Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

Linux has taken over the server space.

But Linux can't even keep up with OSX in market share, or more importantly, developer effort for games/apps/etc.

So Gnome should ask itself after about two decades... are they helping or hurting. KDE should ask itself a similar question.

Gnome has several active Gnome2 forks out there and Gnome3, KDE is simply ... ok

And even then, Unity was another attempt, and who knows what ChromeOS is built on.

Linux already pissed away the golden opportunity of Windows 8. Now that Apple is leading an ISA shift from x86 to ARM on the desktop, Linux needs to get its desktop situation ready.

Linux and OSS are uniquely positioned to outclass Windows in the ISA move, arguably they are in a better position than OSX was in the M1 move. A huge portion of its applications can simply be ported with a decently supported recompile and I think there are package infrastructures that will well support an ARM ISA changeover.

The issue is the desktop. The blocker is the desktop. The barrier is the desktop.

I welcome System76 to take no prisoners in this critical period. If they fail, well, oh well. If they push Gnome/KDE to keep up out of paranoia, well, good.

Just please people, please. Windows is awful. OSX is becoming a jail.

The thing that's keeping Linux from taking over the desktop is the thing that kept Windows from taking over the desktop: OEM preinstalls. As soon as there are enough OEMs shipping consumer kit that runs Linux (and doesn't crumple under Microsoft pressure) then Linux will be a force to be reckoned with on the desktop. Otherwise, all of the DE bikeshedding in the world won't get Linux's foot in the door.

It's a long shot, because Microsoft pretty much controls and defines what a "PC" is now, but maybe there's an opportunity for Raspberry Pi, Pine64 and other SBC vendors here.

I have heard people saying that for 20 years. "We just need to get more OEM preinstalls and then Windows will fail." Meanwhile, various OEMs have come and gone (i.e. they all crumpled under the pressure) and nothing happened. System76 has been around for 16 years, they have their niche but that's about it. Ultimately, they are a hardware company making a distribution that works well with their laptops, and that's all they can really do.

For any of these companies, I would seriously ask them "do you think you can be the next Microsoft or Apple, and if so what would you do to get there". And if the answer has something to do with trying to convince OEMs to install Linux, or trying to ship more random embedded devices, then I probably say they need to come up with a new plan.

I understand the sentiment, but I think the forgotten part on OEM installs is, current OEM offerings are on more premium models. I would be curious to see what would happen if Dell or Hp made like a 250-400 dollar laptop and put it on shelves in Best Buy and Walmart with Ubuntu, Pop or Mint installed. I don't know if it would work, but interesting to try. Like I said, most OEM install tries have been on premium hardware, or in the case of the PineBook, for the person who wants to tinker.

EDIT: Especially since winning on the desktop would be mass adoption. Most home computers are not Dell XPs Or Lenovo thinkpads. And marketing cheap laptops geared to students works in the case of ChromeOS

Dell does already ship a laptop with Ubuntu installed. No I don't think Best Buy and Walmart carry it, because the only target market for it is developers. I remember seeing lots of cheap netbooks that had a Linux option but no stores carried them because nobody besides developers and geeks actually wants that.

My experience with Dell's laptops, despite being supposedly ubuntu supported, would randomly restart, trackpad stopped working, and their docks wouldn't be compatible with linux.

Dell arguably did more damage: by releasing a flawed product, then the rest of the OEMs said "See? No one wants linux".

I think Walmart tried the downmarket linux thing about ... wow, ten years ago maybe? I see an article on Everex Green GPC, I thought there was another one too.

But.. the linux desktop is way better today compared to then, despite my bitching about it.

Maybe a kickass turnkey cloud-based desktop solution would be a big uptake. AWS has won servers, but why shouldn't they win desktops too? What company doesn't want to move to remote desktops for everyone?

That would probably take some investment in stabilizing the remote/RDP video drivers, a lot like what has always plagued linux desktop: video support and drivers.

I don't think this is going to help at all. There are already way too many desktops for Linux and none of them are pushing GNOME or KDE to keep up. To me this is just another one to add to the pile sadly. We already went through this whole song and dance with Canonical and Unity and that ended up dead as well.

ChromeOS (and Android) are their own things and not related to any of the other projects. If somebody was building a new desktop and had a few hundred million dollars to spare I would say just do that similar to how Google did it. A company with those resources would be wasting them by involving itself with the open source desktops, those projects are perpetually in a state of being 5-10 years behind. Of course that means they would have to bring their own app ecosystem too.

So?

Linux works fine for me on the desktop. That’s what I care about. Melt neighbour may prefer BSD, or OSX, or windows, that’s fine

The idea that it’s a war to be won is sad. The only “war” should be against monoculture, and HN in particular loves monoculture.

The problem with linux is not the desktop itself, but almost the whole of the userspace.

First of all, security, or the lack of it. The age-old xkcd is still true, where an attacker can’t install a video card driver on my laptop, but can encrypt, read, send, record basically everything I actually care about on a desktop, and it doesn’t even have to try (seriously, just hide a bash script wherever you want or append to bashrc). Running everything as the same user when no finer grade authorization is available is simply a no go.

Yeah, there is flatpak but I feel it tries to be two things at once, and not being the best in either of them (package management and sandbox). I think we should not imitate what docker or other OSs do, when we have nix, which is imo a superior solution to the problem and we should embrace it. As for the security, we do have SELinux which works very well for courser authorization (fedora does a decent job at it!), but it should be combined with a supportive capability-based security system a la Android, where new processes run as different user from the actual one, and all IPC should happen through some controlled manner.

My second gripe: why do linux people insist on using C for goddamn everything? And no, I’m not advocating for “rewrite everything in X”, but come on, should gnome’s welcome screen be a C executable, really? Especially knowing that bash scripting (which is even worse than C from a correctness POV in my opinion) is the often used alternative —- meaning that performance is nowhere near an issue as goddamn scratch is faster than bash. So other than pipewire, there really are not many places where such low level control/performance is needed, meaning that Java, C# or the other litany of GCd languages could work perfectly fine, and they would likely even increase productivity/maintainability.

What do you think of System76 developing their own desktop environment?

HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29137180

Sounds cool. If they can fund it & have fun doing it could be neat.

All desktops started at Zero and competition will drive others to stay ahead or fall behind

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