I remember in 2000s, I had to edit /etc/ text files to set up internet etc. Nowadays everything works out of box. All sorts of peripherals and hardware is recognized automatically. High quality free open source software is available for most stuff I need. The freedom to choose software and customize Linux, if required, is amazing!
Am I missing anything ignoring closed source Windows and MacOS?
- Trivial app portability - I absolutely love the concept of portable Windows software. Have a single folder with configuration and binaries, that can run for sure anywhere (give or take a .Net/VisualC install) - and you can achieve this for 90%+ of all available apps. With a some sync tool it's simple to have the same (as in reproducible/copiable) work environment on many machines (in the context of ad-hoc gui user applications). I know this concept isn't really transferable to Linux (separated locations per app, "just build from source") and there are attempts (Snap) but due to the fractured scene and #1 it's not that practical for end-users.
- Hardware compatibility - cool that you didn't have device issues, but this could be because you just don't use non-mainstream hardware. Even when I did, a lot of special functionality was bound to (Mac/Win) drivers. Sure, not Ubuntu's fault, but still.
I think Ubuntu/Linux success stories are infinitely subjective - what you need as an end-user, how much time or patience you have, or how much you value privacy/lack of telemetry/security.
A growing number of apps, probably due to Go, are just as you described - a binary you can run anywhere.
I will say, I've been solely a Linux user for almost 20 years now, and still prefer the Windows structure as you described. I like the idea of applications in their own folder, with the binaries and configs and everything just there. In Linux, of course they are divided - confs go here, binaries go here, libraries here. The problem is that -here- isn't well defined. Directions for one distro don't necessarily translate directly to another wrt to locations.
The "registry" is not an issue anymore?
As far as relocatable installs, this is entirely a choice on the part of distro maintainers and a consequence of how the packages are built. They can be built in a way that allows you to put them elsewhere, but it would defeat the purpose of having a package manager. Which makes me wonder, does winget support relocatable installs? I'm sure you can at least understand why Linux distros have chosen to do packaging this way. The killer app for Linux is server installs. It might be perfectly fine to allow users to move around software they've installed after first installing it on a single-user home PC, but it destroys the possibility of automation. A package manager can't know where the software is if it's constantly moving, meaning it can't upgrade or remove it without significant user interaction, which can't possibly scale to data centers full of servers. Different needs for different markets, unfortunately, but to me, even at home, this is an advantage of Linux, because I have many devices.
I guess not being choose between hundreds of media viewers might matter if you're actually a professional media editor or creator, but very people are that. Granted, any professional use of a computer other than making software is going to benefit from Windows. Professional software just targets Windows. That's on the creators of those packages, not the system itself. Whether it's CAD, media editors, the Adobe suite, software teams that charge for use don't like Linux. But they don't like it because people aren't using it. It's a chicken and egg problem.
I'm not sure I actually agree with the ease of adding and moving Windows software, though. One of the big problems is it's often impossible to completely uninstall something. Applications quite frequently drop files all over the place that Windows Installer doesn't know about if it wasn't registered upon installation, and it's even worse if your "installation" doesn't use Windows installer at all and it just you copying an executable file somewhere. Did it leave data in %PROFILE%/LocalLow/AppData, %PROFILE%/Local/AppData, or %PROFILE%/Roaming/AppData, and what the heck is even the difference between those? Where is it putting logs? Where is it expecting config? Without any sort of filesystem hierarchy standard like Linux has, there is no way to know, and systems just gather cruft over the years to the point that common advice is periodically wipe your entire root filesystem and start from scratch.
>- About 90% of the (GUI) software ever developed? I'm happy to hear that there are quality Linux alternatives nowadays, but there's just many order of magnitudes more choice on Windows (and far less, but still more on Mac). For a lot of categories, this might change in the next decade (Electron and other cross-platform frameworks, tech like Proton) but for things like media editing or even image viewers, or until there is some tech to seamlessly emulate, this won't be a fight.
I think this is highly subjective, sure if you need some specific piece of software (e.g. photoshop), but for everything else you are pretty much covered. In particular free software for common tasks like image viewing is much better on linux, on windows everyone uses some piece of software they received with some camera or similar, which is often unmaintained and riddled with bugs.
> - Trivial app portability - I absolutely love the concept of portable Windows software. Have a single folder with configuration and binaries, that can run for sure anywhere (give or take a .Net/VisualC install) - and you can achieve this for 90%+ of all available apps.
App binaries and configuration in the same folder? On my windows install there are lots of files in some subfolder o f C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\ and C:\Program Files\Common Files\
And finding the correct subfolder is not always trivial if you try to nuke your configuration. Mind you that is not necessarily easier in Linux either however things got better and more and more software adheres to the XDG standard locations.
>With a some sync tool it's simple to have the same (as in reproducible/copiable) work environment on many machines (in the context of ad-hoc gui user applications). I know this concept isn't really transferable to Linux (separated locations per app, "just build from source") and there are attempts (Snap) but due to the fractured scene and #1 it's not that practical for end-users.
Syncing your work environment over to a different computer is trivial in Linux compared to Windows (not that this is a very typical end-user work case either). Sure if you put a different distro on every computer it's not so easy, but why would you do that?
>- Hardware compatibility - cool that you didn't have device issues, but this could be because you just don't use non-mainstream hardware. Even when I did, a lot of special functionality was bound to (Mac/Win) drivers. Sure, not Ubuntu's fault, but still.
Yes you still run into the odd bit of hardware that doesn't work, but that's quite rare even on very recent laptops. This is also not a solved problem on windows either, if you don't use the pre-installed OS on your windows PC then installing a new version can result in quite a bit of chasing drivers.
There are issues with Linux still, but the ones you listed are not among them IMO (and Windows isn't really better on this either). One of the things that I find annoying at times is that developers don't seem to consider upgrades to the configuration files when releasing new versions. After some upgrade the previously saved configuration doesn't work anymore, because the file format changed or parameter names changed or similar. While I suspect this happens in windows as well, it's more of a problem in Linux because one upgrades more frequently.
Most of the people don't need this though. I've migrated many individuals and middle offices from Windows to Ubuntu (for myself I prefer Manjaro though) starting from 2007. They only use Firefox/Chrome, Skype/Telegram, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, PDF&picture viewers and VLC (so it's not even about alternatives - all the essential apps already are cross-platform and even easier to install/update on Linux) and never asked any questions - everything feels intuitive and works great. WiFi used to be hard to set-up in 2007-2009 but not anymore. Printing and scanning works slightly unstable with some printers (mostly because they go to sleep and disappear or stop working in Ubuntu). The only Windows app I really miss on Linux is Paint.Net - to me it seems the ultimate perfect non-professional graphics editor while its Linux clone (Pinta) is slightly crappy, although does the job generally and I still am very grateful it exists. If only Linux also had full Visual Studio and Adobe Illustrator+Photoshop it would be hard for me to name a reason to use Windows at all. Most of the new apps I encountered during the recent years (e.g. Obsidian, Typora, MS Teams, etc.) just use Electron and work seamlessly on Linux as well as Windows and Mac this way (I know MS Teams is deprecating Electron and worry about this). The situation with games has also changed (to good) significantly during the recent years AFAIK and probably is even better than on the Mac OS now.
I know. But it lacks ReSharper and I also just feel better and happen to be significantly more productive in the full Visual Studio because of its look-and-feel (this is a mild OCD-related phenomenon). VSCode also notably lacks visual WinForms designer (a thing I would actually pay to get on Linux) and many other features many programmers use.
> Paint.NET is great though, its genuinely the only thing I miss at my debian machine
Try Pinta really, if you still didn't. It's worse but does approximately the same job in the most of the use cases. I would feel really sad and do any hacking to return it if it would be discontinued.
The Linux way of installing the apps is merely a convenient tradition. You can still put the app files anywhere and run. It will put its configuration files wherever the developer wanted them (conventionally the app dir is meant to be immutable and the files are meant to be stored under the user's home dir though). In fact many apps (incl. Chrome and PyCharm actually are installed the Windows way under /opt which is an equivalent to C:\Program Files\).
> there are attempts (Snap)
I actually hate this concept because it encourages duplication (same program files installed under different users) and adds performance overhead (often significant). So, when no traditional package is available I rather get an AppImage and just drop it in \opt (the downside is it won't automatically appear in the menus though so I have to create .desktop files and update the app itself manually).
This also seems very bad for the office setting. I have dozens of employees set-up on dozens Ubuntu computers in the office and want a single-install/update to apply to everyone seamlessly. Now I see Firefox moved to Snap in Ubuntu 21.10 and this scares the shit out of me, but it's supposed to be possible to force it the traditional way in 21.10. They say they will move it to snap only in 22.04 though so I will probably abandon Ubuntu and switch to some distro which is not corrupted by this bullshit. This is sad as Ubuntu still is the most polished and muggle-friendly out of the box, their GNOME mod in particular.
I don't think he was disputing the technical possibility of it. It doesn't help him from a user perspective though to know that this is merely a convention and not a technical limitation.
Ubuntu, on the other hand, seem to like to do many things their way. Like aggressive patching. I recall fontconfig being heavily patched from upstream. Then we have Mir (now almost abandoned), Unity (abandoned), snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :).
I can't comment on everything but:
> Unity (abandoned)
You probably don't recall how bad Gnome 3 was initially, and how much better Unity was over Gnome 2. Sure it also had its issues in the beginning, but it took a really long time for Gnome 3 to catch up.
> snap (flatpak, done differently, not yet abandoned :).
I am pretty sure flatpak didn't exist when snap was announced. Or it was around the same time.
Given the above two, I'd place very little credence on the rest of your points. I agree with the Mir situation to some extent, but look at how long wayland has taken to ship.
If you stop worrying about the victimless crime of fragmentation neither gnome sucking or the specific sequence of development matters.
For what its worth I think they date from around the same time.
https://launchpad.net/snapcraft/+milestones September 2015
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatpak September 2015
The larger issue would seem to be that canonical has a habit of betting on losers it ultimately abandons. Snap looks like the next roadkill to me. Far from being universal it will probably never see substantial use outside Ubuntu.
It suggests perhaps that they should exercise better judgement.
I have a feeling many of these decisions are driven by internal politics than proper analysis. The first question when you decide to go your own way is whether others will find this more useful than the competition. Build better tools is not sufficient if you don’t invest in evangelising and great branding.
I do, and I have never seen its face again since then and the huge upsetting of ruining what worked well, and to create something perverse. And unless it was fixed very recently, it still is, because I just tried `gnome-font-viewer` and there are fades in the interface that cannot seem to be disabled. Unjustifiable. Not just the desktop manager: the paradigm. Dis-functional effects imposed to the user for no reason. And in a context which replaced functions with minimalism.
I am still wondering what caused that stroke of lunacy - at the time, I thought it must had been literally a stroke.
Power users have privilege and need to be hobbled; their complaints ignored. The needs of users with the least privilege, the computer illiterate, should be prioritized.
Or something like that.
But I've also never heard any description of the phrase "power user" that was clearly defined. Wikipedia says:
"A power user is a user of computers ... who uses advanced features"
"In enterprise software systems, 'Power User' may be a formal role given to an individual who is not a programmer, but who is a specialist in business software"
So which advanced features and which business software are we talking about here? That could be anything really.
We do automated computing to have tools in general, as we may need them; and we use special features when we need them.
Figure imagemagick discriminating options or functions the same way ("Lanczos stays in, but we could ditch Hamming").
Some pieces of software are more free to grow, their value is in options (image processing), while others have value in their reliability (banking).
This said, one phenomenon that appeared in the "unfortunate decade" and which is extremely dubious is that of the propaganda that "less is more". No it is not. Freedom is "more". Constraints are "less". (In the general reality of desktop software applications.)
That's an accessibility option. GNOME Settings -> Accessibility -> Enable Animations; or `gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false`. Should apply everywhere.
Yes, but it does not disable the fades, nor all the gratuitous animations I see in the GUI of gnome-font-viewer (one of the very few pieces I can try not having uninstalled it). Those animations must have been hardcoded in the software, it must probably be recompiled - and I do not take it for granted they can be disabled through a configuration flag.
Before posting I tried `gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations` and it returns 'false', consistently (as it should) with `dconf-editor` used to see the options. And I verified (as I just re-did) the behaviour of `gnome-font-viewer`: changing the window content (switching the font) fades (messily) from former to latter, using the menu animates a "pull-down", activating the search slides down the interface...
I will try the GTK inspector today.
* NetworkManager is a dumpster fire.
* Wayland is 10 years in the making and it's still barely out of alpha and still missing crucial features such as fractional and consistent scaling.
* Pipewire is a welcome attempt to mitigate another source of grief, Pulse Audio.
* Gnome? Lets not get started...
Please. RedHat has been a boon to the Linux community but it's lack of - how can I put it tactfully - design taste? has stranded the platform into a decades-long quicksand of endless circular reinvention.
Gnome and Network Manager are fine though. My XPS 15 wifi has been supported for the last three years without any issues.
This has very little to do with Wayland and mostly has to do with the apps and the toolkits. I haven't really seen many Linux native apps that are able to function correctly at a non-integer scale. The rendering of these apps may have to be entirely changed and refactored to use floating point instead of integers. That a big thing to ask every app to do. The hard part is doing that, and then it's trivial to put a flag in Wayland (or XWayland) for an app to say that it supports it.
But, fractional scaling is working like a charm on Gnome + Wayland (after a gsettings command). Very crisp, despite people saying it doesn't work. On X11, even on KDE, I can't get fractional scaling this crisp. This is the only reason I'm using Wayland; all the rest sucks.
But, the problem is, GTK doesn't support fractional caling natively. Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to scale up, then down. This approach generally causes blurring (though I don't know why Gnome on Wayland here isn't blurred).
When I see screenshots of people with fractional scaling on Gnome, it appears very blurry. Comparing side by side, here it isn't. I don't know why and at this point I'm afraid of messing it with and ruining everything.
I have honestly never had that problem in years of using GNOME Wayland, but I experienced it many times with misbehaved X11 apps. Maybe you want to come up with a reproducible test case and then report it?
"Even GTK 4 supports only integer scaling. So for fractional scaling the compositor has to scale up, then down. This approach generally causes blurring (though I don't know why Gnome on Wayland here isn't blurred)."
That's what I mean, it has to be done in the toolkits first. The first step would be to add support for that to GTK which is unlikely to happen until at least GTK5. Then after the apps can start to support it, I think you're looking at at least a few years before there is a realistic chance of having that. Sorry to disappoint, it's just not an easy thing to have. And I don't think there is much incentive to support this from a hardware perspective either since most people that I see asking for this are using it as a workaround for oddly sized 4K monitors.
"This is the only reason I'm using Wayland; all the rest sucks."
I feel your frustration but I actually would not suggest using Xorg in 2021 unless you really know what you're doing. It's not secure unless you take great pains to make it so. GNOME's Wayland session is the most secure Linux desktop there is outside of security-focused distros.
> And I don't think there is much incentive to support this from a hardware perspective either since most people that I see asking for this are using it as a workaround for oddly sized 4K monitors.
All 14" hidpi laptops (meaning, more than 1366x768) suffer from this problem. 1x is too small, 2x is too large.
Low end is 1366x768 at 14", which is 135ppi. Most laptops I see have this resolution.
I was just about to write the same, the only clipboard issues I've had in wayland were with firefox. I don't know what they do, but even in windows I get weird behavior at times (e.g. when copying out of Jupyter cells for example), much less than wayland though.
Right. It doesn't matter if the fault is with GTK, Qt or the Wayland APIs not providing enough support for this to happen, sometime in the last 10 years. The problem is that it didn't.
In the meantime I've been using MacOS that has been doing vector graphics since what? 15 years?
SMH...
This is also not a matter of "fault", by necessity the majority of the work that needs to be done here in the toolkits and apps. That's just the way it is. It's not that hard to implement this on the server side, you just don't scale that buffer when rendering. MacOS is an not a good example because that also uses an integer scale.
It baffles me that Linux is still stuck on this pixel grid that just hangs together at a specific density of 96dpi; something that harks back to the VGA days
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/fontblog/wher...
- https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/fontconfig-ubuntu/
Then you can use their font config confs
Here is the list they are using: https://hastebin.com/fukibunuji.conf
Copy paste what you have in your ubuntu install, then believe me, fonts will look similar!
Make sure to also install the ubuntu font familly
https://archlinux.org/packages/community/any/ttf-ubuntu-font...
And set your font hinting to: slight
Screenshots:
https://i.imgur.com/lKgvBeG.png
Looks good even on YouTube with Dark Theme:
The hand me down parts, while not ancient, were still old enough that I had expected Windows 10 to be able to support it when I installed it on the SSD for that machine. Wifi and Webcam both did not work after Windows finished installing and detecting hardware/updating.
Windows 10 later decided to reboot my system, unprompted, when I still had a project file open in Premiere.
How far Linux has come is honestly refreshing. How long Windows has continued to have absolute dealbreaker issues is astounding.
Also, that’s why even printers need to come with a CD of Windows drivers (probably for the imaginary CD drive that no longer comes with the computer)
What keeps you using Ubuntu after all these years?
You can install Ubuntu and it'll work. Easy. No other distro I've tried (Fedora, Suse, Manjaro, Mint, Mageia) is as easy.
If you remember the earliest builds, they included a video of Nelson Mandela explaining ubuntu and implied it as a light, legally unencumbered OS for the world. I was helping build labs in East Africa at the time, and it was a fantastic choice for running scientific operations because of its relative UI cohesion and simplicity over Debian while allowing access to its vast repositories and package groups.
I kind of lost all faith when the power trips started happening across the GNOME Foundation and elsewhere and moved to less divisively ambitious distros that were more responsive to their users.
I've never had issues installing or using Linux on hardware I picked, but I understand the struggles of working around non-spec and proprietary chipsets without drivers. I don't use non-free drivers in most cases, so having hardware that doesn't struggle with them is paramount.
I've stuck with xUbuntu because it seems to be the most sane of the bunch when it comes to defaults and preinstalled software. Once installed, it does a good job of staying out of my way UI wise.
I'd probably use something like Arch or rolling my own for work if these apps weren't necessary!
I'm curious if the apps you're talking about are not mainstream.
I'm using Fedora on my personal hardware where I don't remember encountering much (Linux-supported) software that wouldn't work. I had to tweak something to get e.g. the native Spotify client working, and it would probably have been easier on Ubuntu for which it's packaged, but problems are relatively few and far between.
On the other hand, in the workplace I've only had Windows in recent years, so it'd be nice to know if there are blind spots in work-oriented software that I've missed.
One specific Linux issue I ran into repeatedly is that Chrome and Chromium by default refuse to trust Linux graphics drivers and instead do software rendering. It turns out, software rendering makes your browser really slow and makes it burn tons of battery when not plugged in. I eventually figured out how to enable most acceleration for Chrome. However, there were several electron apps like Zoom that didn't expose any option to enable hardware acceleration. The zoom desktop app was completely unusable for me on Linux. Instead, I used the browser app exclusively.
Slack was similarly unusable without hardware acceleration but to its credit exposed an option to enable it.
* Setting custom startup flags to chrome
* accessing a hidden dev-specific page and turning on acceleration features that were deemed unsupported or experimental.
This page looks related though I don't remember if these exact instructions worked for me or not: https://www.linuxuprising.com/2021/01/how-to-enable-hardware.... I had to do a bunch of research before I arrived at a working solution.
After I enabled these features, my desktop started encountering a problem where I would have to kill and restart the display manager once, and thereafter the display manager would occasionally hang and I'd have to restart it.
It was manageable with a few days research and technical skill, but it's not the kind of thing you would expect most people to put up with.
Another thing to note, Chrome's software renderer didn't seem to play well with my skylake? integrated graphics. Not only was it slow, but buggy with screen tearing and other visual artifacts. So I had to get acceleration working so my browser would both render properly and be reasonably responsive and performant.
Except for decent power management on laptops, and certain Bluetooth headsets.
Furthermore they've introduced power-profiles-daemon in Fedora 35 [2] by default, which allow granular-ish control similar to Windows' "Power Mode" option and PopOS' system76-power.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/ImprovedLaptopBattery... [2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Power_Profiles_Daemon
I even tried the beta of Fedora 35 which still had awful power management for me. After a couple of days I installed the latest to tlp to see if it had improved the situation since my last try. Still no where near Windows and requires disabling the new power profiles daemon.
Maybe things would be better for me at this point if I had an Intel based laptop but my previous one was and the situation then was the same.
I'm using Ubuntu for 7 years and I have to admit that more unstable system I can't find. No dist upgrade was successful for me, I don't have a week without something crashed, and right now I had to make downgrade of kernel in Ubuntu 21.10 just to boot the computer.
But I still can't shutdown or restart is safely because it crashes during the process of turning off.
I don't know why I'm here, in Linux land. All this is so pathetic I can't even describe it.
Servers on linux are cool, but desktop is a pain. Change my mind!
I went back to Windows with WSL. My employer relies heavily on Outlook and especially the Outlook calendar. The equivalent in Thunderbird does not work well at all with missed invites/missed reminders/missed meetings.
WSL with Ubuntu is amazing for dev work!
Play on Linux.
Lutris.
I installed a game that had a Linux release that blew up on ALSA libraries. The ultimate fix was to install the Windows version over Wine.
Linux > Steam > Proton > Windows Game
works better than
Linux > Wine > Steam > Windows Game
There's really no reason to be running Steam in Wine when Steam runs natively within Linux and Proton does the work for you for each individual game.