Desktop Linux – The Case for a Single Distro | Hacker News Reader

Desktop Linux – The Case for a Single Distro

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8 pointsrsandhu10 comments

I bet if I swapped out xfce when someone was upgrading from win7 to 10, and could sed -i s/ubuntu|xfce/win|ms|etc/ in just the main screens maybe a quarter of all users would never notice. Buying a computer was a thing everyone took seriously in days past, clicking around the Dell website for days. Today, not so much. People often __still__ have a computer, and they view it that way. I can imagine many will not even other replacing aging machines once they croak.

Desktop linux will be bigger, probably much bigger, but as a share of the total desktop market. That market itself is not exactly promising. I think the last data I saw was that desktop sales had been falling for the better part of a decade! Counting laptops. With a dead cat bounce here or there.

This is all a roundabout way of saying that there is still a fight to be had for linux, but it's on phones. Desktop share will not be won, it will be conceded by the big guys as a sales pitch to the primarily techy types using it to embrace their SDK on mobile, where the money is.

As a new Linux user, I used to think along these lines as well. The problem is that the whole reason I was using Linux in the first place was my dissatisfaction with the offerings from Apple and Microsoft. I started on Ubuntu and became dissatisfied with that. I tried a handful of other flavors and eventually settled on Arch.

One of the issues I see with requesting Linux consolidate to become more like Windows or MacOS is that the people who abandon those platforms likely will not be happy with a one-size-fits-all solution. From my perspective, the diversity of choices is one of the main strengths of the platform. If there is already a platform that better suits your needs you have no reason to switch in the first place.

> In a world of Chromebooks and virtualized/web apps, the need for customization and multiple flavours is dwindling — we are good with the browser running smoothly.

> What we need is snappy window management, smooth scrolling and simply a beautiful environment.

I love having single purpose native applications running on my laptop. The current situation with a GNOME desktop environment is terrible.

Where are the regularly updated RSS feed readers, native blogging clients, journaling applications, podcast players? Moving from a macbook to a linux laptop has now become a massive downgrade.

I wonder if the iOS and Android app stores have become so profitable that developers who would previously build linux desktop applications have all moved on to greener pastures.

I'm confused by this. In my experience there are PLENTY of up to date and generally consistently updated apps on the Linux desktop. In a lot of cases, I can find more things that work out of the box on Linux than I can on any other system. If we go with the idea that the universal Linux the author speaks of should be Ubuntu with GNOME, then RSS is covered easily by 'feeds' which is still updated, as is 'feedreader', native blogging is a bit more complex, what does that mean? Microblogging is well supported. Multiple options for twitter, or mastodon are available. If you're hosting your own blog, hugo, jekyll, nift, are all easily supported. I admit I don't do Journaling at all, so I can't help with that, but I'm pretty sure there are options. Podcasting though is pretty easy to cover. Spotify if you just want something quick and easy, GNOME podcasts, Vocal, just look in the Ubuntu store and you'll see heaps of options. If you just like your macbook, that's fine, but let's not malign Linux because it isn't apple...

Change a few of the details, and this post could have been written twenty years ago.

The situation in 2020 is different though. What do you gain with XFCE, Gnome, or your favorite window manager, that is not done better in MacOS or Windows? Both of those environments already provide *nix support, and they have much better (understatement) hardware support.

I'm not entirely sure what hardware support you're missing, but in my experience using Linux works out of the box far more often than Windows. Can't speak for Apple obviously. I can guarantee it won't install and run on my PC without a LOT of work though... But hey. If Windows works for you, then stick to Windows!

Better memory footprint and a tiling window manager. Linux does not inherently have worse hardware support.

And better 4k support...

Maybe not single a distro, but consolidate? yes.

Really?

You really think that an article is necessary to discuss the fragmentation of Linux and how it's holding back the platform.

The fragmentation predates Linux, System V vs BSD, it was a problem in the 80's.

Linux is the technology equivalent of protesting COVID-19 lock-downs. Everyone is so selfish, and self absorbed that they are unwilling to yield for the greater good.

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