Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

> Next year, 2023, will be my thirtieth year of Linux on the desktop, and the thirtieth year of being told it’s not possible to use Linux on the desktop, or to only use Linux on the desktop. Some of the people telling me this weren’t born when I started using Linux on the desktop.

Says a hardcore Linux user. This is what happens when you shove the Linux Desktop to people like artists and the distro 'support' becomes EOL. [0] Thousands of complaints, headaches in updating the system software and if all else fails, migration hell.

Now in 2023, we are still telling users to "choose a distro for Desktop" and companies to 'define Linux Desktop support' for their GUI apps which they still cannot do and support all distros like many can with the latest supported versions of Windows or macOS. This is an eternal issue for the Linux Desktop.

At this point the best Linux Desktop is Windows with WSL2 and requires no reformatting, partitioning, migrating and reconfiguring dotfiles in window managers.

[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/15b-4GMTSEE9tyqeQdBfy_LZnxQI...

> At this point the best Linux Desktop is Windows with WSL2

I tried this once to see if I could run the Linux-version of Emacs, on Windows, because the native Windows-version has terrible performance.

After an hour or so if fiddling I still couldn’t get X-forwarding working and concluded that WSL2 is a console-only toy.

It’s not near being a complete enough Linux-environment.

That seems like bad metric to define the state of WSL since X-forwarding is very easy to do.

You just install https://sourceforge.net/projects/vcxsrv/, run it, then

`export DISPLAY="$(grep nameserver /etc/resolv.conf | sed 's/nameserver //'):0"` in WSL and you're good to go.

It may be worth trying again. On the latest version of WSL2 I've had success in running stuff like Firefox right out of the box.

WSL nowadays provides native graphics and sound support.

> and the distro 'support' becomes EOL.

So what? Upgrade to a supported one.

> Upgrade to a supported one.

Which 'one'?

The currently-supported version of the distro you're on.

It's a cultural difference. People using Windows seem to spend an inordinate amount of effort coddling along ancient installs of Windows 10, presumably because they're such a pain in the backside to set up (I have personally never successfully installed any version of Windows later than 3.11 and got all my devices working, with graphics and networking support a particular problem).

People using Linux will just blow away the install and stick on the latest LTS, because it's quick and easy and supported. If you've got a lot of apps to install it is generally possible to script all that, and so you pull the trigger on an install and it's ready to go in ten minutes.

One slight counterexample is the situation that Black Magic Design's video software DaVinci Resolve is in, where it's packaged for (and only officially supported on) CentOS 7, which goes EOL next year. However, it turns out it works just fine in CentOS Stream 8, and indeed it can be run on other distros in a Docker container based on CentOS (and of course running it in a container brings other benefits like being able to work with multiple versions on the same computer).

In general though, there's more of a "blow it away and reinstall" approach with Linux when a distro is EOL. I know I'm not the only one that takes this a stage further, and just replaces the hard disk when a new LTS comes out, so if anything happens the old stuff isn't "lost".

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