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Comment by zerop | Hacker News Reader

I have been seeing this MS vs other debates since decades. Why Linux has not been able to come up with a consumer OS. Why Windows or MAC only rule in consumer OS space?

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Linux user experience is awful and there’s no pressure to improve it; unlike in a for-profit company there’s no common objective & leadership that unite all the people building the Linux desktop.

Doesn’t help that there are dozens of competing desktop environments so a lot of effort is duplicated and wasted.

Gnome 3 is pretty great and so is Ubuntu 19.10. I have my parents on both and they seem to like it just fine.

Ubuntu is very user friendly. Competition is good for the consumer and result in better products.

Tell that to my friend with whom I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out why Netflix wasn’t working on a brand new Ubuntu install. Had to enable a repo and install an extra package through the terminal. I can do it but there’s no way a normal user would figure that out on their own.

What are you talking about? Netflix works just fine in both the popular browsers that are available on Ubuntu with no packages needed. You either install Chrome just like you would on Windows (just click on .deb instead of .exe), or you click on "enable DRM" on a pre-installed Firefox.

What repo? What extra package? None of that is needed.

I have enabled DRM on Firefox and it still didn’t work. I had to enable more repos (the community ones I think) and install libavcodec-extra as per an answer on AskUbuntu.

I’m suspecting the package can’t be preinstalled for licensing reasons (even though I ticked the non-free software box during install) but in this case why not replace the library with a shim that displays a notification to the user and allows them to install the package through a GUI?

If you are not heavily dependent on softwares that run exclusively on Windows, I would say user experience on any mainstream GNU/Linux distribution is far better than that of Windows(which still insists automatic update before a reboot/shutdown). Also, community support for linux is much better. Places like AskUbuntu and community forums of distributions are much better than microsoft's support forum. Try a distribution like Kubuntu or Linux Mint for a few weeks :)

What finally got me on Linux for good was Regolith (an Ubuntu distribution with a tiling WM preconfigured). The window manager is just better, faster, and I can use my vim shortcuts to move between windows and desktops. And, crucially for Linux, it came ready to go so I didn't have to spend days getting it working how I'd like.

Linux people keep peddling this, I'd say it'll never be the year of Linux on Desktop if you keep denying you have problems. Last I tried to dual boot my Windows gaming rig to Ubuntu Desktop earlier this year, it can't even do fractional scaling on my 4K monitor, making it completely worthless. You'd think HiDPI support is pretty basic stuff in 2019. Granted Windows HiDPI is still craptastic compared to macOS, as least it has been usable since 2015.

Of course, that's what I refer to as a windows dependent workflow, like gaming and graphics designing. And I do agree linux support for those stuff is still limited, but constantly improving(especially with Steam).

The way I see it, "desktop-dependent workflows" overlap more and more with those "Windows-dependent workflows". Nowadays, most people don't need more than a web browser, and in that sense they do just fine with a tablet or phone (where iOS and Android dominate, and GNU/Linux is not really a viable option, at least not yet), or a Chromebook (yes, it's Linux, but it's mainly just Chrome).

Most people I know with a legitimate use for a desktop also have legitimate reasons to use Windows or macOS: gaming on Windows, content creation on Windows or macOS (graphics designing, video editing, ...), and MS Office lock-in. The only exception I can think of are developers, but even then, depending on the kind of development one is doing, using Windows or macOS may be the only choice.

I'm a software developer. I mainly work web and android. That,ofcourse, I can't do it on a smartphone and my Linux distro probably does it better than Windows. Installing and configuring CLIs and other development tools are much easier on Linux. I usually just install a linux distro as dual boot to my peers rather than figuring out how to get those stuff configured right on windows. There are ofcourse things like ASP.NET that are difficult to develop on linux because Visual Studio isn't available but fortunately, I'm able to choose my stack and avoid such cases most of the time. The windows-dependent workflows doesn't mean that doing those things with Linux is impossible. An inspiring story was published here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21504721 Where they switched from Windows/Pagemaker/Photoshop to Linux/Scribus/GIMP for the complete process of designing and publishing a commercial newspaper. For video editing, there is kdenlive, openshot and blender. GNU/Linux is definitely more than just a "web browser" OS and capable of doing most of the things that an average user does on windows.

I, too, develop for Android and, like you say, we have the "luxury" of being able to do it on both Windows and Linux (and macOS as well, if I wanted). Even .NET development is more cross-platform than ever, with .NET Core. One of my points was precisely that developers were an exception in this regard, as our tooling is generally cross-platform. You can't say the same about people who do their work primarily using Adobe tools, for example. And even developers sometimes don't have this luxury: for example, if you do iOS development, to publish on the app store, at some point you must use a Mac to sign the app. Of course you can use stuff like Xamarin and use the Mac exclusively to sign, but this is often inconvenient compared to just using the officially endorsed stack. Overall, requiring a "traditional desktop operating system" to work is less and less the case for the general population.

Using a 4K monitor in a sane way (things not small enough to the point of being unreadable or large enough to be completely in my face) is Windows dependent workflow? I never said I was dual booting for gaming.

Actually you can do this fairly easily by:

1) Learning nano/vim

2) Understanding what X window manager is and does

3) Understanding how config files work

4) Editing the appropriate config file to change DPI. Be careful not to do something wrong or you'll mess your system up

So easy my grandma could do it.

<s>Honestly can’t tell if this is sarcasm.</s> This is probably sarcasm.

If it’s not, you’re welcome to actually point out the configuration files I need to edit. I tried many “solutions”, even edited boot parameters to no avail. According to sources I read, someone without an Nvidia graphics card might have an easier time.

    xrandr --output HDMI-1 --scale 0.75x0.75 --mode 4096x2160

Play with the scale numbers and the resolution until you get the desired effect. Can't give a full tutorial here but "xrandr hdpi" should yield helpful search results.

I'm not denying it's a pain and Windows/MacOS are miles ahead, but this is how you can get by on Linux with X. I use it daily for work and media, on a variety of monitors.

Thanks for the info, will try this when I get around to it. But this sounds like scaling a low res image to fit the pixels instead of native HiDPI support, is that right? Then it will probably be blurry?

Edit: Maybe you meant using a native 2x scale paired with downscaling. Interesting, sounds promising.

Yeah it's definitely sarcasm. I love Linux but even I can't be arsed to get it to work half the time.

Windows can do all sorts of little things on the desktop better than Linux; It may be that you simply do not use those features when you try Windows. I've had my fair share of UX troubles with desktop Linux throughout the years. Now, this would not be much of a problem if it wasn't such a headache to get things fixed in FOSS. Lack of feature ownership often means you have to commit to having certain issues that can be extremely breaking for your use case for years at a time (or be told to "fix it yourself"; hint: most Windows users aren't qualified or interested, so that's a deal breaker). Even Firefox on Windows has this problem.

Apple never wanted the enterprise. Hardware sells to the enterprise are low margin, require babysitting and they require backwards compatibility forever.

The computer market is dwarfed by the mobile market. Don’t forget that Apple became more successful than Dell in the early 2000s selling iPods of all things not by trying to compete in the enterprise.

> Apple never wanted the enterprise. Hardware sells to the enterprise are low margin, require babysitting and they require backwards compatibility forever.

I agree with much of this, except the idea that enterprise sales are low margin. Once you lock in an enterprise customer, the cost of switching to another provider becomes a large barrier. Your margin is dictated largely by the cost of your product, minus the cost of the competitor's, plus the cost of switching. If the cost of switching is high, the margins can also be high.

Apple does not derive its margins from the cost of switching (changing phones is relatively easy). They do generally have a better product, but they also provide incredible branding around being the best. Apples margins are dictated by cost of Apple's product, minus the competitors, plus value of affiliating yourself with their brand.

Your acquisition costs are higher too, since you have not only to undercut your competition, but to be lower than competition - switching cost...

Apple’s products are better for the end user and they are willing to pay a premium. Enterprise sells aren’t to the end user they are to the buyer.

There is an existence proof or lack of existence. How many computer companies that were big in the enterprise like Dell and HP when Apple was almost bankrupt are big now?

Dell basically “gave the money back to shareholders”.

”Apple never wanted the enterprise”

Are you sure? See e.g. IBM who use hundreds of thousands Macs https://www.computerworld.com/article/3452847/ibm-mac-users-...

I’m not saying they don’t occasionally get enterprise wins, but it’s not like they bend over backwards for it.

True.

Because the PC is an open platform and there is an ocean of devices to support. Manufactures are incentivized to produce drivers for the three platforms for their devices, but because of desktop dominance only MS can spend the dollars for competent cross device integration.

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