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Comment by rthomas6 | Hacker News Reader

What is wrong with Linux nowadays? I've used it as my main driver for long enough that I can't see the big problems that are preventing everyone from switching. Like, it seems easier than even WSL to me. Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else. If a person has good hardware compatibility, in the face of the bloated pushyess of Windows 11, why not use Linux? What am I missing?

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>What is wrong with Linux nowadays?

Linux is great for doing things on your own. Where it fails is when you have to sync up with other people's proprietary norms.

For example, I'm a researcher who gets funding from the US government. I can do my day-to-day technical work in Linux. But I'm forced to still use Windows to present PowerPoint slides over Teams to my funding overlords, because that's what they use, and I have to conform to that. Linux ports/knock-offs of those products just don't interoperate with proprietary MS systems well enough for me to rely on them. Unless the US government (or at least the relevant parts I deal with) ditches Microsoft products, I have to keep a foot in MS-land to carry out the accountability parts of my job.

Can you use the online version of PowerPoint and Teams? If not, what is causing the issues?

Beginner friendly distos seem to have solved the package management problem, and there are adequate desktop environments, office suites, browsers, gaming, and everything else.

But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it. Professionals need "good" and judge that by the standards of what is available on other platforms. 95% compatibility with the industry standard doesn't cut it. 80% of the features working at least 90% of the time doesn't cut it. Free instead of paying a few hundred bucks for the extra percentage points isn't even a question worth asking from a business perspective.

Linux has great software, sometimes the best available on any platform, in certain areas. Developer tools is an obvious one. Servers is another. Some of the multimedia stuff is good. The picture for running games is getting better all the time even if most of them are still ports of some kind rather than truly native applications.

But as much as I hate to say it, the reality is that in most areas that most users are going to care about the Linux ecosystem is still lacking in both quality and quantity. I'd bet on the evolution of web technology disrupting Windows long before the Linux desktop does. But that is hardly a solution to the phone-home and forced-update problems that a lot of us don't like about modern Windows.

> But for professional use "adequate" doesn't cut it.

However bad Linux is at package management, Windows is even worse. So I'm not sure how your argument convinces people that Windows package managers are superior?

Most business software can be installed by the network admins, software that can't doesn't matter for a lot of these companies and just won't be used. Even in my smaller but rapidly growing company they are doing more to restrict what software can be installed. Easy install of packages isn't what a large company wants

I didn't say anything about package managers. What counts is the software that is available. The best package manager in the world isn't worth anything if it doesn't have the packages that you need.

This article has a laundry list of things that annoyed the heck out of me. So I decided to try and dual boot to Ubuntu on my Surface Pro 7.

This may come across as a rant, but I do not mean it that way. I know the tears and sweat people have pored it into this. Anyway, here is the list of things that I found are broken:

- HDPI monitor support is BAD. Unity cannot do fractional scaling, resulting in perfect fonts on the menu, but such poor fonts in firefox that my eyes started to hurt.

- The SurfaceLinux sub-reddit seemed to suggest KDE/Plasma is better at this, which it is. I am trying this as my daily driver. The LTS version is still on X11, which means a common app like Obisdian.md actually caused the system to go to swap; I am still trying to figure out if this is the culprit.

- Trying Plasma on Wayland caused the system to hang. Fair enough, this is still under development.

- KDE minimal install, in its infinite wisdom, does not include the network manager applet. It is 2022, do you think users will not want to connect to wifi?

- Each time I switch from clamshell mode to multi-monitor, I need to reset the layout of the widgets on my desktop.

- Another easter egg in fractional scaling; the size of the cursor changes when you hover over certain windows or the task manager panel. I am not as familiar with the Linux ecosystem as I used to be, so I am not sure why this happens.

- Abandoning all hope of legible, anti-aliased fonts, I have tried to increase the font size across the system and in certain apps like Firefox and VS Code. You should see some of the hilariously bad KDE setting screens that cannot work with a font size of 16px (the default is 12px).

- SDDM seems to think I want an onscreen virtual keyboard even though I have a keyboard attached. It literally does not show me the login screen. I have to blindly tap in my password making sure focus is not lost on that box lest I never be able to login.

- Every time firefox starts the application renders like there is a rift in reality in the left bottom corner of screen. A forced maximize fixes this, but still.

I love my Wobbly Windows. I so want it to succeed. But architecturally, something just feels broken. The split between a display manager, a window manager and a compositor just means that instead of having to worry about one thing to make sure I have a working display, I need to worry about three things.

Ubuntu Unity the desktop environment Ubuntu abandoned back in 18.04? On X11 with Gnome 3 with Ubuntu 20.04 it does actually support fractional scaling and if IIRC does it in a somewhat similar way to MacOS where it scales up the res*2 then downscales it. For whatever reason either GNOME didn't accept Ubuntu's changes or they didn't submit them upstream so it doesn't work in any other distro for GNOME 3. It actually works pretty well IME. It possible to mimic it with the right call to xrandr in other DEs.

I still run Unity on a bunch of machines here, but it's old now and starting to bitrot. I haven't even tried on the 1 or 2 boxes that have hi-DPI displays: it's not worth it.

On non-*buntu distros, I use Xfce. It can't do fractional scaling.

Only a handful of desktops support it. From my research, I found 3:

• GNOME Shell. No thank you.

• KDE 5. Better, but still a no thank you from me.

• Cinnamon.

I looked at Cinnamon on Ubuntu and Debian, but the versions are quite out of date (Cinnamon 4.8.x). I wanted the latest 5.x series, and that means Linux Mint, the parent distro of Cinnamon.

So I now have a box with Mint 20.3 and a Liquorix kernel. It works well, it natively can mount my NTFS partition with the in-kernel driver and understand a Core i5 11th-gen GPU.

Cinnamon is a little clunky and a little hard to customise, but it does actually work in the way I broadly expect and can put up with, unlike either GNOME 3 or KDE 5.

Lol. I have similar annoyances on mac but my linux is fine. At least i can do something about it on linux.

There's a lot of software not on Linux or that doesn't run well on Linux.

People pick their OS based on what software they want to run, not the other way around. And they pick from what they can buy. Go into a BestBuy and you can choose between Windows machines, Apple machines, and a few Chromebooks.

If you did manage to buy a Linux machine somewhere, you are going to be disappointed when you go back into that BestBuy to get a printer or webcam or some other accessory and the box says "compatible with macOS and Windows".

But the issue here is not inherently with Linux. It is more so with vendors of printers making drivers. If Brother feels that there are enough people running Linux and want to own a Brother printer, they will make the driver. Maybe that is the issue we need solve, or at least the part we need to be vocal about. If brother gets a significant number of emails asking for linux support, perhaps they will finally make linux a first class citizen?

I think it's interesting you chose Brother here, because Linux support is a first class citizen -- they not only offer CUPS drivers, they offer Deb and RPM packages that also set up dependencies.

I just picked the first vendor off the top of my head and Brother came to mind. Feel free to replace it with any other vendor/manufacturer. In no way is it meant to single out brother as being poor on Linux.

> But the issue here is not inherently with Linux. It is more so with vendors of printers making drivers.

Users don't care. For them things either work or not. Users are not going to e-mail Brother or Nvidia or Microsoft to fix their issues with printers, video cards or Onedrive. How is that so hard to understand?

If the vendors got metrics that showed that desktop linux user share was enough and viable enough, they would. The issue is, Linux users are a small share of the desktop market. But, if that number grew, it changes. Hardware vendors would port their drivers over once the potential revenue of customers on a different platform outweighs the cost in doing so. Otherwise, I don't think Brother or Nvidia really give a damn if an end user is running Windows or Linux, they just care that enough of those user exists in their respective ecosystem to justify the engineering costs.

This is true, but still - people want to print documents. They don't want to run Linux (or Windows). If they can't print documents, that's a problem.

The solution was Google Cloud Print, IMO. That was a great idea. Who cares what you run, as long as it can connect to the internet you can print. I don't know how in-depth it got with the various crazy menu systems

That brings up an excellent point. Services like these start to eventually render driver support useless. I haven't heard of Google cloud print, but I just looked it up. Even though it looks to be EOLed, there are alternatives still going, just not from google. My HP printer has an app. I can push documents to the app that goes up to HP then comes back down on to my printer, if I have my printer configured with that. I think my last printer, which was a bother had something similar where I could set it up on my home network in such a way that I can just email a document to a special bother email address which then prints it out on the brother printer.

People pick everything based on marketing.

Maybe until they get burned.

Ironically, printers are now easier to get working on Linux than they are on Windows. The whole no-driver setup in the unix world murders the "must install this driver and possibly restart" shenanigans on Windows.

I was quite surprised when I switched my main dev machine to Linux and the printer not only appeared by itself, but worked out of the box.

With Linux while sitting idle my laptop burns battery about twice as fast as it does on Windows while I go about my normal workflow. This is a laptop which is certified for both Fedora and Ubuntu.

I've been wondering about that as well, never found a comprehensive answer to why is the difference so stark. I'd be willing to use Linux on my laptop when the difference would be 10-12%, but as of now I just can't. I have laptop because I need to use it on the go and linux makes it harder for me.

Using auto-cpufreq or other cpu frequency scaling services can make my laptop run way longer than with windows.

I have tried tlp which includes cpu frequency scaling on numerous distributions over the last couple of years with little if any noticeable difference.

Well for me the time running on battery jumps from 2 hours to +10 hours.

On an AMD Ryzen 5 5500U

Depends on the model and the up-to-dateness of its firmware.

My main travel laptop is still an old Thinkpad X220, because of the great keyboard.

It lasts considerably longer on Ubuntu 20.04 than in Windows 10 $LATEST. In Windows, it runs too hot to have on my lap, and the fans run constantly.

In Ubuntu, it runs cool and I rarely hear the fan at all.

Check your firmware is current: that's step 1.

Installation is utterly broken and hopeless on Linux. Let's not pretend like it's in any way ready for the general consumer. Including Ubuntu, the "flagship" poster boy for widescale adoption of Linux.

We're more likely to see people going back to dumb-terminals with GUIs being streamed to their ChromeOS from a server running linux than we are to see people using Linux.

What part of installation is broken? It's literally a GUI that you can click "continue" on until you get to the pretty looking progress bar.

Application installation is broken. If software isn't hand-curated in the distro's repository and kept up to date by someone, then get ready to set up a dev environment and compile from source. Hopefully you will not break your entire system trying to cater to whims of whatever insane build environment it uses. This includes new versions that no one has got around to packaging yet.

AppImage and Flatpak are making inroads to eliminating this foolishness, but I still routinely run into software that isn't yet on board with that.

This reads like a comment from Slashdot, circa '97. If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft.

Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.

> This reads like a comment from Slashdot, circa '97

Sadly, while some parts of the Linux Desktop have come a long way since the 90s, many others have not.

> If you have a "toxic" relationship with inept/malicious application software, break ties with it now just as you should from Microsoft.

Presumably people use software to do something, and many times there simply isn't alternative software that does what you want to do and you're stuck with it even though it is toxic.

> Even under your rare worst-case scenario, recovery has never been easier with "live" flash drives. No need to live in fear of breaking something.

Here's something else you might have read on Slashdot in 97 that's still applicable today: "Linux is free only if your time isn't worth anything". My fear isn't losing data or being unable to get back to the working state, it's the time I lose having to go through the effort of doing that when the simple case of just installing a goddamned application shouldn't be such a pain in the first place.

This describes Windows as well though, just read all the complaints from the original article and thread. Sadly there is no decent OS any longer, they all had/have their flaws and now they are being dumbed down and control taken away.

You'll find no argument from me on that score. It's just a matter of which is the least suck for any given person's needs at this point.

>Here's something else you might have read on Slashdot in 97 that's still applicable today: "Linux is free only if your time isn't worth anything". My fear isn't losing data or being unable to get back to the working state, it's the time I lose having to go through the effort of doing that when the simple case of just installing a goddamned application shouldn't be such a pain in the first place.

I am a long time windows user who recently switched to PopOS.I'll say its getting better. This was one thing I was worried about switch back to linux. After I got fed up with what Microsoft is doing with Windows 11, I decided I had it and switched. So far it has not been as a pain in the ass as much as it used to be. There are a few things I still have to tweak to get my work flow back to the way it was on Windows.

MS Office. That's it. That's the reason I went with a Mac instead.

Nobody is kicking MS off of that pedestal, and unless we get some significant anti-trust legislation, we aren't getting that on Linux.

I was a Linux network admin FOR the US Government, in a datacenter, and had to use Windows.

Loss of familiarity - “where’s my cheese gone?!” - seems likely

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