Where does the Ubuntu Linux desktop go from here?
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In terms of quality I would put it about 10-15 years behind Mac OSX or Windows. I almost never have to reboot my Mac because something broke, and when I use modern Windows machines I also seldom have to reboot them.
So my message to Canonical is to make something that doesn't suck. My wife doesn't care what window manager is chosen, just pick one and stick with it until it works. And test the crap out of it. test, test, test... Find bugs and fix them. Your geeky Linux user doesn't care about little annoying bugs, but less technical users really do.
Never heard of the company, but based on the specs of laptops being offered from the website, I'd hazard a guess that the discrete GPU is probably the source of many of your woes. Linux has always been a second-class citizen for video cards, particularly since NVIDIA's binary blobs fly in the face of the FOSS spirit.
If she doesn't do intense graphical editing or gaming, an integrated GPU from Intel would probably run much better on Linux.
FWIW (and I hate countering anecdotal evidence with more anecdotal evidence), I've got a Dell XPS 13 running Fedora and it will run days/weeks without a problem. I reboot it maybe once a month in order to apply the latest kernel, and that's about it.
For the record, I had a really bad time with Nvidia hardware and their drivers on Linux, and the whole Optimus thing that they pushed 5-ish years ago.
Never had a problem with Intel graphics, except that power management (RC6) support in Sandy Bridge chips took a while to mature.
> and this is really bad advice
I think that's a huge stretch. Disagree all you like from your own experience, but I believe that the statement "Intel drivers work more smoothly than the proprietary Nvidia drivers" matches the current consensus.
Oh you have a problem? Stop doing this thing I don't like.
Yay everyone, we did it.
Also, You want to lay down all the graphics options when Linus did that and _not_ pick Nvidia? Cool, go play zork. I understand what the situation was, but don't deny who was actually delivering on graphics performance either.
Today however, it's genuinely refreshing to see AMD's driver efforts and overall offering as a company.
Making the wrong consumer choice here matters, because it can take you from a good, functioning PC to one that works far less effectively.
You're right in that you shouldn't have to give a fuck, that they should all - in support terms - be drop in replacements allowing you to balance up cost vs. performance, but the Linux team have tried awfully hard to make it that way without being able to reach a compromise with GPU producers.
In the meantime, Linux gives you a choice of external GPUs at varying levels of freedom and support. That's more than nvidia gives you.
Again: Today however, it's genuinely refreshing to see AMD's driver efforts and overall offering as a company.
I am not sure whether the parent was using the nouveau drivers or the NVIDIA blobs. It's besides the point either way: GPU's on Linux are notoriously finicky, no matter your stack.
The recommendation to go with an integrated GPU is strictly pragmatic. I personally am a tinkerer and am willing to live with a little bit of pain as far as functionality or configuration for ideological reasons if it means supporting a FOSS distribution. But I can't make that same assumption for the parent's wife, and if she wants something that "just works" because she's unwilling to tolerate that level of pain, then an integrated GPU might be the way to go.
Everybody on the below thread is having a tertiary argument thinking I have something to say about GPUs and their drivers. I could not care less.
Nvidia: run a special process to fetch one of a limited set of binary blobs from a single vendor, shim them into the kernel and cross one's fingers that this combination of binaries will work. Then go through it all again at the next kernel update. Yes, Ubuntu and co. have scripts to do this, but it's all a big hack.
Intel: the drivers' already there, included in the kernel; there's very little to go wrong.
My current system has Intel graphics; if I did end up stuck with nvidia hardware, I'd try the noveau driver, and failing that I'd use vesa. Installing third-party driver binaries isn't worth the hassle.
Yes, Ubuntu and co. have scripts to do this, but it's all a big hack.
I recently bought a Dell Precision 5520 (a bumped up XPS 15 with Kaby Lake basically) and I have to say that the Ubuntu it shipped with worked pretty flawlessly- I had absolutely no issues at all it's shocking to me how well it ran and all the niggling things I expected to pose problems worked as flawless or even better than the last time I run them on windows. (Wifi/Trackpad/Battery and indicators)
The only issue I had was the Thunderbolt 3 dock I bought with it, for some reason the USB ports didn't work. But after I installed archlinux with a more modern kernel even that went away.
I would say that my laptop is almost better supported than my old Thinkpad. And that thing was damn near flawless already.
Linux on the desktop is improving, and I think Canonical was and continues to be a huge driver of that- Ubuntu is the OS that is the target platform for a lot of these Linux supporting devices and Canonical has a lot of responsibility in that area.
We might do well to appreciate that. Even if we don't like things like systemd/mir/whatever
Most manufacturers simply don't have the financial incentive to put in time and labour towards supporting Linux.
I cannot use the UI in OS X (my brain cannot adapt to it somehow), but have to use MS Windows 8 machines for work, and am always surprised by how inefficient their UI is, considering how much money has been poured into it.
However, I've really like using Ubuntu on an XPS 13 from Dell.
To what extent could this be related to using hardware from piss-ant vendors who are trying to cobble something together from whatever Clevo has for sale?
Your comment would be more interesting and sound less like a troll without this.
What are the "things" you're talking about and how do they "break"?
What are the ways Ubuntu is at the standard of 15 year old versions of Windows or OSX?
AIUI Linux is actually pretty well-known for its stability. On desktop I never reboot (Xubuntu) unless there's an update that requires it, and even then it's usually several days later, due to having so much running I don't want to close.
If it "sucked" and was so buggy it required rebooting every two days then I think we'd hear more about it from its tens of millions of users, not all of whom are "your geeky Linux user", as you put it.
> My wife doesn't care what window manager is chosen
I don't care about window managers either. I don't have any of the problems you're talking about.
> little annoying bugs
For example? Actual bugs, or just things you personally don't happen to like or that don't behave like Windows?
I find that hard to believe. I have a crapbook pro they gave me for work and I have to reboot it every few days because it becomes unresponsive.
as Linus Torvalds said in a video on youtube, what linux on the desktop need is to come preinstalled by the major pc vendor ... ubuntu need more deals with big vendors that is all
What we really need is Red Hat to start selling Fedora computers. And KDE Neon to ship laptops based on Debian stable. And obviously at least one big retailer to have them in a physical store, so we tell our friends where to go.
I've been using Fedora for the last 7-8 years, but I have to upgrade every 13-14 months or so. And CentOS is not suited for a modern development/workstation environment.
I can't say bad things about it, except that it's quite often that you can't find packages for various applications. A random example would be spotify, that was one of my last adventures to make it work(I got tired and gave up after a while).
And Fedora/RH has a lot more momentum in general and you can be certain that it will be around for as long as Linux is a thing I guess :)
Suse has gone through various struggles and it doesn't inspire much confidence to me anymore.
Why is Ubuntu the defacto supported Linux distro? Why is,quite often, steam so difficult to install, while it's a breeze to install on Ubuntu?
You can't expect people to consider you as a legitimate target if you're constantly moving :(
http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/android-statistics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...
Market relevance aside, I view Ubuntu's return to Gnome as a Good Thing. It means there will be more work towards common goals by Canonical and Red Hat.
But seriously it's hard to create quality software especially if you are not as rich as Apple or MS
I support the theory of elementary (UI/designer led, unified HIGs, encouraging payment for development of the OS and the general ecosystem, and the emphasis on polished, hassle-free computing) but in practice it's just not there. They need to sort out bugs before taking on new features/designs.
I'm actually just considering what distribution to recommend to an inexperienced user. I would recommend elementary in a heartbeat if serious bugs were fixed within weeks, instead they go on for years.
Has it become worse over the two last years?
If deep pockets was all it took to make an OS succeed, Windows Phone wouldn't be dead.
On the desktop, OSX, Windows, and most Linux variants are all good enough. What matters is application support. For my job, 50% of the applications I use run on Linux, 75% run on OSX (natively), and 100% work on Windows. Can you guess which OS I use at work?
Thanks to Valve, Linux has a real shot at picking up some steam in the gaming space. Without Adobe and Microsoft, it probably won't go anywhere on corporate or consumer desktops.
Nicely done :-)
Make that 110% if you include Visual Studio. The degree of polish that Visual Studio has just isn't available anywhere else. At some point early this year I was considering Linux+VSCode. VS2017, with F5-to-Docker debug, launched and everything else looks like a giant pain in the ass once again. The Azure integration is anticompetitive but, wow, is it also so much better than the alternative.
XCode is a hilarious joke that Apple is playing on developers.
Linux IDEs, while much better than XCode, would have been competitive in 2003 (unless you use Java/IntelliJ exclusively).
It's no wonder that Windows is the only platform where developers shy away from text editors - it's the only platform where the alternatives to text editors don't absolutely suck. It's really not that text editors are better than IDEs - an good IDE and a good text editor are complementary, not competitive.
Where I'm going with this is that a good IDE begets a quality application. That 100% doesn't arise from the ether. Alongside your game argument comes another indicator of this: Windows has a very mature graphical debugger[1] (having been growing it since DX9) where, so far as I have read, both competing operating systems lack this functionality entirely.
Balmer might have looked like a fool with his "developers, developers, developers" dance. The thing is that he was completely correct - instead of mocking his monkey dancing, Apple and Linux should have been paying attention to the people that he was praising.
If Ubuntu want to compete in this space the developer experience must be fixed.
I like Windows more than before but people saying VS is fantastic are starting to annoy me.
My VS crashed 3 times today (!). This comes on top of almost not having any refactoring support unless you buy ReSharper.
I was really excited to get to try .Net three months ago.
Now I'm really looking forward to go back to Java and Netbeans (even if I will miss some things.)
It's no wonder that Windows is the only platform where developers shy away from text editors
This developer love Netbeans on KDE.
This is why vim is a hell of a lot more useful to me on linux than on windows. In Linux, I actually prefer vim over sublime. In windows, I use sublime over vim.
It's not simply a matter of polish, the environments are completely different, and therefore the tools that are successful on the platforms are completely different.
I wish this were true. A great development environment (integrated or not) will get you to the finish line faster, but it doesn't automatically produce quality. Have you downloaded anything from the Windows Store lately?
You (and many others) don't like XCode, yet developers using it have produced some marvelous software on macOS. For example, I think The Omni Group folks have made some applications that work great, look great, and are a joy to use.
When an IDE doesn't do something the way you want it done and you find yourself fighting it, I can totally understand not wanting to deal with it. On the other hand, if your IDE works the way you want it to, it can increase your productivity.
And that's why Linux will never stop the experimentation: Lots of the people actually writing the code wants to experiment and don't want to copy Windows. You will never get unity (pardon the pun) out of a group whose only unifying characteristic is that we don't want to use Windows or OS X.
> Please stop innovation for innovation's sake and just make Windows 98 again.
That's been tried. Remember Lindows? It even tried for Windows compatibility via Wine.
On the other hand I switch away from every distro or at least desktop that does "change" for the sake of "change". I prefer a stable system with optional changes to a mess that breaks functionality with every other update. Sadly some of the programs I use were written for GNOME or at least with GTK, so I am still affected every time GNOME is "improved".
If you want to avoid change, see if the GNOME/GTK apps you use are available in forks for Mate or Cinnamon - if they are, chances are they'll change far less.
That's fine, but Linux is never going to achieve any significant marketshare (and thus get support from hardware and software makers) as long as it tries to standardize on weird UIs. Having some weird options for those who want to mess with them is great, just don't make them the standard. That's the problem with Linux: for some stupid reason, the distros have mostly standardized on Gnome3, which is a resource hog and horrible to use, and not an easy transition for a non-technical Windows user. If they adopted KDE instead, Linux would probably get a lot more popularity.
Individual distro's will pick whatever they want. Several have tried to copy Windows to various extent (with Lindows, later Linspire, being the most extreme example as they tried for binary compatibility via Wine).
> If they adopted KDE instead, Linux would probably get a lot more popularity.
I they adopted KDE instead to the exclusion of Gnome it'd alienate a huge amount of Linux users. They're not doing this randomly. But as it stands, Gnome and KDE are both viable alternatives on most of the major distros, with varying levels of support.
That's the entire problem! We have ONE standard kernel, granted with a few modifications on Android. We have one standard C library (several implementations for edge use cases). We have one standard C++ runtime (and the clang libc++ is completely compatible). On every layer of the stack we have one standard, with one standard implementation, except when you reach the top when it becomes and ungodly mess. Nothing really interoperates in a standard way. Hell, it took until 2006 IIRC to settle on one standard audio API - pulse. Before we run off to reimplement everything yet again, there should be standards of interoperability in place.
For example, why does Firefox not use the KDE open file dialog? I run KDE, I expect to get the KDE open file dialog not the GNOME one. Oh, it's because there's no standard "open a file" API call. Because every time someone reinvents the desktop, they reinvent it from the ground up without trying to interoperate. This is probably why Firefox also doesn't always obey my file associations set via Dolphin, the KDE file browser.
Yes, let's have unlimited customizability, but we need standardized interfaces for basic desktop functionality. A forest, rather than a dozen walled gardens.
This is completely wrong. It's like saying there's no standard init system. Except for a few weird exceptions like Slackware, there is: systemd, because all the mainstream distros have adopted it now. Similarly, there is a standard DE, and that's Gnome, because all the mainstream distros have adopted it (Debian, Fedora, OpenSuse, Ubuntu now).
As for alienation, they're alienating everyone who wants something that works like Windows, and they're alienating tons of Linux users who hate Gnome3, which is why we now have the ridiculous mess of not one, but TWO Gnome forks: MATE and Cinnamon, in addition to KDE, LXDE, and Xfce. KDE is not a "viable alternative" on most distros, as it's very poorly supported, if at all. It's not a first-class DE on any mainstream distro that I know of; within Ubuntu-land it's a separate "Kubuntu" spin that's not well supported, and within Mint-land it's the "Mint KDE Edition" which always lags behind the Cinnamon and MATE versions. I hear you can get it to work on Fedora, sorta. Sorry, but that does not make it equivalent to the support that Gnome enjoys. And as the other poster points out, many applications assume you're using Gnome, such as Firefox with its crappy Gnome file dialog.
>They're not doing this randomly.
No, they're doing it because Red Hat is pushing Gnome hard, and because there's a lot of trend-following in Linux without thinking about what's really good for the community and Linux adoption overall.
Hell no!
Disagree strongly.
I'd much rather want Microsoft to release a polished supported KDE 5 or Gnome 3 than the other way around.
The thing that attracted me to free software was first the price tag (esp when I was a student) and later speed and usability.
While Linux's VESA driver got tons of screen tearing issues and generally poor drawing speeds, Mac OS (this was 10.4) was sitting there drawing a fully composited desktop with no slowdowns whatsoever. At that same time, Linux required special graphics hardware with beta drivers to even get any form of desktop compositing working.
What we've seen are ill-fated attempts to make those desktops work well on touch devices. That's what Unity was all about. On the other hand Apple has refused to make macOS run on touch screens.
Unfortunately, that alone isn't quite the same 'smooth' experience as Windows and macOS because:
- the only somewhat noob friendly out of the box experience that has this setup is the latest Fedora (at the moment)
- you need to be concerned about whether your graphics card is compatible
- many Linux apps aren't built using modern GTK3 or Qt which will result in some jarring/inconsistent experience when doing actual work in your desktop environment
- there are just fewer quality applications to work with on Linux, and cross-platform applications often are less graphically pleasing than their Windows and especially macOS equivalents
- there's no equivalent of Macbook or Microsoft Precision trackpads on Linux, which to me are part of the subjective 'smooth' experience on Macbooks or recent properly equipped Windows laptops
Wayland in my experience really solves the performance/smoothness problems the Linux desktop has. But there's still a long way to go even after Wayland becomes the default on the Linux desktop.
I respect that others like it, -would even vote argue for coworkers to get a Mac even if it is slightly more expensive than my machine if thats what they are used to and like, - but passing it around as a benchmark for a good desktop gets a bit tiring.
(this is why it's often called GNU/Linux - Linux with GNU userspace; Android has its own userland so you could call it Android/Linux)
That said, the UI has never been what's holding back Ubuntu on the phone.
Lack of apps? Marketing?
But I think you know what I mean. A Linux device not controlled by Google. A Linux device that actually can run many ordinary Linux apps.
I moved to fedora because Ubuntu tends to break and guzzle resources.
I will be agnostic - won't change a lil thing even if the distro changes the wm. watch the progress. i will keep unity .. forgive me. i even would backport - if it doens't happen.
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/157I always preferred KDE over Gnome but Ubuntu made it work so well I stayed with it until they abandoned it.
And this is my guess at Canonicals biggest misstep: taking away something that worked amazingly well and replace it with something that was a.) Buggy when it was introduced b.) Very different from the thing we were in love with.