When Miguel de Icaza stopped using Linux
tirania.org
tirania.org
What bugged me most though is the keyboard and the mouse (I got myself the official ones). Last week I gave up and decided I'm not using this computer until I get alternative keyboard and mouse, because my hands just can't stand the official ones.
I'm writing this, because Mac had a reputation for being polished. But what I'm seeing is a lot less polish than even desktop Linux in 2021 has. It really surprised (and disappointed) me.
Coupled with better developer tools, I think Windows is more pleasant to use these days, but we'll see, maybe after changing the keyboard and mouse I'll change my mind.
This bears repeating.
I have a $2500 2019 macbook pro running macOS 10.14, and a crappy $500 acer running Debian. In the last month alone the macbook crashed more than the acer during the last year.
My (Manjaro) Linux desktops are the most problem free of them all. Updates just work. Installing new software just works. All of my common hardware works with it.
Windows I now use only for gaming and watching streaming stuff on the TV. It works well enough for that. I tried using my old Mac pro for that in my exercise room but it will only wake up with the wired Apple keyboard and not a wireless Logitech K400 which works fine with every other computer in the house. For programming I got sick of all the layers of crap and extra configuration I had to do to deal with Windows. Linux is much smoother for running docker and common web development run times, tools, etc. My Macs are for doing Apple stuff. If it weren't for iOS I would throw them in the garbage.
Microsoft have always cared a lot about backward compatibility, going as far as emulating bugs from older versions of Windows to prevent breaking binary software that was relying on those bugs.
Apple on the other hand has been pretty shameless about breaking binary compatibility, the biggest breakage recently being about stopping to support 32bit apps in Catalina.
If anything, I don't think breaking binary compatibility is such a bad thing today compared to 10 years ago. When you were buying software license to use a version for life, binary compatibility was important. Now you're mostly buying services with software that comes for free, so sticking with an old version because you don't want to pay for the upgrade doesn't really happen any longer. Also when software is no longer supported by the publisher you're forced to switch to something else anyway.
And it's not a new attitude for Apple. They simply think they know better than the user what the user needs and give no choice in the matter to anyone.
And, like Icaza you will wind up using BSD for in rack server purposes and interact fine with it via terminal access, and be productive and capable.
Unlike Icaza you aren't so worried about Open vs Free vs Net vs Dragonfly vs TrueNAS. There are issues, things like pledge() and unveil() which can trap you up, but mostly it's ok. The inter BSD compatibility is not perfect but it's pretty good. OSX being the outlier, but home-brew fixes many problems.
That OSX-as-an-Xstation/O365/terminal model, I like.
For me it's something like Suse -> Windows -> cygwin -> Debian -> OSX -> Fedora.
Apple stuff is doing just fine, we just use GNU/Linux for server VMs on Java projects. .NET projects run on Windows, all desktops/laptops are a mix of Windows and macOS.
Not sure what the future will be with IBM, CentOS, RockyLinux, etc. and I've had good experience with Debian.
My wife's apple laptop by comparison is a PITA; Linux on $400 business laptops has done me solid.
I am the author of kinto btw. https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto
What's missing with Linux on the desktop is an overriding vision and guiding force to direct the overall effort toward a clear objective.
This open source army has lots of generals but it is missing a commander in chief. Lots of battles being fought and won but the war is not moving any closer to a conclusion.
And you can then find your niche from there. For me it's a nixos/sway/emacs/firefox that serves me well and gives me enormous power when I need it.
I'm a programmer anyway, so loving linux comes naturally.
It's a pretty good deal and I'm not doing this just because Apple and Microsoft force their own ideology and tracking down my throat, but because this is my passion... I hope I can stay in my niche for the rest of my life and there's no sudden movement to closed systems that will take it away from me.
When I came into contact with Linux, I was already coding for a decade, used Xenix and DG/UX before, it was just a mean to save trips to the university computer center.
After graduating, HP-UX, Solaris, Aix, NT/2000 were the OSes I cared about.
Then J2ME and Symbian came into play.
GNU/Linux became relevant again to me as the other UNIX vendors messed up and it is basically the only option alongside Windows for server deployments.
However thanks to cloud language runtimes, the actual OS is becoming irrelevant to me.
On the desktop side I rather play with macOS/iOS/Windows/Android stacks.
And on embedded, bare metal runtimes for Arduino and ESP32 are where my fun is at.
So programming and Linux doesn't come naturally to me, it was just a means to free beer UNIX when I couldn't afford something else.
Anyway if that is your fun, enjoy.
I'm also soon in my 40s and I had my Apple years between 2004 and 2010. I came back to Linux and kind of hate the word tinkering even. The current Linux system offers something that nobody else does: your own desktop just how you like it.
I have my configs in GitHub: https://github.com/pimeys/nixos
With this config, I can take any ThinkPad (that are plentiful, great HW and cheap), boot from USB and get the same exact desktop experience I've had for almost a decade now in twenty minutes.
And what kind of desktop? A minimal tiling window manager on top of Wayland. Exactly the applications I need. The same wallpaper as always. The same editor, the same browser, the same keyboard shortcuts, the same kernel params, the same internet setup. Sound? Always worked. With PipeWire, it even seems to work better than on my Windows installation (and replacing PulseAudio with PipeWire was a one line config change).
Now. There will be no product manager somewhere that will dictate how I use my computer. If something changes in my workflow, that comes from my configuration. Nowhere else. No advertisement for new products, no suddenly disappearing applications. If something breaks from an update, I just boot to the version before I started them and I'm back to the previous state. When updates are leaving me to a state I'm happy about, I commit them to that GitHub repo and they will work exactly the same until I decide to update again. And I run the master branch of NixOS which is breaking sometimes, and it's still much more stable experience I ever had with OSX...
Of course this is not for everybody, but please understand when celebrating the commercial offerings how there's so many of us who do not want a desktop experience dictated by product managers. Who are kind of conservative how our workflows should stay the same for years, or decades. And we are still super productive, doing our work and very happy using Linux.
You are free to do whatever setup makes you happy, but you will be eluding yourself to assume it is free from corporations that put money into Linux, like Red-Hat, IBM, Intel, Oracle, ARM, Google, ....
Systemd, wayland, DBUS, ....
The secret of course is to make your own desktop and choose the parts for the system. And, now when talking about systemd, it's much nicer to use compared to the Windows and macOS counterparts.
I have used Linux on the desktop exclusively at home since ~1998 and, like Miguel, I went through a lot of pain. Heck, I remember the days when I couldn't even boot my machine without tampering with the kernel. And to compare that to what we now have, well its a world apart. I have been using Debian Testing for some 8 years or more and in that period I probably had one or two (at the very most) dist-upgrades that borked my system. And those have always been due to binary NVidia drivers.
For me, the importance of Linux is that it offers something that no one else can offer - I could take this exact same setup back to my home country and start teaching kids and they would have exactly the same setup as me, with top tools, even though their hardware would be extremely old. I do not think its important that Linux takes over the desktop, much as we all would love it. What is important is that it remains viable without changing its fundamental characteristics. And that, I think, has already been achieved.
This is both asinine and patronizing. People and businesses do, in fact, understand TCO and make decisions based on it.
What's missing with Linux on the desktop is an overriding vision and guiding force to direct the overall effort toward a clear objective.
This is daydreaming. Of course it would be nice if some übermensch stepped in straightened things out. But that's never going to happen for multiple reasons.
Personally, the Linux desktop as it is more than enough for me. It makes no difference whether it's mainstream or not.
Make successful product and it would be ported. WSL is part of the Windows by Microsoft choice.
Mark's millions gave desktop linux a good push and it spawned a new generation of desktop linux (like Mint)
Something something Systemd.
Edit: he appears to be working on something Apple related.
He never really understood Linux, did he? He was always trying to sabotage it, or bend it to his will. Worst was when he tried to get people to use dotnet on Linux.
Edit2: Apparently he does!
For example, he supported standardizing on Microsoft's file formats. The same formats that continue to cause problems for alternatives to excel and word to this day. And his support of dotnet at a time when Microsoft was funding the SCO lawsuits, and calling Linux cancer, rattling patent sabers etc are either tone deaf or disinterested in the freedoms given to use by FOSS.
Or maybe he's a saboteur. He definitely worked for Microsoft long enough. :D
And because of his previous experience developing Gnome, his actions were more influential. So it just sorta depends on how you see the actors in the game. To me, Miguel's support of Microsoft tech (dotnet, and his support of Microsoft file formats) makes him at best a liability to the free world I want to live in. At worst, yeah, a saboteur.