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Comment by Jemaclus | Hacker News Reader

Related to this, I'm kind of shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes. We've got Windows and MacOS, sure, but the nix ecosystem is so fragmented and not as well supported as the other two that it's hard to justify switching.

Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it just works. Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.

I turned an old Macbook into a Linux box, and it's fine*. It does what I need it to do, but it doesn't feel premium at all. I just wish I had really slick, solid, premium-feeling alternatives.

It seems to me that Microsoft or Facebook or SOMEONE with a bajillion dollars could afford to do this and really make a dent in the space and give us more alternatives. I guess the demand just isn't there. Very sad.

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Google ChromeOS

> Chromebook shipments have grown 122% year on year to a total of 9.4 million units in Q3 of 2020. [1]

It covers big market, from tablets [2] to enterprise [3]. And they have AArch64 models [4].

[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pc-shipments-google-chromebook...

[2] Lenovo Chromebook Duet (10.1") 2 in 1 ($266.79) https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/student-chromebo...

[3] Dell Latitude Chromebook Enterprise https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/chromebookenterprise/

[4] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...

I think the demand is there, just no one has the right combination of financial resources, technical ability to pull it off, the right sense of good design, and a way to make money off of it somehow other than by charging licensing fees (which is probably a non-starter if you want to grow the user base quickly and take advantage of network effects).

The companies I can see who are in the right position to profit from developing and giving away an OS that's at least as user-friendly as MacOS or Windows and as open as Linux are Intel and AMD. But it's hard to imagine either of them making something that's a joy to use.

Something Linux-based could work, but Linux is kind of stuck with a lot of decisions made thirty years ago. The kernel is pretty good, but the basic abstractions of POSIX-like operating systems are perhaps not what you'd design if you were creating them from scratch in 2020.

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head here. It's kind of sad... but surely someone will come along in the next decade...

The very most important thing an OS does is run software on hardware. Therefore any new entrant into the OS market must support as much software and hardware as possible. The former is actually kinda doable with compatibility layers and emulation, the latter is basically impossible to catch up on.

So what you're saying is that we're stuck with Microsoft for eternity.

Fascinating.

Microsoft is probably the most strategically important company on the planet. Literally too big to fail.

Yeah, I understand that. But the upside to succeeding is basically a license to print money, ie., so large that it would be worth it for someone to do it... Microsoft focuses on making software that supports as many hardware configs as possible and Google does the same with Android/ChromeOS, but Apple focuses on making the hardware-software integration seamless. They each succeed in different ways, but Apple devices feel like premium, high-quality things where other software-hardware integrations (Windows, Android, etc) feel less polished and less seamless.

It seems like Microsoft or Google could double-down on the software-hardware integration and build a seamless, premium product that really, truly competes with Apple. It seems like it would be beneficial for MS or Google to identify and partner with (or acquire?) a hardware partner and develop their systems hard against that, creating a seamless hardware-software interface like Apple does with its devices.

And I guess I'm just baffled that nobody else is doing that. On the contrary, everyone seems to be going the Microsoft route of developing for as many hardware configs as possible.

If the OS can run in a virtualized environment, you can kind of cheat by letting some other OS like Linux handle the hardware compatibility. It's not as aesthetically satisfying as running on bare metal, but it can work.

If some company wanted to create an Apple-like desktop experience with purpose-built hardware but with an open OS, this could be a good route: implement all the drivers needed to run well on bare metal on the company's own hardware products, but anyone can run it in a hypervisor on any computer.

That seems kind of a circular argument: we need another OS but which emulates existing OS's for compatibility. I agree that compatibility probably overrides other concerns. A 3rd OS would need some revolutionary feature(s) to overcome its compatibility limits. And that revolutionary feature would be something that can't be added to Windows or (x)nix. Anyone want to suggest game-changing OS features?

A better goal would be to isolate OS features to give us more choice. The file system would be independent of the GUI engine, which would be independent of the executable manager, etc. It would give one mix-and-match ability. Possible partitioning:

    - Execution/task manager
    - GUI
    - File system
    - Security system
    - App and upgrade manager
    - Integrator

You do have Android which is often overlooked in these discussions. Strong base of Linux in the bottom and a very cohesive app framework and ecosystem on the top. Polished and premium coupling to the HW from vendors (ok not all of them but don't tell me the latest Pixel or Samsung flagship isn't great). Only thing is, in the end it's not really a desktop OS.

Yeah, that's true, but remember the context of this discussion is how Apple products feel "premium", and there aren't very many (if any) Android products that feel like solid, premium products. Like, we're talking about the difference between a solid, dependable, easily maintainable Honda Civic versus a luxury, polished Tesla.

Did you just call Tesla a "luxury, polished" car? It may be luxurious because of the price tag and lack of polish for the money (i.e. you could easily get a more polished product for the same money). I.e. a Mercedes will get you more luxury and polish for the same dollar.

Tesla is, if anything, similar to Apple in how closed-off they are. Teslas are attractive because of their design and powerful electric powertrain, but polished they are not.

Look out for Kylin OS, it's being created by some Chinese company with that same premium feel. Not complete yet, but works out of the box. I'd probably switch to it once it just works.

Yeah right, never going to use an OS developed by the Chinese government.

Dell XPS or Precision with Ubuntu Mate, am very happy with it.

> shocked that there isn't a strong third option for OSes

Why when there is no third OS that has even 1% share and all Linux combined is about 3%. And desktop Linux is bad.

Why is desktop Linux bad?

I use MacOS (whatever it is called this week) Mint and LXDE

Love Mint (typing on it) The Apple OS has a lot of rough corners (e.g. (max/min)imising windows is a world of pain) LXDE is acceptable because it is on my PI and I do not use the desktop much

I have not used Windows desktop for about a decade, has it really gotten that much better?

I am really happy with desktop Linux

> Why is desktop Linux bad?

There are a huge range of reasons. There's no consistency, everything changes every 2 years, the documentation is awful when it exists at all, if software is outside your distro's package repo it's a bitch to install, there are too many different distros, the community is full of pricks, fragmentation is a time-honored pastime, complexity is fetishized... fuck sound still didn't work consistently on the last Linux based media center I built. A cursory search of the internet will turn up innumerable reasons Linux Desktop is bad.

Which isn't to say that MacOS and Windows aren't bad (and getting worse), but they're still a damned sight better.

> There's no consistency

Just a reminder there's like 7 different context menu styles in Windows 10, not to mention two control panels.

This only emphasizes how bad the Linux desktop experience can be. The devs of the Linux DE community could do better but chose to do gang turf wars.

And as you say, Windows 10 still sits there having confusing and mediocre system UIs.

> There's no consistency, everything changes every 2 years, the documentation is awful when it exists at all

In the days of electron and web apps, it's clear that the users either don't care or developers are shooting themselves in the foot.

In either case, consistency died a while ago.

Mmmm, I don't think this is fair when discussing Linux. If Electron didn't exist, there's a good chunk of apps that just wouldn't exist on Linux at all.

Doesn't change the fact that if people valued consistency, those apps would be flops on all supported platforms.

People value tools that do what they need to do over consistency, but that does not mean that they do not value consistency.

Not enough for them to win in the market, apparently.

> There's no consistency, everything changes every 2 years

It all depends on the distribution (hence "too many different distros" is good). Choose Debian XFCE and you will never see any change, everything is rock-solid. Tested with my relatives.

It's a matter of perception and need in the end, I think. I am happy with XFCE, but then I don't do much with the desktop environment itself other than manipulating windows, having a nice panel on top and some key bindings. Occasionally, I use a file manager, but most of the time I am just in applications, so they are maximized.

With my really simple needs, macOS and Windows is just mostly memory-wasting fluff to me. I switched away from Macs when I realized that what I need and what I can get is cheaper than getting a Mac. ("Cheaper" because I am very sensitive to cost vs. utility. I am typing on thinkpad t430s I found in the trash which I spent just a little to get a better screen, having everything else already that was missing.)

That said, sometimes get frustrating, but they don't happen frequently for me.

It's not bad, people get used to windows/macos and think that "everything needs to look the same". I've been perfectly content with Ubuntu and KDE for years now. I also use a windows and macos laptop for work and they're fine too. I just think people have built up these psychological blocks to anything outside their comfort zone and poo poo anything that isn't a clone of their favorite system.

While I loved using Ubuntu, I found it pretty darn frustrating that driver support could be wonky. I had to dig deep into the weeds to fix issues with my Wifi driver, and had it not been for amazing Linux users with similar computers that posted their remedies online, I would've been SOL.

In contrast, in all my years of using Apple computers, I've rarely if ever had a driver related issues that wasn't easily solvable by updating my OS.

I had a MacBook 2014 at work and grew pretty quickly to love it after only ever using Windows. However, the updates turned a perfectly reasonable machine into a much slower one.

I switched to Linux when I left the company and while I ran into issues installing it on both my PC and laptop (not Mac), the end result works perfectly. I think all the digging around has made me better understand computers. A lot of the Linux command line skills are transferable to Mac.

I have a 2013 MacBook Pro with 4 gigs of RAM that I bought with Mavericks and updated it all the way up to Catalina. My GF is using it pretty happily now and it feels reasonably snappy, certainly not "much slower" than I remember it.

(just my data point)

We have that one too, the keyboard is amazing. I saw the future and paid for 16gb though. Held off on big sur however.

Linux desktop lacks UI and UX consistency. A GTK and a Qt application look and operate completely differently, and even within those there is no consistency. Windows certainly isn't perfect in this regard either, but it is much rarer that I download a new Windows program and immediately notice how ugly and poorly laid out it is.

I'm not the person you responded to, but here are my thoughts...

Keep in mind that the context of my original comment was with respect to having "premium" devices. People pay thousands of dollars for a Macbook because the hardware and the software feel very high-end. The UI/UX is generally seamless. Stuff "just works". There are regular updates. Any software written for MacOS will work on any other Mac, because the hardware/software integration is so tightly controlled. Is it perfect? No. Are there things Linux does better? Sure. But taking the entire Apple ecosystem into account, it feels cohesive and thoughtful, and it feels like it's worth the money.

Contrast that with Linux. With many Linux distros, it doesn't "just work." The OS itself can change very often. The software ecosystem is fragmented. You have to use apt or yum or some other package manager. Sometimes you need five different package managers to install the software you want! On top of that, you can't necessarily run all Linux software on every distro or any hardware. There's little to no UX/UI consistency. As someone else pointed out, Qt vs GTK apps can and do look totally different and there are no style guides or any enforcement mechanisms to make sure that users enjoy the experience. It's the wild west, which is good in many ways, but in the context of making a device feel like a premium device, a wild west methodology fails that criteria pretty hard.

In other words, Linux is fantastic for computer nerds like us who like tinkering with things and don't mind rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty. But it is no way, shape, or form a "premium" experience.

I've been wanting to like Linux for a while. So much, I've spent a reasonable attempt at one distro or another every year. It's always had a range of hardware/software compatibility, or UI issues.

Error messages, crashes, graphical anomalies, hardware kind-of working. There are often fixes, but how much time are you willing to spend trouble-shooting? When you get a new computer or reformat, will you remember what you had to do?

I've experienced this class of issues on a range of hardware and software over 2 decades.

My best guess: Too much design-by-committee, and losing track of emergent concepts - like responsiveness, how the overall ecosystem affects performance, and how the various parts (designed by different people and teams) work together.

Another potential root cause: The way software dependencies and linking works, and the expectation to compile software on your machine.

I may not understand what you meant, but I think that was my question?

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