End of an Era: No Linux Desktop at Home (after 17 years)
blog.herlein.com
blog.herlein.com
You can't beat Apple's industrial design or the quality of parts they use but I have never felt at home in their UI. I probably never will. That's too bad because I'd rather be seen with a Macbook than pretty much any PC. But that's just vanity :)
It works, but not seamlessly.
Then I put a clean install of 9.10 on my new machine last Thanksgiving, and never went back.
I feel that Ubuntu is simply the best operating system out there right now. I use OS X for iPhone development, and Ubuntu makes it feel a bit clunky and very rigid. I also have Windows 7 for gaming, and I'd rather spend days trying to get games to run well under wine instead (and those that don't, get rarely played).
To me their UI is just plain awkward. I use a Mac at work so most of my days are spend working on a Mac desktop. Frustration would be a good way to describe it, but of course you can't say that since it's supposed to be perfect.
At home I've been running my Ubuntu desktop for over 5 years now. It's great. Especially when you compare Finder to Nautilus.
His real complaint seems to be that OpenOffice doesn't interact well Microsoft Office. There are several different good ways of running Microsoft Office on Linux (I recommend CrossOver).
Time-Machine for one-click backups, AirTunes for OTA plug-and-play. Hell, even the TZ selector now integrates skyhook so it's generally correct, NAT withstanding.
That type of ideology carries over to dealing with Word files. Is it really necessary to dick around with CrossOver or WINE's bottling, when the end goal he stated is not to? Some is infinitely more than none to a pedant.
And yet there are others in this thread whose primary reason to stay away from OS X is that window management on Linux is so much superior. It's not my primary reason, but it is certainly a factor.
"dick around with CrossOver's bottling". Umm, CrossOver is a pretty much a click to install and forget-about-it operation. That's why you pay for CrossOver rather than dicking around with wine. Me I really appreciate the fact that every crappy Windows application I install is completely sandboxed away from each other.
Another interesting answer was about emacs bindings in all applications. Since the OP said the majority of his workflow was in Word, I highly doubt this is relevant.
"so much superior"
That's an opinion.
"Just works" is not incompatible with "being able to customize to my preference". As long you have sane defaults (which Ubuntu does), and as long as customization is not difficult (which it shouldn't be for somebody who's been using Linux for 17 years), the ability to customize is definitely Linux's major feature.
Which is more useful to people who use their computers for more than reading Word documents, granted.
"My stress level of fighting machines to do basic things just got lower. And for that, I’ll gladly pay Apple the premium over buying base hardware and doing it all myself."
That's right, there are at least two things even more valuable to the author than having more freedom or the saving a bit of money: His time and sanity.
If you've gotten a computer to, you know, actually get stuff done, why spend any time fiddling with the software and hardware and get stressed out about it? Why even worry about drivers? Why not be able to double click and have stuff just open properly? Why spend hours trying to configure anything? Why not spend just a bit more cash and go from frustration to satisfaction?
This point is central to the reason why Linux, as it stands today, will never become a mainstream desktop alternative.
You sight Windows as having more troubles now than Linux. Fine. But where in the article did the author ever mention Windows? That battle was 10 years ago. The author is not even considering Windows. OS X has been a great desktop environment for years and now even the hardcore Linux enthusiasts are willing to pay Apple to kick the "battle your desktop" habit.
As for meaningful desktop innovation, there's been one thing that Linux desktops (Debian-based distributions, specifically) have that OS X doesn't. One killer feature: Package management with aptitude/Synaptic. Like it or not, aptitude/Synaptic is the best feature that Linux has been able to claim for itself. A one-stop-shop for all of those thousands and thousands of packages. And the upgrades. And the system upgrades. And the dependency management. Graphical, fast, categorized. It has been a wonder to use, truly.
Unfortunately, Apple now has the App Store for OS X and you can actually buy real, usable, curated, and user-rated apps for the desktop and get your updates from the same place. Whoops. Linux doesn't have a killer feature for the desktop anymore, if it ever did.
Why worry about drivers? In Linux, all drivers come bundled with the operating system. On Windows or a Mac you have to install them yourself.
As for your App Store argument: what percentage of Mac applications are available on the App store. Adobe apps are the reason many people run Macs -- what are the chances we'll ever see those there?
What are you basing that claim on, just your own personal experience? It's a pretty extraordinarily claim to say that linux on the desktop requires no configuration, and I think such a claim deserves at least a little bit of evidence above and beyond your own personal experience.
As a counter example to your claim, I just finished installing Ubuntu 10.10 on an Asus EeePC 1015. In the process I ran into the following issues: 1) Wireless doesn't work without additional drivers 2) Multitouch input doesn't work 3) Samba sharing with a windows pc doesn't work. The Asus EeePC isn't exactly an exotic piece of hardware, so it's difficult for me to comprehend why ubuntu can't get wireless working, let alone the other issues. Rewind back to Ubuntu 10.04, and in the default install, X won't even start.
"In Linux, all drivers come bundled with the operating system. On Windows or a Mac you have to install them yourself." In my experience the complete opposite is true. When installing linux I have to go download my wireless drivers using a wired connection, same goes for my printer. On a fresh install of windows 7 (from a RTM version - i.e. not what the manufacturer includes on the machine) everything works "out of the box", including wireless, the touchpad, and my wireless printer.
Now I'm not disputing the fact that linux has made significant gains in usability over the past 17 years, but I will strongly dispute the claim that everything generally works without additional tinkering and configuration.
Depends on the hardware, mostly. Our university LUG does an event called Free Your Machine every quarter, and for most people, it's just defrag, install, show 'em how to use Synaptic, and they're out.
It also depends on what you're trying to do. The basic things have been mostly ironed out by now (wireless is still a bit iffy), but the more advanced things, sure, they'll take some time and swearing.
I think it would be really interesting to see some statistics from this, for example the % of computers on which the default install works without additional configuration, the % of users who encounter problems a week later, the % of users who give up and reinstall windows within a month, the technical saviness of the users, etc. It seems like there's a lot of interesting data we could learn from an install-fest.
"The basic things have been mostly ironed out by now (wireless is still a bit iffy), but the more advanced things, sure, they'll take some time and swearing."
This seems to confirm my objection to the original point, no? I wouldn't consider wireless advanced. If my wireless connection, my printer, and my touchpad don't work out of the box (nevermind my entire graphics subsystem in 10.04) that's a show-stopper in my opinion.
My business does just that. Then again, we buy from vendors who install and support GNU/Linux. Why compare buying from Apple to building a computer yourself? That's a false dilemma.
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> OpenOffice doesn't interact well Microsoft Office
That's a big one for a lot of people.
The good news, for me, is that Linux apparently doesn't seem to care if its popular on the desktop or not. If my choices were Windows and OS X, my life would not be nearly as easy.
At least that's my takeaway from this article. When the author wrote "Error establishing database connection", I'm pretty sure that's what he was talking about.
Edit: reply/edit... man, I need more coffee.
But then, Ubuntu has made tremendous strides in recent years on that front, and I wouldn't be surprised if other distros haven't kept up (though he doesn't say what distro he'd been using).
Ubuntu is the distro I use and it mostly Just Works.
1. Window management for Linux is much more mature than MacOSX's -- XMonad, dwm, Compiz' grid plugin, etc.
2. emacs keybindings for everything in Linux actually works. kill-yank rings work as expected. I've had serious setbacks when using MacOS's emacs keybindings.
3. apt for Debian based distros. (just phenomenal)
Sure, my sound may not work 1/2 of the time, flash applications may use all 4 cores of my crappy laptop, and wireless N is initially disabled by default, but, I'm willing to put up with all of this so the operating system doesn't get in my way when I am coding.
MacOS is there, but it's just not quite there, yet. Linux is making great strides as well, so we'll see how it plays out.
LOVE
GRID
I will buy one later on, though.
But back to the critism: - I doubt that OS X has better driver support than Linux, for your setup maybe(good for you), but generally most stuff simply just work with Linux, I plug in my mouse, and it loads even faster than on Windows 7
- You still(to my knowledge) can't tweak a Mac. Desktop the way you can tweak KDE, GNOME and many others.
In the end my advice is load up an Ubuntu CD and be amazed that Linux is not what you described.
Apple knows exactly what hardware you're using if you buy a Mac, and thus are able to accomodate you quite nicely. This of course doesn't count peripherals, but it's still quite significant.
If we are comparing the two OS-es the only fair comparison we can make is the peripherals, where again, I doubt that OS X would win, sure it has great support from a lot of descent vendors, but again Linux support is huge, not because of the companies interest but because the developer community does a great job in writing drivers at an insane pace, heck they even managed to make broadcom cards work using binary blobs created originally for windows.
I don't understand why kde/qt lost so decisively to gnome in terms of support by the distributions, although I will admit gtk apps tend to look better. Things may have been better if QT had gotten more community support, or at least more designers working on pretty themes.
There can't be many experienced linux desktop developers who would voluntarily do their next project on that platform. As Steve Ballmer famously bellowed in his drunken rant, "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!"
I find almost no reason to switch from a Mac to Linux. It's actually a lot easier to use Mac to develop for work (Rails) because I know every Mac has the same standard configurations and I do not need to make a configuration script to give to all the new kids.
Linux boot/utility disks are still really nice to have around though, and my routers and other embedded devices run Linux.