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Comment by hacknat | Hacker News Reader

I agreed with everything you said except this:

> but there are still things that just going to be less painful on Apple.

Of course OSX is more user friendly now, but Linux desktop has improved by leaps and bounds. 4 years ago you needed to be a developer or extremely savvy to run the average desktop distro, now I would say you just need to be tech sdavvy. I would argue that for the ho hum business cases (not extreme use case profiles like design and video production) that Ubuntu won’t cause any unnavigable issues.

I think in a few years you will see the Linux diaries continue in popularity, especially among developers. Laptops have become commodity items. There just isn’t that much that differentiates (for me at least) a MacBook from a good ThinkPad.

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People have been saying that ever since, uhm, the first Mandrake release? It’s so much easier now, soon it will all be so smooth! except every year there is something else to rewrite/rejig.

As soon as auto-configuring XFree was kinda figured out, out goes XFree and in comes x.org. Xorg getting to the point where having 3d animations doesn’t require kernel-module-config expertise? Out goes Xorg, in comes Wayland. Gnome 2 worked out the kinks? Time for Unity! Kde 4 finally getting snappy? time to break it up! Init systems figured out? Systemd! ALSA getting adoption? Pulseaudio! Pulseaudio finally working? Let’s rip it out! And so on and so forth, in an endless churn.

Now, this sort of churn also happens in commercial alternatives; but stuff gets shipped when it’s 99.9% working, left running for years (or decades, if from Microsoft), then maybe gets rewritten with something that must be better (no regressions) or it won’t even ship. In the Linux world, it’s all just thrown over the wall; maybe you’ll be lucky and it will work on your machine, and maybe it won’t. By the time it gets fixed, it will be time to replace it. And so the experience is a perennial struggle against half-finished, unpolished software.

The reality is, people get paid more to develop for the Mac world and put more effort in consequentially, whereas Linux is still mainly volunteer-driven.

Yes the churn is an issue especially in desktop environments but relatively painless all things considered.

I don't think there has been a single inflection point for me there has been steady incremental improvement.

If you want to think about how far things have come I started using Linux in 2001 with Mandrake. Around 2.2 -> 2.4 kernel switch. So much has changed since the bad old days. I don't want to throw out a "back in my day we walked up hill in snow both ways" style rant but...

-All we had was EXT2 and we liked it...

-You had to manually configure modelines for your video card changing display resolution was more or less a crapshoot

-Apps would exclusively lock the sound card which typically meant the first thing you opened would be only thing capable of playing sound. But you could pipe things to /dev/dsp and have the speaker emit random beeps that was kind of cool

-window manager used to crash a lot and you'd lose all the title bars for all the windows this happened fairly often - cntrl alt backspace is still in my muscle memory years later.

-Printers were basically impossible to configure.

People complain about changes like ASLA, pulse audio etc but I think there is a lot of rose tinted glasses being applied to how things were before. Sure some things aren't perfect but neither was their predecessors and on the whole they fixed more things then they broke.

I am not saying things aren’t better than they were; but they are still not as good or polished as the commercial counterparts (who obviously didn’t stay still), and looking at the overall trend, they will likely never be - because of innate problems with the development model (release early and often, even if it’s basically unusable).

So I can agree that “Linux will get smoother”, because progress is more or less inevitable, but “linux will be as smooth as [Windows|MacOS]”, as upthread implied? Never going to happen.

> not extreme use case profiles like design and video production

There are a lot of use case profiles that are very ho hum for which Linux is a non-starter. I'm thinking specifically of basically any time you need to use Mac-only software. Likewise, I'm sure there's Linux-only software that would make OSX a non-starter.

IMHO, all of the major modern operating systems are good enough and have been for a while now. Pick the applications you want then find the OS that best supports those applications.

It would be nice if the Purism guys would open some retail stores. Once you can walk in some place and get help it gets to be a lot easier to recommend those machines to less tech-savvy relatives.

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