Comment by sacks2k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sacks2k | Hacker News Reader

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Desktop Linux still sucks.

I used various flavors like Ubuntu for the past 8 years and finally got tired of the half-finished UIs, random bugs that were never fixed, and breaking issues with WINE when I upgraded (and had to spend hours of my free time trying to figure it out).

This, in addition to all sorts of driver issues over the years where I had to download test drivers and compile it myself to get it working has made me never look back.

My new setup is a windows 10 machine with the latest version of Ubuntu running (command line only) on Vmware workstation.

I get all of the stability of a windows machine and can still run all of my favorite Linux apps.

The Windows subsystem for Linux also works pretty well for most things.

I also wonder if it has to do with the anti-commercial stance from most people in the Linux community. Besides a couple of niche apps, most open source is not polished in any way and since many OSS developer have day jobs, have no real incentive to fix a specific bug/issue.

People's experiences do seem to be hit or miss, but for me I have the opposite experience. I am far more productive with GNOME 3 than I am with the Windows desktop environment. I do boot into Windows pretty frequently to play some games but every time there is something that annoys me, whether it's adverts in notifications, being told to use Microsoft Edge _again_ or Windows updates that take ages to install.

I much prefer Linux, not just for development but for every day usage.

" half-finished UIs, random bugs that were never fixed"

Interestingly this matches my experience of Windows 10 rather then Gnome or Plasma although they are all rough around the edges.

> Desktop Linux still sucks.

Let's not forget the "for my use case, given my technical prowess" is implicit.

I could write my own device drivers. It's not something I should have to do to get my video card working correctly.

I would rather spend the time on my own projects.

People always say the most polished desktop unix distro is Mac OS. That's why I'm on the platform at least. I'd rather pay the premium to have full time engineers troubleshoot the drivers.

I disagree. One good example is switching between windows of the same application.

On Fedora, I can do this with Ctrl + Tilde. On Windows, there is no shortcut for this. On Mac, this only works if the app is not in full screen mode.

Multi tab applications? Or MDI windows?

On multi tab you switch between them with CTRL + W.

On MDI you have to disable grouping on Windows settings and then ALT+TAB will let you switch between them just like if they were separate.

Ctrl+Tab also works for tabbed and MDI applications.

Right, my bad. CTRL + W closes current tab in multi tab. CTRL + TAB is the one that cycles between tabs. But I suppose symlinkk wanted to use ALT + TAB for everything.

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