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Comment by forrest92 | Hacker News Reader

> As a vocal critic of the Linux Desktop

well, go on then, elaborate...

Not the OP but my most recent attempt to ditch Windows on my gaming desktop ~6 months ago was tripped up when I discovered that core software like file managers and such still crash or wig out constantly (it's always been that way, I simply used to put up with stuff like that, just hoped that had changed since I'd been away) and generally basic interactions (e.g. drag & drop) are still inconsistent and buggy. This on Ubuntu which is allegedly relatively polished. Tried KDE and Gnome both (Gnome's performance was also terrible, incidentally).

And all of it looked pretty bad. I'm a fan of (though not insistent upon using) "ugly" old school interfaces, so it's not that it wasn't "flat" or "beautiful" enough or whatever the current trend is, just lacking consistency and the result of a whole bunch of small, poorly-chosen defaults adding up to a big stew of gross. I could overlook that if it weren't also crash-prone and janky as hell, but it is.

So I'm still stuck on Mac for anything serious, and my gaming desktop sits in storage because I can't be bothered these days to screw with either Windows post-10 or Linux. Sigh.

FWIW my favorite desktop I've ever used, as far as core software, stability, desktop UI/X, compared to its contemporaries, was BeOS.

If you want to love windows again, find the Eurpean LTSB version, it is incredible. No app store, no cortana, none of that shit.

As for linux, I went through a bunch until I found my love for fedora. It still requires some tinkering, but for the most part everything works.

Cannot agree at all.

I switched to Arch Linux when RedHat was swallowed by IBM. KDE Plasma 5 is my thing. Windows 10 is a VM guest in Arch host. 32GB workstation, multiple monitors - 2 24 inch Dell monitors, 1 Haeir 55 inch, SSDs and Western Digital Caviar Blacks and Transcend External HDDs... no issues to report.

Same experience with Fedora for more than 2 years. FreeBSD with Xfce 4 and TWM on my laptop. No crashes, no issues.

Huh. I hit a ton just trying to manage some files and burn a cd or two. Workflow inconveniences, crashes in various applications, little "some KDE service you've never heard of has crashed" messages from the system tray. Firefox scrolling was jerky until I googled a bit and found the right setting to change which is apparently the stop-being-broken switch, which is a thing that exists for some reason. Stuff like that, and on what's supposedly one of the most just-works distros. Weird. Fits with my experience running Linux as my main desktop (and laptop) OS from ~2002-2008, though once I switched to Gentoo everything was less buggy at the cost of having to configure everything manually.

Too off topic for this thread, also past experience has shown that all that will happen is a bunch of evangelists will come out of the woodwork to tell me variations of: you're using the wrong distro, you're using the wrong hardware, or your workflow is wrong and you should change how you do things.

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