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Comment by mkasberg | Hacker News Reader

Crap like this makes my Linux desktop (Gnome on Ubuntu) feel nice in comparison. As the mainstream players have added more bloat/ads/etc (e.g. ads in the start menu) over the last N years, and the Linux desktop has gotten more mature, it really does just feel simple & smooth in comparison.

Not suggesting Linux is for everyone, but if you happen to use it or are thinking about it, it's nice.

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It's amazing to me that Mac and Windows don't really feel (from UX standpoint) that much faster or smoother than 10 years ago despite hardware being much more powerful. Computers get faster but software keeps operating on the "edge" by adding more complexity. Linux is nice, but it would be nicer to have a UX focused product that keeps it simple and takes advantage of fast hardware instead of seeing it as an opportunity to load it with more complexity for seemingly no benefit.

The main problem is Mac's windows management. I'm having good success with the new stage manager feature along with "reduced motion" enabled, and some hotkeys to activate apps. This gives me near-instant transitions, which I really love about many Linux window managers. (Like Sway.)

This with M1 is the smoothest UX I've ever had, even compared to my powerful Windows computer. While Linux and SwayWM did feel a bit more snappy, the other part of the UX was lacking enough that I spent too much time tweaking and not enough time getting shit done.

My work M1 Mac is buttery smooth. Shame about the mess they've made of Window management and focus stealing crap.

I had a 2019 Macbook and it felt like an unbearably slow piece of crap that constantly had the spinning ball and fans blasting full speed doing just about nothing. Now my 2020 M1 feels extremely snappy. Everything is instant now.

They don’t feel faster than a decade ago and they feel significantly slower than two decades ago. There has to be some “law” name for how software expands to consume any increased resources.

I expect that's a corollary to Parkinson's law

You're correct, there is:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

Bill and Andy's law says software gets slower at the same rate that hardware gets faster.

Wirth's law says software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.

There are other similar eponymous laws, but they're basically those two laws stated differently or with different attributions.

> Linux is nice, but it would be nicer to have a UX focused product

I feel like this is being over-used at this point. Modern gnome works fine.

GNOME is garbage made by people who really really wish they were working on tablet UIs but weren't good enough to work for Apple or Google. They repeatedly show disdain for the user base and their product is nigh unusable without extensions they provide no guarantee will continue working version to version.

I guess it doesn't work for you. I have no problems with it. In fact, I vastly prefer it to both Windows and OSX.

For me, I like the simplicity. I don't need any extensions. I don't have to hunt around for settings in ten different places with different user interfaces (windows, I'm looking at you). I have never got on with the window management in OSX, but some clearly prefer it.

I guess KDE is what people who want everything to be customisable out of the box should use, but I haven't tried that in years.

What if I don't want modern UIs and want to go back the old days of spinning skull gifs and flames?

Try NSCDE https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

I disagree. I have been using Kubuntu and Fedora at work.

Fedora supposedly is amazing because always ahead, and I would, except that I'm terrified of upgrading because every time I do, gnome breaks plugins. Gnome without plugins is not usable from my perspective (system tray), which essentially managed to create this horrible situation where I have to delay upgrading for 6 months to be on the safe side.

Kubuntu on the other side, is ubuntu. Canonical messed up badly with Pro, so I'm looking for alternatives. That's when I realized that my only problem with Fedora IS GNOME. Next time, I'm sticking to KDE, I don't care what the most common one is, KDE seems to be more stable and that's important to me.

And the window manager is way more flexibility for heavy multidesktop users...

>Linux is nice, but it would be nicer to have a UX focused product that keeps it simple and takes advantage of fast hardware instead of

Try XFCE or some other low-resource UI.

Fluxbox ftw!!

It's amazing to me how many glaringly obvious issues Windows 10 still has. Recently I had to leave the comfort of my PopOS! desktop and use a brand-new Windows 10 gaming laptop.

Windows + "putty" would regularly lose keystrokes at the beginning of the word. And for whatever reason, typing "putty" would not select "putty" as the top choice, but "puttygen".

And then I wrote a text in Notepad where I had to paste in some information. Ctrl+V and started typing. Boy was I surprised that the paste command was delayed and pasted halfway into the next word.

Like WTF Microsoft? You have 4 CPU cores boosting to 4+ GHz and you can't keep up with my typing speed in the core UI of your OS? Is this thing dedicated entirely to vision-impaired retirees?

I don't suggest Linux to anyone who can't set it up themselves now. Every time I set someone up with Ubuntu or something, they don't realize you have to manually update it so everything is 4 years out of date and the upgrade process doesn't even work anymore so you have to do a full install again.

Windows is built for the average person who just needs their computer to manage itself. The average Windows or macOS user wants the system to prompt regularly and for the "yes" button to just make it work.

Why it's out of date? Ubuntu prompts/install updates in the same ways as Windows.

Don’t know. Presumably the Ubuntu prompts were not as aggressive as the MS ones so the person just closed the window. While my grandma will just end up on Windows 11 without even knowing how which is exactly the “just works, can’t mess it up” setup these types of users need.

Exactly. With Linux, the user has to actually click on the update icon, click a button to start the updates, then type in their password.

For most users, that's just *way* too hard to do, so it never gets done.

With Windows, it'll force updates on you at some point, so Grandma will be updated whether she wants to or not, even if she's in the middle of something. Users like that *need* this.

Not on Ubuntu, it prompts you when updates are available.

Right, but still you have to click somewhere and type in a password IIRC.

That's *way* too hard for many users. If it isn't done completely invisibly in the background, or completely forced on the user, then it just won't get done.

We lost a lot of competence along the years. Are people trying to get back into Womb state? I mean it's not just computers but everything. On the other hand we have highly competent people who are unwilling to put in "the work" if someone does a half assed job for them. Even if they know they can do better with little more effort.

And then there are these ultra dedicated people who do everything to be independent from others to the point of social isolation.

What is happening?!

I think you raise some good points, as I've noticed that it seems like average people, decades ago, used to be a lot more capable of handling various things that today it seems like they're not. I think personally it was because, back then, they were basically forced into it, or just didn't have so many things distracting them.

Still, when Grandma won't update her computer because clicking a few buttons and typing a password is too much work, we can't point to the past here: she wasn't updating computers in her younger years either, and usually wasn't using a computer at all. Even middle-aged people now are using computers and smartphones, when in their younger years they didn't have those things.

No ordinary people are competent enough, even for Linux these days. The tech people tend to over-exaggerate their belief that average people can't think beyond hitting a button.

And these days MS and Apple are pretty good at making the process pretty transparent. I don't remember ever updating my Apple Watch, it's just up to date. Presumably updated over night, Windows is mostly the same.

This is why you show them. I did. And they were fine with doing it.

But if someone is like my brain damaged sister (who drinks their lives away) and is incapable of grasping any information, I make a simple script with just a single command (that I put in a folder called 'scripts' under root) to run at a specific time in the background to do the updating (Typically during hours of non use). The only time it really has to be rebooted is when a new kernel is installed. Well, I let the user take care of that whenever they reboot, or shutdown their machine.

In fact, to make life easier, that is what I do for all of my household computers so that I don't have to think about it (because I am lazy).

Ever think of doing that?

Linux desktops are nicer period.

Both OSX and Windows feel like an archaic mess when you go back to them.

How are system restarts still a thing?!

Windows doesn't support changing the volume by scrolling when having the mouse on the speaker tray icon.

I miss that so much when I'm on windows and not on KDE.

install Eartrumpet to get that, and other useful features.

I am on Windows 11 right now and it most definitely does work.

And 10, both "new" scroll panel and the old mixer one.

It's all the little conveniences like that in desktop oriented Linux-based operating systems (which directly correspond to opposing "paper-cuts" in Windows and often MacOS) which have kept me on Linux for a couple few decades now (last Windows I used regularly was Windows 7). It was rough going at first, as Linux distros weren't nearly as "polished" back then as they mostly are now, but it was worth it because Linux simply kept improving in every little detail that mattered to me. Every time I'm forced to touch Windows these days, it's positively painful trying to navigate even the most basic functions.

They’re still a thing on Linux, I have to restart with every kernel update.

Do you mean like the "system restart required - in 60s" style of the other OSes, or just in order to boot with the newly-installed kernel? The only you-must-reboot-now-no-choice thing I can think of any of my Linux desktops is nvidia driver updates, I guess because you're living on borrowed time without a reboot...

Not only that, unlike Windows TPM + Secure Boot still requires lots of manual shenanigans on every kernel update (at least on Fedora).

It was designed that way, but it doesn’t actually need to be that way.

KSplice, for example, lets you update the kernel without rebooting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ksplice

> does not provide any mechanisms for ensuring function-level consistency while the hot patches are applied

E.g. a shotgun pointed at your feet

To be fair, the comparison is against the way Windows updates itself which is like Russian roulette.

You are talking about unbootable system (extremely rare) or missing drivers. But what I quoted potentially means data corruption.

I've been quite enjoying macOS. It's a different paradigm for sure, but as I get more fluent in it I find I enjoy it almost as much as my linux desktop. Windows still feels like I'm waging war against Microsoft for control of my computer, though.

It's frustrating how easily Microsoft is annoying users purely because they have to have every single pixel monetized on Windows. So much user frustration comes down to this. A potentially useful widget feature if it was open to Windows app developers first, is just another avenue to throw MSN News and ads at you, becoming yet another thing to fight your computer about.

I've had trouble with sound, wireless (both wifi and bluetooth), graphics, boot, and power-state management with Linux, with at least one of these issues appearing in every single device I've installed Linux on, with none of those appearing on the Windows devices that I've also used.

I also have experienced performance, usability, and integration problems with every Linux desktop environment that I've used.

Linux desktops are certainly not "nicer period". They're better than Windows and macOS along certain axes (e.g. transparency and modularity of internals) and worse along others.

> I've had trouble with sound, wireless (both wifi and bluetooth), graphics, boot, and power-state management with Linux,

Hah! I could say the same for Windows! I'm the family IT support person and I've experienced all those problems and a whole lot more in Windows. Especially after Windows upgrades (e.g. going from Windows 7 to 10 or 10 to 11).

At least with Linux there's always a way to fix it. It might be in some obscure StackOverflow post or the Ubuntu forums or the Arch wiki (which is fantastic BTW) but there's always a solution.

With Windows there often isn't a solution other than, "wait for the vendor to fix it." There's not even good troubleshooting options in Windows because the built-in logger is the worst in all of the history of computing and I don't know how anyone can put up with it!

There isn’t always a solution on Linux. I’ve hit a few things over the years where I’ve hit a wall and got stuck. On two occasions I fixed it myself and submitted patches and got entirely ignored. The bot closing your ancient PR that the maintainer of a large open source project didn’t even bother looking at is the status quo in my existence.

Now I acknowledge that I’m helpless on any platform.

In 10 years, there's nothing I've run into that a kernel update didnt fix.

Branding alone gets me. Booting up MacOS or Windows just feels wrong, nevermind the time I spend uninstalling their bloatware or disabling the ads. A fresh Linux system is unparalleled zen, as long as you coughed up the money for a properly supported machine.

> A fresh Linux system is unparalleled zen, as long as you coughed up the money for a properly supported machine.

In before, “Yeah, we’ll, I just don’t use that feature so it doesn’t bother me.”

In response to what? All three operating systems here have things they are uniquely capable of, and uniquely incapable of. The stones are all in glass houses, I dare someone to throw the first one.

This is a really weak retort. Only with linux is buying hardware a minefield where it's common to blame the purchaser for "not doing the research" or knowing what chipset(!) is in some piece of consumer hardware. Meanwhile, this problem simply doesn't exist on the two main desktop competitors.

It's been this way for 30 years.

And yes, this counts for "fully supported" hardware.

Is the whole suspend/hibernate ("Modern Standby") clusterfuck not real enough of an issue for you? Seems like that fits pretty well into the category of problem you're describing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28639952

Let's see: in the last couple of years, my Linux laptops have made me... spend a few minutes googling for how to get systemd to leave dhcp-provided dns servers alone, and one time where I couldn't get a serial driver to install cleanly. Meanwhile, my (work) Windows laptops have tried to burn down my house.

You don't ever restart your Linux system even after kernel and driver upgrades? That's the only time I usually have to reboot windows.

Every time I hang up a phone or video call on my bluetooth headphones, Apple Music opens on my mac and starts playing House Of The Rising Sun. I’ve just come to accept this now because there really is no way to stop it.

I expect that at some point in the future Asahi linux will be mature enough and someone will have finally figured out how to support the trackpad properly so we really can enjoy Linux on Apple’s incredible hardware.

Then I’ll have some kind of awakening where I realise it’s not normal for The Animals to play an outro to every meeting, and well… it’ll be goodbye macos my old friend of 20 years.

Thank you for corroborating this, every time I bring it up on HN people ignore it like it's a non-issue. My headphones should not be a shortcut for launching Apple Music; that is a terrible default setting.

> someone will have finally figured out how to support the trackpad properly

We're there, if you use Wayland. In Firefox I have pinch-to-zoom, forward/backwards swipe shortcuts and KDE has 1:1 desktop navigation gestures. I'm using a wired Magic Trackpad, but I'm sure the behavior is the same on all of Apple's trackpads. Give it a whirl this weekend, if you've got the stuff lying around!

I disagree. I've tried Linux on the desktop over and over and over again from about 1997 and there's just problems with it all over the place. I have used it on the server for the same period. The desktop environment for a start has been incredibly volatile, the kernel maturity is just not there and honestly most of the commercial apps out there which are Windows or macOS only aren't available on Linux. Also sometimes updates break things terribly. To this day many people dread closing their laptop lids or running apt-update on non debian distros.

Ergo I stuck with Windows and used Linux in VMs when required. Then I dived out back into macOS about 3 years ago. This was just expensive, volatile and obtuse. If you stay within the rails it just works though and I'll give them their due; the hardware, particularly ARM is top notch. But again some stuff I need to do just doesn't work well on it and it's very pay to play. I feel a little exhausted if I'm honest after riding the rollercoaster on that.

So now, here I am with an ass end desktop PC again running windows 11 pro and it really does just work fine. I got one annoying notification which was gpedit'ed out and it's been wonderful so far with no further eye pokings. I don't get ads thrown at me. It keeps out of the way. There was one hardware issue which was fixed by replacing an HDMI cable with a DisplayPort cable. It's absolutely boring which is how I like things. If something does go wrong, a thousand people will have had the same issue, so I can fix it with Google in 10 minutes.

Edit: I feel dirty giving Microsoft some credit here.

Edit 2: notable commercial apps I use: Photoshop (sorry gimp doesn't cut it), Lightroom (and no darktable doesn't cut it) and Excel (libreoffice nope). I also have a Lenovo T495s Ryzen here running Ubuntu that hangs after 2-3 minutes on the desktop consistently.

Not being snarky, but when did you last try linux? Your points about volatile DEs and kernel maturity seems almost 10 years out of date.

See my last edit. 22.04 LTS on a ThinkPad T495s Ryzen. Hangs after 2-3 minutes. Absolutely no issues on Windows. Last updated about 2-3 weeks ago.

This is the hilarious thing: https://ubuntu.com/certified/201906-27170

And yes it hung on 18.04 LTS as well.

I don't have the time or energy to deal with that shit in my life.

That almost sounds like bad hardware that Windows is somehow not using, or working around in a hacky way. I am literally typing this on a T495s with 22.04 LTS and no freeze, nothing. Uptime thanks to suspend is creeping along at something like 30 days.

My daughter’s one does the same for ref. Which CPU does yours have in it. Ours are both 3700U.

The issue is related to Radeon and power management. That’s as far as I got with debugging before my crushed soul put windows back on it so I could get some shit done.

processor : 7 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 23 model : 24 model name : AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 3700U w/ Radeon Vega Mobile Gfx stepping : 1 microcode : 0x8108109 cpu MHz : 2300.000 cache size : 512 KB

Ok I am apparently just cursed!

They're as true today as ever. On a modern desktop, using GNOME, everything still randomly breaks.

Randomly (maybe when Gnome is upgraded) most of my plugins break and leave everything in a bad state.

There was the time when ArcMenu broke and left me with no launcher or way to get to anything short of finding my way to a terminal and blowing away my config.

There's the fact that my Logitech MX Ergo is unusably laggy unless I configure a text file: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth_mouse#Mouse_lag

There was the time that Dash to Panel was retired and replaced with the same code but in a new location.

There's the fact that most usable window managers don't support enough zones to snap windows or keyboard shortcuts to do so, and that if you mention this everyone will tell you to use a tiling window manager and act like you're "not a real engineer" for using anything else.

There's the fact that all Linux window managers forget that multiple monitors exist. WMs with launchers will have launchers only on one monitor. Using i3 on multiple monitors is endless pain.

There's the fact that there are a million Linux package managers, they're all feuding with each other, and software developers who care about users more than political infighting have largely given up. Updating Discord on Linux is a nightmare; if I don't use my Linux laptop for a month or two even Google Chrome will be stuck in a state where I have to manually download and reinstall a new package.

I started using Linux in 1997 with Red Hat 5.2. I've used it throughout my career, and 26 years later it's still not ready for every day desktop/laptop use.

> the commercial apps out there which are Windows or macOS only aren't available on Linux

So you're saying that the apps that aren't available on linux, aren't available on linux?

What a great surprise!

I’m saying that everyone shouts switch to Linux but this isn’t an option for a lot of people and isn’t even likely the best solution for most. Most of the commercial apps have no viable alternatives on Linux or the open source market gap fillers are vastly inferior.

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