Is It Finally the Year of the Linux Desktop? | Hacker News Reader

Is It Finally the Year of the Linux Desktop?

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14 pointsmimixco10 comments

It's the year of Linux desktop the same way there is 10 billion devices on the internet running Linux, because Android and IoT.

Doesn't really matter for Linux people, non-Linux people won't care. Hell, there is an argument to be made, that it is typical MS "embrace, extend and extinguish", so net negative.

Nope! Linux desktop is still a PITA. Even Ubuntu won't start fully out of the box due to an Nvidia driver error on my machine. My partner's machine is still unable to even boot to tty1 because of some odd microcode error.

I love Linux to death, but I'm not afraid of the terminal and building from source. I can't imagine my parents or most of my friends really enjoying this sort of stuff. Just too frustrating if you don't live in the ecosystem day to day.

Nvidia's Linux support is bad, not the other way around.

Very true. It makes me regret going with them for my desktop PC. The Intel graphics on my laptop never have issues with Mint.

Many linux problems seem to come down to problems with support by manufacturers. Wifi cards, printers, trackpads, video cards, and so forth. Not really fair to blame this on linux when linux works as well as it does because people have taken the time to write drivers that work as best as they can given that they don't have all the documentation for the devices in question. The same thing goes for blaming programs trying to export to closed proprietary formats because the original software provider isn't interested in a linux version.

I've been on linux on my home systems since circa early 2000's, so I can say that I have run into many disparate problems that can be attributed to linux so it's not perfect, but it's pretty damn good in my humble opinion.

I really don't care if it ever becomes a thing for Joe Sixpack to use as long as it's available for people who are interested in it.

Maybe NVIDIA's Linux driver support wouldn't be so bad if Linux actually made a modicum of effort to accommodate vendor-supplied drivers... you know, things like a stable driver API, documenting what's expected of driver writers, tooling to support and ease the development of new drivers, and isolation so that a bad driver doesn't screw the whole kernel.

You know, like Windows has.

Microsoft may be all cuddly to Linux these days, but when Dave Cutler needs a laugh he still pops open a beer and reads the Linux source.

who is this dave cutler lady you speak of?

  is_it_the_yotld () {
      echo "No. $(($(date +%Y)+1)) is the year of the Linux desktop."
  }

Huehuehue

No more, no less, than it's the the Year of Mercedes on the Highway.

While I am happily tootling along in my Mercedes, I don't mind in the least if you insist on driving a Ford. Likewise, if you insist on running Windows 10 it doesn't affect my running Linux On My Desktop at all.

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