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Comment by lone_haxx0r | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, the Linux world is wasting its biggest opportunity to take over the desktop space.

IMO, Unintuitive interfaces (e.g. Gnome shell), forced package management (as opposed to decentralized distribution of apps) and lack of care for graphic design are the biggest things keeping the masses away from the Linux desktop, because in other areas (speed, robustness, privacy, control) it just blows Windows out of the water.

All of these are highly controversial opinions, many Linux advocates think they are not problems, but I think they really are.

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>forced package management (as opposed to decentralized distribution of apps)

What??? This isn't true at all, you can install deb/rpm packages you download from the internet if you want, there's nothing stopping you. The truth is that you're strongly encouraged to install your applications from a trusted central repository because it's safer and more convenient.

I'd also note that this is not unique to Linux. Android, iOS (this one is actually restrictive), and macOS all use the same model too. Windows also tried it with UWP and their store, and mostly just didn't succeed for legacy reasons.

As a long time Windows user, I switched from Windows to XFCE (Manjaro) and it was pretty seamless. Most of the keyboard shortcuts are the same (or, easily configurable to be the same). I had to hunt down one xdotools script and bind a shortcut for moving windows from one display to another for it to work the same.

There are many things that XFCE does even better or just as good. Window snapping works great. The start menu is back-to-basics simple and fast. Searching in it doesn't search the internet or my whole hard drive by default and it just works and finds things faster. The taskbar is also better IMO because it has way more useful options (such as middle-clicking) and less anti-features. On Windows, I have to use some unsupported 3rd-party thing called 7+ taskbar tweaker to add the same features and remove some anti-features. I am a minimalist and I loved the classic taskbar. I hated some new Windows behaviors like "preview window-content on hover over taskbar item", jump lists and grouped taskbar items - some of which you just couldn't turn off in Windows without that 3rd-party tool. So, after years of fighting against that I figured if I have to hack my DE, I might as well run the one that's free and gives me all the power. (I also have to modify macOS to make it even bearable to use...way more than Windows even, with third party hacks. And Apple certainly gives you less control than Microsoft, so I'm definitely not using that!)

Some things I'm missing on any Linux DE though: GPU acceleration in Chrome. Games.

However, I'm now even doing Microsoft-specific work with dotnet core, VS Code, SQL Server and Azure Data Studio on my Manjaro workstation. For work, I don't really need Windows anymore unless someone gives me some Windows-specific thing to work on, for which I have one machine on standby to do.

Overall, I like how much control I have in Linux. However, Windows is still more stable than any Linux desktop in my experience. For instance, I've lost desktop settings/icons a crash after an update. Wifi stopped working after an update once. But things are/were easy to remedy so I'm staying.

There's a patched version of Chromium called chromium-vaapi (in Fedora's RPM Fusion repositories) which supports GPU acceleration.

Wanted to thank for the post, it finally triggered me to ditch Windows on my laptop. But it seems that Xubuntu would be a better choice for dotnet core development: there is an official 3.0 SDK for Ubuntu while Arch is not officially supported, and no one has built the 3.0 SDK for it yet.

I also read some description of the state on Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/cx64r5/the_state...), and it seems that there are too many hoops to jump on Manjaro.

You know what? Reading your post has now made me want to convert another machine, that I have sitting right here, to use Xubuntu because Ubuntu does seem to have much more official support for things, plus I'd really like to compare it to Manjaro and finally many of our servers are running Ubuntu so it will be nice to get a deeper familiarity with it.

I was just this minute looking at .NET Core 3.0 as well because I had such a good experience with 2.2 on a recent job. Your comment actually alerted me to the fact that I can't get it yet :)

I was off of .NET for years doing mainly Node.js/Angular/React and I'm kind of excited to be getting back into .NET - I'm so glad my 15 years of .NET experience won't go to waste because ASP.NET has been looking very good in web server benchmarks. Plus, C# and .NET are much nicer to work with than JS/TS and Node IMO. Everything is just cleaner.

Anyway - good luck and I hope you have a lot of fun on your Linux desktop adventure. One of my favorite things about the switch over the past year has been the fun of being a sort of hobbyist again, exploring and figuring things out. At this point, I have setup 4 different desktops and I even got advanced touch gestures working on my cheap Acer E5-575g laptop. Can't wait to setup Xubuntu next! So, thanks to you as well!

I'm a big fan of Linux, and have a Linux desktop set up next to my Windows desktop. But. They've been talking about Linux taking over the desktop for the last 20 years. It's not going to happen next year either. And not the year after that.

The only hope we have of the MS Windows / Apple OS X duopoly on the desktop to break up is if the trade war escalates and China starts working towards getting a third ecosystem going. -- Problem is that you'd expect the Chinese to care about privacy even less than the Americans.

I love gnome personally. It’s really easy to avoid using the mouse. Linux desktop certainly has problems, but I’m excited how usable it’s been for me the last couple of years for everything but certain games

I usually don't have my mouse hooked up to my desktop and I've found Cinnamon better to work with without a mouse. I tried Gnome out under Ubuntu (both the latest LTS release and non-LTS) and while it's better than Windows, there were some issues for me. Some reasons off the top of my head

* The default theme no longer outlines which ui element you've selected when pressing tab to jump to the next element. Made it very hard to navigate program menus

* Some windows don't respond to keyboard commands, ie: minimize or move to side. If memory serves spotify was one of the programs this didn't work for but every window I've tried works without issue in Cinnamon.

* Mouse keys has no options provided under accessibility. You can customize the speed and startup delay to make for a nice experience, but the options were simply not there. I googled how to do it through the terminal but all of the top results wanted you to use a package that I couldn't find in the software store. I gave up.

The default speed for mouse keys is unusable. It takes minutes to move from one end of a 1080p monitor to another. Even Windows provides options for this, though the gui options are better in Cinnamon (best in KDE).

* I like pressing the windows key and launching an app by navigating with arrow keys. You have to type to do a search in Gnome?

Perhaps I'm just not familiar enough with Gnome, but I've people say that it's good for use without a keyboard and that's just not been my experience.

> forced package management (as opposed to decentralized distribution of apps)

Come on - downloading random binaries off of random websites and running them is a bad idea. It's always been a bad idea. This is the reason casual people get infected with random trojans, adware, malware, and so on, and the main reason Windows desktops tend to be such a cesspool.

You can still do it on Linux, but it's an exception to the rule not the other way around.

Pop_os! has done a lot for user experience (install and use), trending closer to macOS.

I do see efforts being made towards capturing desktop users.

What Linux really needs is better support from third parties. If I could get a passable version of AutoCAD civil 3D on Linux, I'd never go back to windows. I'd be thrilled to pay for it. Of course... Microsoft owns AutoCAD. Coincidence???

? I don't think Autodesk is owned by MS?

It's great, but...good lord, that name.

If your hope is to appeal to the masses, there are in my view two cardinal sins in OS naming:

1) Don't put "OS" in the name. It's an automatic "nerd alert." macOS is an exception because you don't have a choice to install it, and Apple is...well, Apple. They're often an exception to many things.

2) No punctuation marks, symbols, etc. Just letters.

Pop_OS! breaks both of them, and one of them twice, and it drives me nuts, because it's a nice distro.

You speak the truth. I've tried to explain this to them previously but they just ignore it. I use Arch now, but if I had to use something Debian-based I'd pick PopOS.

My wife now uses PopOS. It may have been easier to convince her to use it if the name wasn't ridiculous. She likes it now, though.

> forced package management (as opposed to decentralized distribution of apps)

Is a great advantage over windows and is now common place with android, iOS, chromeOS and even windows (store, chocolatey) and macOS are trying to go in that direction.

> forced package management

What's forced here? I can use others on ubuntu. I can add alternative repos/PPAs to the default package manager. And what's even the issue? The default package is (as far as I know) entirely open source and/or GNU. "Package management" is not even a concept on windows at all.

I tried to use the Apple trackpad under Ubuntu and only got pointing functionality, no scrolling. The fix was an easy 15 step procedure. Bluetooth receiver didn't work either. By the lack of an outcry apparently nobody cares about that kind of hardware in Ubuntu.

I wonder what it would be like if gnome and kde merged

Utter chaos, infighting, and possibly collapse. The GNOME/GTK and KDE/QT camps have very different philosophies, frameworks, preferred languages, and completely incompatible libraries.

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