I'd love to see real competition in the OS space for people who need both a decent app ecosystem and open source developer tools.
Me too until this May, when it was past time for my aging MB Pro to retire. I really couldn't justify a new one given I don't even like them any more (the Touchbar was the coup de grace).
Hence a Dell XPS 15, running Windows 10. I won't pretend the latter is anywhere near as good as OSX (less stable, less consistent UI, generally lower quality apps), but it does manage all the hardware well & gets the job done. WSL makes it livable-with.
I'd prefer linux though for its window manager choices, single-rooted filesystem, lack of nags & faster file io (among other things).
> I'd love to see real competition in the OS space for people who need both a decent app ecosystem and open source developer tools.
Quite.
Why not install Linux, and run Windows under a VM?
Or if locked to the Windows install, run Linux under a VM?
I am certainly saying that a fresh install of Ubuntu (and a reasonable attempt to get over the initial issues eg. using a respin available on github) has too many problems for me to either live with or spend time investigating. Others may have more tolerance for fiddling around with OSs, but I've done my dash with that kind of stuff.
Maybe. But that has nothing to do with what I wrote.
> I'd be interested in the specifics
Would you? Or would you like to gather factoids in pursuit of your belief that everyone must make the choices you make?
> that you anticipate on supported hardware
Not "anticipate". Experienced, after installation (more than once). It was more trouble than it was worth to me.
> on supported hardware
As I say, I don't think there's a developer edition of the 9570. There isn't an extant linux driver for the fingerprint scanner, which surely there would be if Dell preinstalled linux on this model.
There's a host of folks in my org running Ubuntu on Dell XPS laptops. Issues do arise, but they're pretty rare. I made the switch from Mac almost two years ago and it's been great.
For me the dealing with the few issues that arise is a better use of my time than wrestling with things like Docker on Mac, homebrew, ancient python, and weird VPN issues that seem to pop up with every upgrade.
I don't really believe Microsoft is going to do a linux as a consumer-grade replacement for Windows, but if it did, I suspect the issues I have would go away. Hardware vendors would write drivers, missing software pieces would be filled in, etc.
[Edit: I committed the cardinal sin - or is it a common convention? - of commenting on an article before reading it. A mistake in this case - I realise now the article is just silly speculative hand-waving]
Have you tried to use Ruby or Python on Windows? It's even worse.
Or KDE Neon if you'd rather have an Ubuntu core. I heard good things about it but didn't try.
I want a big company, who I trust will follow through, to take my money and solve my problems with The Desktop Linux™. I need office apps, I need music apps, I need image processing, I need some sort of integrated cloud offering, and I'd like a unix-like back end. I'll pay money for this. I will not pay in time. Apple does this for me currently; MS is possibly the only possible other company which could take on such a challenge, hence the interest in the idea.
It's sort of ironic to me that one of the main reasons I like linux on the server - which I use exclusively - is because I perceive it as "just working" in a way that MS servers never do. The situation is entirely inverted on the desktop - OSX, and to a lesser extent Windows, "just work" and the solutions to all of my problems are, at most, an install and possibly a few dollars away. Linux is very far from that currently, and until it gets a whole lot closer - and it will probably take a big company to actually do it - that door is closed to me, and people like me, for the foreseeable future.
The lack of a company controlling Linux is exactly why it's Linux. I am surprised that someone who is mid-career, has money, and little time doesn't know that.
Canonical has totally failed to deliver this. Maybe someone else could, maybe not. We're just speculating here.
Many of those seem to have gone by the wayside: Unity deprecated in favour of GNOME 3, Ubuntu One dead. It makes me wonder if Canonical found out that it just can't be done, that pissing off the people involved in the projects upon which Ubuntu depends by sacrificing some of the sense of community in exchange the It Just Works™ magic towards which they have been working is ultimately a fool's game in the current ecosystem.
I find that a shame. I thought Ubuntu had the potential to be a sort of macOS for Linux: built upon a free base, contributing heavily to other projects from which it takes, but also adding Ubuntu-specific stuff (still open source, of course) that disrupts the Linux desktop ecosystem to make the current other players (KDE, GNOME, Xfce, etc.) feel like amateur hour. At one time, it felt like Unity could've been Ubuntu's macOS desktop and I could swear they were heavily promoting some Python API for desktop apps that might've been to Ubuntu as Cocoa is to macOS. That also seems to have changed.
Please re-read what I said.
I said that I was hopeful that Ubuntu would create something that would make KDE and GNOME seem like amateur hour. I never said Unity was the thing for which I was hoping, merely that it was Ubuntu's attempt (which, to my mind, was a failure), and I never said KDE or GNOME __are__ amateur — although, you forced my hand with the next bit.
> […] if you take 20 minutes to configure it
This is exactly what I'm talking about as "amateur", though.
Try thinking like a regular user, who just wants everything to work properly out of the box, rather than a technical user who might be happy wasting 20 minutes on the fruitless endeavour of getting KDE to work Just Right This Time And I Swear I Won't Spend Another Couple of Hours Reconfiguring It Again Later When I'm Bored™, because that very way of thinking is exactly why the Year of Linux Desktop will never come.
At some point, my threshold for irritation to run a Linux desktop dropped low enough that I was willing to make the jump. My threshold for irritation for Mac also went up.
I was only willing to do so if I could install a stock standard distro and get to work without having deal with a bunch of configuration hassle. That's pretty much true for Ubuntu. However, there are a couple of issues that one may need to address that I didn't mind so much, but I readily admit, I'm not an average user.
I switched when Unity was still a thing and was surprised to learn that it was pretty good with only a little refinement needed. I was pretty disappointed when Canonical dropped Unity settled on Gnome and here we are two years later at precisely the same place, with the aforementioned refinements still needed.
Like you, I was hopeful that Canonical would produce a generally usable Linux desktop, but that still remains to be seen.
> Try thinking like a regular user, who just wants everything to work properly out of the box, rather than a technical user
I'm by any measure a technical user, with over a decade in software dev and a decade before that in network admin and corporate IT, and I absolutely insist on things working properly out of the box. Anything else is Work™ and I'm simply not going to do it for personal devices. Sure, I'll spend hours tweaking a server to get it behaving exactly the way I want. I am almost OCD about reliable, robust, version controlled environments. Just the other day I spent literally hours massaging some stupid nginx config file so it did exactly the right thing, all of the time, in exactly the right way. And all was right with the world.
My personal stuff though? I have zero, and I mean zero tolerance for any of that shit. My personal stuff better work perfectly first time, every time, or I will be taking it back for a refund or throwing it in the fucking river (regretfully this is not a metaphor). At work I am all linux and open source. At home I am the biggest Apple whore you ever met. I just want things to work.
I am also disappointed in Canonical, who I thought might do as you suggested and create "MacOS for Linux". I think such a thing is sorely needed. They haven't succeeded, though - perhaps MS could. I'd like to see that if they did it, and I'd give it a solid chance.
I'm kind of starting to realize that small nuances in Linux are not forgiven, but they are easily overlooked in Windows.
People are just used to Windows and it's problem's are overlooked.
Anyways, Desktop Linux has always been a mostly volunteered project. There are billion dollar industries around server but most of the drive on desktop is just pure volunteered.
Considering that fact, I think it's doing amazing.
As a mid-career DINC in a 2% income bracket married to a 1%'er, I too, have money but not much time. That is why I will never not use a Linux desktop. Everything just works on my XPS 13 arch + i3. I also own the previous gen mbpro, I think I used that last year may. Just the idea of me wasting time with osx or windows is sneeringly ludicrous.
If "just works" is what you're going for, then install a rock-solid distro on the desktop - Debian GNU/Linux, CentOS and OpenSUSE Leap are the ones which are really in the running, IME; Ubuntu LTS is a distant possibility if commercial support or third-party applications are a priority for you - and, just as importantly, accept its limitations. No, it's not going to support the office, music or image-processing apps that you're used to. But there's plenty that it can do, that many, many users will be absolutely fine with. (The fact that so many people are fine with something as incredibly basic as ChromeOS is proof positive of this. A Linux desktop gives you plenty more than that, and you can easily get it to run on extremely cheap hardware that would not manage to run any other modern OS.)
https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/07/27/dell-xps13-developer-edit...
Alternately, there's System76
Works fine on X11, which is why I think Ubuntu shifted to Wayland and then back to X11, but at this point, X11 is no closer to dying.
Nvidia hardware doesn't like to behave well in Linux. One has to get just the right driver, and the correct kernel options to prevent hangs and poor standby behavior. However, I'm not sure this is terribly different than my experience with Nvidia drivers on Windows.
So far I’ve tried it out with Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10, Fedora and Intel Clear Linux. There’s not much set up involved in getting any of these installed and working.
The only issues I've seen have been, the trackpad’s a bit jumpy and I still don’t have a HiDPI and 1440 mix working nicely together under Gnome.
Currently I’m trying out Arch which is great as a learning tool.
I still have an old Mac for day to day work but I’ll be permanently switching to Linux soon I think.