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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I agree with this. Linux Desktop is fine if what you need is essentially a web kiosk, and if you happen to be doing webdev work or a few other coding disciplines. It's all the many and varied other usecases that exist where it falls down hard, and the really unfortunate part is that when you express that this is why you don't use it the community seems flabbergasted that you don't just want a web kiosk and aren't a webdev. It's kind of maddening.

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It’s come a long way for other uses, though. We have decent 3D modeling, paint, office suites, and gaming (better than Mac, almost as good as Windows). It’s still not quite there, I’ll grant it, but it does feel miles closer than the last time I used Linux (a decade or so ago).

It will never be there. Adobe and Microsoft won’t allow it. There can’t be a replacement for industry standard tools (like Word, Excel, Illustrator, Premiere) unless the replacement becomes the new standard.

Linux desktop is very big in VFX at least.

Except the little details that to work around the usual fragmentation, the VFX industry created a standard for what is supposed to be a VFX workstation, and they couldn't care less about the proprietary nature of Nvidia drivers.

> There can’t be a replacement for industry standard tools (like Word, Excel, Illustrator, Premiere) unless the replacement becomes the new standard

I thought about this in the past and disagree. You can already see it with google docs. Office file format interop is becoming irrelevant because the new format is just an url you point your browser to. I worked at a company that used gdocs and had a total of 0 complaints about sending customers a link to a gdoc instead of a docx attachment. There is no need for an industry standard anymore.

As for adobe tools, ok they might still be an issue currently.

Google docs is useable if what one expects from a word processor is being a digital typewriter with Write like features.

The people needing advanced features of Office are a tiny minority

Except each minority wants a different set of Office features.

It's like that now, but Google Docs will eventually start moving in on Word's more sophisticated feature set.

Sure, like it has already done so for the last decade.

Google docs, Office online and Adobe cloud are giving these a run for their money. Adobe cloud is probably the least successful of three purely due to price and high piracy levels.

I believe Premiere is very popular for mid-range stuff, but it's not really the "industry standard". If that was anything, I think it'd probably be Avid Media Composer. Linux has (freemium / non-Free) Davinci Resolve, which is increasingly popular in the mid range, across all the main platforms.

Edit: The multimedia things I find really painfully missing in Linux are Izotope RX9 and Kontakt.

Do you use Bitwig?

Never tried it. For recording (which I have to admit I haven't done any of for a while) I mostly use Ardour.

Those programs have certainly gained a lot of features in the past 10 years. But they're just as user-unfriendly as they were before. Look at OpenOffice from 10 years ago vs LibreOffice today. The window is more cluttered with buttons and toolbars, but the experience for a MS Office or Mac Write user who sits down for the first time is about the same.

Windows/MacOS are great for developing native software for the respective platform. For virtually every other development scenario i can think of, Linux is imho the weapon of choice, not just web development.

How about editing or colour grading a commercially-released movie?

OTOH, Blender and DaVinci Resolve have first class support for Linux.

How many people are doing that? But as to your question, wasn’t the original high-performance version of Da Vinci Resolve only available on Linux?

You’d use a specific workstation, not a general purpose counter. That workstation is probably something like a quantel rio,

Rio was apparently Quantel's last ever product, released seven years ago. These days I don't think there's any reason to use specialist computing hardware, although if you're high-end you'd have a bunch of specialist input devices and calibrated HDR monitors.

Oh yea they were bought by grass valley. Been a long time since I was in that area.

Nobody is grading on a laptop, they are doing it in a proper post production suite with a dedicated workstation, same with audio, and editing

DaVinci Resolve is historically a Unix (IRIX) program, and works best on Linux; post-houses who have dedicated Resolve workstations generally use Linux.

> colour grading a commercially-released movie

I'm wondering if you deliberately picked an example where the undisputed industry standard runs on Linux.

I didn't! I had no clue. I'm even surprised Linux has good support for the colour space needed for colour grading.

No, that's just plain wrong. Me, my family and everyone in my company use Linux exclusively for everything, and did so for the past 15 years. We use it for photo editing as well as CRM, video editing as well as videoconferencing, gaming as well as office management, etc.

But at what cost? What did your family give up in terms of time, money, mental load, and having to do things on Android or iOS because we use Linux in this household?

Sure, it seems to work well enough for you, but what are you asserting? That everyone else who is claiming Linux Desktop isn't a good fit for what they use a computer for is intellectually lazy?

I think that's a trap Linux Desktop evangelists have fallen into because they can't stand to recognize the truth that maybe a collection of fragmented pseudo-platforms cobbled together from disparately developed software --mostly by hobbyists-- just isn't actually as good at a lot of things as something developed by one well funded professional team as an actual platform.

I think the way some of the Linux Desktop community denigrates people who don't use it and pretends that there are no legitimate reasons anyone reasonably competent wouldn't is doing the community as a whole a great disservice and has been for twenty years. Not only are they driving otherwise interested parties away, but they're also refusing to admit to deep seeded problems that subsequently are never addressed.

No I'm asserting that people are more comfortable and productive with the system they know best. I'm just saying that I know many people who are perfectly happy and productive using MacOS, or Linux, and that your dismissive comment was pretty rude and uninformed.

It's just that most of the complaints about switching to Linux, i.e. it's hard to do X, are wrong. My dad won't try it because he can't run MSword. There's nothing you need to do in Word that can't be done as easily with Linux workflows. There are exceptions, but most of the time it's true. It does mean learning new workflows, but that's usually as hard as it feels.

I'm not a graphics person so I can't say if gimp can replace Photoshop, but a lot of little tasks I used to open Photoshop for on Mac are easily handled by GIMP or even imagemagick. The majority of users would be fine learning these tools.

It's where you take some anecdotes and then apply "most" and "the majority" to them that I really disagree with. There are a lot of serious computer users and professionals who would love to be using a FOSS OS free from all the bullshit of Microsoft and Apple, but are unable unable to because even if it is theoretically possible to do what they do on Linux, the headaches of doing so are just not worth it and it doesn't look like the Linux Desktop community is very interested in changing that because it is "good enough" as far as they are concerned.

That's wrong.

Linux works for myriad of usecases the same way that windows and macos do. And it sucks at a fraction of other ones but windows and macos do too suck big times at other things.

The difference with my grandmother and most average people is she hasn't been forced through school and work to the windows or mac ecosystem. She wasn't used to software x and y. When she asked how to do things, she didn't have any preconceptions. Resistance to change is the main deterrent to people. Most people used to amiga or atari suffured when they had to learn windows. Most people are struggling a bit when switching to MacOS, I sure do as well. The difference is you seallow it easily because you actually bought a freaking expensive equipment and feel forced to get used to it. While if you are just a format + reinstall away from windows you will just not have the patience to dedicate the time to discover the UI, shortcuts and softwares to achieve the same thing but with a slightly different workflow.

If anything, Linux and the BSD have never struggled from unsolvable usability or compatibility issues, provided the hardware was chosen carefully, they struggled because they are free, are installable on commodity hardware already sold with other OS and thus aren't taken seriously.

I agree the usability issues of Linux are not unsolvable, they're just unsolved and have been for 20 years because the Linux Desktop community in general isn't that interested in solving them.

My parents used a Linux desktop for years in the late '90s and '00s, mostly because it was substantially easier for me to help provide support for. The only reason they no longer do is because tablets are simply a much more convenient form factor to do virtually everything they need to do on a daily basis.

There is a point at which usability is not about the specific interface, but that it's about applications and the OS being consistent. I, as someone using and programming computers for upwards of 40 years now feel that software is getting harder to use: it is less and less consistent while features are more and more difficult to discover. I hate the direction Gnome has taken where almost everything about the UI gets thrown out and re-written every few years, with features that I use simply disappearing. I hate newer versions of iOS where more and more gestures are added, while things like the home button are now gone and my phone pocket dials or turns on the light if I put it in my pocket the wrong way (which wasn't a problem in the first few generations). UI changes take mental resources away from the task at hand as one has to figure out how to do something that was easy to do before. An interface that that looks hard to use initially may well end up being easier to use if it is consistent and discoverable.

My number 1 UI complaint about GUIs these days is about the complete lack of keyboard shortcuts. Google Earth is one of the worst offenders: so many of the menus and dialog boxes have no keyboard shortcuts. The ridiculous part is that the Amiga did better on this measure more than 30 years ago. There was even an official Amiga User Interface Style Guide published in 1991 that spelled out how apps should look and feel. Even most MS-DOS apps had a consistent style to their interfaces and menus with shortcuts. MacOS may be one of the few in which menus remain fairly consistent and discoverable.

I now understand why the greybeards were grumpy with us young whippersnappers going and replacing the world. I am become one.

I don't agree either. I have been using Linux as a primary desktop for 24 years and I don't have any major issue. I have a lot however, when I am using a Windows computer.

Try gaming then. Linux for gaming sucks. It’s been improving but it’s still dogshit. Especially with how games are always updating now and are constantly adding new content/changes. Drivers are often terrible too.

Gaming on computers is such an edge case for a tiny fraction of the population, the hardcore gamers. Most people simply don't even have a powerful enough computer to run AAA games anyway and buy a playstation, xbox or switch to play games.

And I always had fun playing hedgewars on linux with some friends, thank you.

It is funny you mention drivers because: - printing and scanning on my fedora laptops is a totally flawless and transparent experience, only requiring at the beginning to install a package which was pretty quick using gnome software. Doing the same on the windows laptop of my girlfriend required spending 10 minutes getting the correct driver on the manufacturer website, installing the drivers including a ton of random unneeded software, rebooting the laptop and now everytime she wants to print anything she gets some annoying popup windows. - the prior scanner I used for 25y before moving country was still perfectly supported on my linux distributions while the last available driver for windows was for windows 2000. Better hardware support from Linux actually allowed me to use my scanner more than 10y longer than if I had been using a Windows or Mac.

Some exotic hardware may not be supported at time of release on linux but all in all if you do your homework before shopping there is no issue.

You're kidding, right? PC gaming is huge.

Huge in money because gamers spend a tons of money on hardware and games.

It is not huge in term of % of computing users. Most computers sold are tablets and laptops without any decent GPU. Most people cannot run less than 10y olds AAA games (and many of those usually works well on linux with proton anyway).

> Most computers sold are tablets and laptops without any decent GPU.

Sure, but we're talking about desktop computers here.

The only development you can't do on Linux is Apple and maybe some Microsoft related stuff

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