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Comment by KirinDave | Hacker News Reader

"Everything just works" so long as your expectations around "everything" are essentially set by a desktop computer experience designed in 2005.

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!

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It's not primitive in terms of UX. You just need to spend more time configuring it. Some will argue that that means it's primitive, but I don't think so.

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.

6 hours battery life is bare minimum these days. I wouldn't brag about it the way you are.

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.)

>6 hours battery life is bare minimum these days.

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...

> sad to think that 'MacBook Pro' is the bare minimum now.[0]

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.

> It's not primitive in terms of UX. You just need to spend more time configuring it. Some will argue that that means it's primitive, but I don't think so.

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.

at least I don't have to run 300 lines of powershell to remove telemetry and candy crush soda saga from my brand new computer

checkmate

I don't either, and I never did. My brand new computer shipped without spamware, because I chose a reputable vendor like Microsoft and not famously abusive vendors like, say, Lenovo.

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.

OP's comment around Candy Crush has nothing to do with Lenovo and everything to do with Microsoft. It happens - by default - on clean installs of Windows 10.

A Linux system with Gnome comes with good defaults, too. The difference is that with Linux you can use XMonad if you so wish, but don't pretend that that is what a new user faces.

> 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.

>It's not primitive in terms of UX. You just need to spend more time configuring it.

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.

I just had to change the same setting on windows, changing a line in a text file is much simpler than the maze of configuration dialogs I had to go through on windows. The linux way is easier, but the windows one is more discoverable, it would be nice to have an inbetween.

Yup, bleeding-edge laptop support is still a toss-up, but it's getting better, IMHO!

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...

> 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.

Apple has really pushed the bar up in terms of what users expect from their computers out of the box, and that has affected Windows as well, so in some sense Linux has been swimming upstream? treading water?

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.

[1] http://chaos-reins.com/2016-11-14-arch-yoga-910/

I like how you picked Arch, which is notorious as one of the few distros without an installer program, and the most difficult to install. I also highly doubt that recompiling kernels are the norm, though I may just be going off of a decade or so of experience...

I've been running Linux for about 4 years now (Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch over the first year or so, been on Arch ever since), and I've never had to recompile my kernel (I did choose to do it once, but this was because I was interested in trying it out rather than something not working right; I'm a bit masochistic that way).

I mentioned Arch because its repos/kernel seem the most up to date and hence most likely to support newish hardware. Plus their docs for getting to run on new laptops seems pretty comprehensive [1].

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

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Category:Laptops

This.

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.

You and others make a good point about getting going faster on windows, but one thing that a lot of people don't factor in is the amount of time fiddling with windows as well. Getting it working or fixing problems and other configuration probs. And not all hardware works well under windows or the latest version of windows. There is some real time spent trying to configure windows as well.

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.

I have a Windows PC and an Ubuntu system running on the same NUC hardware, as well as a higher end desktop that I use. I have to twiddle with the Ubuntu system pretty much once every 3-4 months after an update breaks something. The Windows 10 box keeps running... My big desktop has upgraded from 7->8->8.1->10, and is still running, though I'm considering a clean install, as some of the cruft from experimenting with the WSL and Docker for Windows Containers has left things a little funky.

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).

> 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.

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.

Have you plugged in an external monitor and not had an issue? I think that's not the norm even for that setup.

What do you mean by issue? After a couple of xrandr invocations to configure them, which could be automated by some GUI app if I were so inclined, I've never seen external monitors have issues on either of my Linux laptops.

Requiring an xrandr invocation equals to having issues. Perhaps it's a small problem, perhaps it's a very easy problem, but it definitely is a problem.

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.

> plug the wires, and it works immediately

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.

With OSX/Windows, it tends to mirror by default and/or present a window asking you what you want to do.

Requiring a CLI to connect a monitor/projector is a UX fail.

There are plenty of tools to automate that. arandr is a very simple and powerful tool to arrange monitors with a GUI. Gnome has its own, much simpler, monitor configuration dialog. My system defaults to extending to the right, by the way, because that's generally what I want when connecting a projector.

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.

And the thing I think you're hearing is that "progress" should not equate to "good enough." Doing a sensible and even helpful thing by default is part of user friendliness.

On my Thinkpad's X200 (VGA) and X220 (VGA, DisplayPort), plugging in external monitors has always Just Worked. I've been running Xubuntu on them for about 5 years.

It even worked on the first try from the X220's DisplayPort through a DP-to-HDMI-cable onto a TV.

-----

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.

Running Linux Mint MATE 17.3 on my ThinkPad T530 for a couple years now with no problems. I even game on it with Steam (XCOM runs OK on the integrated Intel graphics). Been very happy with it.

I have a T520 and last year I tried to run Ubuntu, but my battery life was around 20% worse than under Windows 10 (and the Windows 10 battery life wasn't great either). You say you haven't had any batter life issues. Does that mean it isn't worse than Windows?

"And it's still dependent on Mozilla or Google for its browsing experience."

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.

Even compiling a chromium shell includes some telemetry! Every browser collects some telemetry and websites do more.

There is no networked computing experience that does not allow vendors to extract metadata.

That's a nice set of rose-coloured glasses you have there. Hey, here's something I can do on my linux desktop that I can't do on my win10 desktop: change the way it looks! Yeah, I know, primitive UX, right!?

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.

I agree with you, that the experience a lot of times not as efficient and that its not for laptops. I had some weird problems on 2015 Macbook pro (max config.) where the linux is not able to shutdown the system, and the whole experience requires a lot of experimenting.

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...

Here's an interesting twist on the "out of the box experience": It doesn't just come down to drivers and configs. Yes, Windows might be better situated in that regard (although it also has its problems, try installing it on a PCI SSD the setup doesn't have a driver for...).

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.

>definitely not getting you the out-fo-box working functionality that windows gives

Oh come on, windows distro doesn't even have coreutils in it.

Although I agree that the "out of the box" experience is still not great on linux, I would ague that it's much more competitive. Most things do work out of the box. And at the end of the day, I have full control of my machine, and the software is being pushed by a group of people who don't see me as "the product". I can't say that about Windows or Mac.

I'd say the out of the box experience of a full install of Ubuntu vs. Windows for a given set of hardware is definitely better. With windows, you often have to seek out the correct graphics driver, and sometimes network driver (though that's about it for the most part).

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.

"Everything just works" should be interpreted as an asynchronous piece of code, because there are no guarantees that everything will work "today".

Desktop Linux is eventually consistent?

Depends on your drivers, I mean, the last wart I had to struggle with was some flickering with Electron apps, but reverting to an older model of hardware acceleration did the trick:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/752743/ubuntu-16-04-skylake-6...

i get 10 hours of battery life on my xps, and i get 8 on my libreboot x200.

Battery on linux if perfectly fine.

"But even updates work!"

Same people who love tiling window managers... you're the 1%!

Primitive in terms of UX where?

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