2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop? | Hacker News Reader

2022 was the year of Linux on the Desktop?

justingarrison.com

234 pointsxrayarx341 comments

If you click through to the link, you'll see that the results add up to 150%. That should be a sign that something odd is going on with this survey result and we need to interpret it with caution.

The question was "What is the primary operating system in which you work." (Emphasis mine.) The question itself implies that we should only be able to pick one, and yet the results clearly indicate that more than one was allowed. Most likely, people were listing the OSes they use a lot. A great many of us developers use a commercial OS locally, but also interact with Linux servers or containers on a regular basis.

That said, there's no simple interpretation of that "40% use Linux" number that passes the smell test. It's implausibly high for the number of people who use it as their primary workstation OS, and it's implausibly low for the number of developers who regularly work in Linux. More likely, what this number represents is that different respondents interpreted the question, which appears to have been ambiguously framed, in different and incompatible ways, and so the result is statistically meaningless.

Yep, Previous years = 100%, so the question has changed somehow

https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo...

I guess you could use Windows at work and Linux at home (or viseversa).

I'd bet some people also say Linux becayse they have homeservers and other secondary uses besides their primary driver.

Where I work our laptop runs OSX but we're not allowed to do any work on it (and it's heavily locked down to prevent it.) Instead all of our actual work is done on a machine we ssh into. If you use Windows at home I wonder if it would be wrong to list all three popular OSes.

Now that I'm no longer forced to use a Mac at work, all of my work happens on Linux. I only marginally touch Windows and Mac for testing and builds.

If I can find a good MDM solution for Linux hardware and software, I'll let the employees at my startup use Linux too.

I get a sense that corporate MDM is all that's holding Linux back.

Microsoft just released Linux support (Ubuntu) in their MDM Intune. It’s very barebones yet but provides first fundamental capabilities.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/fundamentals/su...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/user-help/enrol...

Not even Ubuntu, Ubuntu + gnome. Everyone is different but for me gnome feels like osx ui, both of which I dislike immensely.

Isn't MDM very much anathema to the Linux user's philosophy? I've avoided it pretty sternly.

For a personal device. Corporate devices are subject to a whole host of regulations. PCI, HIPAA, etc.

You can't even touch fintech unless your engineers work on MDM'd devices.

You can't trust every single employee to always keep their machine up to date or be on the up and up. Statistically speaking, you'll need it eventually.

Are they? First time I hear that users' desktops are subject to PCI in fin-tech companies.

start with password complexities, prevention of unauthorized access (i.e. screen locks), full disk encryption, so on, for those users who are close to cards/data management.

Using Linux not making people automagically smarter and setting simple passwords or not enabling disk encryption - that kind of stuff I can easily imagine to happen without external curation.

I have worked at 10+ fintech companies in a mix of full time and contract roles and exclusively use QubesOS. No one was able to make a coherent argument how MDM was going to work or help improve the security of a base OS that is not even connected to the internet.

At best I could run something like osquery that sends reports to my sys-net VM that forwards them to to an interested IT group at a set interval, but no one has actually implemented this as I am always enough of an edge case that they can file a special exception for me.

Some fintech orgs do get by with Linux users just using osquery reporting to a central monitoring panel like Kibana or Kolide that can send automated alerts to those not complying.

I see it like that - you can create any car or vehicle to be used on your backyard somewhere in distant village, until you start driving on public roads, selling it to general auditory - then, please, stop being cool kid and start using common practices - i.e. have stop backlights, safety belts, noise levels ...

Linux is just a tool. Yes, just another tool.

I've personally seen multiple, not even single digits of persons, who store they ssh private keys unprotected, not using Full Disk Encryption and so on - most of them even have no idea that booting with `init=/bin/bash` will open their system. Those are average Joe and needs curation.

Industry need to the way to ensure on such things => industry created MDM.

Actually it's finally a sign, someone starts interested in bringing Linux To Desktop. I'm waiting for telemetry to be added - that will assure me of the interest further of Linux as a viable Product, not just concept.

This exists: https://drivestrike.com/solutions/business/

But I think your point is sound. Our totally not monopolistic tech giant friends would never dream of colluding to make mobile device management proprietary. To lose hold of MDM would unravel too much. and iStuff doesn't play nice w/ Linux. If there were a decent way to get Messages and SMS on a desktop Linux OS I would be there today.

Messages and SMS work with Matrix which works great on Linux.

Is Chrome Enterprise for ChromeOS, and the built-in Debian container, an option?

Also, “the primary operating system in which you work” doesn’t necessarily imply desktop. People could be using a Windows or Mac desktop and then primarily work in Linux via remote terminals and/or VMs.

> It's implausibly high for the number of people who use it as their primary workstation OS

This might just be the bias of the circles I move in, but over the last five years me running Linux on the desktop in a development work environment has gone from a weird oddity, to uncommon, to boringly normal. I've had a few non-work tech-adjacent friends ask for opinions on running Linux on Thinkpads for example.

I strongly suspect there's a multitude of factors including the rise of the cloud, the maturation of Linux desktop distros, Linux being the default/only options for things like Raspberry Pi's, developer software being multi-platform, etc.

While some hardware issue still remain, getting Linux compatible hardware of any type is pretty easy. It's not 100% guaranteed situation like Windows is, but you'll have multiple options for whatever you are looking for, which is a massive difference compared to years passed where some hardware categories simply did not have a fully fledge Linux compatible option.

If I'm honest, Linux is...exhausting. I'm technically proficient, but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script. Software updates rarely work. There are random crashes that take hours to fix. I'm about to give in the towel and get a Mac.

I can get it to work because the terminal doesn't scare me, but there's no way I can recommend it to anyone without a certain amount of technical skills.

Not my experience at all. Been running Ubuntu LTS for work for years and updates are just about bulletproof.

Novice Linux users often make the mistake of adding third party repos to their package manager, which almost invariably causes trouble down the line. Some distros (for instance Debian) have a culture of discouraging this practice, while others (particularly Ubuntu) have a user culture which encourages it.

This is easily the most common reason for updates breaking. RPM and dpkg are both nigh bullet proof, and you can generally count on most distros to keep their own package repo in good order. Dependency resolution between out of sync and uncoordinated package repos is where things start to break down.

It doesn't help that every online guide tells people to do this without warning about the consequences. Want to install nginx? Copy this line of script and enter your password, no need to fuss about the details!

The Linux volunteer community needs an attitude shift to start recommending the user friendly method over the complicated methods. You don't need to apt install Chrome, it's in your software store, just like most other programs you probably want. If you go die-hard Linux (Arch, Gentoo, etc.) then perhaps there are too many variations in use to give a clear cross DE answer but on Ubuntu 99% of users are on GNOME with Ubuntu customisations, so you can use the Disks tool instead of dd, the Disk Usage analyser instead of a complicated du grep sort command and the software manager instead of apt for almost every common task.

Linux people are often fond of their command line and so am I, but this way any normal user will quickly shy away from the platform for no good reason. There are also people who have weirdly strict opinions about the "right" way to do things (systemd hate, Wayland hate, vim enthusiasts, bash vs zsh vs fish debates) that ruin the experience for everyone but will leave an especially bad impression for newbies. You'd better know the difference between pacman, apt, dnf, and brew before you go to the Arch forum or expect to be insulted for being such a complete idiot to even consider asking a question.

There's no singular 'linux experience', all the problems you list are expected problems with some software on linux, but work just fine with other software systems on linux. Unfortunately many of the defaults chosen by Ubuntu are very poor and give bad first impressions. I think that recommending Ubuntu is an anachronism from the mid to late 00s.

Experience makes it all much easier, simply because you learn which software to avoid. Having this experience, linux for me is stress free and low hassle. But if you don't want to accumulate that experience, if you want to stay on a default track with the right choices made for you already, then you probably should go with your gut and get a Mac.

Anyway, the "year of the linux desktop" is a joke. The very premise is an old meme that nobody should take seriously, nobody can even agree what it should mean. The year linux became viable for desktop use depends on the person doing the considering. For some it was years ago, for others it will be never.

> I think that recommending Ubuntu is an anachronism from the mid to late 00s.

What would you recommend as a modern-day user-friendly Linux experience? I've been looking for something not too demanding to put on an old X220.

MX-Linux, hands down. The most user friendly desktop distro I've used.

Not sure about performance on an X220, but I've loved Fedora workstation edition. The default Gnome setup is pretty user-friendly in my opinion, a there's a decent amount of support to be found online.

I'm not certain, but "needing a bash script to change the mouse scroll speed" sounds like the kind of inanity I've come to expect from Gnome. KDE is probably a better choice for somebody with this complaint.

It might also be a Wayland and/or libinput limitation.

I have used fedora on my x220 since I bought it new. Still runs perfectly.

HN would throttle my posting if I replied to everyone, so I'll just pick this comment, which speaks most directly to my experience, and thank everyone while thanking you. Do you remember if there were any tweaks you needed at the beginning, especially to get all the hardware working?

To techies who are interested in using Linux, I personally recommend OpenSUSE Tumbleweed because it has up-to-date packages and is relatively stable. Debian Stable is a good choice if you're insensitive to outdated packages. Debian Sid is alright, but in my experience has more breakage than Tumbleweed and recovery from that breakage requires more expertise (Tumbleweed automatically creates btrfs snapshots before and after every package manager action, making it easy to roll back any mistakes or bad upgrades.)

To the average Joe Blow, I don't recommend any Linux distro. I only give recommendations about Linux to people who already want to use Linux for their own reasons; I don't evangelize it to people who are already content with Windows or Macs. For such people, Windows or Macs are a better choice.

> To the average Joe Blow, I don't recommend any Linux distro.

Windows + WSL is pretty neat and very close to be the best of two worlds.

The average Joe, friend of mine, doing mostly SEO stuff (so has some basic web background) was able to start using WSL to run his curl tests, running some tools like sitespeed.io in his docker and things of that sort, without leaving his lovely Windows system.

So I'm pretty assured here.

Fedora. If you don't like Gnome, the Fedora KDE spin is almost as polished

Linux mint is brain dead simple. Everything just works. Same version runs on a 14 year old laptop as well as it does on a newer Epyc deskside workstation. There are others like it, but Mint is really quite simple to use, and quite a productive environment.

There are others like it as well.

I've been running linux on my desktops/laptops and servers for the past 24 years. I've not run into problems from a desktop/laptop perspective for the last 15 years. Some have, but its rare.

Agreeing with others, Fedora, partifularly the KDE spin if you want somethings a little Windows GUI like.

Mint or manjaro

I agree with Linux Mint but you can just download and boot off a thumb drive to try it out yourself without actually installing anything.

I would try Mint with KDE but also try a few other desktops. Maybe you will like them more.

Honestly you should take a stab at arch. There is a cli wizard installer now.

Arch was what I first tried, probably about a decade ago (on the same hardware). I had some networking troubles, the details of which I don't recall, and probably some other failures of understanding on my part.

Totally agree that was your experience. The benefit now is there is a “do you want to install systemd network manager” step which if you say yes will significantly ease your setup. My family and friends I buy used thinkpads and install arch with a windows vm and honestly nobody blinks an eye. 99% of what people do is a web browser so just throw chrome/chromium on there and make sure KDE is setup to bug a bit for updates and yer fine. I won’t go back to giving windows laptops out.

Open suse leap or tumbleweed for work, depending on your situation. For home use something like mint. I dont do banking on my computer or money stuff. For that I use my Iphone

> There's no singular 'linux experience'

True, there’s two:

1. Complaining about your experience, only to be told that someone else doesn’t have problems because they’re better at it than you.

2. Being the guy who says he’s better.

And then there's this guy, who gets mad at people who share positive experiences because he thinks the discussion is the rightful territory of those who want to complain.

The apparently innocent "sharing" of positive experiences - so sweet! so nice! - is from Linux self-identifiers all too often a very crude backhanded "you're wrong about the problems you claim to have with Linux, and if you're not wrong, then you're at least thick or lazy".

You've pulled these insults out of thin air. I have no animosity towards Windows or Mac users, nor for those that might hypothetically like Linux but understandably have better things to do with their time than learn the ins and outs of it.

Apologies if that seemed directed at you personally, which wasn't my intent. Attribute it to HN trigger-finger.

It is a general and widespread phenomenon though that anyone who has been less than positive towards Linux on HN or anywhere will recognise. I don't think it reflects animosity towards users of mainstream OS's so much as defensiveness, particularly from strongly self-identified Linux advocates. Which is all a bit daft, because it's (a) perfectly obvious that Linux has plenty of problems (how could something as vast as an OS not?), and (b) that doesn't make it any less the clear choice for some classes of user (like myself).

Sure, as I say in my first comment, there is a lot of software for linux that just isn't very good, and there is a lot of bad advice and bad defaults floating around. Separating the wheat from the chaff is a daunting task to any new user, and I think most will fail and feel dejected unless they have a strong personal motive to stick with it and learn through experience. It's definitely not for everybody and I don't expect it ever will be.

But if somebody does stick with it and gain that experience, it's often possible for them to find a combination of software and settings that earnestly work well for them personally. It's not as though linux users are all masochists, the reason I continue using Linux is because for me, it's lower stress and hassle than anything else. I learned to use it when I was younger and thought that tinkering with such software was fun. That allure wore off years ago and my present self wouldn't have the patience to learn it all over again, but Linux remains the best choice for me given the experience I already have with it.

I use Linux (Fedora in my case) as my primary (actually sole non-mobile right now) OS, with software dev as my focus. Its the best for my purpose, though I've used both MacOS and Windows extensively so I have a reasonable awareness of the relative tradeoffs.

I do find the Linux community often insufferable though. Also often extremely helpful however. I guess communities also have their tradeoffs.

> those that might hypothetically like Linux but understandably have better things to do with their time than learn the ins and outs of it.

This is me. I have one SSD each dedicated to Windows and Linux, and I use Linux fairly regularly. However, I still use Windows for most of my work, because Linux's multi-monitor, Wayland, and HiDPI support is still questionable. I used to love to tinker, but now I just want to get my work done.

At this point in my life I have almost lost all faith in people sharing an honest assessment of anything. The Linux is hard trope is really starting to bore me. I get it things may be different on Linux/Mac/Windows but most UI things are pretty easy to accomplish everywhere. Should I complain that windows is hard because find-xargs-grep isn’t available in the default install even though it is pretty easy to install the software?

I've been running Arch Linux for about 2 years two high-powered desktop machines (home and work). I run `sudo pacman -Syu` every day and I've only had one video driver update (nvidia) that broke me. I had to login from the CLI (which I'm using all the time anyway) to rollback and pin the version.

It's been an incredibly smooth experience.

That said, the one thing that I still haven't migrated over to fully is Linux on a laptop. I'm macOS on an Apple MacBook Pro 14" (powered by Apple's M1 Pro).

I’ve been running desktop Linux since the 90s, and it’s been my primary desktop since XP was first released (XP was what drove my to Linux) and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve needed to write a shell script to fix basic functionality.

I’m not taking anything away from your experiences though. Just offering another data point.

I do get the appeal of macOS. I use it for work but I honestly find it more frustrating than pleasurable but that’s purely because I don’t always agree with Apples design choices.

…And that is the real problem with macOS for me. If you like their default experience then it’s a much more pleasurable platform to use. But if there’s any significant part of Apples design choices you don’t get alone with, then you’re often shit out of luck. Trying to bend macOS to behave any way outside of Apples vision can be more frustrating than dealing with Linux quirks.

That all said, I am in love with the battery life on the ARM MacBook Pros. I’ve managed to go a full working day without plugging the MBP in. There isn’t any comparative device out there for Linux.

So in the end I find Linux for personal devices and macOS for work is a great compromise for me.

I get about 4 hours productive use out of my work Macbook M1 pro (32 GB RAM, 1TB NVMe) on battery. I get about 3.5 hours productive use out of my Zen2 HP Omen laptop (64 GB RAM, 3TB NVME). Though I have to reduce the brightness of the Zen to get better lifetime.

I am a bit of a power user, running large builds, analytics, and other things, so its not surprising to me that I get less than others. I would like to see an all-day battery laptop for people like me, though I suspect it will be a few more years.

Oh, and the original work windows laptop I had (fully corporate controlled) with 32GB RAM and 500GB NVMe barely lasted an hour on battery. And it BSODed frequently.

I'd still prefer a Linux work laptop, but the Mac is at least a poor-mans version of it. Windows, even with WSL2, was horrible.

For high load activities like builds and analytics, I use a server, either on the LAN or in the cloud. It gives me a better local performance experience and makes my jobs more reproducible for others to run. It for sure includes the added complexity of aws-cli scripts and ssh stuff though so YMMV.

I have the same feelings about OSX, though. It's probably a result of familiarity more than anything else.

Take mouse speed, for example. I remember this being incredibly difficult in OSX: https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/7bg3gg/removing_...

On linux it's just a menu option in a gui, or a single command.

Every platform has plenty of bugs, but I find it is consistently easier to figure out how to change/fix things on Linux than on OSX or Windows. OSX is probably the worst platform as soon as you're doing something Apple didn't anticipate (or, is actively blocking you from doing).

My experience is similar. Anything more complicated than the basic stuff like surfing the web is hard.

Things are getting better in the Linux desktop, but in a slow pace. I had some hope with the PopOs (I don't know what they are doing nowadays).

>Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script.

I just checked on my Macbook and I couldn't find any option to change scroll speed. So it's more that on Linux you _can_ create a bash script to do just about anything even when it's not a feature the OS has. Unlike others where it's either a simple UI button or you just can't do it.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-your-mouses-...

It’s under Accessibility.

I was able to find it on the latest macos by opening up preferences and searching for "scroll". It's under Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad/Mouse Options

You definitely can for both mouse and trackpad

A. I'm looking at pointer speed section in Mouse Preference in Control Center. It's pretty simple. It give acceleration and sensitivy.

B. Just about every GUI aims for decent defaults and doesn't allow endless customization and such customization generally isn't a beginner task.

I've used the Linux desktop for ten years (Mint then Ubuntu-Mate). Haven't customized anything with a bash script for many years. It is currently clearer how to do things than Windows - it's fricken TWO start menus jumping over each other.

Should have been clearer: mousewheel scroll speed, which there's no way to control from the GUI.

Sure, but that is a fairly obscure setting that I don't think merits your earlier build-up "Something as simple as...".

On the one hand, I'd certainly admit Linux has "warts". It's GUI is perfectly usable and clear - it's more now what one is doing than the horror that is Windows 11 imo (and I'm working on that occasionally now). But the warts of Linux are accentuated by the OS attracting a certain kind of "OCD" user who will tell you how terrible it is for lacking X utterly obscure feature.

I agree with the parent comment. This isn't that niche a requirement and its just one of huge list.

Dismissing people's needs isnt the way to solve this.

I'd like to see a comparison between, say, how many people want to customize their scroll speed (hard on linux, easy in windows/macos) and some other use cases, like how many people to sandbox and control permissions for individual apps (easy on Linux using Flatseal, hard on window/macos).

Then we can get a better sense of how niche these demands are, and how well these desktop OSes support them

> control permissions for individual apps

Sandboxing is ridiculously bad on all 3, the best being MacOS. But this is one area where desktop OSs are simply way behind mobile ones.

Mousewheel scroll speed is not a niche feature.

It's obscure on Linux, perhaps! Meanwhile this setting is in the control panel on both windows and macos. No shell scripting required.

Nah, it's pretty inexcusable for Gnome to not surface such a setting. LXQt's mouse configuration GUI lets you configure it, and LXQt has no more than a handful of people working on it. Gnome has more developer resources and could implement this easily, but they also have an attitude problem and bad priorities.

Yeah, the clear problem here is GNOME and it's arrogant disregard for users... Which I guess really is historically in line with Linux culture, unfortunately.

GNOME and Ubuntu are not representative of "Linux culture".

“Linux Culture” is also similarly full of these sorts of “no true Scotsman” arguments, as well as deferring blame to other projects, and “oh you just simply need to use [package] Instead”.

These are all things that make Linux on the desktop inaccessible. The moment you start talking about weird cultural minutiae like this, the whole thing is already incredibly inaccessible in my eyes.

“Computer Culture” is also similarly full of these sorts of “no true Scotsman” arguments, as well as deferring blame to other systems, and “oh you just simply need to use [operating system] Instead”. These are all things that make computing on the desktop inaccessible. The moment you start talking about weird cultural minutiae like this, the whole thing is already incredibly inaccessible in my eyes.

Seems approximately equally true and arbitrary.

"Linux culture" is whatever most Linux users use. I don't know about Gnome, but Ubuntu is certainly that.

It's sad that Red Hat adopted GNOME for desktop.

Is there such a setting in Windows/macOS? (genuine question, haven't used either much in years)

result #2 in google: https://www.thewindowsclub.com/change-mouse-scroll-speed-win...

Yes. It's in the GUI in both cases.

Thank you!

I haven't needed a bash script to customize anything but I have had ti spend countless hours in the terminal making seemingly mundane software and hardware work.

Just because you've used Linux-training wheels edition and don't remember having problems isn't grounds to dismiss the large number of people who do have issues with Linux.

I also find Linux exhausting. I use it daily in servers and containers. It excels from an administrative perspective. I avoid using it as a client desktop pc at all cost because that is not where it excels.

A scroll wheel speed of one line at a time is not a good default.

Ubuntu has not been user-friendly for many years. It's unstable while being stale. And you points soundsore like your issue is with Gnome.

Actually, I don't imagine switching to Windows or anything because I find writing a bash-script much easier than constantly dealing with the fact some things just aren't (realistically) configurable at all, and I absolutely hate dropdown menus within menus and having to use a mouse for everything.

That said, Windows/MacOS are MUCH more stable. Granted, I didn't use them nearly as much, as I use Linux (mainly Ubuntu and mainly LTS versions), but I basically didn't encounter any hardware-specific bugs at all for the last couple of years. Or some deep ecosystem problem, like all this Pulseaudio bullshit.

Linux is really frustrating, and I'm starting to actually lose hope we'll live to see it becoming, you know, usable.

It always feels like a build-it-yourself vehicle. Using it as a daily driver when you need to get to work on time is not advised. Even when you get it running for a while, the breakage is inevitable, and you'll be under the hood. It is really cool if you love to tinker. Its an OS with a lower level of abstraction, and one that is less productive overall for most users, especially anyone who needs things to just work consistently.

I work on Linux for Linux. All I use is terminals, jetbrains and Firefox, plus a million command line tools. And maybe the occasional gimp or VLC. Nothing ever breaks for me. I've been dist-upgrading the same install for over ten years now.

Never had any issues with Ubuntu past 16.04, at least not anything requiring bash scripts or issues with restarting. Still wouldn't recommend it to non-technical users though, but that's because 1) They'd have to let me install it for them, and 2) That would probably lead to me being tech support, which I don't have time for.

I fully agree to that experience. Next thing I tried was to have three screens with different DPI’s. It’s possible (that’s a lie, since you can’t adjust DPI and scaling properly in Linux at all, you’ll end up with a half working ugly system and irrational behavior when you move windows around), but sadly my notebook needs to work in more than one place…

I’ve invited a a long time Linux user who claimed to never had any problems whatsover to have a look. His verdict was that I should have only one external screen and use the same screen in the different places.

This stuff works with Windows and Mac out of the box.

Exhausting compared to what?

If you think that Ubuntu has poor user-friendlyness wait until you try this new "Windows 10" thing everyone seems to be on about.

You have to click through about ten pages of menus just to set up the network, and if you get anything wrong the error message is just along the lines of either "Sorry, that didn't work. Please try again!" or "Error -X8004a119af3c occurred", neither of which are particularly helpful. It doesn't come with a usable shell. It doesn't even come with ssh, or zip, or Python.

You're expected to interact with the entire thing by clicking on page after page after page of little coloured squares that aren't meaningfully labelled. Why is a user interface designed like a 1980s "My First Video Game" project supposed to be good?

You mean Windows 11, 10 is old now.

My T440s has seen Qubes-OS, Ubuntu, Fedora, Pop-OS, Mint [Gnome, i3wm, KDE, Cinnamon). Pop-OS is my favorite on if I want a usable nvidia gpu with hybrid graphics. The only issues I had with most updates was a full boot partition because I skip cleanups.

I have a lot more issues with Windows moving stuff. Settings are a mess W7 -> W10 -> W11.

Qubes is still my go-to if I have to deal with malware infested things.

I'm full time (95%) on Fedora KDE (Desktop Ryzen 2000, RX500). I've had some quirks with Veracrypt and an external drive and crashes related to running out of memory (I'm sure DotA2 leaks memory since the performance gets worse over time)

I've checked my desktop for mouse scroll speed and actually don't have that option. I did change my scroll speed in one case which is Firefox (about:config => mousewheel.default.delta_multiplier_y = 85)

I agree. When things are working - it's great. And having to dig in to get things working right is okay, too. However, when there are issues with hardware, it seems that the solutions that are in the ether are pretty hackish and you have to spend the afternoon trying multiple "fixes" to get things to work again.

I have to use Windows for work, and I ended up just throwing in the towel this year and switching back to the dark side for the time being because I have to get shit done.

> Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script

Indeed, I never realized there does not seem to be a Ubuntu system setting for adjusting the mouse wheel sensitivity. Apparently, standard solution requires installing „imwheel“.

Lol. Weird. Then, again, in 15 years using a scroll wheel mouse I never had the need to adjust its sensitivity.

Yep. I don't use Linux on the desktop simply because I don't care enough to be assed with arguing with it. Thus I would rather swap my kidney for some Apple crap and put up with the trade off which is works vs flexibility.

I can get it to work because the terminal doesn't scare me, but there's no way I can recommend it to anyone without a certain amount of technical skills.

Then it's a good thing we are on hacker news!!

1. Redhat standardized on RPM. Debian/Ubuntu had dpkg. Arch has their AUR packages. Slack used tarballs.

2. KDE and Gnome created two different rivaling GUI's. Never merged and split the development community down the middle.

3. There are N different GUI libraries: FLTK, GTK+, QT, wxWidgets, etc.

4. There are 3 different cross platform packaging solutions: Snap, Flatpak, AppImage

5. GPU and Wifi drivers can be a pain to get running sometimes, even if they're prepackaged for you. (Hell, my Nvidia drivers crash my windows laptop all the time).

6. Support for hardware sometimes requires third party libraries (solaar for logitech, etc).

7. Some software only supports Mac/Windows, but Mac won't legally let you install their OS in a VM, (not that it stops some people). If you're a business you're forced to use windows anyway for niche software that won't run with Wine.

8. Battery life on laptops typically is worse than a comparative windows/mac system -- because windows and mac tweak more settings for power and performance.

All operating systems are exhausting.* I don't understand why Ubuntu updates would break anything, they've been so reliable lately that I even let my mom update her computer herself. But anyway, if you think they're bad, wait until you see mac OS's.

* Unless your usage is so light that all your computing can be done on ChromeOS or iOS, but even those are plenty annoying.

It's funny. My NixOS machines (desktop and two laptops) have had minimal breakage while upgrading. And the breakage was easy to fix with a small git commit.

My macOS (Intel MBP) and Windows (Dell laptop) end up with something borked by updates pretty much like clockwork. I suppose I am a poweruser of those systems by nature of being a dev, but something always tends to stop working.

Have the totally opposite experience. Ubuntu has a quite minimal settings panel, that's good.

Windows settings are much more difficult to navigate. The layout / structure has changed a lot between updates. Settings are hidden deep within preferences menus with multiple tabs.

Google for things and you find ad ridden pages with screenshots and pop-ups about clicking here, there, then here.

It's a mess.

Windows 11 fixed a lot of problems caused by Windows 8 that continued into Windows 10 when it comes to settings. My computer doesn't support it for arbitrary reasons Microsoft came up with so I can't use it where it matters, but I've got to give it to them that the UI for settings improved a lot.

The start menu, task bar, context menus and almost every other aspect of the UI got a significant downgrade in the process, which is a pain, but at least the settings were fixed.

> Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script.

This is Ubuntu and GNOME both having adopted unfortunate strategies wrt UX in recent years. They seem to be trying to emulate the Apple "we know best, take it or leave it", removing customization and freezing the UI, but without the resources spent on getting it "perfect" for the majority. They may still be fine choices for some users but they closed the door on being the "just use this" generic options.

KDE has supported changing mouse scroll from the UI for some time. Linux Mint (including its Debian edition) with MATE or Cinnamon, or BudgieWM are other fine choices for non-terminal users. Fedora has been picking up as a general all-round desktop distro as Ubuntu has been falling from grace.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/KDE-Now-Has-Wayland-S-Speed

Observation:

I started daily driving linux in the 90s. When I switched to a mac around 2010 if found Mac exhausting. It had different usage patterns than I was used to. Some of my most used features weren't there. Having a reasonably usable shell experience required lots of tweaking and macports then brew. When I switched back to linux ~5 years ago there was a while where getting back into the linux groove was exhausting because I wasn't used to it, but not as exhausting as switching to mac because I already knew it, just needed to get back in practice.

Every time i use windows (which is rarely, once a year maybe) i find it exhausting.

I propose that it's not the OS that's the exhausting part - it's the switching to a new environment with different workflows and thought processes around it that is exhausting. Similar to how it's much harder to get familiar with a codebase in a new (to you) language than in a language you are proficient in - but both cases can be taxing.

This is something those "defending" the harder-to-use/learn thing always bring up. As if affordances must always be relative to prior knowledge. But they're not (always) - some things just are harder to use than others (at least relative to a specific meaning of 'use').

Programming languages - you could argue Rust isn't hard to learn, by pretending that everyone claiming it is are just having trouble adjusting from javascript. But that breaks down when you realise the Rust learners finding it hard are actually polyglot programmers who are finding it harder than all the many other languages, in multiple paradigms, they have already successfully learned.

Similar with Linux - I find it harder to 'use' in a certain sense (the sense most people mean - which is getting all the ordinary hardware & software stuff working) than the others. You'll tell me it's unfamiliarity, but it's just not - my first Linux was Slackware on floppies, and I've used it alongside Windows and MacOS now for decades. I choose it for my primary OS for other reasons, but ease of use certainly isn't among them. I still have to fiddle more with it .

I wish I could have the graphical stack and mouse handling of MS Windows in general. With the trackpad precision and battery life of Mac on laptop.

The fact the mouse scroll wheel doesn't even work well on Linux is just shameful.

What doesn't work well about mouse scroll wheel on Linux? Its behavior is very similar to MacOS, in that it sends scroll events even to unfocused windows.

Sending events in unfocused window is quite nice I would say.

The issue is the scroll speed and amount is inconsistent between applications.

And now with some applications trying to implement smooth scrolling it's even worse.

On the flip side, Linux is infinitely more useful to me than Windows. My desktop’s motherboard’s onboard graphics card failed but I have an external graphics card. Windows is unable to boot because of the failed onboard card. Ubuntu worked absolutely fine. I had to modify 1-2 lines in a configuration to prevent Ubuntu from loading the onboard graphics at all, otherwise it would start off funky.

And MacOS is just too slow. There’s far too many animations and it’s extremely difficult to multitask in a useful way.

It’s like Apple has basically been creating MacOS features based on 2 criteria’s. Either so they look good in a demo, or they’re a replica of an iOS app.

I mean no disrespect but Ubuntu really, really isn't user friendly. There is no other distribution that introduced so many headaches for me. I think Ubuntu is coasting on there reputation from years ago.

I have to disagree here and provide another experience.

I regularly revisit Linux for desktop (like every five years) and this time I moved 100% from Windows 11 to Fedora 37 and it's been a delight. It's not only a good desktop OS now: I find it better than Windows. Why?

* Performance: I think it's more responsive, like the file manager. It doesn't have an innate dependency on scanning every single thing for viruses that is hard to disable per design. I think my SSD loves me now.

* Ads integrated in the OS: Well. It doesn't have these.

* Customizability: Even GNOME that is not known for this can adapt to the user much better than Windows 11. Windows 11 is terrible and takes steps backwards in this regard. For example GNOME Tweaks + Dash to Dock and I have a Mac-like dock. It's like the Mac dock but more customizable, and it's easy to customize too. Hell I can even customize FreeType to choose between ClearType style rendering or macOS Quartz-like rendering (respect LCD pixel boundaries vs respect font design - you can only have one).

* Apps: Linux culture is to rely on repositories for apps. Windows isn't. They have winget and Microsoft Store now but it's still an unresolved cultural problem where only a subset of apps are found there, and if they do, they more often than not do system-wide changes anyway. Linux has nice, easy to use, stores like Mac. Linux is also miles ahead with containerized app systems like Flatpak or Snap where UWP support (Windows counterpart) is more than shaky in the big picture, and I'd even say a failure.

* Mouse Scroll Speed: Is set in GNOME settings.

* Software Updates: Have still always worked for the past few months.

* Crashes: None yet! Other than app-specific ones but so far only "silent" stuff that don't really affect me that seems to relate to the file manager and thumbnailing corrupt h.264 videos? (a guess from the logs)

I guess your mileage MAY still vary here but as for me, this is clearly a better and more user friendly OS now than Windows 11. I can't believe I'm saying this. But it just is for me and my hardware + software setup now. I like photography and Darktable is a full-fledged Lightroom competitor too.

I'm not a Linux nut either. I was positively surprised and this is the first time in twenty years I've finally felt fine with moving from Windows.

Games? Yes, at 40+ years of age I still do that, juggling time with family life. I have an Xbox Series X for that, letting me use a tiny Intel NUC as my PC. The Xbox gives me a much more fun experience with gaming than a Mac. Been there. Never again.

The scroll speed, independent from movement speed, is not in the gnome settings

> but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script. Software updates rarely work. There are random crashes that take hours to fix.

You either have hardware problems, or something screwed up your install; the settings manager for mouse acceleration is available where all other settings are, no scripts or command line editing necessary, just a couple clicks and you're done. Now I'm not exactly a fan of Ubuntu and prefer other distros but software updates do actually work on Ubuntu, and I'm not aware of any problems that could cause random crashes. At least on Debian I lost memory of the last time I had to reset the machine due to a crash. Check your system, it may have software and/or hardware problems elsewhere.

This mouse setting depends on several factors (i.e. Wayland availability, evdev vs libinput) and the setting doesn't apply to every application if you do manage to change it. The modularity of the Linux ecosystem has several parties argue that it's not really their place to implement a fix, so issues get closed without a proper resolution.

The updates are fine these days unless you add external repositories. Sadly, that's what every forum post and blog article will tell you to do.

Rsndom crashes occur if your hardware has problematic drivers (Nvidia, sometimes Intel) and they're a mixed bag. Laptops are more of a problem than desktops but sometimes you just have bad luck. It can also depend on the kernel your distro chose because sometimes a lot of problems can be fixed by updating to a higher LTS version, but the end user should never even need to know this is an option let alone try it for themselves. Canonical and others also include their own kernel patches sometimes which is a whole lot of fun when it comes to reporting bugs.

I feel like non-free OSes like OSX and Windows are exhausting. Everything is driven by politics and PR rather than what actually works and it's all made artificially inflexible. Trivial things become rocket science because of this war over mind share.

I think it really depends on what you use at home though. I've run Linux as my primary OS from the beginning (when I got my first laptop at 10y/o.) If you use different technology at work and at home you're probably going to run into this. Something I've done in the past when this gets bad is to find excuses to use the technology at home (even if I think it's inferior to what I would have otherwise chosen.) This tends to resolve the problem even if I don't stick with it.

The reason why I like Linux is because I can use the terminal a lot. Unfortunately I'm forced to use terrible ElectronJS apps from time to time, though, and more and more programs seem to either not have a TUI or be a full rootfs (as a docker container) because apparently the devs don't know how to properly package them?

I definitely don't recommend Linux for people who don't want to use the terminal. Actually I hate it when they do and try to make Linux look like Windows/macOS. If you want the Windows/macOS experience, use Windows/macOS.

What do you mean saying "Ubuntu" — I suppose it means Gnome desktop by default?

Try KDE / Kubuntu, it features the scroll speed control [1]. (Xfce, sadly, does not.)

Also sadly, Mac is increasingly windows-like, with things that tend not to work out of the box (and just unsupported), and software updates bringing some trouble, especially huge updates like a new OS version.

I stick with a Linux desktop where I at least acceptably understand and control every important aspect. I did have a Mac at work for several years, and it was also pretty fiddly in certain aspects.

[1]: https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?t=160416

As a counter example I have helped hundreds of nontechnical people switch to Linux over the past 15 years who prefer it to Windows and can do anything they want via the GUI without knowing how to manage an antivirus.

ChromeOS and Android are also Linux and users seem to get along just fine with those too.

I never experience crashes except when I have maxed out my ram doing something dumb.

> If I'm honest, Linux is...exhausting. I'm technically proficient, but even the "user-friendly" Ubuntu is a pain to work with. Something as simple as changing the mouse scroll speed requires creating a bash script

This is a totally legitimate gripe. On the other hand, I like to have the key repeat speed set to higher than MacOS lets me in their menu, so I also need to configure this in the terminal, except the only references I can find for it safe random stackoverflow questions and blog posts rather than official documentation, so the units are unclear (I can't remember if it's the delay before repeat or the actual repeat speed, but I remember being surprised about how one of them worked with regard to needing to modify the value in the opposite direction than I expected), and I need to log out and back in to test it, after which I might need to tweak again due to not really understanding the units and maybe overcalibrating, which requires another logout...etc.

MacOS is probably easier if you don't want to stray at all off the prescribed path, but any time I needed to do something even slightly outside the seemingly arbitrary sanctioned happy path, it ends up being either even more annoying to configure than Linux, requiring some app that inevitably wants to me to pay them for what feels like basic functionality to me, or is completely impossible regardless of how much effort or money I'm willing to spend. Given how much I like the setup I've been using for years on Linux and how rarely things break for me compared to MacOS updates due to functionality being provided by third party apps (e.g. my iTerm shortcut for showing/hiding the fullscreen terminal occasionally not working after being required to a major OS update, but working just enough of the time that I suspect I wouldn't be able to find a fix), I won't ever be running anything else on my personal machine unless something drastically changes.

> Software updates rarely work. There are random crashes that take hours to fix.

This (IMO) is precisely why Ubuntu is not a user-friendly distro. Fedora (and especially Silverblue) is much more user-friendly in this regard.

I know it's common to judge Linux in general on the basis of Ubuntu in particular, but I don't think it's a fair assessment.

I'm on Arch and a 4K display and had to hack the package 'xf86-input-libinput' to be able to adjust mouse scroll speed, towards faster. Upstream has been unwilling to implement it. I published the mod here: https://seitics.de/files/xf86-input-libinput/ should anyone stumble on this post via search engine. To change scroll speed from 1 1 to 2 2 use e.g.

xinput --set-prop "Kingsis Peripherals Evoluent VerticalMouse D" "libinput Scroll Distance Scale" 2 2

aside from

xinput --set-prop "Kingsis Peripherals Evoluent VerticalMouse D" "libinput Accel Speed" -1.0

for cursor speed which already worked. HTH

Edit: Patch by 3rd party, I fixed it up so would apply cleanly to most recent package.

The article is disappointingly short, but at least for me, the title is true; at long last, 2022 was finally the Year of the Linux Desktop. May the YotLD meme live on in spirit.

I finally switched my desktop and laptops 100% to Linux. Some games don't run - fine - plenty of other games do. Ableton runs well in Wine, but Bitwig is native, and yabridge runs VSTs. MuseScore was saved. KDE is pleasant and productive. Blender is amazing. Pipewire is audio done right. Electron, despite its problems, makes Linux a build target of ordinary apps. Flatpak and AppImage enable simple cross-linux-distro app distribution. Critical mass achieved.

No desktop is perfect, but at least for people with a nominal, base level of experience, Linux is the least bad.

Looking to the future, I hope the Desktop Linux experience improves with respect to memory exhaustion, and I hope a Patreon-like platform gains prominence to enable easily donating to keep projects alive; it's currently cumbersome to find all the different places to donate.

With great gratitude to every free software and open source contributor, happy end of 2022!

I’m running the Steam Deck and it is an absolute generational shift in gaming on Linux. The majority of games now run totally without problems.

Same. The only ones that seem to have problems are the ones that explicitly don’t support Linux via anti cheat or weird launchers or DRM. If it’s just a normal game, it runs fine.

Would the assassin's creed series games work through steam deck? I've wanted to try them but not enough to bother with windows...

That has been my experience this year as well. After a frustrating bout with my video drivers on windows, my thinking was "well, that is usually what keeps me coming back to windows whenever it happens on Linux, so what do I have to lose?"

Turns out Debian+KDE +Wayland is exactly right for me, especially KDE connect. The only pain point has been VR gaming, so I've kept a minimal windows install on a small ssd. Everything else has been smooth sailing and I'm considerably less frustrated by design choices when I can just fix them.

> Linux is the least bad.

Hear hear! I use Gnome purely because home-manager can configure 99% of it. I had to use Windows a few days ago in order to use Serif products and, beyond looking shit, the lack of the gnomeflow is bloody annoying.

FWIW Elementary sports a pay-what-you-want store.

Before MuseScore being saved I had to run a Windows VM with Cubase/NotePerformer to get decent mock-ups. I'm waiting Debian Stable to receive a better Pipewire with the next version. Truly a phenomenal year!

No it wasn't. Nor was it needed.

Linux is unstoppable. The monotonic accumulation of all that open source goodness is like a giant capacitor taking forever to charge. The result takes a while compared to a well funded commercial enterprise, but it slowly morphs into a super desktop that is basically impossible to compete against. Free, super capable, private by design. You cannot beat that with bells and whistles. The "average person" UX red lines will be met at some point.

Make no mistake. Life is not linear. Nothing much happens, it becomes a running joke and then, boom and its not a joke anymore, its the new reality.

> Make no mistake. Life is not linear. Nothing much happens, it becomes a running joke and then, boom and its not a joke anymore, its the new reality.

A data point: today I was talking with a friend who works in a company making a 3D software. Apparently since last year they lost most of their clients to Blender, which used to be the butt of so many 3D software jokes.

Similarly, OBS.

The entire streaming industry uses OBS. Colleagues at work use OBS casually to capture recordings.

Thank you for the reminder! I've been considering setting up a NixOS streaming setup, and this seems like a perfect choice.

Let’s not forget that the other players in the OS game are literally the biggest and richest companies in the world. Apple, MS, Google. It’s phenomenal what Linux has achieved and will continue to achieve

These comments are hilarious.

Linux user community: Linux has been fine for casual users for years! Give it to your grandma, it's not a problem!

Also Linux user community: Wait, you used an nVidia GPU in your build? What kind of idiot scrub are you?

If there's one thing I've seen that's consistent with Linux users over the last two decades, it's been blaming users for all their Linux-related problems.

Or “You mean you want to run two monitors with different DPIs? What kind of oddball user are you, anyway?” Linux display stack’s treatment of monitor DPI is basically “throw our hands up and let apps like Firefox make it work!”

I think you gave this example as a joke, but here is a quote from one of the Wayland developers:

> I would suggest that this setting [UI scale] needs to be a global and not a per-output thing. If it was a per-output thing, windows moving between different monitors would probably have problems (text size changes while window size does not?). It is hard to imagine how it would work as a per-output setting, for me at least.

See https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i... , the original issue and the discussion gives quite some insights in how Linux developers see the world.

Unfortunately my example was based on real-world frustration.

That conversation was just maddening to read. One person arguing for the end user’s experience and the other one (apparently winning) tunnel-visioned on “pixel perfect”, “well defined”, “guarantees to developers” and “relevant specifications”. Meanwhile, for the last at least five years, I can turn on my Mac, drag windows from one hidpi display to a low dpi display, and everything just works and window sizes and fonts behave sensibly.

The ability to make tough technical compromises in favor of the average end user, over technical purity and developer comfort, is what distinguishes a polished, finished product from a science project.

And dragging apps between displays with different DPIs work on Windows too. Nothing more to add, wholeheartedly agree with you.

Well, Windows doesn't work that well. At least on my setup, when I drag a window across DPIs, the window size is incorrect on the other monitor, during the dragging animation, and then when I release the mouse button, the window and fonts properly "snap" to match what I'd expect. A little janky but it kind of works if you have no desire for a polished product.

I wish the conversation was 10 years ago

Linux scrub Q, does NVIDIA not use any Linux for themselves? Or is it a financial reason to ignore Linux?

I think they don't care about the userspace at all. I assume from their perspective, most (all?) of the Linux use-case is for their expensive cards to be running in servers doing CUDA.

Yet CUDA still basically only runs on RHEL and Ubuntu LTS.

(tbf to Nvidia tho, their support is improving and with big tech putting a lot of weight behind cloud compute the problem will likely resolve itself)

NVidia makes the best Linux driver + graphics card combination going, and always have. If you actually want to play games on Linux, NVidia cards are the way to go. But open-source people don't like them because their driver isn't open-source, and Wayland people don't like them because their driver has limited Wayland support.

Absolutely the opposite experience here. I used Nvidia ~2015-2020, and AMD since. AMD works much better, period. This is with Arch Linux and NixOS.

At least NVidia did not replace their driver with a less capable one for older cards.

So instead of GL 4.1, AMD opens source does GL 3.3 for older APUs, and good luck trying to get any kind of video decoding acceleration.

the creator and maintainer of linux .. Linus Trovalds .. would disagree with you a bit [1].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2lhwb_OckQ

Torvalds tries to have his cake and eat it with the ridiculous Linux approach to drivers; there's no stable API, and he wants you to contribute your drivers to the kernel tree, but also even leaving aside copyright issues he won't accept drivers into the kernel tree if he's not happy with them.

I have two nvidia machines and they work fine on NixOS. Including prime on my laptop!

I've got elderly relatives using ChromeOS laptops and Android phones just fine. Both run on Linux and are far easier for them to use and for me to support than the alternatives.

Oh definitely, but we both know that when people talk about "using Linux" they don't mean Android and ChromeOS.

You're technically correct, and for practical purposes incorrect.

I will offer a third perspective: Linux has a really horrible user experience on the Desktop but it is the least shit option of the mainstream operating systems.

For me the choice is simple because a non-free operating would not be acceptable. And no, I am hardcore ideological about it, I use a Linux Kernel with binary blobs and all but the point is having system that serves me and me alone. Telemetry, advertisement, forced updates, not allowing me to do whatever the fuck I want with my system are non-starters.

Beyond the ideological I want to note that while learning curve with Linux is steep there are some aspects that make it worth it:

It is mostly a one time investment: Linux is pretty conservative. Once you get it, you get it and wont really have to learn anything new. Most of the time even the bigger disruptions to the ecosystem are not that relevant to the end user and can always be simply avoided if one chooses to, not just for years but decades or forever.

Compare this to Windows. I used Windows XP heavily and absolutely wouldn't be able to perform basic tasks on an modern Windows system. In comparison, if as Linux user from the Windows XP era were teleported into our times, they would still feel at home on today's Linux and could be perfectly productive in nearly not time.

If you are in tech, you might have to learn Linux anyway: Linux server skills are really important to have. And these skills translate back to the Linux Desktop and vice versa as well.

Also docker performance is vastly better on Linux than on Windows or Mac so that alone makes the Linux the best platform for developers. (Not to mention many tools being only Linux native or having priority Linux support.)

Also people need to stop using Ubuntu. I have been using Linux for ages and find the UI super confusing and wouldn't be able to do anything on it. It's just shit.

Use Linux Mint.

Oh and I am using NVIDIA GPUs just fine on Linux. I had some trouble with freezes and crashes but most of these got fixed in updates.

Maybe we can use Haiku as a daily driver one day but for now there is really no good alternative to Linux.

My last attempt was using Mint precisely because that's what people kept recommending and it still sucked ass, ran into major resolution/scaling and audio issues immediately that made me abandon it for Windows 10.

It's too bad, because W10 has its own annoyances (mostly the forced updates and boot interstitials) but at least it actually worked. While I don't have a problem with proprietary software as a Principe, it is nice to have community driven stuff as a counterpart, which is why I periodically test the waters with Linux. It's just that, every time I run into annoyances and problems that make me give it up.

Anyway, ideology aside, I use all three major desktop OSes regularly: gaming desktop is Windows, work laptop is MacOS, workstation is Linux. Linux has certain niceties for developers, but for non-dev-specific stuff it's the most painful to use overall (although MacOS has a penchant for hiding things from the user which can be very frustrating). I also encounter the most instability with it, I think, though these days all three aren't that bad on that front.

Edit: though I'm thinking about a Steam Deck, and that's a Linux PC I suppose. Valve has been doing great work at making Linux more viable for PC gaming.

Depending on how long ago that was, you might simply want to try again with a newer version of Mint.

New hardware can be a problem, especially on Mint which is a little bit more on the conservative side. It just takes times until drivers are made and improved and finally land in Linux Mint. It's not like Windows where drivers are available on day one.

It doesn't feel that much of a problem for me because I started using Linux back in the days when driver support was big, big issues. Back then you weren't even sure if you could get wifi working. These days it is smooth sailing COMPARED to back then but I can see how it might take adjusting for someone coming from Windows. Yes, you have to shop for hardware with an eye on Linux compatibility in mind.

Isn't Linux Mint basically just a different UI on Ubuntu?

I mean there are also alternatives not based on Ubuntu (Arch, Debian, Fedora, Alpine, Void, ...)

Yes. But also no snap, telemetry or other Ubuntu shitfuckery. It only just takes the good stuff from Ubuntu.

Being based on Ubuntu is pretty great because is is allows access to the huge package ecosystem. Lot's of commercial software is (sadly) only targeting Ubuntu so you can just use the .deb without problems.

Stock Debian is also a great choice (Ubuntu uses Debian as a base) but a bit harder to set up for beginners. (There is also a Debian based Linux Mint variant.)

There are many good Distributions but strictly for beginner "I don't want to tinker" suggestions, the Debian-based ones are a safe choice, again because of the package ecosystem. (Though something like OpenSuse is also very friendly).

I always found the Arch wiki amazing, but of course that's for those who actually want to tinker :-).

Your grandma is a big gamer, right? Or is she into deep learning stuff?

Trying to figure out how being easy enough for your grandma is related at all to nvidia gpus.

Out of curiosity I just pulled User-Agent stats from my “Show HN: Inflation-adjusted stock charts – Total Real Returns” post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32081943 that was #1 on Hacker News on July 13, 2022. Of 38595 clicks that day from news.ycombinator.com total:

    30.8% (11868) Macintosh
    22.7% (8745) iPhone
    21.7% (8356) Windows
    15.7% (6065) Android
    8.5% (3284) Linux (!Android)

That implies a 61%/39% desktop/mobile split.

Mobile: 59%/41% iPhone/Android split.

Desktop: 50%/36%/14% macOS/Windows/Linux split.

Personally I switched back from macOS to Linux (Pop_OS!) as my primary desktop operating system in 2020.

My linux user agent would've told you chrome on mac, and I use neither.

Is there any Linux distribution with MacOS levels of reliability, simplicity, and productivity, that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full, random things like thunderbolt docks not working, or sleep states being faulty (or the machine not working properly after waking from sleep), or external monitor resolutions being wrong, and monitor scaling working properly when you have two monitors with different resolutions?

Most of my colleagues at work picked Linux over a MacBook, and they waste countless hours fixing their various Linux bugs.

I have a box I've been updating Mint on for the last 10 years with no real issues for the last 6 or 7.

> that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full

Who hurt you? Pop!_OS?

Ubuntu, for like a decade. Made running Ubuntu servers real dicey.

Sleep states are faulty on the Linux laptop I'm currently on, and I do occasionally waste time on interoperability with various commercial software, although countless hours seems excessive. But when it comes to running dev software or getting up and running with a new project, or compiling some github source, I think I save much more time than I've lost.

What frustrates me is that other Linux users will tell you with a straight face that you must be flat-out lying if you bring up sleep problems. Had three users tell me that on HN just about a day ago.

It's really very hardware-dependent. You can have five machines and sleep and PM works just fine, but if you get unlucky you also can have five machines and three don't go to sleep and two have poor battery life. Sometimes this affects even devices marketed for Linux, like the framework.

> Sometimes this affects even devices marketed for Linux, like the framework

I was interested in the framework laptop at some point but it increasingly looked like a Windows-first laptop on which the company is happy about you installing Linux on it.

There are laptops marked 10/10 on iFixit on which Linux works perfectly, I'll pick them until this changes.

Yea, but this is something unique to Linux, since everyone runs a different distro on different, never 100%-supported, hardware. So, they likely have never run into sleep problems- my desktop linux box doesn't have any at the moment.

Sometimes these difficulties have a silver lining, though, after they force you to learn more about the systems you're using. I thinks it's less of a trial-by-fire than it was even four or five years ago when I switched completely to linux, and only getting easier.

It indeed depends on the hardware. I had computers with capricious suspend in the past. The last ones worked fine, except one which sometimes hung on wake up and sometimes had graphical glitches and random hangs, but all this went away when I removed the faulty RAM stick it had…

I’m sort-of fine with the issues. I’m not fine with the increasingly hostile attitude you meet from most of the Linux world if you in the public eye dare ding their precious baby.

How dare you, though?

Well it's kinda understandable, although lamentable, since open-source development requires high morale/passion if there's no monetary incentives. If someone fixes your car for free, but afterward you complain about them scuffing the upholstery, they probably lose motivation. I know it's not the same thing, but I think it comes from the same place.

There's also the safety-in-numbers aspect, similar to editor wars, where people adopt the attitude that the more people that use their thing, the better it will be, so they are waging a propaganda campaign for their cause.

True and annoying. Writing as a f/t Linux user (Fedora Workstation on a laptop), and I appreciate where it shines enough to choose its particular set of tradeoffs for myself. But there's no doubt Linux users can be annoyingly obdurate about its deficiencies. Similar things crop up in tech circles all the time - eg. Rust programmers informing people having trouble learning Rust that there's nothing hard about it.

You must be lying! Are you implying S0x works badly and wakes too many times, pcie_aspm requires to be set to force to have decent results and enabling S3 is hidden somewhere in the BIOS assuming it's there at all?

You must be lying, I never heard of such stories!

NOTE: My computer came without OS. Assuming HP Dev One or System 76 behave better in this regard. But I'm a sucker for 2-in-1.

Linux doesn't have power nap. That being said, I can leave my Thinkpad in my bag for a few days without worrying about losing any of the work on it. It won't win awards for standby durability, but that may just be a lost cause for x86.

Powernap? You mean S0idle? If it is advertised it is used -- tested on Thinkpad Yoga L15 Gen...3? .

I think it's because it's an apples to oranges comparison. I'm guessing you installed Linux yourself on your PCs, instead of it coming pre-installed. Whereas for Mac OS, you can only get it on devices pre-installed, so naturally all hardware functions like sleep will work perfectly. I'm guessing if you buy a laptop from those distributors with Linux pre-installed, you will also get great hardware support

Bugs? sounds like they misconfigured their OS

Linux is not a commercial product that'll suit everyone all at once, you need to learn about its components, linux is just a kernel

If your argumentation is "various linux bugs", then you should stick to Windows, it has nice "various windows bugs", or macos, it has nice "various macos bugs"

There must be a reason why linux empowers the world from micro controllers to datacenters as well as the Steam Deck and the nintendo switch for its FreeBSD variant

Use what empowers you, no need to spread FUD

No FUD. On laptops I’ve repeatedly failed to get the correct battery life. I’ve also struggled with audio working correctly and reliably.

Sure, something might be misconfigured but the universe of misconfiguration for a Mac and Linux are substantially different because Linux is a much sharper tool.

Pointing the finger at the user is emblematic of the problems Linux has when people say it isn’t suitable for the desktop (and these days they mean laptop).

Linux empowers from micro controllers to data centers because there are domain experts being paid to keep the whole thing running AND NONE of those use cases are for interactive day to day customer use on a laptop (eg power saving, audio, video playback, video conferencing, etc) b with the exception of steam deck and switch that have a carefully tuned and tightly controlled OS distribution for a carefully chosen hw configuration. Windows is arguably the closest to the problems Linux faces but generally Windows does a much better job providing usable and stable APIs that vendors build against whereas Linux does not always do such a good job (+ vendors care about Windows whereas Linux is generally an afterthought except if it’s relevant to Android).

> On laptops I’ve repeatedly failed to get the correct battery life

You have to configure for it https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management

Linux doesn't know nor care about what machine you use, it could be a microcontroller without battery to a datacenter to a laptop to a console, configure for what you use, it's not "windows for Intel PCs, RISC? what is that? fuck off"

> I’ve also struggled with audio working correctly and reliably.

That is very hard to believe, my bluetooth headset worked out of the box

> with the exception of steam deck and switch that have a carefully tuned and tightly controlled OS distribution for a carefully chosen hw configuration

That exactly prove my point, users usually misconfigured their OS, the moment you configure your Linux OS, just like Valve did, with your distro of choice to suit your HW, then everything works as expected, that's a one time job

If that workflow doesn't suit you, then linux is not for you, and that's ok

> Pointing the finger at the user is emblematic of the problems Linux has when people say it isn’t suitable for the desktop (and these days they mean laptop).

Because that's the reality of it, the problem is the user who expect things to work for him while ignoring its dimensional capabilities

That's not a linux problem, that's a user problem, it's arrogant and selfish to expect "Linux" to work just for your specific HW and specific usecase and all of the effort should be dedicated to you, just you, for your own sake

Do like valve did with steam deck and configure your Linux OS for your HW, if you are not ready for that, then use windows or macos

> You have to configure for it https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Power_management Linux doesn't know nor care about what machine you use, it could be a microcontroller without battery to a datacenter to a laptop to a console, configure for what you use, it's not "windows for Intel PCs, RISC? what is that? fuck off"

Sorry no. That’s not actually true. Linux the kernel and thus the distribution definitely knows I have a laptop. In fact, many things auto-configure themselves correctly around this fact.

> Because that's the reality of it, the problem is the user who expect things to work for him while ignoring its dimensional capabilities That's not a linux problem, that's a user problem, it's arrogant and selfish to expect "Linux" to work just for your specific HW and specific usecase and all of the effort should be dedicated to you, just you, for your own sake

Consider which OS then I’ll be choosing for my 70 yold mom who isn’t very tech literate. I disagree that it’s arrogant to expect buying widely available and relatively standardized HW (this is x86 not ARM) and expecting it to work well. That’s par for the course for Windows btw.

> Do like valve did with steam deck and configure your Linux OS for your HW, if you are not ready for that, then use windows or macos

Ummm… so you’re agreeing with the OP and me then? There’s no Linux distribution that provides a smooth out of the box user friendly experience? As a refresher, here’s what OP for this thread said:

> Is there any Linux distribution with MacOS levels of reliability, simplicity, and productivity, … Most of my colleagues at work picked Linux over a MacBook, and they waste countless hours fixing their various Linux bugs.

Within the specific context of this thread and what’s being discussed, is your post providing evidence for or against what’s being requested? I’m relating that my experience is similar. Sure, I’m not expecting a MacBook because that’s generally not feasible for general HW unless you have the dominance of Windows or Android. And the Linux ecosystem honestly has done a fantastic job in the x64 HW support all things considered. I’m fact, none of the issues I’ve had are really the Linux kernel itself so most of the benefit of the SW/HW layer configuration and isn’t even a distribution thing. And given that my laptop is fairly popular and has dedicated pages on Arch, one would think there might be community-supported “here’s default machine configuration that sets it up correctly” option.

There’s also the general weird design choices from KDE and Gnome, trackpad cursors still not working correctly (although much better than before thanks to that guy that’s taken on that task), Flame screenshot tool that still doesn’t work in a multi display setup despite that bug being open forever, Bluetooth audio switching not working quite so well, hibernation not working, laptop not going to hibernation by default on power loss, kwrite not automatically saving and restoring unsaved documents on power loss etc etc. These are all bugs or default behavior selection that doesn’t feel sane and I think it’s fair to say it’s not at the polish level of Windows let alone Mac. Since the vast majority of this isn’t about the HW/SW layer, I’d say comparing against the Mac is also fair game. That’s why I’m agreeing with OP and saying he’s not crazy and that I’m not aware of a distribution that is polished (Manjero comes close but the bugs are mostly upstream). What you’ve written sounds defensive and argumentative which makes it seem like you’re supporting the claim that there is a user friendly distribution that has the polish of Windows or Mac but all you actually seem to have said (and correct me if I’m wrong) is basically that that’s unreasonable to expect. I happen to disagree with that position since it’s actively harmful to trying to have Linux get market share, but that’s also arguing a different thing from what OP said. It’s kind of interesting to see this derailment whenever the comparison to user friendliness / polish of Windows and Max are brought up. I think the truth is that it’s really hard to achieve this in a bazaar model where you’re throwing together arbitrary components and no one is doing regular testing of livability of a distribution from scratch (everyone’s deployed their own workarounds when they hit bugs vs making sure that those workarounds are deployed by default for the users it’s relevant for, or even better fixing the issue when it’s not a problem with Nvidia).

In principle I would love to use Linux, as the developer experience isn’t great on Windows, and I would rather not be tied into expensive Apple computers.

However, I don’t want to learn about components of my operating system, that is below my pay grade.

I’m not trying to spread FUD, I’m speaking firsthand on some of the experiences my colleagues have had with their brand new $3000 business Thinkpads running all manner of Linux distributions.

I don’t doubt Linux is the right choice when you are creating a tightly integrated, walled off product like a Nintendo Switch.

I think you have some serious rose tinted glasses on if you are positing that these fixing OS bug scenarios are limited to Linux and do not also commonly occur on proprietary OS. The QA on Microsoft releases has been awful in recent years.

Your points doesn't make sense since you expect Linux to be Windows, it is not Windows

If you need Windows you use Windows

If you need an OS that is configurable and open, you use Linux

If you don't like to configure your OS, then you don't use Linux

That's not "elitism", that's respecting the work done by countless people to offer a free and configurable OS without strings attached

There is FUD in OP's comment since my original reply to tell people to use what empowers them got downvoted, -3 pts right now

"FUD: Fear, uncertainty and doubt is a propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or false information and a manifestation of the appeal to fear."

How can learning of your tools being below your pay grade? Ability to use tools properly is a prerequisite for any professional. That sounds very weird to me.

Software development is full of anti-intellectualism and friends. So many "professionals" don't think they should Learn New Things. Said "professionals" tend to be excellent org chart climbers otoh.

People don't have enough time in their life to learn about everything they touch and need to say no to some things to get anything done.

Maybe those professionals want to learn tools for their actual job instead of fighting with the platform underneath. Just like artists want to draw, not learn how to fix their graphic tablet's broken driver.

Well, a painter probably knows a thing or two about the paint and the canvas, and a musician knows a thing or two about their instrument and... well... music theory.

Doesn't sound crazy to expect a software developer to know a thing or two about their system. Not necessarily down to the device tree, of course. But being stuck at "learning to use a terminal is below my pay grade" feels like the other extreme to me.

Most of the learning I'm talking about is like an hour of work. But the resistance doesn't even let people get to that point.

An operating system isn’t a tool, it’s a means to an end.

It’s like saying it’s bad I don’t know how all the internal components of my car work because I rely on my car to get to work.

As far as I am concerned, my operating system is a black box for interacting with VSCode, Slack, Outlook, Firefox, and use a terminal in a user-friendly way. I don’t care how it works, its components, or how it is constructed. I certainly don’t expect to have to fix it - making the operating system reliable and user-friendly is someone else’s job.

Most people don't want to be mechanics just to drive to get groceries.

My grandfather was truck driver. He knew his truck as his fingers. He could reassemble drive of his car at weekends. If he wouldn't possess skills to repair his truck, he would die somewhere on the winter road when that truck breaks, so it's not even question of preference, it's question of survivability.

It's not as drastic for programmers, but I, personally, trying to keep that attitude myself and I'm trying to learn systems I'm using to some degree.

I bet most people aren't going to the local supermarket on a long distance truck.

Sounds like you would not actually love to use Linux, then :-)

> the nintendo switch for its FreeBSD variant

Nintendo Switch doesn't run FreeBSD, although it does use some code from FreeBSD. The Switch OS (Horizon) is a proprietary microkernel-based system that isn't POSIX-flavored at all. I don't think the full lineage/history is publicly documented, but CFW and homebrew toolchain developers have noted strong similarities to the 3DS OS.

Sure there are lots of reasons, with free beer UNIX clone being the top one.

Nintendo Switch doesn't use BSD, it is a microkernel.

> linux empowers the (...) nintendo switch for its FreeBSD variant

But BSD isn't Linux... Both belong to *nix family, but so does macOS

Pick a T-series thinkpad with an AMD CPU/GPU combo and the latest fedora. Done.

Don't forget that MacOS ships with very Limited hardware, too.

Funnily enough, this is the exact spec of laptops (except with Nvidia GPUs) that all of my colleagues who have had these problems use.

Not surprising, since Nvidia is famous for terrible Linux support. I couldn't get scaling to work on my desktop with an Nvidia GPU, but my T-series Thinkpad (AMD CPU and GPU) works perfectly fine. In fact, sleep works better than on Windows since it doesn't do the stupid battery-draining "Modern Standby". If I send it to sleep on Linux, it actually stays asleep until I open the lid.

So exact spec except for the only spec that actually matters.

Sleep was broken for a year on those with the amd platform. Based on 4 laptops t14s gen 2 iirc.

Latest kernels seem to fix it. But tbh I felt like a fool handing those things to our freelancers.

Fedora Workstation

No. I am using Linux on PC hardware and I miss Mac OS X. I have a lot tweaks and hacks that just don’t cut it. For example, the PC Home and End keys for text boxes are hard coded into X.

Funny you should mention that because I always have to fix Home and End on Mac with Karabiner-Elements so they don't go the beginning and end of the entire document which is totally useless.

That said, I agree with you.

macOS is a mess. Some apps respect proper bindings home/end, some including native Apple ones are just crazy. Ctrl+A/Ctrl+E works as a super home/end for VSCode but as an ordinary home/end for Jetbrains. Mess, giant mess.

The only thing that macOS did good is a separation between ctrl+C and cmnd+C, so I can interrupt apps in console and copy text without issues.

I still haven't fixed that on my Macbook, as iterm2's changes mess with Karabiner's changes. It is a pain in the ass.

Your description of macOS's and MacBooks' reliability doesn't match my experience. I've been using MacBook Pros for about 15 years now, and every single one that I've ever owned or used long-term has always had some kind of bizarre issue that ended up forcing me to replace it.

It's actually funny that you mention issues with Thunderbolt docks and monitors, because I feel like those were some of the most frequent issues I've encountered. This year, I actually swapped my work MacBook Pro for a Linux laptop specifically because my Mac would completely and irrecoverably lock up every time I tried docking it to two 4K monitors. My new Linux laptop has some issues of its own, but nothing that severe, at least.

> that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full

Funny you say that. I can't boot into my dual Windows-arch desktop atm. systemd-boot is broken after I tried to set up XBOOTLDR partition, which I only had to do since the default Windows EFI partition didn't have space after an update.

1h20m to backup the 500GB SSD. I had to restore it once already after a botched shrinking of a Windows data partition. There was also a problem where literally nothing would boot - not even a USB. I believe this happened because I accidentally copied my main SSD (with the arch/windows EFI partition at the front) to the 8GB USB drive, and (again, speculating) having two similar drives confused the BIOS enough that nothing would boot, it just kept defaulting to network boot. "(Drive not present)" on the Windows/arch boot options. Sigh...

Anyways, I still need to try adding/removing a timeout for the systemd-boot config. I've already tried hosting everything on a separate, larger EFI partition. When I boot to Linux from the BIOS it just shows me options for Windows 10 and back to boot.

TL;DR Linux is a huge PITA.

> without the boot partition getting full

This is very annoying. Some distributions are able to boot directly from the main partition, without a need for a separate /boot though, even with Btrfs. This is the case for the computer I'm writing this comment with running openSUSE Tumbleweed, I think I had that with Debian or Ubuntu in the past. [a]

> sleep states being faulty (or the machine not working properly after waking from sleep)

> or external monitor resolutions being wrong

Fine on my computers too.

> monitor scaling working properly when you have two monitors with different resolutions?

I gave up temporarily on this. It seems to work well on Wayland but I can't bear the blurry fonts that comes with fractional scaling on Wayland (and this is not just Linux, I think macOS is like this too), and I'm still on X11 the scaling is not very adaptative. HOWEVER KDE is getting proper fractional scaling support just right now [1]:

> “What does this do?” you might ask. It allows the Qt toolkit to turn on its pre-existing fractional scaling support on Wayland that it always had on X11. No more rendering to an integer size and then scaling down! This should result in Qt apps that are scaled to anything other than 100%, 200%, or 300% scale having better performance, less visual blurriness, and lower power usage.

And KDE on Wayland may be usable now, so that might be the thing that makes me switch in the coming months.

[1] https://pointieststick.com/2022/12/16/this-week-in-kde-wayla...

[a] edit: by the way, I just installed Debian on an old x86 tablet that was running Ubuntu (because i386 is not supported anymore, and recent versions of Debian are way better than recent versions of Ubuntu anyway). It had a separate /boot on Ubuntu, I installed Debian in a Btrfs subvolume, its /boot is there so now the separate boot partition is completely useless and I will get rid of it. So I can confirm it works on Debian too.

What partition configuration do you have? Do you have a fdisk printout handy (aka `fdisk /dev/FOOBAR` and run the p command)

  Disk /dev/sda: 465.76 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
  ...
  Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
  Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
  I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
  Disklabel type: gpt
  ...
  
  Device         Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
  /dev/sda1       2048   1050623   1048576   512M EFI System
  /dev/sda2    1050624 972578815 971528192 463.3G Linux filesystem
  /dev/sda3  972578816 976773134   4194319     2G Linux swap

sda1 is the EFI partition mounted on /boot/efi, /boot is a folder of /dev/sda2.

sda2 is fully encrypted, subvolumes used to be managed by snapper and I installed openSUSE with its installer which does a lot of magic so my mount is a bit of a mess. Grub is able to find its config and boot the OS but takes ages to decrypt so I replaced it with systemd-boot. Here's mount:

  proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  devtmpfs on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,nosuid,size=4096k,nr_inodes=3048348,mode=755,inode64)
  securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,inode64)
  devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
  tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,size=4883644k,nr_inodes=819200,mode=755,inode64)
  cgroup2 on /sys/fs/cgroup type cgroup2 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,nsdelegate,memory_recursiveprot)
  pstore on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  efivarfs on /sys/firmware/efi/efivars type efivarfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  bpf on /sys/fs/bpf type bpf (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,mode=700)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on / type btrfs (rw,noatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=266,subvol=/@/.snapshots/1/snapshot)
  systemd-1 on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=28,pgrp=1,timeout=0,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct,pipe_ino=16762)
  debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  mqueue on /dev/mqueue type mqueue (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime,pagesize=2M)
  tracefs on /sys/kernel/tracing type tracefs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  configfs on /sys/kernel/config type configfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  ramfs on /run/credentials/systemd-tmpfiles-setup-dev.service type ramfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,mode=700)
  ramfs on /run/credentials/systemd-sysctl.service type ramfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,mode=700)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on /.snapshots type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=265,subvol=/@/.snapshots)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on /boot/grub2/i386-pc type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=264,subvol=/@/boot/grub2/i386-pc)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on /opt type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=261,subvol=/@/opt)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on /srv type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=259,subvol=/@/srv)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on /boot/grub2/x86_64-efi type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=263,subvol=/@/boot/grub2/x86_64-efi)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on /usr/local type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=258,subvol=/@/usr/local)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on /root type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=260,subvol=/@/root)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on /var type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=257,subvol=/@/var)
  /dev/mapper/cr_root on /home type btrfs (rw,relatime,ssd,space_cache=v2,subvolid=281,subvol=/@/home)
  tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,size=12209112k,nr_inodes=1048576,inode64)
  /dev/sda1 on /boot/efi type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro)
  ramfs on /run/credentials/systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service type ramfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,mode=700)
  tmpfs on /run/user/1000 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=2441820k,nr_inodes=610455,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=1000,inode64)
  portal on /run/user/1000/doc type fuse.portal (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000)
  gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/1000/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000)
  tracefs on /sys/kernel/debug/tracing type tracefs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
  portal on /root/.cache/doc type fuse.portal (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0)
  gvfsd-fuse on /root/.cache/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0)

I have a similar setup on an nvme disk in another computer.

I might as well delete the 2G swap partition by the way, with 24G of RAM I'm not sure it's that useful.

I believe the bigger "problems" happen when a random laptop is used instead of the few that are rock solidly supported by major distros. I am the same BTW, I usually buy a laptop that maybe kinda supported and then cross my fingers and hope that it works. Then I start fixing those issues that can be fixed or create little workarounds around those that can't. For my wife I just bought a Dell XPS and that was that, no tweaks or workarounds necessary.

I occasionally try a Linux distro on a new computer that I'm building, like Ubuntu and Mint, and so far I've never been able to get it running satisfactorily without any major problems.

Last time, I was using an Intel barebones NUC for a stepmania setup, and ran into major problems with both audio and display resolution. Gave up and went to Windows 10, no major issues there setting it up, though the occasional boot screen interstitial is very annoying.

Random hardware which is designed for Windows typically gets Linux support within a couple years after its release. But if you are actually serious about trying Linux, buy it preinstalled.

Fedora was much better than macOS for me. Don't have your kinds of complications though.

> that can reliably be updated without the boot partition getting full

I have the suspicion that this is caused by users who add extra kernels and don't use the system provided ones.

Ubuntu retains only a certain number of (distro-provided) kernels.

Ubuntu desktop version doesn't even use a separate partition for `/boot`, so there's no risk.

I remember this being a problem for Ubuntu Server, but it was long ago (I think 16.04, or maybe earlier).

> sleep states being faulty (or the machine not working properly after waking from sleep)

This problem can depend on two things.

S3 (suspend to RAM) became a bloody mess in recent times (possibly, because of Microsoft's push for the Connected standby). The firmware of some laptops (and even desktops!) doesn't advertise the state. One can verify this with `sudo dmesg | grep "supports S"`: if there is no S3, it's the producers fault. In such cases, I actually don't know how Windows works (for example, if they patch the ACPI tables).

If S3 is advertised, but it doesn't work well, then the producer didn't release proper drivers. Best thing is to open a bug in the kernel tracker; some producers do actually react.

Kernel v6.1 released a lot of fixes for laptops, so it's worth giving a shot.

I'm definitely not justifying the status quo, but it's a chicken and egg situation (small user base -> underdeveloped drivers -> small user base).

> random things like thunderbolt docks not working

I suspect this is a similar (hardware drivers) problem.

> external monitor resolutions being wrong, and monitor scaling working properly when you have two monitors with different resolutions

I suspect this is an X11 problem, which can be considered "Linux", although I'm not sure exaclty. Scaling is a bloody mess, and I think it's not related to drivers.

To summarize, the fault is a mixed bag. for hardware/driver cases (and they're many), there's nothing to do; some distros adopt kernels earlier, but that's not necessarily a good thing. For display scaling, I suspect there's nothing to do, either - this may still take some time.

> In such cases, I actually don't know how Windows works (for example, if they patch the ACPI tables).

It uses Modern Standby (aka S0 Low Power Idle).

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

> if there is no S3, it's the producers fault

Or it's Linux fault for not supporting the S0LP? Sure, there are a lot of problems with the S0LP implementation on Windows, but the idea itself is good - that's what all the phones have utilized for at least previous 10 years. Maybe Linux actually could do it better than Windows, if some effort was put into it?

> Or it's Linux fault for not supporting the S0LP?

That Linux should support all the crap in existence is a fair argument, however...

> the idea itself is good - that's what all the phones have utilized for at least previous 10 years

Phones are different from PCs, in the hardware design, but also in the usage pattern. If something makes perfect sense on a phone, it doesn't imply it does it on the PC as well.

I owned in the past two hybrid (Microsoft) laptops, which I carried and used on the way frequently, and still, the idea of a connected standby was evidently nonsensical (even ignoring the horribly broken implementation). If one wants to stay connected, they use a smartphone, and/or a smartwatch. A laptop can't be kept in a pocket and pulled it out in a second; it's also often awkard to use on the way.

There are no measurements around; embarrassingly, a presentation by an Intel engineer¹ has zero data, but has photos of cute animals. It certainly consumes more than S3, but how much, is carefully ignored (I bet considerably more).

The modern standby, and the convergence narrative in general, is pushed by the companies that couldn't set a foot in the mobile market (Intel and Microsoft), and are trying to appear relevant.

I hope it dies, although with M$ behind, it's unlikely that it will. It's tragic that a useless idea clearly invented by business suits, is affecting the hardware landscape so significantly.

My M1 Macbook pro is connected to a Dell thunderbolt desktop docking station. This had caused me so much grief with the screen, that I directly connected the 43 inch monitor to the M1 rather than go through the dock. Moreover, the ethernet on the dock is wonky, often dropping out. This makes the work VPN sometimes ... challenging.

Was just as wonky when I had the windows laptop that the mac replaced. BSODs were common with it, and its crashed the MacOS machine multiple times.

Linux OTOH, doesn't seem to have a problem with the other dock I have it connected to. Haven't had a crash.

But hey, doesn't fit the "linux sux" narrative, so YMMV.

My M1 pro is also way fiddlier and flakier with thunderbolt docks than my Linux thinkpad. Just monitor detection and enabling itself seems slower and buggier on a mac.

It's not exactly a desktop device (though it can be booted into a desktop), but Steam Deck is by far the best Linux experience I've had. It seems what you really need is a company with an incentive to make a good hardware+software package.

Steam Deck is the only way I am going to indulge Linux Desktop long term in the future. Just have to save a bit so I can buy the 512 GB version.

You can buy the cheapest version and upgrade the M.2 SSD

Ironic for me. 2019, 2021 and half of 2022 were the years that I went all in on Ubuntu for desktop. It was an overall awesome experience as a developer.... and then Zoom and Slack started crashing randomly or having weird bugs where I'd needed to restart the app or even the machine in order to get them working again.

2022 is the year I switched back to windows as my development experience with WSL2 + being able to use Zoom and Slack without them crashing or getting random bugs.

Even running Linux GUI apps works well on Windows. Run evince file.pdf from the wsl2 command line and evince opens.

The one thing that doesn't integrate well is linux disk encryption utilities and windows. I wish I could use LUKS/cryptsetup but ended up giving up and using Bitlocker.

Note that you don't even need apps, you can just use Zoom and Slack from your web browser. (For Zoom especially, nobody should be trusting their native client in the first place after their security debacles. Your browser is a convenient security boundary.) If your browser locks up to the point where it requires you to restart your machine, that sounds like a much more serious problem.

Came to say that too. Zoom nags you about their app every single time, but it works in a browser.

I like Jitsi, because it is open source and it is not Zoom.

That's... not really useful for those of us who need to talk to other people using Zoom.

Out of curiosity: what makes it mandatory to use Zoom? Jitsi runs in the browser (just like Google Meet, btw, which I still like better than Zoom), so it should not be a permission issue.

Everyone else in the company using Zoom

Recently, I've been impressed by Intel's Clear Linux project. It really feels like a completely new generation of Linux desktop that's designed from the ground-up to be more performant than even Windows, while still being "turn-key" pretty much, and a bleeding-edge yet stable rolling-release at that.

Lol. This is complete nonsense. Numbers that don't hold up, assertions which don't pass the smell test.

Linux excels in invironments where people don't ever lnow they're using Linux. Servers, embedded and highly customized environments. For average users Linux is still too much of a disjointed mess with poor hardware support.

I use multiple Linux distros daily and none of them would pass for a primetime ready desktop environment in any of my personal or professional environments. As much as I hate windows and Macos Linux just isn't up to the job of replacing them on the desktop. Luckily for them that is becoming less and and less relevant outside of the business environment.

In the end Linux is still little more than a random collection of software loosely connected through an administrator centric framework.

“The Year of Linux on the Developer’s Desktop” is kind of moving the goalposts from the original idea, no?

Not even that - developers that are keen enough to fill in Stackoverflow's user survey.

That’s against the rules.

I’ve been doing this 20 years.

You can only say next year is the year of the Linux desktop.

No hindsight stuff allowed.

That's moral choice I guess: you were simply making mistakes for the last 20 years, an the OP is blatantly lying. Also, you were simply giving people hope, and OP is actively sabotaging the development, by trying to make false impression that this garbage is already working fine. Which, as every actual Linux user knows, just isn't the case.

Obviously, that's Microsoft PR department post. Using praise as a weapon.

I've had to update Ubuntu (to the latest LTS! which is 8 months old already!) on a laptop (a Thinkpad, for God's sake!), and I'm still fighting a bunch of problems (not exclusively driver-related) that I didn't have on the same machine on older Ubuntu (or maybe I've already fixed some of them before and forgot about that… but some certainly are new!). I hate it, and I have no idea how non-technical people manage to use it for daily life and not as a troubleshooting exercise simulator (I've heard some of them do — not sure if that's true though).

It was a joke my friend.

Merry Christmas

That was too, in case you didn't figure… Kind of.

> a million steam deck

this is still just a rumor at this stage as there is no source apart from one guy saying it in a KDE conference. If Valve had indeed shipped more than a million they'd be screaming about it on the rooftops.

Why would they? Private companies don't need to brag.

Also, on track record, Valve have been very quiet in general about the huge piles of money they have raked in over the last 20 years.

While also investing heavily in hard and software BUT never really expanding their teams by thousands of new people.

Steam link, steam controllers, steam machines, vr headsets, steam deck

inhome streaming, remote play together, steam workshop, family sharing, mobile apps

Yes they do if they want to build excitement and interest in their niche platform. Money isn't the only reason to brag, attention is critical to a platform's success and Valve's Linux-based platform is starting from behind.

>starting from behind

They have 20 years of brand history, what are you talking about?

I'm talking about their Linux platform's position among gamers and game developers where usage & support is scarce, why would I be talking about their brand?

Ubuntu keeps getting better and better for me. This year I bought an Asus laptop with all the bells and whistles, and allegedly the only supported Linux was Fedora. I tried to get everything setup and failed multiple times, and then I went back to Ubuntu, installed a much newer kernel since Ubuntu distros are conservative there, and that was pretty much it.

Can't beat the build quality and performance of the Macbook Air M1 for the price and size in my opinion so I'm sticking with it for laptop. But as for "Desktop" I've almost fully switched over to Mint and very happy with it. Windows + WSL2 for work so I guess I turn up in all metrics on the surveys :)

Another vote for Mint here. Had some minor mouse sensitivity problems starting out but other than that I’ve been using it as my daily driver for 2 years now without any problems.

When I was at Google (2014-2017) - The Linux (I think it was Ubuntu based) just worked. Granted it was mostly java/blaze/little r/js/go, no dedicated graphics chips us (I came there from gamedev background). It was working just fine, and we had option to use Cinnamon or something else.

The only thing I remember is that it wasn't that easy (or maybe my memory does not serve me well) to "apt update" anything (and that makes sense). I think apt was going somehow through internal servers. All I remember is that "apt-file" wasn't working or was prevented from doing so.

Nonetheless - never had problem with the distro/whatever, and TBH never cared what linux is there - as compiler/everything else got somehow in, and you just carry on your work in Eclipse/CLion/JetBrains/Chrome/Firefox/etc.

Actually now that I think, I might've had NVIDIA card of sorts. But what I meant to say, I never needed/care what GPU I have (unlike before), so it must've worked fine somehow. Maybe I got once or twice the machine to crash, and it was all the time on.

I had a Titan x in my workstation to around the same time at Google (deep learning). Everything generally worked but then after about two years I ran into a disk space problem that prevented apt stuff from working. But by that point a lot more had moved into desktops-in-the-cloud anyway.

Rant: last weekend I finished building my teenager dream PC - 12 cores cpu, 64GB RAM, RTX 3060 12GB VRAM... GNOME on Ubuntu still managed to crash / hang on a fresh install.

Will try Mint / others, but it's a shame the "gateway distro for new users" is in such sorry state.

Nvidia with Wayland? That's on you then, man.

Exactly why I only use linux for headless serves. God knows how many totally obvious mistakes would be “on me” if I tried to set up a GUI workstation. Who’s got the time to learn why you can’t use of of the main GPU brands with one of the main GUIs?

Well, you did build your own rig, so some learning is expected, no?

Well it has been known for decades the Nvida is openly hostile to Linux Desktop, and actively tries to prevent development of open source drivers,

Hell Linus has a famous speech where he literally flips of Nvida

Celebrity kernel hackers lobbing attacks at hardware makers in speeches is no way to run a compatibility matrix.

>Celebrity kernel hackers

Wow... that is a take... Linus is a "Celebrity kernel hacker" really?

I could be wrong but it sounds like the poster is making a joke by parodying a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

If I ask about this around the office, do you think anyone will have any idea what I'm talking about?

It might be obvious in your social circles, but that doesn't mean it's even remotely common enough to be assumed knowledge for someone trying out linux on the desktop for the first time.

>>If I ask about this around the office

Depends, is this an office is Linux users? If so then i expect yes they would

This is entirely NVIDIA's fault, not Linux's. AMD plays ball.

Hackers. You'll find a few around here.

Forget it, I'll just install windows.

Doing some basic research beforehand seems reasonable to me.

Generally though, that combination is fairly notorious for quite a while now, due to nvidia not playing ball very well.

I recently went through the exercise of setting up two Ryzen PCs. One with an AMD GPU and one with an Nvidia GPU.

Surprisingly, the only issues I had with NVIDIA was that my window manager would not let me start it because I had an NVIDIA GPU. They make you pass a flag along the lines of “yes I am running NVIDIA with Wayland”.

The AMD GPU was a nightmare thanks to a long running bug. I eventually got it working, but it was unexpected. NVIDIA on Linux has improved a lot!

Same story: 16 core, 64GB ram, 6900xt. And nothing crashes because even when being ridiculous I knew better than use Nvidia on Linux

I'll take "Sentiments from the Linux Community that Actively Drive Users Away" for 300.

Yeah, there's a huge problem in the community where every problem is the user's fault.

Like, using the most popular graphics card provider on Linux shouldn't be some outlandish idea that should be ridiculed.

I think it will change in a few years. There's been a lot of cool stuff added to Linux over the past few years. You can even use peripherals like hardware fan controllers or RGB hubs. With Nvidia open sourcing their drivers I'm hoping that wayland issues get ironed out sooner rather than later

In reality it's more like a sentiment of a certain hardware manufacturer towards the Linux community. The best the community can do is make it known.

Good, too many people are using Linux.

Meanwhile, my Linux partition is rock solid and I cannot for the life of me figure out random hangs and crashes on clean Windows installs.

It is an Nvidia GPU. Honestly, they’re rarely the problem in Linux. Not in practice anyway.

Any hardware diag I try passes. Drivers? Tried both manufacturer and Windows Update. Always ends the same.

The mouse driver BSODed the machine one time. That was a new one.

I’ll stick with a Linux distro for real work, thanks.

Aren't we all using libinput now? I'm shocked the mouse driver BSODs Linux these days.

Linus Torvalds giving the finger to Nvidia should be required reading for all new Linux adventurers.

I've been using Linux as my primary OS for around 3 years now with an nvidia GPU and haven't had any issues. I don't run Wayland for obvious reasons, but otherwise the system is rock solid. I have not had anything resembling the nightmare experience people claim with Linux and nvidia GPUs.

Try Manjaro with KDE.

Manjaro's more stable than Ubuntu (somehow), and KDE is better than GNOME. :D

Gnome Ubuntu is the "gateway distro for new users"? I would never ever Recommend that to new users.

Mint, popOS, and a few others for people coming from Windows would be the "gateway distro for new users"

gnome 3 is not for new users, back in the day, gnome 2.4 days maybe that was the case

At this point, the "gateway distro" for new users is running any of those in WSL. There is so much more buy-in if you can someone that they don't have to throw away their laptop and get one with this specific chip selection so that everything works. And if you can tell them that yes, of course, you can run your games at the same time, without fiddling, dual booting, or fear of getting banned for "cheats".

That probably is gateway for curious persons or who really wanna have Linux.

Myself included, and people around me keep using WSL without any slight hint of swapping [back] to Linux Desktop. I even know in person the guy who is on WoA (Windows on Arm) with Surface and WSL - he had enough 5+ years of Gentoo experience.

I've installed WSLg and disabled after ~ 20 minutes - just found nothing to run in GUI mode from Linux. Sure, others may, especially dev guys with JetBrains or whatever IDEs, but I literally couldn't remember anything beyond xeyes and konsole to play around with.

Would be nice to see some stats from Microsoft on WSL auditory/usage.

The other Ubuntu desktops should be fine. I recommend the Xfce one personally, it has everything thats needed of a sane gui and the xfce is not a RAM hog.

However the snap nonsense also means I might have to consider Ubuntu no longer suitable to recommend if they continue down this path.

Almost same config as my deskside. I've got 16 Epyc CPU cores, 128GB RAM, and 2TB of NVMe along with 8TB of ZFS mirror with hot spare. Same GPU. Linux Mint went on w/o problem. I did have to switch from nouveau to nvidia drivers, but that's covered in the driver manager.

Again, everything just works. Even the stupid little USB sound card I plugged in. Been listening to spotify while working on it. Using Zoom on that for my private non-work meetings.

Cinnamon version, 21.1 version of mint. Painless. Even getting zfs up and going. I updated to 2.1.7 at that.

Then I am glad I missed it.

I spend my days fixing other people’s Linux problems, I don’t wish to fix my own on my own time.

I still love the OS, but only for Docker and Kubernetes. I’ll run a mature desktop OS with a plan over Linux, possibly Windows.

Until Acrobat, Photoshop, and Illustrator work in Wine, it's a hard no.

Word and Excel are good :) plus there are tolerable replacements. Outlook is buggy as hell, but evolution can do its job.

But when I need to fill out and digitally sign a PDF form - something that should be an easy and mundane task - the entire Linux ecosystem fails me.

Also, task prioritization is still horrible. I fire up a high CPU background task and the mouse cursor stutters? (in GNOME)

I regularly fill out pdf forms using firefox on Linux Mint.

Little anectode … My Parents are over 60 and know a how to use a computer on a basic lvl… like installing software etc…. 6 years ago I forced them to switch to linux with linux mint and christmas presents…. It was a hell of a work at first. To show them how it works etc … They adapted very fine and are now big linux fans, because its so easy and not overloaded with shit you dont need. Every other person in that agegroup that is using windows has a shitload of strange software because it was the anwser to some problem on google and at leas 10 accounta for things they dont understand….

My parents are super happy with linux. My mother even shoked me when she had a problem with a printer and was suddenly using the comand lines for showing me that the printer doesnt react… that was a crazy moment for me … mama using shell commands … I think if mama is using comand lines linux desktop is mainstream!!!

Btw she was also surprised by the amount of help she got in the comunity

Has been for me every year for the last 22.

Occasionally I Remote Desktop into a windows machine or show someone something in their MacBook, it’s exhausting how bad the experience is. Random hangs, applications crashing, lvl of basic functions like virtual desktops, and don’t get me started on the Mac trackpad being the wrong way round.

“The Year of Linux on the Desktop of Developers who bothered to register on stackoverflow“.

I wonder when Linux can finally gain proper fractional scaling support. Now I know Gnome has it under wayland, but many other applications does not, electron apps sometimes can work with caveats, but I still have to make a lot of effort to make it really look okay to my eye.

Now out of box, everything feels broken here and there. And every time I came to use it as a real desktop environment instead of just a development machine I was distracted by the instinct to fix things without being to get anything done.

I know if someone reside mainly in terminal or use tile-based environment would work okay, but this kind of setup unfortunately does not work for me.

Gnome doesn't have it. Looks like it'll land next year.

Playing numbers from developers survey, while even Steam places it at around 2%.

I mean Steam is probably biased in the opposite direction since gamers are clearly going to be more likely to use Windows.

But yeah clearly not nearly as insanely skewed as these numbers. Statcounter puts it at 2.8%.

I can’t consider Linux desktop until copy and paste is consistent and seamless and lets me use the macOS key combination everywhere.

And of course all this should just work, not be a series of cli commands and configs.

because it's usually Ctrl + Shift + C to copy from a terminal? Otherwise I haven't noticed much inconsistency on the distros I've used

It's pretty much just that. People get hooked on the beautiful consistency of the command key and overrate how much value-add it really provides. They'll make arguments about how often they copy-paste and how every bit of complexity fills up their brain and other pseudoscientific stuff.

I can’t consider MacOS until the „@“ character is back on its internationally standardized place and Apple Safari supports VP9 hardware decoding.

I've had exactly the opposite experience switching to Mac from Linux. used to be my cli editors worked with the clipboard, now I have to `M-x shell-command-on-region pbcopy`.

I've written a wrapper script for it and bound that but if I have to write lisp to use the clipboard I consider that backsliding.

While I agree with many of the points here questioning the validity of the title, I must say that 2022 definitely feels to me like the year of Linux on the "developer desktop" - it was the first year where nearly all of the people in my developer circles embraced Linux and where all major laptop manufacturers offered a developer-focused Linux laptop (HP Linux One, Lenovo Thinkpad Linux Edition, Dell XPS Developer Edition, System76, and so on.).

Strange article trying to extrapolate a very biased subpopulation and grasping at other aspects to claim this year was "the year of Linux on the desktop". Unix was already dominating anything non-personal and non-mobile. Personal use outside enthusiasts and devs is still a blip on the radar.

If anyone thinks otherwise, ask yourself how Windows continues to get away with such consumer-unfriendly practices.

Unix has been absolutely dominant on mobile for years now.

Try to write a pure POSIX applications on either iOS or Android.

https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/fall2016/atlidakis

That's not the same thing though, is it? Even desktop Linux is not technically POSIX compliant.

But Android and iOS are complete nightmares in this regard.

I believe that. Imagine the power of having a Unix box in your pocket whereever you go.

It's a pity the Ubuntu phone went nowhere. There is Ubuntu Touch though (haven't used it).

A box programmed in Objective-C, Swift, Java, Kotlin, ISO C, ISO C++, plus OS specific APIs, with hardly anything that shows up on UNIX architecture books.

It is because without it there is no UNIX.

So I rephrase, try to write a iOS or Android app using UNIX only APIs.

Linux != Unix

While that's true, there is an exception for Huawei EulerOS 2.0 on Huawei KunLun Mission Critical Server.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm

I don't think it was renewed, though.

After 25 years as a dedicated Mac user, I kind of inadvertently switched to Kubuntu for most things, and it's been mostly fine. It gets better and better with each release too.

My singular major complaint is that not enough applications leverage the KDE system that allows you to rewire various keyboard shortcuts, so I can only half-ass having a setup where all the shortcuts mimic those of a Mac.

I've been running Linux Mint for years on both laptops (Thinkpads) and desktop, it hasn't been any more trouble than MacOS or Windows. Things just work out of the box for the needs of a basic home-office user & programmer.

I think it's just important to pick the right distro. RHEL which I use at work is giving me way more trouble.

MacOS and Windows treat their users like idiots. Since I have technical proficiency, I like to be able to use it. Using forked software, scripting, low-level config. It's frustrating how much of a pain in the ass that stuff can be on non-Linux desktop environments.

That's my main motivation to using Linux as my daily driver (3 years now).

I'm a software engineer turned manager, was on Linux for a while but my main tool is unfortunately outlook. I tried in vain to find a good outlook alternative that works with exchange but couldn't find one. The o365 web client is super slow so after a while I gave up and went with the macos flow.

The Linux CLI is a dominate user interface I use at work, it is also just called bash (well, that’s the default shell anyways). I have never tried an actual Linux desktop at work, web and native Mac applications are still dominate there (besides the CLI).

The cli existed when Linus was still in diapers.

Even Bash predates Linux by years.

There is zero that running a bash Shell has to do with “Linux”

Yes, but it is the desktop I’m used to, and it’s running on Linux.

> . I have never tried an actual Linux desktop at work

Which is it? Your statements are contradictory

I meant something with a GUI. Though I guess all the web stuff technically runs on Linux.

That isn’t what people mean when they say a Linux desktop.

I understand that Linux may not be for everyone, but I have not used anything else since 1999 at least. I stick with Debian, even on my desktop, in spite of it not always being the most updated. But it is rock solid. YMMV

Any clue on what distros are causing the growth? First I've heard of all this.

windows?

Can 2nd this one, I tried Mint and Slackware this year, just because of the Win11 app checker thing kept popping and reminding me that i don't want another few years worth of BS like that.

Article says that doesn't include WSL / Docker

I don't think that's what GP meant with their comment.

It's a joke about people moving to Linux not because it's gotten any better but because Windows has been getting worse

steam deck

Nah, not enough shipping to move the needle

Professional developers use Steam Deck as their main machine? I have the wrong job it seems!

Steam Deck is not a distro. SteamOS is.

Steam Deck + SteamOS is a catalyst in the making. You pretty much have to use Flatpak for application installation otherwise you risk your installs getting wiped out when Steam does a distro upgrade. You get a managed desktop experience with the setup. When you couple the Steam Deck with a good dock you have a great desktop computing experience.

Not sure how accurate this is, but you can take a look on wikipedia. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

So, this person called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29746655

They're going to be giddy when they learn about Chromebooks!

Is there something to know to make the Linux desktop/modern GUI apps more responsive? Sometimes it just feels clunky. This is under gnome.

How should we be able to help without knowing your hardware and distro?

Pepperidge Farm remembers when 1998 was the year of Linux on the Desktop.

Red Hat and StarCraft boxes lined the shelves of CompUSA.

It's funny sad that every year is the year of Linux on the Desktop. I used it as my desktop from around '97-'99 and eventually gave it up for Mac. It was fun to tinker with and get my Enlightenment setting just right but I can't see it ever taking much marketshare.

70K responses biased towards Stack Overflow users. This is pretty weak.

Linux desktop on x86 is the backbone of (almost) every single ARM MacBook.

I’d argue the problem isn’t really with the Linux kernel or the command line.

The UI experience is unfortunately the same coherence of design horror story it has been since forever.

Windows is of a terrible of it's own, but wayland, gtk, the OS services model and user settings are just a horror show.

It’s not finished until more Microsoft and Mac users convert to Linux.

Welcome

This is utterly ridiculous. Unless you're a long-time Unix hacker or system administrator (I was the latter for ten years), trying to do anything in Linux is time-consuming, difficult, and ultimately very frustrating. Desktop Linux was always be a backwater for techies and it has absolutely no hope of widespread adoption like Windows or macOS.

The article continues to grasp and cling onto straws, to actually prove that a minority of StackOverflow techies who bothered to fill in the survey are using their machines as a Linux Desktop and not normal users as proof of 'widespread adoption'.

A long time delusion preached by Linux Desktop techies. The Year of the Linux Desktop has ended with Windows being the best Linux Distro.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com