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Comment by toxik | Hacker News Reader

Truly the year of desktop Linux is soon here!

For that to happen, we'd need a company to invest into good UI/UX. As long as I have to DuckDuck to find the button for creating a new folder in Nautilus ... desktop Linux will remain a niche.

There's plenty of good UI/UX outside of GNOME. Personally I find the UI/UX in KDE to be better than Windows and macOS's desktop managers. Each to their own and all that though.

> There's plenty of good UI/UX outside of GNOME.

True, but keep in mind that GNOME sets the bar very very low.

Look at Chinese Android phones: They get away with slapping an unresponsive and confusing shell onto their phones and still sell millions.

I wouldn't be surprised if this will happen for Laptops soon as well, with custom in-house DEs. Imagine that Chinese OEMs will be happy to get rid of Windows.

Not a fan of chinees phones. But have you used a mordern oppo, Huawei or xiaomi recently?

yeah, modern miui seems surprisingly well thought-out and designed in some areas, with small details like rippling animations

Ubuntu is pretty much there UI/UX wise for example. If Samsung provides top notch firmware then I don’t see any problems with a Linux laptop and would want one myself

I dont think so, compared to Mac Os or Windows ubuntu doesn't even come close in terms of UI/UX. PopOs or Elementary feel much more polished.

> feel much more polished

'Polish' is the last thing users care about. If it wasn't true Windows and Android wouldn't be the most popular operating systems over decades and decades.

I find gnome more consistent and polished than Windows 10. They have done some wise design choices and created a fairly minimal environment that looks decent and not the confusing chaosWindows can be.

The point is, better UX does not always win.

Again thats your personal preference, if you give a linux desktop and a windows desktop to an avg person for a week, Im sure they would pick Windows since thats what they can easily identify their workflows with. Linux distros have a long way to go before they're mass adopted. Im from India, and a while ago when, Student laptops offered by few universities had Ubuntu as default OS. Windows installation is the first thing they did.

Around the windows and android days, they were the only mass used OSes. Linux has to compete with Mac UX which normal users find very good also windows UX is so imprinted into people. So by polished I meant that.

Seems like an odd example to choose, you right click and then "create a new folder" just like in Windows.

Wouldn't this be the year of laptop Linux?

Always is.

To be fair to linux, this time could actually be different with a market shift as big as this. The biggest reason(s) Windows wins consistently is backwards compatibility and a large suite of software/apps. Windows for ARM kills these advantages. If ARM is the future, the playing field is being leveled significantly.

Gaming is the thing that locks a lot of us into Windows. Direct3D really has allowed MS to keep the Desktop Windows as a monopoly IMHO (in addition to what you have said).

It helps that OpenGL is an API designed by committee, where the amount of extensions means having to code multiple paths anyway, depending on the card, driver and OS.

Vulkan isn't any better, just the bare basic and then extension loading fun.

Game developers tend to prefer proprietary APIs because vendors actually care about the overall development experience end to end, instead of expecting the community to come up with something.

Wait until you find out who’s on these committees…

I know who are there, and the fact that they rather contribute to the private APIs than comunity tools kind of says it all.

As an example, mesh shaders or ray tracing APIs weren't created on those commitites, rather yet another set of extensions taken from proprietary APIs.

It's not 2017 anymore. The two big things that lock gaming into Windows are anti cheat and video game launchers.

I remember messing with the Warframe launcher and renaming some exes to bypass another launcher. The games run fine. The hyper complicated Chrome Embedded Framework stuff breaks all the time because it uses weird sandbox crap that is intimately tied to the windows kernel.

Windows for ARM has mostly-working compatibility with x86 and x86-64 Windows apps. It's not as good as Rosetta 2 on M1, but it's present and functional - so the app suite is still an advantage.

This isn't the first time the industry shifted to ARM and Linux. Remember the Netbook era pioneered by Asus EeePCs but later adopted by lots of others? Back then Microsoft extended the life of XP specifically for those machines and offered massive subsidies to OEMs to ship Windows -- even though that meant throwing in an Intel processor instead of ARM. And eventually Microsoft won because the Intel systems were sold for less to consumers despite costing more to build.

So the story isn't going to magically be different here. If Linux starts to get a foothold then Microsoft will just offer some subsidies to get their OS back on the market. The difference here is that desktop Windows does now run on ARM -- so if anything, Linux has less of a competitive advantage as it did in the Netbook eta.

Those early EeePCs were amazing. This is before the 11" Macbooks and Chromebooks, etc. Back then laptops were full-size and expensive. An EeePC netbook allowed one to have something they could put in their bag easily for only a portion of the cost of a laptop. They were absolutely limited, but if all you needed to do was basic stuff such as write a paper in the library, they couldn't be beat.

They were fantastic, my 901 lasted years - with Debian and a couple of upgrades (storage/RAM) it was a great little machine. Lightweight, compact and rugged.

I even ran OS X snow leopard on it for a while.

...and practical Nuclear Fusion is only 10 years away! /s

Don't most of consumer Linux laptops just get pirated windows installed on them?

No. Often (not always, but surprisingly often) Linux laptops work out more expensive than Windows ones due to Windows subsidies and greater economics of scale.

So you'll see people buying Windows laptops to run Linux far more often than you'll see Linux laptops bought to run Windows (pirated or otherwise).

I thought a Linux laptop/computer was the same thing as a Windows version, just without the Windows tax. I have not looked at these offerings in years, so has the Linux offerings from the big vendors matured enough that they are different than the Windows versions?

I believe the idea is that Windows laptop makers make more money from preinstalled bloatware (McAfee, Candy Crush, etc.) than the cost of the OEM Windows license. So if they ship the laptop with Linux which doesn't support the bloatware then they don't make as much money as compared to the Windows version at the same price.

Not just this, though this is a big factor. Often there will be hardware differences too. For example a Linux laptop might run more expensive hardware simply because it has better support with open source drivers (thus satisfies Debian et al users). Whereas a fair number of Linux users are more than happy to run closed proprietary binaries instead. So often Linux certified laptops will be different hardware to their Windows counterparts rather than just Windows machines shipped without an OS.

Then you also have the economics of scale where building a laptop for 1k customers would work out more expensive (price per laptop) than building the same laptop for 100k customers.

There's a free version of windows 10. The only difference from paid version is that you can't change the wallpaper.

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