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Comment by earlone | Hacker News Reader

Yes agree. I started using Linux (Gentoo) as student 20 years ago to learn LKMs programming, and with my main Desktop being Windows currently, I give a new try to linux distros every year. I see Linux distros improve year after year, but they are still light years away from providing a good user experience. And even if I don't agree with many Windows 11 updates (like the cumulating number of services required to run user interfaces, the taskbar which can't be moved anymore, the bloatware by default and so on...), Windows still provides a better & smoother user experience overall. Even Desktop multitasking experience feels better engineered in Windows, probably because of a better Desktop processes timing.

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It's interesting hearing such diametrically opposed experiences. I've been using Linux as my main desktop for over 20 years.

I find Windows to be an unholy confusing mess these days. Want to set the microphone sound level; go to sound settings - nope, not there. Probably in some other legacy control panel I guess.

By contrast, most things I need to configure in Linux are in a single place. File copying is much faster than Windows. Updates don't prevent me from working and require multiple reboots. It crashes less often.

Anyway, a lot is probably just what you're used to. I'm sure I excuse many Linux failings because it doesn't bother me and I know how to work around it.

I understand your perspective and appreciate the flexibility of Linux, however achieving my desired setup on Linux does involve more effort and is sometimes impossible, as I explain in my post below.

How has had the entirety of the open source developer community not managed to make even a mediocre step forward in UI/UX of even the biggest Linux distro?l in 20 years? Hell, even Blender has made big strides and I thought that'd be impossible.

Blender is unique in having a big set of users who are actually good at aesthetics professionally. A subset of that group wanted to contribute, and the technically minded were actually willing to let them.

Most other open source projects have people behind them who don't put UX first, and who are suspicious, jealous, or plain disagree when people want to help with UX.

This shouldn't be too surprising in a world led by people who value technical excellence most.

The bottleneck regarding UI/UX was (and is still) X11 / Xorg, with the obsolete client/server architecture inherited from a time when computers had no graphic card. Wayland has been in progress for some time now to replace X11 / Xorg, but it is still bugged to some extend, and driver support needs to be improved.

I find it better than windows rn. Linux mint especially.

I mean there is even a playstore-like "app" to install softwares

> they are still light years away from providing a good user experience

I really don’t get this. All modern desktop environment (OSX, Windows, KDE, Gnome) looks like very similar in terms of user experience quality to me. All are different, true, which is why I can understand will exists. But I will very hard pressed to justify "actually, x is better than y" (yet alone "light years away"), for any pair (x, y).

Can you name just three deal-breakers, things so huge that they deserve that "light years away" judgement ?

Well, as you say, desktop environments look the same. But they don't feel the same. When we talk about UI/UX we talk about look and feel. I've installed Ubuntu & MX Linux to reply to your question, here are random issues I get with the default setup: why do I get no sound when I play a youtube video (it works on one distro, broken on the other one) ? why do I have no option to change the refresh rate of my monitor to more than 60Hz ? Therefore where is the 120hz smooth scrolling ? Why is my keyboard layout set to english by default while I am located in Europe ? How am I supposed to configure my WIFI password if my keyboard layout is incorrect by default ? Why does my CPU fan runs at full speed while I am just writing this text currently with no other user task in background ? If I use a laptop with a second keyboard (bluetooth), why aren't my keystrokes taken into account when the system asks me to confirm the reboot by pressing "enter" (I need to reach the laptop keyboard since the bluetooth one is not taken into account) ? Why does my browser need to reload its cache & configuration from my drive each time I boot my computer; why isn't it loaded in RAM by default ? Why do I still have the first mouse wheel scrolling event ignored in the Chrome/Chromium web browsers in most distros I try, while this bug has been driving users nuts for years while the solution is already known ? I use a dual monitor setup, why does the system displays some glitches at first boot ? Why doesn't it doesn't remember my primary screen when I log off the session, and shows the login prompt on the other screen ? Why does the system hangs when I run a game like counter strike 2 and I try to switch back to the desktop ? Why does the system get super slow while it tries to recompile shaders, making it impossible to open a web browser ? and I'm not even mentioning the issues installing/uninstalling proprietary video drivers which is still a huge mess. For my usage, the Linux Desktop feel experience is still pure hell currently... although I really wish it were good.

I’m sure this is great feedback for the community, thanks for taking the time to test and write it up.

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