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Comment by pizza234 | Hacker News Reader

Linux Desktop doesn't really suck anymore. Enough time passed that the experience of the high-level (ie. desktop) part of any distro is good enough*.

Worst part of Linux is the death by a thousand paper cuts. Bluetooth may work or not work. Apps may be compatible or not with Wayland. Power consumption may not be efficient. Computer may not resume from sleep. The browser may burn CPU when playing videos. Etc.etc.

Lots of stuff like this can happen, and I guess, anyone will experience one or two. I've been using Linux for a long time, and there is always something.

Everything can be fixed with patience (and experience, that one may not have), but Linux is definitely an O/S that needs some work, once one goes past a casual use. Casual users may not notice.

My favourite niggles: clipboard not being always shared, and file managers not sharing bookmarks data across them. These are definitely embarrassing.

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> "Worst part of Linux is the death by a thousand paper cuts."

Funny you should say this, because it's exactly that feeling that drove me away from Windows. For many years I tolerated Windows because "It's what everyone uses", but eventually there came a point where the "paper cuts" just added up to where I could no longer tolerate it. The annoyances and frustrations were bad enough that if I did not have Linux to fall back on, I would literally have given up computer work entirely.

This is my perspective too. Whenever I find myself having to use Windows (which these days is just for games with Windows-only anti-cheat), the annoyances feel so much more pronounced.

especially funny is that an OS called "Windows" has a laughably crappy window manager. Having to move the mouse to the small titlebar to move a window? having to hit a corner or side very precisely to resize? You'd think no developer working on windows ever tried the damn thing.

You can do both of these operations using the Windows Key + Arrow Keys on the keyboard.

what does this do?

I have now seen what this does, but that is nothing compared to what nearly all window managers on Linux allows, next time you're at such an installation, try hold alt down, and press anywhere in a window with left mouse and move, or just somewhere remotely close to a corner and right click and move.

Hardware producers, inevitably, produce drivers for Windows first (and possibly, only). This of course doesn't guarantee quality drivers, but does guarantee drivers, which is better than no drivers at all, at least in the short/mid term.

I did have problems in the past due to recent Ryzen and ethernet drivers for example, and using last Linux kernels (or even compiling them) is something that can't be asked to the general public.

Fragmentation is also a very real problem, and it's inherent in Linux. I've discussed in another post about fragmentation of the GUI toolkit libraries problem, which has very visible consequences in daily usage.

> Bluetooth may work or not work

In my 4yrs+ of using Linux, this has never been a problem for me.

> Apps may be compatible or not with Wayland

App developer's fault. Besides xwayland bridges that gap.

> Power consumption may not be efficient

Use Wayland for GUI apps. Use more cli applications.

> Computer may not resume from sleep

This one I have to concede. It's been wonky but for me now seems reliably stable with my setup.

> The browser may burn CPU when playing videos

This one has been fixed recently. Chromium and Firefox already support hw video decode with Firefox set to make it the default configuration in FF 103.

> clipboard not being always shared

I don't know what your setup is but gnome's gpaste clipboard experience is 100x better than any OS I've used before.

> file managers not sharing bookmarks data across them

Have never come across this use case. Why would you expect this to be a feature? Even Windows doesn't support this feature when you swap file managers.

>Use Wayland for GUI apps. Use more cli applications.

How about "the OS display server, composer and GUI and should be well interested in the OS and perfectly usable out fo the box for all use cases".

My free time is precious and I don't want to play sysadmin on my home computer with Wayland and X11.

Windows and MacOS have their display servers figured out for decades, so the user doesn't have to think about what a display server is, while Linux is still juggling 2 different ones both with their pros and cons depending on your apps and hardware, one or the other might or or it might not.

I work in cybersecurity so everyone in the company is fluent in Linux which we use on a daily basis in various flavors both CLI and a few DEs, yet nearly all of use either Windows or Mac or both at home. Have a guess why that is.

I suspect your colleagues prefer Windows & Mac over Linux not because of Wayland incompatibility but rather because the software selection is better covered over there. E.g gaming software generally targets Windows OS.

It is no secret that Linux software has historically not been targeted at the masses. Add to that, developers who are not interested in publishing software on Linux platforms. You can see why the overall experience might not be that great on desktop Linux compared to Windows or Mac. Even though this might be changing as more users feel comfortable with Linux.

IMO iOS, Windows, Linux all have their strengths and flaws; it would be wrong to compare them side-by-side.

This is a very uninformed opinion of how Linux works. I'll post a few random notions, because there's a bit too much to talk about.

Linux has, because of legacy reasons, a more complex than required clipboard concept. Because of this, different apps may use it in different ways, and have unexpected behaviors. Some applications (I think, but not sure, Libreoffice) may lose the clipboard content when closed. The very fact that one needs clipboard managers to workaround the base clipboard behavior is proof that Linux's clipboard implementation is not working (from a user perspective). And beware that clipboard managers may have unintended security issues (I'm positive some do), ie. storing user data on disk (copying confidential information to the clipboard is inevitable, and you do the maths).

Bluetooth has been historically broken. Bluez has been poorly implementend and documented. Here's an old post: http://www.bennybottema.com/2010/08/08/how-ubuntus-broken-bl...; it's old, but the situation has been bad for a very long time. As of Jul/2022, at least some (potentially all) Ubuntu distros ship with a broken pulseaudio/bluetooth configuration by default; a bug has been opened for a couple of years, and has been ignored by Canonical.

File managers depend on the graphic toolkits used. Applications that use different toolkits will display different file managers, and for example, they won't share bookmarks. This means that you open an application and bookmark a directory, then other applications, and the bookmark is not displayed.

> Use Wayland for GUI apps. Use more cli applications.

Telling the user to change applications because of problems of the operating system is nonsensical.

Everything I shared is from my own personal experience with using desktop Linux. Obviously your experience is going to be different from mine, as that depends on what software we use and what distro we pick.

That said. Bluetooth works as expected on my hardware. Clipboard sharing works as well, there was a time it was missing on gnome terminal but can't say am scratching my head about that one today.

Can't say I've see folder bookmarking across different file managers, even on Windows. You have to point me to examples here.

Telling a user how to reasonably fix a problem trump's whatever misconceptions you have about desktop Linux. They can always put Linux down and use whatever operating system works best for them, if they don't want to try alternative solutions.

> Bluetooth may work or not work. Apps may be compatible or not with Wayland. Power consumption may not be efficient. Computer may not resume from sleep. The browser may burn CPU when playing videos.

Haven't touched Linux desktop for 10+years but funny it's still like this?

Is there any certified hardware that actually has stable Linux desktop experiences?

There are some ubuntu-certified laptops, but I have very little problem with Thinkpads (T480 for personal use).

I am not looking forward to wayland upgrade time. At the moment it's fine, and I'm sure it will all be figured out eventually, but the transition will be a hassle and I have my doubts about whether some features will make it or not.

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