> clean, consistent, and "just work" on the desktop
In my experience, most Linux desktop environments are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows here. What specifically do you want fixed?
In my experience, most Linux desktop environments are leaps and bounds ahead of Windows here. What specifically do you want fixed?
It doesn't really sucks. Instead, I'm happy I have no longer to put up with the growing number of Windows annoyances. The balance is definitely positive.
That said, there are a number of issues that I've found. Some of them are solvable via configuration, some of them are not. I'll omit a couple of bugs I submitted to KDE that they say are corrected in the new version. Unfortunately, it seems I'll have to wait a long time until that version is published and then reaches Debian stable.
- KDE look and feel customization is badly scattered in multiple menus. Some options are not accessible and need to be changed in scripts written in a KDE-specific language. There are a couple of very bad UX in the last category.
- Firefox, Thunderbird and other applications use completely different file dialogs with different conventions that I haven't found how to configure. Firefox is more difficult to configure than it seems. I started caring because it had tiny scrool bars. For some appearance configurations I had to look at Firefox source code.
- My Behringer external sound interface doesn't work with the default software. It works with Jack, but I've been unable to configure JackD to start automatically, so I need to start it manually every time I reboot. Mitigated because I always hibernate.
- Drag & drop works in a very weird fashion. When I drop something, a popup menu appears asking me if I want to copy, move or link the dragged item. There's no way to configure KDE to just move. I need to press shift before I start dragging and that conflicts with multiple selection... no way to move multiple files without the shitty menu.
What I found sad was the response to users' request in forums. Some users volunteered solutions and they were told that they won't be included because the fixes needed to be included in some config dialog, documented, translated to all languages... and noone will have time to do all that.
One thing that I had not thought about was the increasing complexity of code bases. I looked what I needed to compile a browser, not sure if it was Firefox or Chromium, 500 GB required. Firefox also needs Rust now.
I'm worried that the OSS projects have no enough volunteers and the barrier-to-entry is high enough to discourage more people helping.
That would be GTK.
Years and years of Windows and Linux taught me to avoid drag & drop, mostly, except for dragging files around in file managers (and even then, some of the Linux ones…). I learned that it would, too often to be relied upon, do something I didn’t want, cause a program crash (Linux is especially bad about this), put the program in some weird broken state that falls short of crashing, or simply not work.
It took years to un-learn this avoidance of that interaction, after switching to Mac.
Now when I occasionally poke my head into Linux-land again, I don’t have that instinctive avoidance of d&d, and so I try it a lot more. Bugs and bad behavior abound. Anyone wants to see Linux desktop be bad at some things, go hard on drag & drop for a couple days, you’ll see it.
This workflow it's being terrible in Linux, worsened with the lack of a directory tree pane in the file manager.
Dolphin mixes directories with files in the tree. That would seem to bring the same functionality, but no. I've tried to get used to one-click to open, but it opens the door to all kind of unwanted behaviour when combined with the D&D. I need to undust the Air to remember how it worked there. Sometimes I just want to make sure I'm only selecting one file and I can't.
Anyway I haven't found the funcionality unstable. Just unwieldy.
See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Firefox#XDG_Desktop_Portal_... for Firefox, you have to both install the relevant portal (e.g. xdg-desktop-portal-kde) and enable its use in Firefox (as the wiki page explains). While these instructions are for Arch, I assume something similar exists in Debian.
> I started caring because it had tiny scrool bars.
Does it have tiny scrollbars on Windows? I agree that they suck, though I've learned to live with it by now...
> I looked what I needed to compile a browser, not sure if it was Firefox or Chromium, 500 GB required. Firefox also needs Rust now.
Probably Chromium? I've compiled Firefox in the past and don't recall needing 500GB, though Rust was indeed required.
Does it have tiny scrollbars on Windows? I agree that they suck, though I've learned to live with it by now...
Try these "about:config" settings:
- widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled -> false
- widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.round-thumb -> false
- widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.thumb-size -> 0.9
- widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override -> 18
Then I wanted to match bars (and some menus) colors with my theme so I found these:
- ui.themedScrollbar
- ui.themedScrollbarInactive
- ui.themedScrollbarThumb
- ui.themedScrollbarThumbHover
- ui.themedScrollbarThumbActive
- ui.themedScrollbarThumbInactive
- ui.menu
Colors are in the usual HTML #rgb format.
I hate having multiple conflicting ways to do the same thing. Even within something like Ubuntu I can think of eight ways I've installed software.
Steam regularly fails to open, and games compiled for Linux, not running through proton, regularly crash.
Hardware features randomly don't work. My laptop won't go to sleep when closed and runs full power while in my backpack. My extra mouse buttons that could be bound in windows without an issue didn't work on Linux.
Everything about Linux irritates me these days. I don't want to use other OSes for ideological reasons, but my problems have only increased since moving to Linux on my personal machine.
That said, I wonder if some of the pain you are feeling is self-imposed. If you just use a single linux distribution, it is generally consistent in its install methods. Wouldn't you find it weird if someone complained about how the MacOS install process differed from Windows? That's roughly the equivalent of what you are saying.
The power management issue is a real problem, and it plagues not just linux, but the PC ecosystem (x86 / intel,amd) in general. MacOS gets around this by tightly controlling their hardware and software to create a great experience. It's harder on the PC side due to the sheer number of configurations of hardware and software that have to cooperate to accomplish good power management.
This is the same root cause w/ 'hardware feature' support. A PC is a collection of independently designed hardware and software, smooshed together into some sort of computer. Making that work is difficult due to the sheer number of combinations that are possible.
My feeling is that this situation is ripe for solution by a company that treats their software and hardware as a complete system, and to deeply attack these challenges by curating (and eventually designing, if needed) components and software to polish the user's experience.
1. apt 2. .deb files 3. Ubuntu Software center 4. tar.gz 5. curl > sh 6. Docker 7. Flatpack 8. Snap 9. Compile it myself
On Windows it's usually just an installer. On Mac you either you brew, or drag a binary file into your applications directory.
Power and hardware is absolutely worse on Linux. I still dual boot on all my machines, so I can make direct comparisons on the same hardware. This isn't just an x86 problem.
I agree that we desperately need a solution.