Thoughts on desktop operating systems
tbolt.space
tbolt.space
Ubuntu with its Unity design first, then Snap, put desktop Linux back a decade. What a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. A SUV.
Win11 is stable and fast(ish), but we’d be crazy to depend on a commercial OS for privacy, security and long term stability (unless subscription model). A sedan.
Haiku is amazing, but why are there so little users and devs? With Chromium based apps (eg. Falcon) the modern web is no longer a problem on Haiku. It’s actually got the most modern design of the batch I’m listing,the least bloat and performance is great. Batmobile.
The ‘BSDs. Great performance, reliable systems, great license, they do need a simple GUI installer. Trucks.
I notice a subtle delay whenever launching most Microsoft made applications. I wonder what possibly goes on behind the scenes to make the “new” calculator and photo viewer take a second to load on each launch. The “old” versions always launched immediately.
I can’t help but think that telemetry is the reason. Or perhaps it is a combination of telemetry and bloat.
Maybe it's just me.
Chances are that more than telemetry, some of that kind of checks are being made on the binary and the libraries it loads on startup.
I'm a 100% GNU/Linux guy but it would be dishonest not to acknowledge that Windows security has improved a lot if compared to where it was once upon a time.
It's a big sad thing that Microsoft is pushing so many dystopic stuff, Windows could have become a great OS.
Having Vulkan and OpenGL on GNU/Linux does hardly help changing the mind of most AAA game studios to port their Android NDK games with Vulkan/OpenGL ES into GNU/Linux, instead Steam has to emulate Windows and DirectX, to get any reasonable number of games on GNU/Linux.
Strongly disagree. It seems to me that Ubuntu was( and still is) the main driver behind most of the improvements in the linux desktop space. The linux desktop experiences lagged being MacOS and windows for years. Even after ubuntu transitioned back to gnome, they still made a lot of improvements which lead to significantly better UX.
The curse of linux desktop, is that the linux community seems to be allergic to any changes be it systemd,unity or snap packages.
This lack of a singular community is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing due to the freedom FOSS software provides; not all software is going to fit everybody's needs, and FOSS allows the freedom to modify software tools. However, the curses are resources spread thinly across competing projects, as well as the rough, sometimes chaotic development cycles that sometimes occur in bazaar-style projects that lack Steve Jobs-esque "benevolent dictators" who have a clear vision for the product being developed. For example, the transition from X to Wayland would've probably gone smoother if there were a powerful entity that was able to enforce its will among Linux users and developers, but since there is no singular Linux community, the "bazaar" independently adopted Wayland at each project's own pace. This is the fundamental difference between Linux versus platforms whose vendors exert greater control, such as Windows and especially macOS.
In my view, the lack of singular vision and focus is not something intrinsic to FOSS. When i look like at projects like blender3d, Cpython, linux kernel,LLVM etc... I think a project can be fully OSS, with a degree of cohesion and focus conducive to faster interation and improvements. I would even go as far as saying that the most successfull projects tends to be that way.
The linux desktop space just seems to be particularly fragmented. Seems to be mainly from the historical of a system born mainly from command line space, a weird attachment to a certain "old ways" of doing things etc... And a whole lot of strong personalities too busy bike shedding to see the forest from the tree.
> For example, the transition from X to Wayland would've probably gone smoother if there were a powerful entity that was able to enforce its will among Linux users and developers, but since there is no singular Linux community, the "bazaar" independently adopted Wayland at each project's own pace.
That's fair. A strong leader would have helped. But i think more than a strong leader, a shift in the community culture is more what's needed. But i am not holding my breath. People interested in desktop OS are either using MacOS or windows 11.
I think one of the differences here is that the Desktop is more of an aesthetics and ergonomic thing compared to your examples above. It's harder for people to agree on and when there are subjective feelings around it instead of objective, there is a need for a central decision point which takes quick decisions.
But i don't think the problem with linux desktop is the easthetics. Agreeing on the objectives and fundational technical decisions. For example, kernel scheduling policy influencing latency and desktop responsiveness, X vs wayland and the impact on things like touch screen etc...
This feels very much like its written by somebody who hasn't used Linux as a desktop OS and is an unneeded back-handed comment that does the rest of your otherwise reasonable comment, a dis-service.
Even if buying from Tuxedo or System76, there is some footnote on some features that might not exactly work out.
Now if Desktop Linux is a traditional deskto/tower PC, or something like a Raspeberry kind of devices, then yeah probably everything works, including YouTube hardware video decoding and such.
Using GNU/Linux distributions since 1995.
I actually forgot about this. have you used chromeos for anything else than just a frontend/terminal ?
But as i get older, and have more responsibilities. I have less and less time for tinkering and need to have something reliable without fuss. I can't count the number of friends like me who were die hard linux fan who progressively moved to MacOs (better hardware helps, but also better app ecosystem) just for practical reasons.
But in many ways , your comment is a reflection of what i was trying to articulate. Any criticism of linux/desktop (and note here that i am only criticizing the desktop experience. The server side and command line are second to none) is always frame as a problem of the user... either you are using wrong, or you don't know what good, or things work on my machine must be a you problem...
They pushed Upstart. It fell to systemd.
They pushed Unity. It fell to GNOME.
They pushed Mir. It fell to Wayland.
They pushed bazaar. It fell to git.
And so on.
Also worth noting that they've never been big contributors to the Linux kernel itself. Top contributors include Intel, AMD, Red Hat, Google, Meta, Linaro, SUSE. Even Oracle.
Canonical? Nowhere to be seen.
Mir, however, was a mistake from the very beginning indeed.
Nowadays I mostly use Cinnamon with Mint but either of those two felt more pleasant to me than stock GNOME.
I like systemd, but I do understand the objections to it. Luckily if you don't want to run systemd, you don't have to.
I don't like Unity, which is fine because there are tons of other options. The article author loves MacOS's look and feel. I don't. So I'm screwed because MacOS only comes in one flavour.
I don't think the article gives enough coverage to this. It's not just "tinkering" with Linux. We have real choices, and it's the only one of the three where that's the case. That's way more important (to me) than a lot of the other things they talk about.
Choice is not a substitute for quality. It doesn't really matter if i have the choice of 23 sedans if what i need is truck.
In many ways, i feel like the choices in the linus desktop ecosystem are an illusion. Repackaking and slicing of the same software stack because someone doesn't like a color theme. And the price we paying for this illusion is the fragmentation and lack of cohesive experience afforded to other major OS.
# That's way more important (to me) than a lot of the other things they talk about.
That's fair. But i think the point is that you might be different than the vast majority of desktop user, for which a OS is just a mean to an end.
Game development on OSX is fantastic for thousands of iOS game developers. iPad games can often run out of the box.
I just find the experience of navigating through them with my keyboard so much more inherently satisfying than anything else I've come across. I don't game, I just like doing weird things with code, so it's a natural fit for me.
And this was not some obscure Laptop or something. A self built Intel desktop with an nvidia GPU.
Ended up switching to a MacBook Pro instead. I like macOS. With VMware Fusion having become free for personal use, I recreated WSL2 basically on my Mac.
There is more to it why I got the MacBook. And setting up a Linux console VM is indeed much faster and easier than fiddling with Nouveau and NVIDIA drivers.
Be careful
After weeks struggling with UEFI issues, I returned it, back to running Linux on VMs.
Ubuntu and Kubuntu latest were the lucky distros.
No problem running them via a USB stick on the device, place them with all the usual partitions on a NVMe stick instead, and nope, no disk attached.
And no, I don't need tips of what other magical distribution I should have used instead, that would have surely pinkie promise work out of the box. I have been installing Linux distributions since 1995.
Eventually either it only works straight away, or gets sent back.
I'm missing something here. I assume that, if something isn't recognized at the BIOS level, then the OS can't do anything about it?
> It’s slowly gaining adoption which is great to see. The Windows hegemony may never be toppled but I’m rooting for Linux.
If anything i am seeing the reverse. I think windows is becoming a competent dev. OS much faster than linux is becoming a gaming/producitivity OS. Since WSL2 i am feeling less and less the pull to setup any kind of linux enviroment.
And everytime i do, the linux "jank" always pops out in surprising way. For example, 120hz@4k + fractional scaling, or any kind of HDR breaks everything last time i tried ubuntu
HDR, though, forget about it. My gaming PC is still running MS Windows, for HDR, Nvidia GPU support, and DRMs (cannot get Netflix 4k HDR outside of windows and smart tv similar stuff).
Sadly MSFT being MSFT, after all of this progress, they are now regressing with ads and news inserted inside the desktop. Weird telemetry and loging requirements and now with AI everywhere.
And if any one from the windows team is reading this... FIX DESKTOP SEARCH :)
And using your example of Desktop Search, more than once I’ve had a build fail because it could not delete the files in the artifact directory because the desktop search was indexing one of the files.
Not often, not always, just enough to be very annoying. I was always bumping heads with file locks one way or another.
There is a reason why UNIX file locks are called advisory.
I'm looking for ways to use it at the office...
But one thing that drives me nuts is where you get software from. Some software is delivered from the "repo" \, some is from "flathub" and some is downloaded rpm's or whatever.
But once you've installed it, there is no simple way to tell where you installed it from... I'd expect like a little logo overlaying the icon or something.
My only gripe is setting up Docker containers on Windows kind of sucks. But for web apps, games, and general productivity, it's been a perfect daily driver for several years for me.
MacOS for me is the one that has fewer distractions.
I've been using the same image since 2006 (I upgraded OSes and migrated from one notebook to the next) with no issues, no reinstalls.
That's 18 years having a really stable environment.
Still miss Linux for thinkering, though.
I keep hearing this. It's the worst gaming platform of all time. Windows was brute forced into being the only gaming platform on desktop computing due to the total dominance of the IBM PC and the Windows operating system. Neither of these were designed for games. Only cheap hardware and very powerful CPUs compared to the alternative made them viable at all. It should be viewed in terms of opportunity cost - what could gamers have had if it wasn't for Windows?
it's had some rough points, but both the nVidia proprietary, and AMD open source drivers are solid. CP2077 works just fine, ditto for the Halo collection. Proton is amazing and works out of the box.
We don't even have WSL. The development experience is as windows-y as you could imagine: deployment is a copy paste on a shared drive. Some internal package installation is a copy paste from a shared drive. External program installation is hunting on the Web. The terminal is light years behind what Unix has to offer.
Ah yes, and the laptop weights 5kg and holds the battery for 3h.
The only reason to use this platform is when you re a hostage and have a gun on your head
I don't follow how is it Window's fault that your company is incompetent? I get +10 hours on the Thinkpad X1 Carbon and it's a ~1.5kg laptop
- desktops are now considered "endpoints" or "bootloader for a WebVM" (the monsters improperly named browsers for legacy reasons);
- desktop are the CORE of computing, as long as they are classic networked desktops, meaning a single application, user programmable as a NORMAL usage, like modern Emacs or classic Smalltalk workstations;
- modern desktop OS, both FLOSS and commercials are CRAP, simply because they are things designed with a bad idea in mind. Many from OSX to Gnome SHell (the second capital not a typo) tend to be narcissistic putting at the user sight center the least useful thing "the WM/DE/DS" or the element that should just be used to handle apps and files;
- Windows recently in UI terms have copied some logic FLOSS design, being a bit more usable, things like a reasonable context menu and so on, but it's plagued by the commercial push of ads and nagware anywhere, OSX seems to be an essentially dead product the vendor keep just to have "a complete offer" but they do not want desktop computing, they want grown slaves/child able just to touch a colorful screen with their fingers, FLOSS plethora of WMs tend to be static, only something have happened to the tiling WM landscape, GNU/Linux DE/DS (since tied to systemd) like Kde or Gnome SHell have essentially no idea on how to evolve anymore;
- in applications terms most apps remain in their legacy state or they tend to became DocUIs without being real DocUIs so mimicking WebUIs, becoming monsters to overcome the biggest modern desktop problem, the fact that for commercial reasons we do not have anymore a single application as an OS, meaning the lack of integration with the sole possible IPCs like cut&paste and drag&drop.
Until FLOSS devs realize what we lost embracing modern commercial desktop there will be no chance to recover, the desktop future remain the sorry state of a crappy WebVM bootloader where the user can't even handle it's files much, can't even own information in files (with storage dedicated to specific apps instead of generic files usable with many different tools).
This seems like an odd complaint in the context of a desktop computer like an iMac where you have effectively infinite choice in input devices. I don't disagree that Apple's stock keyboard is bad and their mouse team seems actively hostile to the idea of making their product not stupid in some way, but it's a desktop computer so....just plug in any other USB keyboard and mouse you prefer, or pair up some Bluetooth ones, whichever way is your jam.
I use a Macbook Air for work so when I'm mobile I'm stuck dealing with this thin squishy thing keyboard (IMO the trackpad is pretty good as they go), but when I'm at my desk I'm typing on a ZSA Moonlander full of Boba U4 switches and mousing with either a Logitech MX Vertical or a G700S, and it all "just works".
Yep, decent like a porno movie. /s
Who does not love gray on gray, dark blue on light blue, the absence of every delimitation of GUI elements ?