Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com