why macOS and Windows exist.
2560x1400 external monitor? Doesn't sound like a HiDPI display unless it's only 15". This is another bare minimum thing I wouldn't brag about.
"good sleep support" has very little to do with activating sleep by shutting the lid. Grandposter is referring to Linux's terrible reputation for successfully going to sleep and waking up without crashing. You fail to convince again.
Quake 3 is an 18 year old game. How is it's performance in 2017 anything to write home about?
RAM is plentiful, the fact your idle system fits in 200mb is thus unimpressive too.
You, sir, yourself, sound like you have 2005 standard. (Or perhaps 1999 standards? That's when Quake 3 came out.)
sad to think that 'MacBook Pro' is the bare minimum now.[0]
>RAM is plentiful, the fact your idle system fits in 200mb is thus unimpressive too.
not true. It is impressive that a modern machine can be ran and coordinated on such a small footprint.
Ram isn't eaten up with a zero cost. In other words : memory usage indicates more than just what's available, it's a performance metric.
[0]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/14/13616404/apple-macbook-pr...
Yes! Actually! Older Macbooks have better battery life! Apple's quest for form factor has actually led them to cut into battery life for their top models. This is why people jokingly tell me to "upgrade to a 2014 mac."
> not true. It is impressive that a modern machine can be ran and coordinated on such a small footprint.
It's also impressive that Red Fraggle can balance two pickles on her nose. It's not really relevant to the claim of "performance" though. It's equally irrelevant to security. Unless you define performance as "fitting into a minimal RAM footprint." Something many memory allocators elect not to do because of the compaction cost hurting running time performance.
Okay, so... let's just think about what you said for a second. Windows 10 and Mac OS X deliver extremely high end configuration with a lot of extensibility in their Window managers via first and third parties without extensive modifications. I have some unique XMonad configurations too! But if I have to be a direct contributor to my experience, I remove a lot of the credit from the people who shipped the software, because they basically sent me an SDK for making a good UI environment.
> The point about portable computers is also false. You just need to pick a machine with hardware manufactured by friendly vendors who help write drivers. Why would you want to support anyone else?
Yeah. "Lenovo is friendly" is not a very compelling argument. Their support and sales are miserable. Their machines are unimpressive. Their supported versions of Linux are years out of date.
> Battery life? My x230 with tpm installed gets 6 hours of battery life on the stock battery.
My surface book gets 6 hours of battery life even if I'm compiling android binaries regularly. Without changing anything.
> HandleLidSwitch=suspend
Are you actually going to pretend that sleep support isn't a major issue for many portable hardware setups? Or is this restricted to "only specific token gesture devices from specific vendors?"
> Performance issues? My system idles at 200mb. Good luck getting macOS or Windows to do that.
What does this have to do with performance?
> The terrain has changed and the mainstream Linux distributions are now very stable and usable daily driver systems.
So.. tell me... does Canonical's kernel update purge old kernel images yet, or are regular users still SOL after about 8 months of use unless they invoke a shell script they barely understand provided by stack overflow? Asking for a friend who I had to do this form.
> Linux is more than competitive,
If Linux is only for experienced users but both OSX and Windows can deliver to the full spectrum, then that's a superset, doge.
This kind of double standard is why linux ends up getting overhyped.
checkmate
I'm not terribly concerned about app or browser telemetry. If you're using Chrome, you're spitting back a ton. Firefox? Still sending some! Your mobile device? Spitting back a ton. Everyone other machine? Also doing so. Canonical? Also doing some, although to their credit it's less.
You have basically equated all telemetry with intrusive spyware, when in fact it's usually banal data designed to make it easy to identify problems after a bad software push. While maybe we could have a discusion about where to draw the line of "too much" for Windows 10, you've set such a profound double standard you won't even allow a dialogue about it.
> Yeah. "Lenovo is friendly" is not a very compelling argument. Their support and sales are miserable. Their machines are unimpressive. Their supported versions of Linux are years out of date.
I don't care about sales, and they publish excellent hardware maintenance manuals which means that I don't need to rely on their support. You say that their machines are unimpressive, but I don't share that sentiment. They're not flashy, sure. But they're rock-solid and take a lot of abuse. You can drop them or spill liquids on the keyboard, and your system will be fine. Just wait a minute for your drink to come back out at the bottom. And despite that, they're still pretty light. I think they're quite impressive.
>> Battery life? My x230 with tpm installed gets 6 hours of battery life on the stock battery.
> My surface book gets 6 hours of battery life even if I'm compiling android binaries regularly. Without changing anything.
You're comparing a 5-year old computer to a brand new one. Apples and oranges.
> > HandleLidSwitch=suspend
> Are you actually going to pretend that sleep support isn't a major issue for many portable hardware setups? Or is this restricted to "only specific token gesture devices from specific vendors?"
Never had a sleep issue with my ThinkPad, ever. There is no vendor support for Linux.
> So.. tell me... does Canonical's kernel update purge old kernel images yet, or are regular users still SOL after about 8 months of use unless they invoke a shell script they barely understand provided by stack overflow? Asking for a friend who I had to do this form.
That's a Ubuntu issue, not a general one, and they should really offer an option to do this automatically. There's no excuse not to. But that's hardly a big issue, is it?
But tell me, does Windows auto-remove the remains of failed updates automatically now? Because during the Christmas holidays, I used the disk cleanup tool to remove several Gigabytes of them from a family member's Windows 10 computer.
Aaaaand this is why I opted away from Linux and back into the Windows world after university. I'm trying to get shit done, I want to install and go and almost never have to touch anything but my code and solving my problems - NOT solving the problems with the tools that I'm ostensibly supposed to be using to solve my problems.
For all the flak it gets, since 7, Windows Just Works for me.
Is that your way of saying that you cannot run proprietary stuff like IE or Safari and that .. is a bad thing? I don't know a single person using Edge/IE anywhere around me, so I have trouble parsing and understanding this statement.
There is no networked computing experience that does not allow vendors to extract metadata.
Battery on linux if perfectly fine.
Same people who love tiling window managers... you're the 1%!
Davinci resolve seems to have a Linux version but not enough for someone who does more than video.
I don't know how fleshed out the DTP side of things are but as a amateur photographer and graphic designer I've been able to get away without having Adobe anything (except Lightroom) installed for the past few years at home and at work.
You will have to learn a new UI though, but I find this is easier to do than it sounds because most of the open-source software doesn't try so hard to map things to their equivalent real world process. (I found that the hardest thing about Photoshop was its terminology and workflow, which was built to be familiar to film photographers and print media people)
Linkscape is good, but I don't use Illustrator that much. For DTP, Photoshop + InDesign are hard to beat and again, an industry standard.
Maybe I'll run Windows in a VM but I don't really see myself going without these tools which I rely on daily.
The problem I have with most of the replacements is that none of them seem to put much/any effort into cataloguing and taxonomy. There's plenty of open source alternatives for the RAW exposure component of Lightroom but I don't think that's the reason people stick with it. Organising photos is hard and Lightroom is fantastic at it.
You mean in a file system at all or you mean that it wants things stored in a particular folder structure? If the latter, Lightroom doesn't enforce any particular structure. If the former, I'm not aware of another solution that works with images that aren't on disk. Darktable, RawTherapee, Capture One Pro etc. all work with stuff on a filesystem.
Darktable for example saves its settings in a file alongside the RAW image. Done. I can move those around without being afraid of anything. LR however enforces Adobe's own, opaque solution that I'm not aware of any possibilities to efficiently manage without going through LR itself.
Don't get me wrong, tagging etc. is nice. I'd just rather do it on my own in a system that I can manage myself (e.g. BeFS if need be).
If you want to make books profesionaly there is no replacement for indesign. Scribus doesnt have multiline paragraph composing. So technicaly if you want to set something to the block, you will get always better result in indesign. 3D and photography are interesting to programmers but books... they make them with TeX. But with tex its hard to do columns and more complicated composition. One way could be scribus latex render windows but its somehow shitty.
Its too niche thing i guess.
Same goes for After Effects - node based composing is fine on linux but layer based for animation (motion graphics). AE only thing on the planet.
Its getting frustrating especialy with recent decline of mac os and mac hw. Again - hackintosh to the rescue but try to find hackintosh laptop.
Photoshop is the industry standard, yes, but 'creative work' extends beyond digital design.
Having worked with and at digital agencies, adobe is the industry standard. I am open to learning about an agency which does not use Adobe, Sketch etc.
Capture One may or may not work with Wine; all the tests in the database are old.
Just out of curiosity, though, as a photographer, what does Linux do better than macOS? Apart from the hardware (and my 2012 MBP works great for development and raw processing), I can't see what is compelling about Linux. I ran Linux on my Thinkpad T42 for years (Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu), and macOS is so much nicer.
Huh? Linux is still one of top platforms for any kind of highend professional video work. Software like Lightworks, CG renderers and designers, etc. Is that not "creative" work?
Its mostly Adobe with their monopoly. The thing is.. i suspect they could target linux atleast experimentaly - since its already multiplatform and on unix. They dont seem to be using much of the OS parts.
I know about this already, but the point is that end user experience for me had been getting worse than Windows7 for example (not talking about the UX here). The fact that i have to use powershell or service control center to control the stuff is just not nice. I think an end-user should not be forced to go to regedit to stop Microsoft to install crapware like candy-crush etc.
Why the hell anyone would want that on a server is beyond me.
> Devices currently running Windows 10 Pro, version 1607 can get Windows 10 Enterprise Current Branch (CB) or Current Branch for Business (CBB). This benefit does not include Long Term Service Branch (LTSB)