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Comment by Ingon | Hacker News Reader

I think too many distributions is part of the problem. Especially starting out, you don’t really know/understand what the difference is between each other. You just want something that works for your case and skill level.

I wouldn’t put all these options together, but rather focus on a few distributions that are easy to setup and work well. If we want ppl to move to linux, we should focus on them. Present them with a few options that work really well, with guides on how to start up coming from windows/mac and solving their problems. Just presenting a list of options doesn’t make the decision easier.

Personally, I’m using Pop_OS! because its easy to setup, works well on laptops, gets out of your way, and its more or less Ubuntu underneath, so its much easier to find software and help for it. But the distribution that really converted me over was Manjaro

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Too many distributions is also part of a bigger problem and why there will never be a "year of the Linux desktop". We are looking at insane amounts of developer & administrative resources being wasted by every doing mostly the same thing in a slightly different way. Imagine the progress that could be made if all of this workforce was actually united and was working on one (or a handful, think server/workstation/tablet editions) good distribution.

Now that cuda support has been announced in WSL, it might well be the beginning of the year of the Linux desktop. Before the announcement I planned to have two separate machines: Linux workstation and Windows desktop. Now I’m seriously considering combining the two into a Windows/WSL workstation.

Reminds me of an article from 2003, talking about wasted resources on too many similar apps: http://freshmeat.sourceforge.net/articles/too-much-free-soft...

This is one of the core points of the "Linux Sucks" series of presentations [1]. If you haven't seen any of them, I think a TLDR might be "technology is not holding the linux desktop back; lack of cooperation and other social issues are". And though slightly different and about about a separate domain, I think "The Lisp Curse" [2] has a similar thesis as to why lisp is not mainstream.

The linux kernel is a huge success because there is exactly one kernel and its monolithic architecture ensures that the only way to accomplish anything is to cooperate with everyone else so you can get your thing added in. If you want to do your own thing, that's fine, but it will never be a part of linux.

If the linux kernel had a micro kernel design, with different competing projects for the different layers of the kernel, the linux kernel would not be the success it is today. It would be a niche tool, like the linux desktop. In linux userland, the plethora of distributions, GUI toolkits, desktop environments, init systems, applications and so on ensures that none of the projects can ever succeed.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKwWPQ1Orzs

2. http://winestockwebdesign.com/Essays/Lisp_Curse.html

Manjaro convert here too! I have used Linux since around Red Hat 4/5 and I'd been trying Linux desktops here and there for 20 years... The ease of installing software on Manjaro is what really got me. I always hated searching for and configuring keys/repos/ppas for every package I wanted, plus many, many times that I tried Ubuntu it would just refuse to boot one day after an update.

I guess the other thing that I love about Manjaro is that it's configured with XFCE by default, which, after some configuration gives me a better minimalist Windows-like experience than Windows itself. I no longer have to fight Windows and hack the taskbar with 7+ taskbar tweaker to get features like dragging taskbar buttons around - all the features I want are built into XFCE. Anything that was missing I added by scripting xdotools, wmctrl and other supported tools.

> I think too many distributions is part of the problem.

I think that's the wrong way to look at it. We should not look at the distributions as a choice people have to make once they have decided to use Linux. It's a choice people always have to make when deciding which operating system to use. Windows is one option. Debian is one option, and so on. They are all different operating systems. The only difference is that the Linux distros are compatible with each other and that's a good thing.

If they're so compatible with each other, why do they all have different packaging mechanisms and repos and discourage users from installing software from places not under their complete control?

They all have some differences and that's ok; you would not normally expect different operating systems to work exactly the same way. But it's still usually much easier to take a program written for Arch and make it work on Debian than to do the same with a program written for Windows.

In my experience, no it isn't. Granted, that is entirely thanks to WINE, but Windows being as stable as it is on an ABI level means you don't even have to recompile anything for the compatibility.

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