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Comment by andolanra | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why the conclusion is, "Linux on the Desktop isn't possible," when the big blocker the author had was pretty consistently finding and installing software compatible with a small ARM64 machine. (That's not to say it's not a valid conclusion to draw in general: just that it's a bit of a non-sequitur for this article.)

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> "Linux on the Desktop isn't possible"

That's not his conclusion. This is:

> So, in summary, would I recommend the Pi 4 as a worthy general computer for anyone? Definitely no. Would I recommend it as a worthy general computer for a certain subset of computer users. Definitely yes!

This is literally the last paragraph of the post:

> But, sadly, I don't think this year is the 'Year of the Linux desktop'. In general, I think 'Linux on the Desktop' for a mainstream audience is always going to be 20 years away, just like nuclear fusion.

Again, that’s not the same as “it isn’t possible”.

I didn’t say that. I said the fabled “year of the Linux desktop” is a long ways off, in terms of being a potential option for the vast audience of users who currently own a Mac or Windows computer.

That's really not a fair judgement. Like wazoox said, you used completely untypical hardware for a desktop system. And on top of that you did use neither a typical distribution nor a modern Desktop environment. For example, you wouldn't run into the multimedia software issues with something like Ubuntu with a KDE or Gnome desktop. And with something a bit less mainstream like Arch or void you'd have a great foundation for more alternative setups (like a custom desktop environment with software you selected for yourself).

Look for example at https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/kubuntu-focal.html.

But the vast audience wouldn't use such an ARM64 machine for that and won't have these problems. The audio problems for instance that you encountered with all applications are obviously related to the hardware, not Linux. Even on my weird desktop running slackware I run Zoom, Jit.si, Cheese, Skype, etc without any problem.

It's precisely the other way around, I've seen several articles recently about the fact that Linux adoption on the desktop has soared rapidly, and you see Lenovo and Dell supporting Linux on a large number of machines nowadays.

The only thing you showed is that there is no desktop-grade ARM64 Linux machine available.

> The audio problems for instance that you encountered with all applications are obviously related to the hardware, not Linux.

When people say "Linux on the desktop" they mean "Linux on most common desktop hardware". They don't mean "Linux but only on one carefully tested machine".

A Logitech C920 especially is very common and uses standard USB audio, so it should work. The fact that it doesn't could feasibly be a firmware bug that happens to work on Windows for some reason, but given how janky Linux audio is in general, I think it is almost certainly a bug in Linux (or PulseAudio or whatever if you're going to get nitpicky).

I can confirm that a C920 works well in Debian Linux -- stable, amd64, on both Intel and AMD CPUs -- so I would guess this is some exciting bug arising from the intersection of the Raspberry Pi hardware and drivers written for it.

The problem I had was “it works sometimes, and in some ways, but not other times”.

And as a developer, inconsistent behavior in any system means chaos and something I can’t depend on to get my work done.

This is not a problem exclusive to Linux on the Pi. While much less of an issue, I have had strange driver problems when I tried working from both Ubuntu and Fedora on my Dell XPS 13.

On the Mac, or on Windows on the PC, at least the random weird behaviors (like random crash if I open this, change that, open this, and then use two different audio interfaces) are consistent, so I can usually adapt my workflow to avoid them.

Out of curiosity, what driver problems did you run into? I switched my primary laptop to an XPS 13 a few months ago after almost exclusively using MacBook Pros for over a decade and I haven’t run into a single driver issue. Even the usual suspend issues I seem to have with almost every single Linux desktop I build didn’t show up.

If anything, I feel like I ran into less issues overall on the XPS 13 than I did in macOS once I had everything set up properly. That being said I suspect part of it is due to having a very minimal setup. I have no DE, no DM, a lightweight WM (dwm), etc. so there are fewer moving parts that can cause a crash (in addition to a much more responsive feeling UI on cheaper/slower hardware).

Most people use their computer for Facebook and email, and Linux gets that job done just fine. My heuristic is that if ChromeOS would suit a user's needs well, so would a properly configured Ubuntu LTS. I've put it to the test with a few family members without complaints.

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