Is 2021 the Year of the Linux Desktop?
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I recently switched to an Asus after a decade of Thinkpads (because a custom maxed-out Thinkpad would've taken 2 months+ to get delivered). What I forgot to check was Linux compatibility. With out-of-the-box Ubuntu, wifi didn't work. I was forced to switch from my usual distro, and still bluetooth doesn't work. Thankfully there are enough people wanting to run Linux on those machines that a few enthusiasts have managed to get the drivers to a point where it's usable.
Think about it, how much of your machine's stack have you actually built yourself? Probably only a tiny fraction: some dotfiles, tiling manager bindings, a few scripts, ...
It's a collective effort, and the more people use it, the more enthusiasts work on it, the better it becomes for you and I.
In Android 12-based devices these drivers will become simply plug-in kernel modules, so all devices will run the same kernel and it will finally be able to be updated without messing with the drivers. This is in addition to less and less out-of-tree patches each year as more of them get upstreamed.
This means Android is creeping very close to mainline Linux, and already some projects like postmarketOS have devices they've done the last few tweaks needed to run it on existing phones like the Poco F1. I don't think it would have happened otherwise that most mobiles worldwide would run almost-mainline Linux, so I'd say the Android project has been a net boon for Linux enthusiasts.
Once new devices like the Pixel 6 start shipping and having the Android 12 requirement to run the Generic Kernel Image (GKI), then people will be able to use mobile Linux on powerful phones finally, as well as their old or cheap Androids.
https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/2021-is-the-year-of-linux-on-...
The basic thesis of the author was:
1. In 2021, Chromebooks are everywhere.
2. Chrome OS is Linux.
3. Therefore, 2021 is the year of Linux Desktop.
Honestly, I'm not sure this is such a great argument. Isn't it rather like "2021 is the year of Chrome dominance"?
“There's a difference between Linux the technology and "Linux" the political movement, and the political side of Linux has always obscured the practical. Listen to Linux fans all the way back to the 90s, and you hear at worst a mashup of "fight the power" free software advocacy and triumphalist hacker manifestos. But most buyers rank philosophy really low in their purchase choices, behind things like price, ease of use, and software availability.”
ChromeOS is a cloud operating system (OS) that tracks and records all your activity the moment you sign in. Naturally, a Google account is required to use the full functionality of the OS. It is used by millions of schoolkids with all the privacy implications that entails. Somehow, Google's promise to never build profiles of their school users is enough to placate developers. In fact, developers are more likely to defend Google rather than question or scrutinise the privacy implications of using a cloud OS.
I presume most developers are happy to sign-in in an OS to unlock OS functionality and have their activity tracked? After all, we've happy to push this model on kids.
It's ironic that so much cloud software, whether an OS or a SaaS product, is built on open source software. And yet cloud software gives users less control and more tracking than the desktop model. Cloud software has been open source's greatest success - just not in the way open source advocates expected it to be.
I installed Windows 10 on my Thinkpad P51 with two monitors. Everything worked out of the box.
So at least for me 2021 is the year of Windows Desktop and certainly not Linux Desktop.
Disclaimer: I try 1-2 times a year to install a working Linux on desktop since 1994, and have my family use it. It never, ever fucking worked. I am so pissed of because of that because I have Linux on every backend server and I lost hope that one day I will have a Linux desktop.
Comment: I may have been able to make Linux work on my computer after digging some obscure settings in x.org and whatnot. I just want my front end device to just work - so Windows it is.
But I think there is a general problem with sleep modes as mentioned. Luckily it boots in a fraction of the time Windows took.
Why would anyone not prefer this over a mixed set up? The only reason I see to use a mixed set up is if you're forced to use a laptop. Personally I don't optimize for working in meetings and planes though and my life is just simple and straightforward. I keep just 1 cheapo laptop around for that stuff.
With that said, XFCE handles mixed DPI/scaling just fine for me.
I'm not saying there's never going to be a problem--especially with brand new hardware fresh off the press, especially combined with a slow moving distro. But trying once or twice every year, and it never working? Either you're running the most exotic hardware on the planet, or you're running the oddest distribution, or you should start playing the lottery.
And even then, I have a Lenovo that was a very hostile driver experience to start with, and yet everything is now supported in the kernel minus the fingerprint reader.
You may be lucky, I was not.
Last time I tried it was Ubuntu 20.04 when it was out. The result is in my post above.
I work in IT for 25 years and I am a geek at heart. The state of the Linux desktop is horrendous.
This is not a problem per se - Linux has a good and stable place on servers. It just means that peopel who want to run a desktop with linux must be ready for a lot of browsing, experimenting, ... Windows users do not.
Try running Kubuntu off of a live USB (you can do this with any Linux distro, you don't need to install it just to test it). I'd honestly baffled if it didn't run perfectly as long as you agree to install the drivers when prompted to.
I share your exasperation (or at least I think that's what I can read between the lines). I really want to like the Linux desktop, but... I just don't. I'm holding out hope for Haiku and Serenity OS. Perhaps one day they will be the ones to achieve the Year of the Linux Desktop, as a successor platform.
My opinion is this: Linux does work, but it doesn't work cleanly for desktop/laptop use. There are rough corners galore, especially around support for specific hardware or hardware features. You get used to them eventually, or you're irritated, but they are there.
I also use Mint on my M93P Desktop. Ditto likewise.
I used a Unix Desktop from 1991 to 2001. Since 2001 to 2021 I've used Linux as my day-to-day system.
I've never used Windows as my day-to-day system. There never was any need to.
I don't think I'm an exceptional genius, Linux just works.
Also, MS Teams installed from the Ubuntu software store on Ubuntu 21.04 does not support screen sharing. You have to switch from Wayland to X11 to enable it. Even then it is missing features like selecting a single window to share, allowing others to highlight on your screen. It does not matter whether this is Microsoft's fault - Teams is a must have in many organizations and Canonical promotes the app in their store.
[0] https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:de-compat
[1] What I have personally encountered: on KDE drkonqi crashes all the time when remote, on GTK-based DEs I get color management prompts and gnome-keyring breaks on local sessions - even worse, it seems to block for minutes then tell the caller that you don't have credentials instead of exiting with an error.
ChromeOS is as much a Linux computer as is a Tesla automobile. Sure, there's a linux kernel down in there somewhere, but it's not the thing we mean when we say "Linux Desktop".
There's very little computing done where the hardware is not designed with the software in mind and vice versa.
The days of "software x running on hardware platform y" might be behind us for the majority of the planet's population.
On Android, Linux kernel is an implementation detail not exposed to userspace APIs as official stable APIs, even for basic stuff like bluetooth or accessing files outside the sandbox, Java APIs have to be used.
Then on the ChromeOS side, not all Chromebooks support Linux based applications, and even that is actually a design similar to WSL 2, by running it into another VM on top of the Linux kernel used by ChromeOS.
WSL is microsoft giving up. Other users dont really need PCs any more, you just use a phone or a web browser.
As far as I can tell, Chrome OS is the Linux desktop and the GNU user space. The user space may not be exposed by default, but it is there. It may not be considered complete by those who expect compilers and X to be installed by default, but those tools can be installed since the underlying infrastructure is in place. It is not another Android where, as far as I can tell, very little of the GNU user space is in place.
Having to switch into developer mode (on older Chrome OS devices) or run Linux applications is a sandboxed environment is beside the point. These are just a security model layered on top of the OS.
Fedora Core gave you everything you needed for the typical desktop use case: a browser, an office suite, and an email client, with a modern, sensible GUI.
Anybody still denying the usability of desktop Linux since then either plays vidya (which, granted, has been a perennial problem on Linux), or is simply wrong.
More and more I find myself using the CLI...
A new platform could give people new reasons to consider alternatives?
The year of the Linux desktop was 2016, when Ubuntu 16.04 was released. It went downhill ever since.
I am not happy with the desktop environments we have now. I have to use a custom Gnome Shell to make my experience acceptable.
Unwanted popups, slow and "fancy" effects that makes your workflow slower, weird default behavior (like alt-tab with gnome), multiple clicks to do what you used to do with 1, etc.
I don't think that's being picky, it's just wanting something that works and doesn't infuriate you with every new update.
I think Linux is different than other operating systems because if something goes mainstream that you don't like you have tons of viable options. With each component of the OS being tweakable you can choose opinions that others have made or forge your own path.
For example if you don't like whatever the latest window manager is you can pretty easily replace it with i3, bspwm or any other window manager that you prefer. Want a different desktop environment? Great, there's plenty of them. Prefer the ethos or core values of one distro over another? Sounds good, I'm sure you'll find something you like.
It also makes troubleshooting a lot more difficult, since any efforts to find solutions will invariably land me in posts primarily about some other combination of components and it's up to me to sort out their relevance to my issue.
YEAROFLINUX=1999
while :
do
echo "Is $YEAROFLINUX the year of the Linux Desktop?"
YEAROFLINUX=`expr $YEAROFLINUX + 1`
done
Sure the desktop is a bit ugly. But pretty much everything works out of the box. If MS released a native Office for Linux I could get rid of my Mac.
Linux is already totally ok for a vast majority of usages (and even gaming is less and less an issue).
At the end of the day, who even cares of Linux market share on the desktop ?
Because this hides an insidious and bigger issue : PCs, even if it’s a 1% market share os, HAVE alternatives OS. Other modern platforms don’t.
I’d rather prefer « xxxx is the year of the 1% Linux on phones » than any evolution on the desktop which would have pretty much no impact on a Linux user day to day usage.
Have you tried LibreOffice? Admittedly, I don't have to share complicated MS Office documents with other people, but I do like using LO.
[edit] Actually, there are some things about LO I'm not sure about: For instance, I don't know how to use their formula editor, and when I tried using it, I got confused and found another way of inserting mathematical symbols into my document. Also, I don't know how good the spell-checking is, since I don't have a spell-checker working on mine. So these are some caveats in my endorsement of LO.
If you do share documents, Excel files especially, you'll quickly find that people using MS Office wouldn't like you using LibreOffice.
I haven't tried running office in wine in over a decade, although I've realized they've achieved great things (by the games they support). I don't game, and all I need the Mac is MS Office, so I never tried again.
Things that didn't work out of the box "for me":
- Using multiple displays with mixed DPIs without wayland.
- Using wayland with nvidia (Even with the latest driver that supposed to give a half-baked support for it)
- On my HP laptop when I close the laptop lid, instead of suspend, it will turn airplane mode on. The only fix is to remap the key that send airplane mode to suspend.
- Multiple functions keys doesn't work, They don't even send keycodes so I can remap it.
I had to delve deep into Arch Wiki to fix most of my issues, at that point, I just gave up and installed windows 10.
Yeah, "everything works out of the box" should always be replaced by: "everything worked out of the box for me".
For the second one, I don't have any tips for you, nobody can fix that but nvidia.
For the third and fourth one, you might be able to get someone to fix that if you search around for long enough, but it will take work.
Next time you buy hardware you may want to make sure it's supported with your OS first. Sadly that's still necessary in this day and age.
Right now all the distros together can't crack 2.5% of the desktop market.
"No, it's never going to be the Year of Mercedes on the Highways.
Right now all the Mercedes models together can't crack 2.5% of the motor vehicle market."
(It makes no difference who drives a Mercedes and who drives a Ford, or a Pontiac, or a Volkswagen, or a Skoda, or a BMW, or a Lamborghini. One is just as useful as another. It's pointless arguing about such irrelevant trivia. Ditto for Windows, Linux and OSX.)