Linux on the desktop is gaining ground
techcentral.co.za
techcentral.co.za
When was the last time you used modern Windows and encountered this issue?
Windows rebooting you by force was an issues in the early days for Windows 10 to the point it became a meme people like to refer back to, but that hasn't been an issue in years.
I don't have Candy Crush or Netflix. Probably because I'm in the EU and didn't connect it to the internet when I installed it.
It took me, a fairly savvy user, a couple of tries to figure out what was required, which is pressing Shift + F10, opening a terminal, entering a command, hoping for the best. That didn’t work, so I then needed to do the same process a second time and run a second command to open regedit and amend a registry value from 1 to 0. My father wouldn’t have known where to start.
Anyway, the moment it was all installed and hooked up to the internet to update the ads appeared so I downloaded TronScript and gave that a run to remove all the bloatware and ads.
Edit: Also EU.
> Some apps that are bundled with Windows now have the option to be uninstalled. That list includes the Camera, Photos, and Cortana apps. In the EEA only, Windows users will have the option to uninstall Microsoft Edge and the Web Search from the Microsoft Bing component.
You can uninstall Edge, over here Microsoft doesn't even let you open all hyperlinks with something else that edge. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/why-do...
Despite HN's opinionated view on this, a commercially successful OS will never be like Arch where you have the bare bones and everybody needs to install everything they need from scratch.
I've tried to do this a number of times but no matter what I disable in the task scheduler it just ends up reenabled the next time I update the damn thing. Frustrating!
And then a month ago, and a few months before that. This is after going out of my way to disable automatic reboots.
Windows being so bad has pushed people to find a better OS.
I think when I started using Linux 20 years ago, Wine was already one of the most impressive "feature" of my first Linux distro (SuSE 9.2 from a magazine btw) and I’m still impressed by this project. But Proton, that’s another beast.
Linux Hits 4% on the Desktop (imgur.com) 2024-03-02 | 47 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39576200>
Why desktop Linux is finally growing in popularity (zdnet.com) 2024-03-05 | 40 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39607080>
I think the traditional desktop will go away slowly anyways and most people will use operating systems like iOS and Android.
Where GNU/Linux works just fine are classical desktops, preferably self built.
Laptops sold by OEMs with Linux support.
I can't stand using a trackpad.
What a nightmarish hellscape that sounds like.
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under linux, while having a linux dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
But Windows will generally support every monitor and resolution/scale well which can't be said of Linux (which struggles with hidpi) or macOS (which can't do fractional scaling and has blurry fonts on lodpi).
You get the advantage of having all the software that doesn't work under windows, while having a windows dev environment that works very well even with Cuda for ML.
FTFY
Whereas if you go with Windows and WSL2, everything just works with a lot less setup. WSL2 also has an x server now, which means graphical applications work under Windows.
For laptops, linux is the way to go because of i3wm, nothing as good as that exists for mac or windows, and because they are more resource constrained, you can do more tinkering and disable a bunch of things to speed up the system. For desktops however, the only reason I want linux is to do development, which pretty much only requires a file system and a linux terminal, which WSL2 with VSCode Remote SSH extension provides fully.
the year of the Linux desktop will be once Windows 10 stops getting updates
"Works for Me" (TM).
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-version-market-share/android/m...
Absolutely NOT. I would not use Linux if it forced a desktop environment on me. The whole reason of me not using windows or osx is because they do.
This is the problem with "Linux on the desktop" becoming mainstream. Mainstream users want a company to tell them how to work with their computers. I have my own opinions.
The benefit however is that more people using Desktop Linux might force Hardware vendors (like Nvidia) to finally get their shit together.
I really love KDE. It's getting better and better and doesn't tell me how to work but it enables me in figuring out my own style of workflow by adapting to me instead of me to it.
Ah, the joy of opening the lid the next day to see it waking up on the logout screen, then power off then you discover the battery is empty. Such a hard issue for a 3 decades OS and a quarter of a century on laptops.
Even Linux never ever did that, and I can remember that sleeping haven’t always been a given under Linux.
* Only tested on 7 laptop models over the past 10 years. YMMV.
This Torvalds guy is right. If you try to write a tutorial for how to do something in Linux, you will be in a world of pain, because users aren't using Linux, they're using apps that are using Linux.
Can I write "click on the start menu at the bottom left"? I can't. Because first of all nobody even officially calls it the start menu as Windows does. Sometimes the taskbar is at the top, other times it's at the left. Can I say press windows key (I mean, the super key (I mean, the meta key)) to bring up the application launcher? I can't do that either, because it depends on the distro's default configs. Can I say Ctrl+Alt+T brings up the terminal? Who knows! At least, surely, all of these distros are GNU/Linux so I can rely on bash commands being available everywhere, right? But then if I'm writing a tutorial for SSH'ing into a server, and the server is running FreeBSD, now the commands are the same but the arguments are different! And I know FreeBSD isn't Linux but it surely is weird that all these things that are similar but different are different from that thing that is also similar but different.
Meanwhile if you write a tutorial for Windows XP, it still works in Windows 11 because the system GUI and tools barely changed.
This is an advantage in volunteered end user documentation that Linux can't enjoy, because any step-by-step tutorial for Linux would have to be written for every single distro, or become or a ridiculously convoluted mess. And with Waylands that is only going to get worse.
Personally I'm not really counting on Linux desktop gaining popularity because, with all honesty, I found the GUIs of almost every Linux application I tried just terribly poor. Maybe this is because from I'm from XP era when lists and buttons were tightly packed into forms without all this auto-save switches nonsense, but in my mind, if Windows is losing users as they abandon their old GUIs and move into this same waste-of-space-fest (although that's probably not the reason for it), then maybe Linux should just make their GUIs like old windows instead of making them like new windows.
I don't see the reason why so many of these apps lack a main menu, for example. When an app has a main menu, and I can't find a function in the main menu, I just go "well, guess it just can't do that." But now I'm just wasting my time looking around the screen seeing if there is something I can click to do what I want. And right click often doesn't do anything. Where are my context menus? And where are my tooltips? This isn't designed for desktops, is it? It's designed for tablets. I just don't think going from Windows 11 to Windows 8 is much of an improvement. It's like you made a CLI tool without --help. In KDE Discover if I press F1 do I get a manual? No, I get the About screen.
Please do not make applications thinking the user can just Google it if they're stuck when if you Google "how to do X in Linux" you get 99 different solutions that don't work for your distro.
This is like searching "How to do X in Windows NT" and expecting to get results for Windows 11. Should be no great shock that when you use non-specific search terms the search engine returns non-specific results.
Edit: I just realized Windows is so obviously Windows I didn't even write Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 10, Windows 11. I just wrote Windows. That's what not being fragmented means.