Why Linux is not ready for the desktop, the final edition
itvision.altervista.org
itvision.altervista.org
Wow. Such sweeping generalizations make me not want to pay attention to anything this article has to say.
But let's entertain the possibility that parts of that statement are true. It's practically impossible for "Linux developers"—whatever that means—to ensure that a change they make doesn't break something downstream. Unlike proprietary operating systems, the Linux ecosystem is not maintained by a single company, so it's impossible to know and account for all the environments a piece of software will run in. Distro maintainers work tirelessly to ensure bugs don't make it to users, but it's simply impractical to test every single combination of hardware and software that exists. This is extremely difficult even for proprietary operating systems where development is centralized, let alone for a distributed environment like most software for Linux, and Linux itself, is developed in.
When you think about it, it's a miracle of modern software engineering and a testament of the power of collaboration and the free software movement that the Linux ecosystem works as well as it does, and in many areas matches or exceeds the functionality of other operating systems, all the while preserving important user freedoms. GNU/Linux is a stronghold for user-friendly computing among alternatives from companies that want to control how you use your computers, or profit from your data or attention. It's not perfect, but it's one of the few options we have (besides the BSDs, but I wouldn't consider them to be as user-friendly).
This box has been stable enough to make money. But not as stable as my backup (also Gentoo) which runs stable and updates weekly.
Edit: my biggest source of stability issues are Nvidia drivers mis-matched from kernel. Takes a whole reboot to fix.
Also, I use ext4 since like forever, ext3 before that and have never had issues.
To be clear, my point is that these open source devs (I'm one too) are very careful to not regress. I think the software quality is very high.
The context was the sweeping generalisation that Linux devs and that they don't care about regressions, see up thread by @imiric. In that context I've not had regressions. More explicitly, for this narrower context, I've not had regression bugs in ext3/ext4.
I'm not making a claim that I've not had never had ANY issues or never have to fsck my drives; nor am I making claims that nothing has ever appeared in 'lost+found', nor am I claiming that ext3/ext4 are perfect. Nor that Linux is perfect.
Just claiming that the software quality in the Linux ecosystem is very high. I'd say better than many closed-source solutions -- which couldn't be proved anyway.
I've only been at this since 1994 and still have a lot to learn. However, I don't learn much from the "you're wrong and not good" type of conversation.
Unless you were routinely running mtree or something similar, you’d honestly have no idea.
My point here is that software can appear to be fine when it’s actually shit because most people won’t notice any kind of corner case. All you’re saying is that you’ve very likely missed the corner cases.
The combination is not perfect unfortunately. The other day, I had a CPU cache parity check failure hang vim when I was trying to close it. I had to reboot to get rid of the hung kernel thread. It would be really nice if all CPU cache levels had full ECC protection, but only some of them do.
That's exactly the point, though. Linux will "never be ready for the desktop" because of the problems that this causes. Developers of software for Linux, not to mention kernel developers themselves, do not have the kind of funding that Microsoft has to test on a truly staggering number of hardware configurations. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, they don't have the luxury of supporting a comparatively small set of hardware combinations like Apple has.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2020/02/15/micro...
Also, Microsoft does not do internal testing of various hardware configurations anymore:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140806183208-12100070-why-d...
They rely on end users to find problems for them:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/12/12/micro...
This doesn't mean Windows doesn't have hardware dependent bugs of course.
And even then, Apple has never been able to promise that you can keep the software features your computer shipped with across system updates. If a feature is removed, your only path of recourse is to treat your current patch like an LTS release.
These problems can be mitigated, though. All it takes is a company willing to lead the effort and maintain a stable, limited and tested ecosystem of software built on top of a stable, limited and tested version of Linux. And/or maintain a secure runtime environment like Google has done with Android.
The problem with this is that it invariably takes away some of the freedoms Linux users expect. Personally, if I'm not allowed to run any software I want, how I want to, and terms like "sideloading" and "jailbreaking" are thrown around, it's not Linux and I don't want it. At that point you're no longer using a general purpose machine, but a machine that someone else decided how it must be used.
Besides, like a sibling comment mentioned, bugs do happen even on Windows and macOS. This is an inescapable fact of software development. I was simply pointing out how harder it is to manage this on Linux, and yet it remains usable for many people despite of it.
However, it’s very possible for a company to build an Apple like company by creating their own Linux distro that is well tested and guaranteed to run at least as well on their hardware as Apple’s software does on Apple’s hardware.
This is the System76 approach.
Alternatively, you could create a distro that is restricted and sell it to hardware vendors who then have the responsibility to test your distro against their hardware. This is the MS approach. There’s no reason such an approach would necessarily have any more issues than MS does.
In fact, because of the open source nature of Linux development, it’s likely that the Linux versions should do better than their proprietary counterparts, because downstream companies, teams and users can test before the product is released and point out problems before the product has even hit alpha. Heck, they can even share patches.
The real problem with Linux on the desktop is that it doesn’t have enough market power to make the kind of testing MS and Apple and their downstream clients do financially worth it.
There is no reason why the server space shouldn’t have the same issues. But the Linux server space has enough money that downstream vendors clients and users are able to invest money in testing, which has meant the advantages of open source have pretty much wiped out all the competitors in the space.
It can be a miracle, and yet still not be good enough. Even as a business user, knowing that if I build an app and it probably won’t work in 5 years, is all I need to know about this hobbyist toy. Linux is fundamentally not ready for anyone who has needs more than a Chromebook (which also runs Steam, by the way).
It’s like pointing to a skyscraper made out of sand. Sure, it collapses every time the tide comes in, but your robots can rebuild it in 5 minutes flat, so it’s clearly ready for tenants.
Wow, piss right off you to you, too.
Linux is ready for me, and has been for decades. By your logic, I need nothing but a Chromebook.
Linux is imperfect, like you, but it's never been an ass.
For my part, I’m back on Windows and Mac. Screw the community’s arrogance more than the project. The community, as even the comments here show, does not deserve a victory.
Android is perhaps the closest to what you seem to want, although even it is much more aggressive about deprecating APIs, ABIs, and features than Windows.
The is no Linux distribution today that even attempts to deliver the interface stability you appear to want. And given the development model and business structures involved, I think it’s unlikely there ever will be.
You, and the many computer users like you, will probably never have a suitable Linux distribution. That’s an unfortunate reality. It’s not your fault: what you want is reasonable, but Linux isn’t set up to deliver it.
if one’s “criticism” is snarky or just plain needlessly rude, one shouldn’t be surprised when they receive the same in return, this is extremely basic human behavior. very very basic.
we all learn this in like elementary school, if you’re rude, people will treat you like a rude person. it’s not shocking and it’s not unexpected. its extremely basic social shit learned by even small children.
I Certainly admit that some Linux users are heavily in denial about linux's flaws, and don't take criticisms healthily, but this is a trait in humanity, not just in Linux users.
If your version of diplomacy is starting off a meeting with urinating on their flag, don't say diplomacy never works because no other countries can take criticism.
"Good enough" is highly subjective. You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but millions of people also think otherwise.
> Even as a business user, knowing that if I build an app and it probably won’t work in 5 years, is all I need to know about this hobbyist toy.
That ultimately depends on your tech stack and app features, much more than your OS. If you build a statically linked ELF binary that runs on the command line, chances are it will continue to work decades from now. If, OTOH, your app depends on a specific version of a GUI toolkit or some esoteric libraries, you might run into issues in the future. This is the same on any other OS. Microsoft does a commendable job at maintaining backwards compatibility for apps written in their supported stacks, but step outside of this and you'll experience problems. Same for macOS to a lesser extent (Carbon -> Cocoa, etc.).
Ironically, I might as well point out that billions of people think otherwise of Linux. In some countries, a few trees is “good enough” as a bridge. The IRS, of course, says COBOL is “good enough” to use as a web backend for the moment.
The weirdest thing is how people complain that engineering is a race of the bottom. Scarcely a thread goes by here without a tragedy of the commons reference. Yet inexplicably, business executives are terrified cowards when it involves free software. This of course makes no sense; you can’t have both. Either the complaints are wrong, or Linux is in fact unsuitable for purpose.
> Microsoft does a commendable job at maintaining backwards compatibility for apps written in their supported stacks, but step outside of this and you'll experience problems
Oregon Trail, a game made for Windows 95, still runs on Windows 11. (Edit for below complaint, as I’m posting too fast: You need all the DLLs that came with it on the original CD in the same folder as the EXE.)
Try installing and running any Linux app, be it even GNOME Chess, from four years ago. See how it goes. Consider my allegory of the sand skyscraper.
On that note, the Carbon to Cocoa transition mostly wrapped up a decade ago, and was completed by the majority of apps two decades ago. Try installing a Linux program from 2005 with a UI made in any toolkit of your choice.
The Linux community chases trends and kills APIs more often than Google.
Fatal error: MSVCRT70.DLL could not be found.
But that's easy enough to fix, right? Just dig through Windows's package manager (sorry, I meant MSDN) trying to guess the right vcredist, and try a few and hope for the best.
For those unable to tell, I am using sarcasm in that last part.
To be fair, I've seen plenty of commercial Windows software ship over the years without runtime components required on the original supported OS (or with required redistributable components that had to be separately installed from the distribution CD-ROM for no well-explained reason).
These same billions, sans a very small fraction, don't even have "operating system" in their vocabulary. And as far as they are concerned, Chrome browser on one operating system is just as good as Chrome/Chromium on another operating system.
> Try installing a Linux program from 2005 with a UI made in any toolkit of your choice.
Personally I would not have difficulty doing this with containers. But there is no reason to do this at all. No sane and sober person wants this.
Would you say MacOS, Android, and iPhone are also hobbyist toys then?
And by the way, if you statically compile your app for Linux it will basically work forever. Linus's mantra: We Do Not Break Userspace. These are userland problems and can all be avoided with a linker flag if it's a priority for you.
A statically compiled app that used Jack for audio might have problems running on PipeWire.
A statically compiled app from 2012 that used PolicyKit for authorization might not work today when asking for sudo. Everyone’s moved on to polkit.
The meme is wrong, don’t regurgitate nonsense. I can guarantee you my Windows app compiled in 2007 still has the UAC prompt and the audio system working correctly.
Not a single major distribution doesn't ship Xwayland by default. The entire gaming community relies on X11 continuing to work, just like they rely on x86 libraries to stick around.
> A statically compiled app that used Jack for audio might have problems running on PipeWire.
A statically compiled app that uses Jack for audio might have problems running on Pulseaudio/ALSA/OSS. Jack's never a thing that's generally available, so claiming it's a backwards compatibility issue is nonsense. If your application requires Jack, then you need to ship it.
Note that you'll also have issues on Windows and Mac because Jack - unsurprisingly - is not installed by default on those platforms either.
> A statically compiled app from 2012 that used PolicyKit for authorization might not work today when asking for sudo. Everyone’s moved on to polkit.
If you used policykit correctly you should have either used the dbus protocol, or the command line utilities. These are the APIs for userspace and they haven't changed since 2012.
Nowadays all software is built on libraries and frameworks, and they have security issues and even just bugs, and you want to get those fixes. If you want to run 5+ year old software, you can now do it natively in a VM in almost any computer; so why does my shiny new OS have to run ancient binaries again?
Security is is a real issue for a subset of computing tasks. To further your point, for those tasks you can argue that constant vigilance and patching are a necessity of the modern world (an alternative and arguably better approach would be that formal verification and not updating, as often applied in safety critical control systems.) However, security is often used as a pernicious ruse for forcing obsolesence: want the latest security patches? update to the latest OS version. Oh look, the latest OS version no longer runs on your perfectly good hardware. Or similarly, oh look, your perfectly good software no longer runs on the latest OS version.
But now consider the subset of computing that does not need to involve security either because it has literally no security implications, or because it can be sandboxed by the OS (e.g. games, music and video production, architectural design, scientific simulation, mathematical research, ...) There is a large body of this kind of software that works perfectly well for any number of years (modulo forced obsolesce initiatives like "modernising" the UI or moving to the cloud). I would argue that the primary function of the OS should be to provide a stable platform for running such software securely. Yes, the user could learn how run it under emulation, in a container or VM, but then what is the purpose of the OS?
The alternative is a high software maintenance burden/cost to everyone (for applications to just keep the lights on, or users to stay current in a churning software landscape) and/or the destruction of a massive amount value in developed but no longer easily able to be run software: this value destruction here is twofold: (1) the licensee can no longer run the software that they pay for, and (2) the effort expended to develop said software is discarded.
Most businesses just want things to work; their software/hardware costs are often rounding errors when amortized over their lifetime. I'm sympathetic to users who have paid for programs wanting to run them forever, but software businesses have to make money and sell new versions, so they add new features and follow the OS upgrades. It's hard for businesses to support older software or a big diversity of versions; it's why companies mandate a standard and try to enforce it.
With Microsoft, they are making millions on OS and related basic programs, and so can afford to support things for a long time. With OSS like Linux, there is less funding and less people who are interested in running old versions. As someone who has had to keep some software up to date on Linux, it can sometimes be more of a pain to update a package (because of dependencies) them to just recompile the thing from source. The 5 years that LTS releases get are good for 2 average commercial update cycles, which I think is reasonable. Beyond that, people's skills are going to be out of date.
And then one day the underlying libraries will have security problems. Your statically linked application has just become a gaping hole.
And finally, you don't want your statically compiled binary to be hundreds of megabytes and take forever to launch, do you? But seeing how many people here are advocating Snap/Flat/AppImage, I guess it's not a problem? But why would you need a Linux userspace or OS in the first place when all you are doing is running virtual containers? You can run them on Windows or MacOS as well.
That said, you can just copy the .so files if you want to run the old binary.
Furthermore, binaries are mmapped, so even if it is very large, it will still launch relatively quickly since only the parts needed to launch are read into memory.
Can you stop for a second and realize your "solutions" are absolute unmitigated crap and 99.999% of people of the world wouldn't bother even if they could?
In Windows you don't have to do that. You can compile an application in Windows 11 and run it in Windows XP for Christ's sake (if you don't use new Windows APIs).
Show me a way to compile anything in Ubuntu 24 using only its own libraries and have it run in Ubuntu 6, huh? Without virtualizating/chrooting/crap like that. No, you can't? Fine.
> Not many libraries use the GPL
Let me start: Qt. Before your spew "GTK", who is going to pay for porting the code to GTK/GTKMM (since GTK is C only)?
End of your wonderful story. You really want to bend reality to make Linux look "OK". It's not. It's bad.
That of course requires updating the application when a vulnerability is found in a library, but this is no different from Windows where you have to update many applications to fix vulnerabilities in third party libraries. The number of vendor updates to fix the same libjpeg of libpng issues on Windows is truly staggering.
The Qt libraries do not use the GPL. They use the same LGPL that GTK does. You are making stuff up to bash open source UNIX machines (which is what Linux machines are).
Can you stop with anecdotal evidence? I don't care that you can make old software works. I can do as well, you know. Been there long before you even knew Linux existed. Had a nice little trip with GCC 2.96 by RedHat if you even remember that fiasco of epic proportions.
Where did I?
Or something that's available to 0.0001% of its users has become an OS "feature"?
Who are you kidding, man? What else, you gonna claim Linux is "fine" because people can write assembler code for it? It can even run on your PC?
That's not what a desktop OS is about. That's not how it's used.
> In Linux nothing even close is possible.
This is a feature of Linux. Linus Torvalds is very adamant about supporting old binaries with new kernels, even if it is not commonly done.
Build a Flatpak, you're done. Your application can depend on a stable runtime and work on any Linux distribution.
> Linux is fundamentally not ready for anyone who has needs more than a Chromebook (which also runs Steam, by the way).
Chromebooks now cover 85% of the U.S. education market, that's most workloads. The Steam Deck is also Linux (SteamOS).
What's left in the world of Win32 apps? Specialty commercial applications like Photoshop, first person shooter games that require an anticheat kernel driver. If you don't need those, a system like Bazzite is much less user hostile than what Windows has become in the era of Windows 11.
Flatpak weakens but does not entirely remove the dependence on the underlying Linux distributon. Flatpak relies on a system service called xdg-desktop-portal to bridge apps inside the flatpak sandbox with the host OS. Applications distributed using flatpak may not work as expected if the distribution ships too old a version of xdg-desktop-portal.
Containers have been around for over a decade now. This "no backwards compatibility" meme is utter horse shit.
But, it seems that FUD about what it is capable of is still actively here, which is good to know. With frameworks and libraries, there is a 0% chance you don't have SOME update for your Windows app in a couple years, forget 5.
Now, there are lots of headwinds against Linux -- Windows is a known quantity, everyone knows the MS Office suite, people hate change and don't want to learn new stuff.
But to pretend that Linux is a house of cards because there are sometimes issues that cause troubles is not being honest. Even Windows can have big issues, or have we forgotten the CrowdStrike outage earlier this year?
All OSes have always had issues; that's why all of them have patches and updates.
Apple on the other hand got them to switch to userspace:
https://www.crowdstrike.com/en-us/blog/crowdstrike-supports-...
How many people are running a locally-installed office suite at this point? Mailing files around seems archaic for most purposes. At my prior (open source) employer, even we had mostly given up on running local office productivity apps.
In a previous job, 20 years ago, we found that the Linux USB stack was so bad that it was full of deadlocks and unprotected shared memory on 2.6. Just atrocious. And subsequent releases broke it again and again.
About 5 years after that, working for a different company, I had a well-known kernel developer tell me point blank that as long as we release our code to the kernel, they will "keep it working." When I probed what that meant, he genuinely saw no difference between "compiling" and "working."
There are various efforts to add testing/tests. Those are good. But we lost a lot when Solaris, Irix, etc. all died, and Linux has never quite gotten there, and I doubt it ever will.
If we are being honest though, in the terms that this article is arguing, "Linux" as an ecosystem is the wrong label. When it comes to stability and support, we need to think of each Linux distro as an Operating System. In that sense, things like RHEL are certainly well supported--including on the desktop. If your app targets RHEL, you pretty much have none of the problems discussed in this article. You still have a smaller universe of applications than Windows of course which is to be expected.
So, the problem boils down to "nobody is making sufficient money off desktop Linux to steward a desktop Linux distro". That is not careless devs or bad design decisions though--no matter how chicken-and-egg you try to paint it. It is simply the network effect.
Decent desktop operating systems exist and they already have large application universes and large, monetizable user bases. They appeared into a vacuum that lacked such operating systems but that vacuum no longer exists. That makes it almost impossible to economically introduce a new desktop platform. Certainly none of the commercial attempts have succeeded in the last few decades. In fact, the system that has been the MOST successful is Linux. By that metric, saying that Linux is doing it all wrong does not ring very true.
Valve is doing a lot to make Linux gaming a reality because, when it comes to the network effect, it is largely true that Steam ( not just Windows ) is the true platform. So, if you can bring Steam to Linux, you can move the users there too. It is still early days for that but it appears to be working.
On the mobile side, the network effect is very much alive as well. This is why Windows, using of course all of Microsoft's tricks, strengths, and knowledge, completely failed while the Linux kernel ( in the form of Android ) has totally dominated. And that is not for any of the reasons cited in the article. Do you think an Android app from 2008 will run on Android today unmodified? An iOS app from 2008 on iOS today? I don't think so.
I wasn't arguing that it was entirely false, but that the generalizations of "regressions are introduced all the time" and "Linux developers spend little to no time" can't be applied to the entire Linux ecosystem.
I wouldn't discredit your experience, but speaking of Linux kernel development specifically, my understanding as a user is that it's held to a very high standard of scrutiny. Rants from Linus are famous for drilling into people that "WE DON'T BREAK USERSPACE". If you consider how many thousands of lines of code are changed on a regular basis, it's an engineering wonder that it works as well as it does. In many ways Linux is a victim of its success.
The sweeping changes in Linux are amazing, but they also break a lot, frequently, and the testing approach leaves a lot to be desired. I am old and a former embedded coder, I understand how the 90s developers feel about unit testing, and I am sympathetic to the idea that test-driven-development and heavy UT in modern teams is often completely out of control, but Linux is distinctly lacking in real testing of independent units in isolation. I am aware of kunit, kselftest, etc.
But you’re just reiterating that the kernel development itself lacks sufficient testing which necessitates this. Everyone is a volunteer; the result is as you’d expect.
Look, there’s nothing wrong with this. In reality all the people who are electing to run Linux without it actually having sufficient quality for their purposes are the actual problem, who’d which there are hundreds of companies that just don’t care. We created this situation by undervaluing quality vs cost.
But it’s also the reason it won’t be a success on the desktop. The only way that happens is if windows takes an even more substantial nosedive. Things are going to have to get pretty bad for that to happen.
Looking back on how things panned out, going all in on illumos a bit over ten years ago is something I wish I had done.
addendum: by "all in" I mean as an operating systems developer.
Your entire post begins with a weak "no that's not true", and then the entre rest of the post is explaining why it is true and will never change.
Just check this bug tracker. Just this one. Bug report on top of bug report caused by a fix which was caused by another fix.
Sadly it's not just one bug tracker, I keep an eye on many of them.
Of course in the magical Linux land if "It works for me", then the author is lying.
Never mind that the author of this "click-bait" article is a ... Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer. Yeah. I can vouch for every letter in the article. It's written with my blood.
How many Microsoft or Apple bug trackers do you have access to? The fact is that we have to consider that open-source work is largely done by volunteers and commercial developers with their own use cases in mind, and we only know about the drama because it's out in public. The drama inside big tech firms could be worse and on a larger scale and we would likely not know about it. Even if an insider told you something, it would be only a small part of a bigger picture you can't see.
On the desktop, Linux is an afterthought for the vast majority of consumer hardware vendors. Many Linux desktop users run configurations which could generously be called “alpha”.
With MS windows, this burden is shouldered by every hardware manufacturer. It’s nonsensical to release a peripheral which doesn’t work on windows. Laptop/desktop makers then qualify common applications to make sure everything works as expected.
If any of the above doesn’t work out, then MS will get a call, or the hardware vendor.
> Linux is not an operating system
> While Linux is unrivaled on servers and has been the world's most popular operating system for over two decades, the situation on the desktop is quite bleak.
It either is or is not. It is illogical to claim both true and false to be true at the same time, yet that is what he did.
The vast majority of AAA titles run seamlessly on Linux. Per protondb[0], ≥80% of the top 10, top 100, and top 1000 are rated "platinum" or "gold" for Linux functioning (by users).
Some of the quotes from the OP's page border on parody. So, CS2 doesn't count as a AAA title because it's based on DX11 and doesn't have realtime ray tracing. But apparently this same person is oblivious to the fact that both real-time RT and DX12 translation have been completely usable on Linux for years now. Nvidia helped ship native RT to Linux clients in Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and Proton has supported the majority of DX12 games with RT since before the Steam Deck existed.
Kinda makes you glad that this is the final edition, if that's the sort of due diligence being exercised.
Look at their contributions to the Linux kernel, GCC, KDE, Wine, and many other projects.
A total clickbait for sure.
Speaking for myself, I'm mostly surprised that someone with such an intimate knowledge of Linux has ignored it's developments to this extent. This entire thread is mostly at the consensus that you have tortured many of the talking points in this article beyond taking seriously.
Many in this thread have also identified that MacOS and Windows are deficient in several of the criteria you listed. So what even is a desktop, really? An ideal, or a thing people use?
What have I ignored precisely?
Bugs? Regressions? Missing features? Lack of funding?
Xorg being deprecated, Wayland being all the rage while being usable only in Gnome and KDE?
> Many in this thread have also identified that MacOS and Windows are deficient in several of the criteria you listed.
Windows: 2 billion users with no technical background.
Linux: 40 million users most of whom are geeks.
End of story.
That said, Linux has more users than Windows:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/
Android Linux is at 46%, while Windows is at 26%. Other Linux versions have 1%.
Xorg is being deprecated and replaced with semi-broken something where tons of functions only work in KDE and Gnome. That's all you need to know about Linux.
By the way, “Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works” is both a non-sequitur and untrue. The guys who wrote the display servers used on those are users of those systems.
Xorg has been the de-facto X11 implementation on Linux for the past 25 years.
First XFree86, then it was superseded by Xorg.
You're being nit picky only that's not a counter argument. That's ad hominem.
> the article’s author is a well known X11 hater and you seem to agree with everything he says.
I'm the author of the article and I'm not a hater. Understanding the limitations of something is not "hatred". I guess the entire world is black or white to you, either I have to be deeply in love with Linux or "You're a hater" which is another ad hominem.
See you've stopped arguing and now switched to discussing me personally. I knew it would happen given how you never had any counter arguments in the first place, the problem is I've been here for over 25 years and know Linux inside out and EVERYTHING that is "claimed" in the article is the common truth.
> By the way, “Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works” is both a non-sequitur and untrue.
Yet another "counter argument" that lacks any validity because it's empty.
> The guys who wrote the display servers used on those are users of those systems.
This is an article about Linux _USERS_.
You still don't bloody understand that. I don't care about software engineers that can make anything work given enough time. I don't care who wrote Quartz or Surface Flinger. They are not end users.
End users use Operating Systems, buy them and buy software for them. Their developers are absolutely IRRELEVANT. There have been dozens of forgotten OSes that no one uses.
To give an example, the sudden interjection of “Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works.” appears to be an example of disorganized thinking, since its connection to what was being discussed is superficial to an extreme. There are other comments by you that exhibit signs of disorganized thinking even more clearly.
You likely could benefit from seeing a psychiatrist.
The guy even contradicted himself:
> Linux is not an operating system
> While Linux is unrivaled on servers and has been the world's most popular operating system for over two decades, the situation on the desktop is quite bleak.
Both cannot be true.
The Linux kernel is NOT an OS.
Any given Linux distro which is not compatible with any other Linux distro or even its own earlier or later versions couldn't be called an OS. It's a software compilation for a certain time period.
An OS implies everyone runs it, anyone can compile software for it and have it run on all devices with this OS. This is impossible with Linux outside of Snap/FlatPak/AppImage which themselves are lightweight virtualization solutions.
This is what Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android are. Linux is not.
Also, please don't throw FUD around without explaining yourself. You probably don't even know/remember what it means any more.
An OS must have:
* Stable API/ABIs including for the kernel
* Wide software compatibility
* Decent QA/QC
* Can be used with any hardware it's meant to support
E.g. the open source AMD driver, amdgpu, has a gazillion of regressions and issues for any kernel: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues
If it works for you, that's called "anecdotal evidence". That doesn't mean suddenly Linux has become an OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system
The reason Linux is not an operating system is because it is just the kernel and you need more than a kernel to fit that definition.
The only thing you said that is correct is that amdgpu has issues. Everything else you just wrote is wrong.
1. Is Wikipedia _page_ an authority?
2. Does Wikipedia page buy operating systems and software for them? No? That's what I thought. Where's native commercial applications for Linux aside from very few specialized ones? Where's native Linux for Linux? Oh, wait, even Indie developers have abandoned Linux because why if there's Wine + DXVK.
3. Who cares about obscure something that pretends to provide APIs? How is it relevant for adoption and usage? Oh, wait, it's not. We've had dozens of dead wanna-be OSes that provide APIs. All dead. Linux on desktop is one of them as well.
Yeah, "I'm wrong".
Linux desktop market share proves it beyond reasonable doubt. LMAO.
The fact that absolute most people shy away from Linux is another proof that it's a "great OS" and "better than Windows".
Keep on living in your fantasy world. Sadly people around you don't share your ideals. They want shit to be done. They install Windows, use it for a decade without any issues, buy a new device. All good.
Somehow people think bundling half of /usr/lib is the solution.
The M4 Mac mini finally convinced me to give up on a Linux desktop for now; the combination of native Mac games, Whisky, and Windows via VMWare works at least as well as Proton for me, and everything else including development is much more convenient, including running Linux VMs when useful.
If you can survive with Proton, LibreOffice, and GIMP; you can much more comfortably survive with Proton on ChromeOS, Google Docs, and Photopea. Just hating Windows is not enough of a reason to be a Linux user, and as long as that is the case, Linux will remain niche.
Last week I tried to run Witcher 3 using wine and it took a while to debug. The installer runs immediately and seemlessly - but then it got messy
It involved installing `winetricks` which seems to be some service that installs a multitude of driver, libs and software through a clunky unresponsive UI. (not clear where it's being installed from, but #yolo) The necessary libraries I had to deduce from reading forum posts and the errors I got on launch. You then had to go in and make sure to launch the directx 11 version of the game (ie the .exe) buried in a hidden directory (~/.wine/)
Is this was "Platinum" means.. i don't want to image what Gold entails
What you want is to use a program like Lutris or Bottles to manage your runtime for you, if you're not installing it through Steam. I don't know who put you up to installing Wild Hunt on a vanilla Wine prefix but they sound like someone with a good sense of humor.
I will take a look at Lutris/Bottles. I just assumed Wine would work directly. It's worked for me most of the time in the past
The only games that routinely cause problems are those with ridiculous kernel-level anticheat, and I am not interested in those games.
Are you saying Linux has "games" because it excels at ... emulating them?
What's the point of using/running Linux then when you have a much higher chance of running games successfully natively? What about dozens if not hundreds of games that use a kernel level anticheat? Pretty much none of them work in Linux.
What's the point of native Linux APIs then?
That's weird.
Wine + DXVK are so good, Linux is GREAT.
No, it shows how horrible Linux is when not a single vendor outside of Valve wants to touch it. And everyone who tried to port games to Linux went bankrupt.
https://www.feralinteractive.com/en/news/?platform=linux
Proton often runs games better than the native ports, so there is not much of a loss if there are fewer native ports. Furthermore, in a number of cases, Windows games actually run better on Linux in Proton than on Windows.
Elden Ring is a fantastic example, as on day 1, it performed about 15% better on Linux in average FPS, and had substantially less stutter if I recall correctly.
World of Warcraft is another great example. It is well known to get about 20% better performance on Linux than on Windows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2_LlSaYNUo
Minecraft is another such game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytgDMgYL0eo
If you use AMD GPUs, it is more often the case that Linux will outperform Windows in games, since Valve wrote the shader compiler used for them on Linux and it is fairly amazing:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...
Nvidia is working on improvements for the performance of Windows games running on Linux too. A recent driver release mentions a few such improvements:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/237587/
Not all games perform better on Linux than on Windows, although Valve has people actively working on changing this:
Though speaking of a 1080Ti, that's a GPU you don't want to run on Linux because it lacks some Vulkan features for good DX12 translation: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/issues/465
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/ray-tracing-gtx-gpu-driver,news...
I ran Quake II RTX on Linux on a GTX 1080 Ti with RTX on back when I still had one. Of course, the performance was bad, but it ran. Some sites have benchmarks:
https://www.thefpsreview.com/2019/06/08/quake-ii-rtx-perform...
The RADV driver apparently did the same for ray tracing on Vega.
Looks like it was added to Vulkan spec in 2020, so after the Quake 2 RTX. It was implemented for GTX for about 2 versions and removed? https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listreports.php?extension=VK_KHR_...
From this comment that mentions downgrading to that driver version removes another required Vulkan extension for the game: https://www.reddit.com/r/vulkan/comments/kdzitt/comment/m114...
So it's not really ≥80% for top 10 at least.
But am I really that alone in recognizing a lot of truth in this article? It's sad to see so much hostility within some of the other comments, even here on HN, quickly coming to linux's defence rather than having at lest some degree of reflection and acceptance towards what are almost undeniably the very common experiences of many linux users.
It somewhat proves point 7 that while not exactly to the letter of the examples given, support the point that until there is wider acceptance of the problem we are far far from a solution.
It's possible to think very positively of linux yet still recognize so many of the challenges that make linux hard to use on the desktop. This very day I can't suspend/resume my desktop because the kernel crashes on resume, a pretty basic feature of a computer in 2024. I put up with it, because Linux is still a great choice for a technically-minded user. But there are other software orgs out there that simply wouldn't tolerate this level of lived experience of any end user. But linux does, and we are where we are.
Linux users can be defensive or even toxic about their operating system so I hardly blame the author for being impatient or frustrated. Still, I don’t blame people for being frustrated in turn at that tone.
It definitely isn't, but honestly Linux could use more of a drill-sergeant treatment. It's either that or we keep doting on our little pet OS and give up on the idea of desktop Linux being at all a viable competitor to the goliaths of Microsoft and Apple. Maybe we never stood a chance?
Keep in mind, I'm pretty much committed to Linux myself, as I'm not willing to compromise with Microsoft and Apple's user-disrespecting, locked-down, enshittified software. But I have no illusions about the inconveniences and sacrifices of that decision.
That said, Linux has other advantages that corporations will never touch because it doesn’t make business sense. I’m really glad it’s still there as a bulwark against enshittification and all computing freedom being taken away from individuals.
I'd like to believe that, but I can't help but think that if Microsoft really wanted to lock all PC hardware so that it could only run Windows, or if Google really wanted to add Attestation features to Chrome so major websites only worked on proprietary OSes, "the Linux guys would complain" wouldn't make their executives hesitate even for a moment. (In some cases EU legislators might give them pause, however.)
They managed to add DRM to HTML without too much trouble, after all. And now that Mozilla is an advertising company, that kind of thing will only get easier. And even with the Linux-based Steam Deck selling a million units or so, game companies are still fine locking Linux out if they feel like it.
Desktop Linux is pretty much totally ignored by the money people, the big decision-makers. Linux users are a very tiny minority. Your average person on the street barely knows what it is, if they've heard of it at all. So I'm not sure it qualifies as a "bulwark", I'm sorry to say.
Why would it be? It's about Linux on the _desktop_ where it sucks a$$.
Open Reddit, open any distro related forum, open unix stackexchange - hundreds of support messages daily from a tiny Linux community. That should speak volumes about how ready it is and I didn't even touch on individual issues. The article is called "Final", I will not be actively updating it. The previous one existed for over a decade and I'm done with it.
There is no hardware emulation in a Flatpak. There are no "machines" virtual or otherwise other than the computer and host kernel that you are running as an operating system on it. What Flatpaks provide are the support libraries ( the specific versions of those libraries ) that an application requires to run. That is exactly the strategy that Windows uses as well. Windows applications, usually distributed as binaries from very early in the history of the OS, have learned to bundle most of those libraries themselves. For the low level stuff like C and C++ standard libraries, Windows bundles multiple generations of them that are taking up space ( and providing attack surface ) whether you are using them or not. The biggest difference with Flatpaks is that these libraries are not installed until you install and app that needs them. This is why the author complains that Flatpaks "waste space". Windows takes up tens of gigabytes of storage for a basic install but then does not require as much to be installed later to support legacy apps. Somehow the author thinks this is better.
While the tone and framing may make it especially good at attracting responses, I do want to clarify that I don’t think it was deliberately optimized for the engagement.
While I empathize with these novice Linux users (who may not be self-aware they are as novice as they are), I do so to consider what a distro that avoids all of their problems would look like.
And, a big part of that is a huge colorful chart about what hardware is supportable and is not supportable during the install, along with the user typing out something like:
"I understand this hardware is not supportable and this is the fault of the vendor of the hardware. I understand that if I want a supported system I can buy one at https://ProductionLinuxInc ; furthermore, I understand and agree that by typing this acknowledgement and clicking "Accept" that I am legally bound to this agreement and legal penalties apply if I bitch about this operating system and my bitching either by its contents or what my bitching alludes to are factually wrong".Most Linux distros won’t jive with that very well. And because every Linux distro uses a different theme and one of a dozen UI libraries/DEs/etc. the downloaded GUI application will look bad because it won’t fit in. Flatpacks and snaps really are a solution that just allows you to not pollute your OS file system (which was never designed with the concept of apps: there are no reasonable namespaces, no easy ways to uninstall, etc.) and to statically compile the app so the next OS update doesn’t break it.
If the distro contains everything you want in its repositories you can use an “App Store” front end to get what you need and the OS will helpfully keep it up to date which is more than you can say for Windows and almost what you can say for macOS. But if you need a third party app you are out of luck: including it in the distro is a process most people won’t want to undertake.
The solution is likely not going to make the nerds happy: something like snaps are the right abstraction for Applications (I am using the capitalized version here to distinguish it from system programs). What will also happen is that some Linux distros will support this kind of solution out of the box and will be the desktop distros. Not every Linux distro will be blessed with being able to run popular apps. Ubuntu is likely on the right track for this and the Unix purists will hate it more every year as it loses the original shared system philosophy and inches closer to what macOS provides.
So the real question is: do you use your Linux distro desktop for the kernel, the package system, the package repositories, or the 1337 cred?
Most apps/DEs/etc. use either GTK or Qt. If your application uses GTK or Qt, it will use the user's preferred GTK/Qt theme by default, and fit in with all the other GTK/Qt apps on their system.
Sure, you might get unlucky, and your GTK app won't look great on a KDE desktop where that user doesn't have any other GTK apps and it sticks out. Or vice versa for your Qt app on a GTK-based desktop where the user hasn't picked a matching Qt theme.
But unless, for some reason known only to yourself, you decided to write your app for FLTK, EFL, wx, or some other niche toolkit, your app is going to work like at least one other app on 90% of users systems. And for those users running FLWM, Enlightenment, or some other weird graphical environment, I'm sure they'll cope.
Which version of GTK? 2, 3, 4?
Which version of Qt? 2, 3, 4, 5, 6?
What about X11/Wayland/Win32 compatibility? Oh, it's a$$.
And who will maintain/rewrite the source code?
Win32 on the other hand? Except for the introduction of Unicode friendly functions it's remained the same for almost 30 years.
I have to use Windows to test my apps, and each and every time it just infuriates me with ads and cluster fuck UI, constant notifications of different products, ads in start menu.
It's only consistent on delivering ads, not how the user interface is organized
How you have to tweak registry to remove the ad, but still can't get rid of OneDrives reminder, and then comes the forced updates. Settings are spread in between millions of places, extremely confusing, and twisted.
Search results are random, what the hell?! Can't even run the most used app with confidence, from search. Which is just a absurd.
Managing software, is freaking pain. Everything is everywhere, no proper centralization whatsoever. choco is good, but its cli, with which people have so much issues with.
And I have seen people suffering with bugs that was never solved, I had to setup another file browser just so the client can use his computer. Otherwise, it would take hours to load a simple folder.
The default Editor have no syntax hi lighting whatsoever, so streamlined developers, can't even provide a good editor, that could be compared with the most basic editor coming with gnome.
Windows is just not usable, and in my way, it's only feeding on the legacy, the apps. But Linux becoming much better now
Yeah, with hundreds of contributions to multiple Linux projects including the Linux kernel, GCC, KDE, Wine, etc.
A total hater.
> How you have to tweak registry to remove the ad, but still can't get rid of OneDrives reminder, and then comes the forced updates.
Takes roughly 2 minutes, ok.
> Settings are spread in between millions of places, extremely confusing, and twisted.
Not sure what you mean. In Linux settings are spread all over UI, /etc /home/.config /home/.app etc. etc. etc. And you need to learn shell and console editors to configure stuff.
> Search results are random, what the hell?! Can't even run the most used app with confidence, from search. Which is just a absurd.
Search is not even available for multiple Linux DEs.
> Managing software, is freaking pain. Everything is everywhere, no proper centralization whatsoever. choco is good, but its cli, with which people have so much issues with.
MSI and GPO exist. Most serious applications nowadays have auto-updaters. Others often need no updates.
> Windows is just not usable, and in my way, it's only feeding on the legacy, the apps.
Works near perfectly for 2 billion users.
> But Linux becoming much better now
Barely works for its 40 million users, riddled with bugs/regressions and missing features.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2020/02/15/micro...
That is far from near perfectly and there are many severe issues that have plagued Windows systems over the years if you take the time to look.
By the way, those auto-updaters you mention waste system resources. Linux systems use package managers that prevent you from having O(n) auto-updaters consuming resources all the time.
Now,
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#LGPLStaticVsDynami...
> For the purpose of complying with the LGPL (any extant version: v2, v2.1 or v3):
> If you statically link against an LGPLed library, you _must_ also provide your application in _an object_ (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.
Basically not a single software developer is going to go through these hoops to link with LGPL statically. I don't care about theory crafting. Linux has been there for over 30 years now. Show me the applications that comply with that. I dare you.
Actually I know a single example (!) and that's proprietary NVIDIA drivers. Not an application BTW. You cannot imagine how difficult Linux kernel developers have made life for NVIDIA. Yeah, there's a huge object file to be linked with the kernel. Other examples? None. In Windows you compile a driver and have it work flawlessly for at least a decade.
Sorry, I'm done with you. You're now baselessly and shamelessly accusing me of lying where a simple Google search reveals everything I say is true.
Windows requires none of this crap. What's funny is that Win32 is the only stable Linux API. Not even glibc provides it. What's even more funnier is that DirectX is still a far more richer set of APIs than what Linux provides despite Open Source making it as hard as possible to link to it. And basically no one does.
With most laptops and pre-assembled PCs Windows comes for "free" (included in the cost). If you're a builder, you can get a Windows license for a low as $10 and live happily ever after and use your old applications including I don't know Adobe Photoshop CS2 released ... almost 20 years ago. Still works fine in Windows 11.
Merry Christmas.
You just provided evidence that your remarks were wrong and then claimed it validated your remarks as being right. Rather than accuse you of lying, I would accuse you of having a severe issue in your basic reasoning skills.
Furthermore, your rant is consistent with disorganized thinking, which is often a symptom of schizophrenia. I suggest seeing a psychiatrist.
I said that even linking with LGPL is a task almost everyone avoids (NVIDIA being an exception).
You cannot link with GPL _at all_ unless you provide full source code.
Fuck it, I'm out.
I studied introductory psychology in college. I am a decent judge of whether people could benefit from psychiatric help and the more you write, the more convinced I become that you could benefit. Please go for an evaluation. Ask your regular physician for a referral. A psychiatrist likely could help you.
> Takes roughly 2 minutes, ok.
Sure, then after 2 or 3 days it pops up again.
Do you want to use OneDrive? > No
Oh, too bad, You should turn it on, I will remind you in a few days. > 3 days, 5 days Oh, Sorry, never is NOT an option.
How can that be acceptable!
At least you know where your configuration might be! On Windows, You don't even know where your apps configurations are. Is it in some deep level underground of registry? Or in App Data, local or roaming, or somewhere else?
On Linux, I know user based configs are in `.config`, and system-wide configs are in `/etc`. Some older app may store their config in home, but that's all. How is that difficult?! And everything is just text files and most of the time very nicely commented.
And I probably never needed to touch anything in `/etc` for almost over a year, unless I am messing with something.
> Search is not even available for multiple Linux DEs.
What?! Gnome has excellent application search, Win + one or two key presses I can launch my app, and it's actually consistent. No ads inserted randomly to interrupt my muscle memory.
KDE also have it. In i3 I can use `rofi` to do the same.
> MSI and GPO exist. Most serious applications nowadays have auto-updaters. Others often need no updates.
Oh, lol. How can one excuse the mess of going to each application's website, download binaries and install, and then let each and every app phone home to check for update, and then go through the upgrade dialogs, keeping watch if the app has inserted any search box or toolbar opt-outs? That is just absurd! I can just run `yay -S --noconfirm` and put password, and my update kicks in. Most of the apps are not bothered if I am running their latest version or not.
> Works near perfectly for 2 billion users.
Because, again, it's only feeding on the legacy, and because people pay the Windows Tax, without knowing, or in my country, it was easily available with new purchases for free (Piracy).
IF, people had to install Windows by themselves, I can confidently say, most of the people would stay far, far away from it.
> Barely works for its 40 million users, riddled with bugs/regressions and missing features.
I have been using Linux for 20+ years. I am not riddled by any of those 'bugs' and 'regressions', funny thing is, sometimes there are minor hitches, but again, they are minor.
And if I face a problem, I can communicate with the respected community, and get a solution. For Windows, which is a black box, you never know if you'll get any solution for your inconveniences. Like, getting rid of OneDrive, permanently. Or File explorer getting stuck indefinitely for hours after hour, and there's no solution to it. The client suffered for almost years, and he had no way to reinstall.
Citations needed. Doesn't happen to anyone else but you.
> Oh, too bad, You should turn it on, I will remind you in a few days. > 3 days, 5 days Oh, Sorry, never is NOT an option.
Again 5 minutes of Googling disables it.
> On Windows, You don't even know where your apps configurations are.
In Linux they can be in a dozen of different locations as well. And Gnome even has (had?) a sort of registry.
> What?! Gnome has excellent application search, Win + one or two key presses I can launch my app, and it's actually consistent. No ads inserted randomly to interrupt my muscle memory.
"I use Gnome/KDE and I don't give a damn about all other DEs."
Got it!
> How can one excuse the mess of going to each application's website, download binaries and install, and then let each and every app phone home to check for update, and then go through the upgrade dialogs, keeping watch if the app has inserted any search box or toolbar opt-outs? That is just absurd! I can just run `yay -S --noconfirm` and put password, and my update kicks in. Most of the apps are not bothered if I am running their latest version or not.
Most serious Windows software doesn't need manual updates. Windows and MS Office update themselves. Adobe, Corel and 3dMax products do so as well. Tiny utilities? Who cares? They just work.
It's Linux where people get obsessed with updates because there's no API/ABI compatibility per se and you have no choice. In Windows? Run something from 20 years ago and don't bother.
> Because, again, it's only feeding on the legacy, and because people pay the Windows Tax,
$10 tax. Yeah. I've spent hundreds of hours fixing Linux. No tax at all.
> I am not riddled by any of those 'bugs' and 'regressions', funny thing is, sometimes there are minor hitches, but again, they are minor.
Anecdotal evidence rears its ugly head AGAIN AGAIN AND AGAIN. "If it works me for Linux is perfect". Never mind people who actually do the dirty work of fixing hundreds of regressions every Linux kernel release.
Nothing ever changes with the Linux cult. "It works for me, I'm a seasoned developer, I know my way around console, Linux must work for everyone".
Even in this discussion this has been repeated ad nauseam.
F it. I'm out.
It's neither about if it works for me, it works for everyone, nor it should be, if it doesn't work for me then it doesn't work for everyone.
You're making some points, that most of us Linux users knows to be wrong, and pointing it out.
You're just a hater, with some outdated information about Linux. Obviously Linux is not for everyone, no one is saying it is. But it provides a open, no bullshit, interruption free, environment, that I own, not some corporate doing business with my data. That is alone enough to me, and many other
Please don't let the door hit you on the way out
We have already had this on Linux for years, it's called AppImage.
And they weigh in hundreds of megabytes, right, because they come with all the dependencies starting with glibc.
Yeah, that will totally work and has been a smashing success. Except it never has.
> because they come with all the dependencies starting with glibc
Good, because my system doesn't have glibc, by choice.
> Yeah, that will totally work
It's already working.
> And they weigh in hundreds of megabytes
My home connection is 2-gigabit symmetrical and the internal NVMe in my laptop is 4TB. So cry more poorfag.
But it's not a problem for me. It's also not a problem for most people. And it's not at all a problem next to the dumpster fire of closed source OS ; so ultimately there is no real problem.
Yet, all of that is moot, because someone already solved the problem. But I'll wait until they publish their work to talk about it.
You need to dial down the hysterics by about 1000%, or alternatively you might want to head back to the YouTube comment section since your vernacular seems more appropriate for it.
The security issues are twofold. One is that you could easily be tricked into installing malware. Two is that you will never be able to keep up with security updates, leaving yourself vulnerable to being compromised by flaws in network applications.
Making that model of software distribution difficult is a feature, not a bug.
(Yes of course the solution is to fund Gimp until it’s better than Photoshop by so much that the industry switches. It was the solution 20 years ago too. Adobe has run away with this market. Photoshop is but one of many applications desktop users need.)
https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=applicatio...
It works for a number of versions, although not all of them. It is a shame that Adobe does not port Photoshop to Linux. It used to run on IRIX:
I say this as a person who is a huge fan of Linux/Unix on the desktop. I wish I still was able to run it as my daily workhorse like I did for a decade and a half (and that was before the distros actually got good at this). You can make it work. But an average user isn’t interested because there are only downsides and little benefit.
I worked for an open source company for over a decade. But, although things improved over time, within about a week of joining I went out and bought a MacBook to use (for the first time) because it was more politically acceptable than Windows but I didn't want to deal with either a locked-down corporate Linux distro or an unsupported free Linux.
Shouldn't you try to convice Adobe instead? AFAIK, they're already using their bespoke UI and if Sublime can do it, Adobe can sure deploy Photoshop on Linux even if they only want to bless Ubuntu.
As opposed to, say, Windows, where there is only one GUI and one theme by one company so everything is perfectly match- wait, no, they have bits and pieces running every GUI they've every invented all the way back to the 90s ( https://www.dvhardware.net/article75347.html , or https://ntdotdev.wordpress.com/2021/02/06/state-of-the-windo... though that's old now ) and also lots of applications using QT or Electron or whatever just like on Linux. So clearly that's not the problem; if it's good enough for the most popular desktop OS, it can't be that bad.
And people are also used to web apps, which vary widely. The web has no standard UI toolkit.
To open a window there is exactly one way if I want it.
To open a window on Linux do I call into X11 or wayland? Do I need to also provide a DRM layer for incase it needs to be run directly ontop of DRM because BIG_USER_WITH_MONEY wants that.
Should I use QT to get a decent UI library, or GTK, or one of the many other less popular ones.
As a developer that would want to release a GUI app it's not extremely easy to pick for linux. There's no clear guidelines stating X has these features but Y doesn't (winforms vs whatever Microsoft's latest attempt at UI is).
Let's not even get into actually needing to ship a fully cross platform app. C# is blessed on windows, swift on MacOS and C on linux... Which means all the business logic will end up at the very least exporting a C API if I'm not deciding to just bite the bullet and pay QT.
All this ia why you will likely find that someone will develop a Windows release and maybe MacOS if they have a userbase that can justify the development cost. Maybe they are nice and run a test on wine and treat that as a supported platform but I only know of exactly one company that does that outside of maybe some game devs.
And that doesn't even touch anything in the article on why Linux on the desktop won't happen because the 1% of devs that went down this rocky road then also finds ABI breaks.
Not as much anymore. Part of it due to the mess that is the first-party Microsoft's GUI frameworks situation, part of it due to .NET's own APIs and semantics not evolving together with Windows since long time ago.
Funny anecdata: someone* recently made a small app to indicate when (now broken) CTRL+C is actually triggered in Windows. It was initially written in WPF and was exhibiting a weird unmanaged memory leak. Only after porting it to Avalonia (which works everywhere) the issue went away: https://x.com/KooKiz/status/1873726346897330243
So your experience might actually be better with a cross-platform GUI framework!
Mind you, it's still in its "homeland" on Windows - things like access to Registry are part of the standard library, but you may find it performing better on Unix systems otherwise. The IO abstractions certainly do!
* well, not someone but one of the co-authors of Pro .NET Memory Management.
My point however was that compared to C# you are fighting an uphill battle using any other language to do native windows UI development...
Also why I stopped looking pretty early into native on windows and built a webapp...
But yes, I get your point, if you're not familiar with C# (or Dart or Kotlin for that matter), there is motly a one way out in the form of a web app.
And the reality is that you can just target GTK on Linux. That you happen to have picked a single option on NT doesn't magically make it different, it just means you already made the decision.
And should I target X or Wayland? Which Wayland extensions are ubiquitous enough so that I don't need to manually reimplement things in my app? Should I target pipewire for audio? Pulse?
If I pick a modern stack like Wayland + GTK 4 + pipewire it might not work on older linux distros. Maybe that's fine for my needs, maybe it's not. If I pick X + GTK 3 + pulse I might end up reimplementing half of the desktop manager in my app and need to constantly rewrite my app.
Do I distribute deb/rpm or do I distribute a flatpack/snap... Actually which one.
And don't bring up that GTK abstracts Wayland/X because if I target Wayland I have access to a ton of Wayland extensions which aren't there in X so I do need to make that decision the moment I need to get access to that stuff.
So even just picking GTK I now have a matrix of 9 different configurations. GTK is not the defacto framework on linux. We now need to add QT to the mix and the whole collection of things there.
But to answer ypur question, if I pick winforms + an exe + wasapi for audio it will work on all supported versions of windows and I don't need to compromise on features. It will very likely also work under wine on linux and macos for that matter...
I use KDE Neon because I haven't bought a Mac yet but I don't know if that would be an upgrade. Neon is just superb.
I just can't imagine how anyone could get use to Neon and then use Windows without thinking it is a joke. Especially if you turn off the bells and whistles, everything is instant and instantly responsive.
I barely know any linux commands but installing software has been trivial in various software managers and apt get.
Beyond that everything just works. I think this experience is predicated on not playing games though. I have no idea what the state of games are for Linux, Windows or Mac.
As long as Neon has a critical mass to exist I could absolutely care less if more people use it or not.
Both are moving away from that model.
For everyone else, the reason they don't use Linux on their desktop is because it didn't come installed on it.
If somebody does to desktops like what Google did for smartphones, then Linux will finally have its moment.
Somebody does to desktops what Google did for smartphone. The company is called Microsoft, and the behaviour is called blatant monopoly abuse.
They didn't even use the same graphics drivers till late.
lol... so, all of it? Linux is a kernel.
Regardless, my point had absolutely nothing to do with technology. Android's popularity has absolutely nothing to do with Linux and/or what it shipped with or didn't ship with. Its popularity has everything to do with the fact that it shipped preinstalled on devices that people bought. Linux isn't going to become popular on desktops until it is shipped on desktops.
Replaced them with Windows.
Because the Linux desktop is and continues to be a sup-bar experience for the average joe. GNOME requires a modification to even run Discord properly, but anyone who points this out gets shouted at.
People don't not use Linux because they've considered it and found out that their applications won't run on it. They don't use it because they've not considered it at all, because 99%+ of people do not choose the OS on their computer. They go to the electronics store and buy a Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, or Apple. There's no Asus Eee running Xandros at my local Best Buy, and if there ever was, it wasn't on the shelf for very long.
My experience lines up with this.
Both my elderly parents run Zorin OS on their separate laptops for the past 6 years, they understand as a kind of 'free windows'.
They don't care about the inner workings, they go online, check email, do shopping, make travel arrangements, print a ridiculous amount of paper. And I stopped getting calls because 'the printer is not working'.
That's already happened, and Google did it. They are called Chromebooks. They are Linux underneath, use the GNU userspace stack and Wayland for GUI. They have a button that installs Debian, and GUI packages you "apt install" appear in the Chrome app launch folder.
Apparently ChromeOS is being swallowed by Android, which I suspect isn't a big move. Crosini, the LXC thingy that hosts Debian on ChromeOS, has already been ported. That means Android will be powering laptops. Does that make it a Desktop OS? If so, that does the we can count Android's 45% market share of all personal computing devices towards a Desktop OS? And if we do that, does that mean Linux has finally won the desktop wars? By any definition it's already won the personal computing devices wars.
> That means Android will be powering laptops. Does that make it a Desktop OS? If so, that does the we can count Android's 45% market share of all personal computing devices towards a Desktop OS?
OS market share for a particular device type is typically measured as the respective portion of the OSes that run on that hardware. If you are looking at desktop/laptop market share, you'd only count that :)
I’ve been using Linux on my desktop since 2004 or so.
And lack of games is always brought up as if gaming was one essential feature of a computer. That’s what consoles are for.
Anyway, desktop Linux keeps getting relatively better when you compare the increasing hell that a Windows user is subject to.
(Hello hello Ricardo)
That having been said, most games work fine on Linux nowadays anyway.
I don't game, so that doesn't bother me, though I read it works pretty well these days.
I've used nothing but Linux since, of various flavors. Use it for work, use it for home. Everything just works.
One thing I will note is that despite my general distaste for Electron, it's probably been the biggest recent accelerant for making this all easier. Slack, VSCode, Teams(yuck), MongoDB compass, Postman, etc all work flawlessly. Prior to it existing, we were stuck with Wine, open source alternatives in various states of disrepair, or missing out. I can't even remember the last time I had to 'miss out' because of Linux, I think it was some proprietary VPN blob around 2010 or so.
No Linux-based OS has gained mainstream acceptance. You can try to blame that on marketing or corporations or whatever, but I don't buy that. I think open source software is the best way to make technically-superior software, but I think often it's a poor way to create the best user experiences, because the kinds of people who create open source software often don't care to focus on UX.
> That’s what consoles are for.
Millions (tens? hundreds? more?) of Windows gamers would disagree with you. You buy a console and do what you want, sure, go for it. But there is a market for Windows gaming, a very big one.
Gnome is a very well managed project, but its resources aren’t infinite.
Or they do, but it's not the average Windows user's UX they focus on.
They are, that's why I have to dual boot. If my games worked on Linux, I would never run Windows. DirectX is their lock-in.
> What's worse is that software compiled for the current version of Linux X will not necessarily work for the current version of Linux Y. Linux distros insist that all the software must be compiled for their current releases or provided as source code. The problem with source code is that normal users won't bother to compile anything, and secondly, it's not always possible to compile software because it may depend on a specific compiler or dependencies that your distro doesn't provide
This is at the core of it, I think. Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience; it often fails due to linking or other dependency-related errors.
Also for some mysterious reasons, compiling C code under Nix always works and dependencies can't be missing.
It feels a bit like "Emacs is my favorite operating system, if only it had a text editor"
NixOS's philosophy? amazing. Actually trying to use, install stuff to, make changes to, etc. NixOS with the currently existing tools? horrible.
* move my arms again, so I can learn how to
* push myself up again, so I can learn how to
* move my legs again, so I can learn how to
* crawl, so I can learn how to
* walk.
Although Nix knowledge helped me tremendously in managing heterogenous codebase with more than a million of LoC
I hope the situation has improved, but the last time I had to deal with Nvidia (kernel/driver/library dependencies/updates/etc.) under Nix it did not remotely work out of the box and it was a huge pain. (And switching to AMD or intel was not really an option.) Doing anything off the beaten path seems to be challenging even if you have experience with Nix.
The arcane Nix language doesn't help matters.
I think immutable is the future, and I wish I could recommend Nix (and other immutable systems) to normal people, but at this point I think you really need to be a Nix expert/fan to set it up and actually enjoy it.
No
My experience with Windows, exactly.
I have been using multiple Linux distros for over 20 years (and supporting other people) and this has simply never happened to me. Not even since I started using a distro that is supposedly less stable (Manjaro).
> Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience
That is why very few distros expect users to do it. Are you thinking of Gentoo or similar? I think its good that there are distros that cater for people who want to compile software, but why choose one of those distros unless you actually want to compile software?
From the point of view of most users, Linux is very similar to iOS or Android - you install software from the "store".
I believe the comment you're replying to is stating that Linux (and its app ecosystem) is much more fragmented than iOS and Android. Each distro has a "store" of apps that only reliably work on that distro.
I knew rms at Berkeley, when he was still (considered) cool.
It's not supposedly, a "rolling distro" can't be stable because it has no stable ABI (upgrading a few dependencies is enough to change the ABI exposed to applications).
When your compiled binaries work one moment and then don't work after a system update, that's considered unstable and is one of the reasons people pay Red Hat to support old Linux versions for 20 years.
Some people think "stability" means crashes when it comes to distros, it does not.
I should have used a less ambiguous term in this context though.
A significant fraction of the software I use is installed through yay’s extra packages which do frequently require building from source so it’s not just a Gentoo thing. It’s far from as seamless (or as limited) as Android/iOS app stores.
* and not even half of them can be blamed on NVIDIA
Which is why I said "or similar". I actually had AUR in mind (as I use Manjaro).
> This is at the core of it, I think. Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience; it often fails due to linking or other dependency-related errors.
Huh? If you’re compiling your own code in a mainstream Linux distribution then I’m not surprised you have to nuke and pave.
It’s a distribution, meaning they build and distribute the software for you.
Flatpak deals with all the applications that don’t need to be built into the operating system itself.
I've had no failures building major projects like CPython (multiple versions) as long as I RTFM and ensure that clearly identified build dependencies are installed first.
The way I started was by installing Arch Linux on a 32GB flash drive. No I did not write the ISO onto the flash drive. I used Virtualbox to load the arch Linux iso and mounted the flash drive into Virtualbox and installed onto the flash drive as if it was a regular HDD/SSD. The only annoyance was figuring out the bootloader for this particularly exotic way of installing Arch Linux.
After that I spent most of my time really just doing everything in a web browser for several months. I did this, because I wanted to have a less distracting computing environment where almost nothing was installed. The fact that games didn't run on Linux was supposed to be a feature, until I realized that they mostly run on Linux anyway. Then I bought a 512GB SSD and installed Arch Linux on it in 2018 and never even thought or cared about what Linux distribution I am using ever since.
99% of computer users will never consider replacing the operating system that came installed on their system, they don't want to risk bricking it or losing data.
I was forced to use Windows for a year as a developer. I threw WSL2 on it and it was fine. I installed Docker desktop for Windows and it worked fine for Linux.
But especially on the Mac, while I have to download updated commands, it is genuinely certified UNIX.
On both Macs and Windows I also get mainstream software support and on Macs, I get a laptop that can run 14-20 hours on a battery and runs cool and quiet.
it's free.
it's stable.
it's easier to use.
it doesn't have adds.
it uses less resources.
it runs on older hardware.
it doesn't contain spyware.
it doesn't violate my privacy.
it includes more powerful features.
it offers more alternatives for the GUI.
i can trust it because the kernel has been audited.
it is way easier to configure to my personal preferences.
it allows me to replace or remove any application that i don't like.
Mac [...] is genuinely certified UNIX
why should any normal person care about that? UNIX is dead. Linux would be a genuinely certified UNIX if anyone would bother to pay for the certification. in fact, at some point someone did: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/293396/is-there-a-l...
By the way you can buy a brand new M1 MacBook Air from Walmart for $699. These are still being manufactured by Apple and distributed via third parties.
As far as “trusting it” because it has been audited, the Heartbleed bug was part of Linux for years before it was discovered.
What “more powerful features” does it have than a typical Mac?
What exactly do you do “daily” with a $100 laptop?
From your past comments, I’m assuming you are developer, are you really using a $100 computer?
I'm waiting on the mail for a $70 Chromebook with 8gb of ram and a 2-core/4-thread CPU to replace this laptop because of a half-damaged charging port. I picked a Chromebook for the 10+ hour battery life, the same reason you chose a Macbook that costs 10x as much.
I use a terminal text editor to write code and I use a web browser for everything else. If it wasn't for browsers being so bloated and desktop applications made with electron, I would be happy to settle with a laptop that had even just 4gb of ram.
Not to mention how many slow bloated Electron apps or Chrome itself runs on that.
I definitely couldn’t do any serious development on a ChromeBook.
But you said you care about an ad free experience and privacy and you are okay with hardware and an OS by Google????
I'm not the person who posted about privacy - I consider chasing it a dead and fruitless end. Something will always be watching you. It's mere luck that preferring Linux happens to give me an environment that's mostly private by default except for anything involving the web browser.
My MBA is much more ergonomic and user friendly, but it's like being with an annoying roommate that insists on sleeping on the same bed and taking shower with you instead of having an appartment all by yourself
Over the last 25 years I've spent hundreds of hours fighting with its bugs. Not free by a long shot.
> it's stable.
Anything but.
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues
> it's easier to use.
You must be joking right? A step in any direction and you must use CLI.
> it doesn't have adds.
Windows neither has "adds".
> it uses less resources.
Proofs required.
> it runs on older hardware.
Good luck using Firefox or Chrome on "older hardware". Good luck watching videos on older hardware that lacks HW H.265/VP9 decoding. Older hardware for what? For NAS? Why would you need desktop Linux on it?
> it doesn't contain spyware.
Prove that Windows spies on you. And also, Windows is used by NSA/CIA/FBI and pretty much all governments of the world some of which are openly hostile to the US. So much for "spyware".
> it doesn't violate my privacy.
See earlier.
> it includes more powerful features.
Examples or bust.
> it offers more alternatives for the GUI.
Windows has had CLI for aeons and now not just one but many including Bash (WSL).
> i can trust it because the kernel has been audited.
That's an abject lie.
> it is way easier to configure to my personal preferences.
And Windows doesn't need configuration as it just works.
> it allows me to replace or remove any application that i don't like.
What would you like to replace in Windows that's not "replaceable"? Examples or bust.
Whatever is powering the start menu ads.
> Prove that Windows spies on you.
https://thenewamerican.com/us/tech/computers/windows-10-is-s...
While Microsoft gives the option to disable some of their spyware, it is not possible to disable everything via Windows settings:
https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/microsoft-windows10-privac...
I could continue, but where have you been the past 10 years? Windows has been spyware since Windows 10. There is oodles of telemetry, and you need to have been living under a rock not to know about this. This seems appropriate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKYQ5ibxslI
By the way, long before Microsoft started blatently spying on its users, they put a back door into Windows allowing them to push updates to Windows machines, even if you disabled updates. We know because they used it at least once:
https://www.informationweek.com/it-sectors/microsoft-updates...
When a company can push updates to a machine, it can change whatever it wants. Such changes can include giving themselves full remote control of the machine, if they did not have full control already.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252087642
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252412228
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7655683
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252623445
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251628859
> what “data tracking” can you not turn off?
https://eclecticlight.co/2021/08/12/is-apple-keeping-its-pro...
What was the issue? Immediately after power management initialization during the first boot the system seen that the battery was in a bad condition and tried to hibernate but for some reason crashed instead. Out of warranty, the battery is extremely hard to replace, so a registry quirk injected through a Linux boot cd immediately after setup helped.
Is Windows actually ready for desktop?
I have used Linux for just shy of 30 years. It is different than Windows and far more powerful. It is just that people do not want to learn different things. Plus Linux has no spyware.
These days, you can do anything on Linux that you do on Windows, except for some 3d Gaming. And that is because hardware vendors refuse to support Linux in the way they support Windows. It is the fault of Video vendors, most notability Nvidia.
So off to my usual rant :) If I was the "ruler" of Linux, I would make sure no Nvidia GPUs would work under Linux until Nvidia opens up their GPU.
The differences from Windows versions 7 to 10 to 11 are substantial. To me it seemed like a consistent desktop experience from Linux Mint is much better for those who do not want change at all.
Even GPU drivers work fine for 90-99% of games on Linux. The biggest issue keeping certain games from running on Linux is actually anti-cheat support:
Because Linux does not support hardware (or at least new hardware) in the same Windows does.
AMD makes new graphics card, steps on Windows vs Linux to release an updated driver to support it
Windows - Update driver, release via Windows Update / Website etc
Linux - Send patches months in advance to the LKML using email, make sure any patches needed in Mesa are also sent in with a completely different system. Then, wait for your patches to be peer reviewed and land, then wait for a kernel release, then wait for distros to package said kernel and release it, which if you're on a distro that fixes to a kernel version, could be waiting 6 months.
And even that's gotten better in recent years, too. Nvidia hasn't fixed everything, but two of the biggest concerns (not supporting Wayland and fighting community drivers) have began to be addressed recently. It's beginning to look like Nvidia is taking desktop Linux seriously, albeit slowly. Most of these changes landed in the 555-series drivers, which are still pretty fresh, maybe even still in beta iirc.
I've used Linux for as much only I'm a tad more humble. Mentioned more than a dozen times in the kernel git log. Not a big achievement but kinda shows I'm not just a bystander.
You've never said how much time you've wasted fixing Linux or making software work. Must be a non-issue I guess.
Exceptionally humble, indeed.
> You've never said how much time you've wasted fixing Linux or making software work.
This comes up often and I'm always fascinated by the implied assumption that time isn't wasted fixing Windows or MacOS computers and making software work on those systems. The age-old "No, I will not fix your computer!" is not a Linux meme - in 99% of cases it refers to a Windows machine.
We can trade anecdata until the heat death of the universe, and in fact you've nicely listed many of the pro/con points in your articles. However having read both versions (current/technical and final), I must agree with parent. This is just a rant from someone who likes Windows more.
I also want to call out your "solving linux" section (in the technical article). You've listed basically the entire Ubuntu playbook (which is, btw, a UK company, not an African company). Mark "poached" debian developers (DDs), poured millions of his own money into it, spearheaded many of the desktop-specific innovations (now supplanted by other software, but Ubuntu provided the initial push), created an app store, did an enormous amount of work popularizing Linux specifically for the desktop, was the first to start "officially checked and approved" hardware list, etc.
And the results show even if we don't attribute them to Ubuntu today, and even if we're using alternatives: Linux desktop today is a much smoother experience than 20 years ago.
So, while I can sympathize with many of the points in your technical article (https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...) even if I do not agree with them, the linked one really seems like distillation to a "I like Windows more" rant.
And no I've spent far less time "fixing" Windows. In fact I don't remember doing that ever. I've had multiple cases when Windows stopped booting and in absolute most of them I just had to reinstall the system from scratch. That's all "I've wasted".
Linux on the other hand?
"It works for you everything is made up in the article".
Never mind how once I had to fix a glaring issue in the Linux kernel which rendered tens of thousands of systems unbootable and which took me over 24 hours of hard work to unravel.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206175
Yeah, indeed I've never had anything like that in Windows in 30+ years that I've been using it. Never once a Windows update rendered the system completely dead. And I'm not talking about my system, I talking about hundreds.
Lastly I'm just a poor Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer who actually overlooks a lot of stuff and sees a staggering number of fixes in every stable Linux release.
I follow way too many bug trackers and LKML as well. It's all good, please disperse.
That's one way of dealing with it.
> Never mind how once I had to fix a glaring issue in the Linux kernel which rendered tens of thousands of systems unbootable.
You didn't have to fix it, you could've booted the old kernel. You chose to debug the issue and help. That's commendable, but do you think people (who work on Windows or hardware, or in IT departments in any organization) don't do that for Windows as well?
> And I'm not talking about my system, I talking about hundreds.
Is it tens of thousands, or hundreds?
> Lastly I'm just a poor Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer who actually overlooks a lot of stuff and sees a staggering number of fixes in every stable Linux release. I follow way too many bug trackers and LKML as well.
Well if you're Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer, it's natural that you see many more Linux bugs than Windows or MacOS bugs. Again, commendable that you choose to participate, help, and make it better! You choose to live on the bleeding edge, and so you bleed. But that's far from typical Linux desktop user experience.
> Could you be specific about what constitutes "a rant"?
Well, your entire comment is a rant: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rant
You're obviously very passionate about, and involved with, Linux. But you also seem to hate it so I'm confused why do it? Buy a Mac, be happy, live and let live, etc.
Windows can be reinstalled, Linux bugs never go away by themselves.
> You chose to debug the issue and help.
No, people don't do that in Windows because Microsoft has much better QA/QC. Not a single Windows update since 1998 has rendered my system unbootable. Microsoft is certainly not perfect and Windows sometimes has regression but those normally affect very few people.
> Is it tens of thousands, or hundreds?
Windows installation user base: 2 billion. Linux: 40 million. Have fun with mental gymnastics.
> You choose to live on the bleeding edge, and so you bleed.
There's a huge number of bugs affecting "stable" Linux distros that use "stable" software including the kernel. Linux bugs are not specific to the bleeding edge but they are more prominent.
Here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219638
> Well, your entire comment is a rant: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rant
This is not a counter argument and I will not waste any more of my time with you. Try using the dictionary argument with your children, "You are a retard, my boy! Why? Look it up in the Merriam Webster dictionary, that's why".
The amount of BSOD I've seen and unfixable issues after spending hours googling and browsing windows shitty support sites are just the tip of the iceberg.
Windows is utter trash and the only reason it won is because of the monopoly it established, forcing everyone to use it, hardware manufacturers to support it and once the dominance was established, you can't escape it.
MacOS is literally only used with hardware lock-in. People don't choose it. It's forced onto whoever chooses to overpay for an Apple computer.
The only reason Linux won't win the desktop is because it doesn't have a monopoly to support it.
These discussions that pretend any of this is due to merits of one OS over the other are moot. It doesn't matter at all when it comes to who or how many people use it. These are all determined by external factors.
Last time I did it was in the Windows XP SP0 days.
> The amount of BSOD I've seen and unfixable issues after spending hours googling and browsing windows shitty support sites are just the tip of the iceberg.
When was the last time you got BSOD? I've not seen them after Vista.
> The only reason Linux won't win the desktop is because it doesn't have a monopoly to support it.
"Win"? Start with software compatibility. There's no one Linux, there's a billion of incompatible distros that make it impossible to run old software.
> These discussions that pretend any of this is due to merits of one OS over the other are moot.
API and ABI compatibility are swear words to you, I get it.
I'm sorry if you don't care about those, the world will shrug you off. No other OS has this madness.
> by external factors.
Yeah, for Linux fans it's always someone or something else. The fact that Linux is a bug-ridden mess of software with no compatibility and no stability isn't an issue of course. It's because Microsoft/Oracle/NVIDIA actively interfere with Linux. Or aliens? Must be aliens.
Keep your ad ridden Windows mate, you clearly deserve it. Not worth my time to answer this low level of a reply.
I've been running Linux exclusively since RedHat 5.0 (no, that's not RHEL, that's more than a decade earlier).
This entire article is 1000% true. Every word of it. You can "opine" and "disagree" with it as much as you want. It's become too damn popular in the western world lately to opine about anything.
Feel free to opine about gravity, just don't fall off the top of a 10-storey building.
BTW this is why the entire world is running "ad-ridden"/"privacy-invading" Windows.
People run it because
1. Windows doesn't get in the way and allows them to run their software.
2. Windows is rock stable and doesn't break randomly after every upgrade (sans occasional conflicts with third-party software here and there affecting ~0.05% of people).
3. Windows is simple.
Linux has no implied compatibility, it's full of regressions, it's complicated as hell and it still has poor HW support. Yes.
> Windows is rock stable and doesn't break randomly after every upgrade (sans occasional conflicts with third-party software here and there affecting ~0.05% of people).
What? I've lost count of the amount of times that I've had to restore botched Windows updates. It has gotten better lately, but it still happened more times than I've had to deal with update issues on my Linux installation. And I run my Linux near the bleeding edge where, in theory, everything should break all the time, right? Well, it doesn't.
My point stands. People don't choose their OS. It's chosen by the hardware manufacturer, their employers or their requirements. I'm gonna repeat this because it's extremely important: people don't spend a single second choosing their OS.
If you want to game, you have to use Windows (yes I know about Proton and love it, but mainstream online games require Windows). If you want to use your computer for work, you need Office. Even with Google Docs, people in my country simply default to the Office suite. Again, not because they choose it, but because it was already chosen for them by the monopoly that is already in place.
Aside from Office, you have all of the other specialized tools like the Adobe suite and many others that force you to use Windows again.
Windows doesn't have anyone competing with them. Their monopoly guarantees they can get away with anything. It's not a competition.
Windows 11 is a great example of this. Nobody asked for it. It's garbage with more ads in it. It wasn't built to improve the system for users, it was built to sell ads and force people to buy new computers. Being the only option allows them to do all of this. Windows simply doesn't need to add, change or remove features because of competitors since there aren't any.
People run Windows because it works. FTFY.
The number of times something in Linux has broken over the past 25 years for me has been insane.
How about the Linux kernel failing to boot for three releases in a row, a regression that affected tens of thousands of laptops?
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206175
Of course in the unicorn land of Linux cultists it "works" too, but then you open any Linux related forum and multiple threads about something not working anymore are posted daily.
I invite you to r/Fedora for example.
> My point stands. People don't choose their OS.
There's no point.
There's an actual OS, Windows.
And then there's a software compilation X version N that comes with no warranties whatsoever, it's called Linux Distro X version N.
People choose to run an actual OS with the ability to create and run third-party software for at least a decade, in the case of Windows for up to three decades.
Linux offers NONE of that.
No stability, no quality, no QA/AC and no implied or enforced backward or forward compatibility.
Continue to OVERLOOK all of that and believe "But mom, Windows is preinstalled!"
I know a TON of people who have left Linux after a few years of struggling with it at every turn. They are all now running Windows or MacOS.
> Of course in the unicorn land of Linux cultists it "works" too, but then you open any Linux related forum and multiple threads about something not working anymore are posted daily.
As opposed to Windows where nothing ever breaks? That doesn't make any sense. It's a known fact that Linux users report way more problems than Windows users because they are simply more technical, more in line with the open source spirit and dig deeper.
When I had issues on my Windows, it was extremely hard to find any solution online. Nobody goes to r/Windows for their troubles. From the few answers I've found, pretty much all of them ended up being "re-install Windows" or "re-install parts of Windows".
> People choose to run an actual OS with the ability to create and run third-party software for at least a decade, in the case of Windows for up to three decades.
Sorry but, that's simply not true for the average person. I'm not talking about the typical HN user here. The absolute vast majority of users *do not choose an OS*. Surely you can't argue with that, right?
> Continue to OVERLOOK all of that
No. I'm well aware that there are many things to improve on Linux (especially desktop linux), but my whole point is that it's utterly irrelevant until people actually get to choose an OS. Linux could have zero issues and work flawlessly everywhere and it would still have almost nobody using it outside of our tech savvy bubble.
If Linux as a whole was as bad as you say, it wouldn't be used in the majority of computers in the world. It's only desktop Linux that suffers from your complaints, and it's simply because it doesn't have companies with infinite money and monopolies behind it making it more seamless for the average user while forcing vendors to support it.
My Linux desktop machine does not crash. It runs whatever I ask of it boringly reliably. So does a laptop. That's been my experience for twenty years now.
My shiny new Windows 11 work laptop locks up about twice a day. Reboots if I hold power for long enough to start running again. Gives me no indication what is going wrong. Doesn't even give a blue screen with an error message.
Bluetooth usually connects after twenty minute or so of repeat attempts. Accidentally plugging in a dock overrides mic/speaker settings to ones that don't exist in multiple places. Routinely demands reboots to update itself with no observable change in behaviour.
The Windows system isn't even stable enough to host virtualbox - that upsets the network connection.
Useless.
hahha, really fun taking into account quote from article:
> You're using the wrong Linux distribution
An issue on macOS, too. Plug my MBP into a dock and it assumes that I want the Dock's audio to be the default input and output devices.
The main difference, I feel, is that with Windows you can tell the system is built with a company's interests in mind, while in Linux this feeling is absent, and instead, you can tell the user is at the center of attention. And even if the system may not be perfect, it constantly evolves for the better. Just this difference ensures I will never go back again, nor will I ever recommend anything else.
With Windows, the system is a boss, with linux, you are the boss :)
Windows software from yesteryear frequently requires an installer that will not run on modern Windows. 16 bit installers are very common. So, the situation is not quite as rosy as reported.
My main complaint though is calling Flatpaks “light-weigh VMs”. If you are technical, you know what he means. If you are not, this leaves a totally wrong impression. Flatpak emulates no hardware. So there are zero “virtual machines”, light-weight or otherwise. Flatpaks run in a sandbox but mostly that is just a feature of the Linux kernel. Flatpak apps run directly on the host kernel just like any other app. It is totally true that Flatpaks “waste” lots of space because the way they provide portability is to bundle all the libraries that the app may need.
If we are going to complain about Flatpaks though, let’s be honest about how older Windows apps work on modern Windows. They do it by bundling all the libraries that the app will need. If you try to run ReactOS, you will learn that often you need to install old versions of the C and C++ standard libraries ( along with other things ). It is true that Windows includes much of this “out-of-the-box” for compatibility. And guess what, you pay the storage space for that on Windows. There is a reason that Windows is 30 GB freshly installed. Linux does not make you pay that tax. Instead, you have to install that stuff the first time you install a Flatpak. If you install a second Flatpak requiring the same libs, they share the space—just like in Windows.
So let’s not dump on Flatpak for wasting space just because it waits until you need it to install all these support libraries. I do not want my Linux distro to require 30 GB minimum drive space just in case I install Space Cadet Pinball.
Do I like Flatpaks? No actually. I use a distro with a huge repo largely to avoid them. Do I think Linux backwards compatibility could be better? Yes, actually. But please, let’s at least be honest and accurate when we talk about these things.
2: The statement "Linux developers spend very little to no time checking that their code changes don't cause regressions or breakages" cannot be applied to all or possibly most developers. What packages is TFA talking about here? Maybe TFA means "Denuvo developers spend very little time checking that their code changes don't cause rootkits or kernel exploits - in Windows."
3: "Lack of general software" - TFA seems to be arguing that because software is not specifically compiled for Linux, it is therefore not "available", which is laughably false. My entire Steam library works just fine on the Steam Deck and in Debian. In fact, many of those games run on Steam/Proton when they could not be made to run on modern versions of Windows.
4: "Poor file and folder sharing" - I don't think TFA has ever tried Samba in an all-Linux environment, but I will grant that permissions across machines can be tricky. You know, like sharing folders between Windows XP, 7, 10, and 11.
5: "Lack of funding on the desktop" - Listen, I don't think IBM/RedHat are underfunded. I don't prefer Gnome Desktop, but it's perfectly functional, and funding doesn't seem to be an issue there. Maybe we should ask Canonical if they've ever funded desktop work.
6: "Hardware support and compatibility" - Listen, I'm using an HP 1012 laser printer. Microsoft stopped writing drivers for this perfectly usable printer in Windows 8. I'm using a modern GPU (Radeon 6700XT) that has drivers built right into the kernel. I'm using a scanner that was new when Windows 2000 was new, and I can tell you, it won't work in Windows anymore but it will for sure work in Linux. Once again, TFA does not give examples.
7: Ok, I'll give him this one. You can pay for commercial support for Linux if you want it, though! Canonical and Redhat would love to have your money.
Summing up, it seems like this guy is just complaining that Linux isn't a commercially-supported O/S, except it is, if you pay for it. Maybe he means "Linux isn't Windows." So, his entire premise is wrong, and trolly. And speaking of trolls, you'll see TFA's name in the ars forum if you search, and I'll give you two guesses what his posts there look like.
It’s like saying that FreeBSD is on the desktop just because Sony used it as the base for the PS5. These are specific scenarios with specific hardware optimized for each use case. Desktop Linux encompasses the sheer amount of available PCs and laptops that one might install it on, and there is a miles long list of “just about everything works except $x thing” articles.
I otherwise generally agree with your points and think the article itself is more troll-ish than it needs to be.
You can install regular Linux applications in Desktop mode, including Libreoffice and Firefox.
It's probably fair to say the majority of users don't do this, but it's a completely accessible, usable, and supported Linux desktop. So, yes, the Steam deck is a Linux desktop.
Even gaming mode is a usable "Desktop" environment, usable with a virtual or actual keyboard, touchpad or regular mouse.
You can even install SteamOS on a regular PC! You might have to tweak it a bit to get your particular hardware supported, but you'll end up with...a Steam Linux desktop.
> It's probably fair to say the majority of users don't do this
You still missed the part where I noted:
> These are specific scenarios with specific hardware optimized for each use case. Desktop Linux encompasses the sheer amount of available PCs and laptops that one might install it on, and there is a miles long list of “just about everything works except $x thing” articles.
This is and has been the thorn in Desktop Linux's side for the last ~20 years.
How many desktop PCs aren't certified to run Windows 11? Can you hack it and make it run with esoteric commands and dubious registry edits? Sure, but then you're in the same spot Linux users are.
How much hardware do people throw away because manufacturers don't write updated drivers anymore? Right, you're back in the just about everything works but situation again, except in Windows.
The only real difference between Linux and Windows is that new hardware is better-supported in Windows, and comes with a shelf life, and older hardware is better-supported in Linux with a shelf life that Microsoft can't touch.
When you add in and then Windows includes telemetry and data mining that Microsoft won't allow you to turn off and won't tell you what is included I can't see why anyone would want Windows.
> These are specific scenarios with specific hardware optimized for each use case. Desktop Linux encompasses the sheer amount of available PCs and laptops that one might install it on, and there is a miles long list of “just about everything works except $x thing” articles.
> This is and has been the thorn in Desktop Linux's side for the last ~20 years.
The Steam Deck literally does not have these problems. It's the the Linux Desktop, perfected!
A significant amount of goalpost moving is happening here. My original point holds true: general Desktop Linux, installed on $randomly-bought-general-class-desktop-or-laptop-machine, is not the generally solid experience that Windows is.
> When you add in and then Windows includes telemetry and data mining that Microsoft won't allow you to turn off and won't tell you what is included I can't see why anyone would want Windows.
I wasn't even debating these points with you. I don't think anyone should use Windows either, but here we are.
> The Steam Deck literally does not have these problems. It's the the Linux Desktop, perfected!
It is a gaming machine that happens to run Linux, and you have done nothing to convince me otherwise.
What does "not ready for the desktop" even mean? Its been ready for MY desktop for over 20 years. Points 1,2,3 and 4 are pretty much wrong. Point 5 is a problem for other OSes too (there are bugs in applications!), point 6 is only relevant if you have particular hardware you want to work with Linux, and point 7 is not my experience.
Now I'm using a Dell, and again, full hardware support with zero issues using Wayland and Pipewire. And I use Slackware, not exactly a sophisticated distro, but one that just offers upstream software with no modification.
I can assure you 'linux' works just fine on the desktop (something I have done for a couple decades), and while there is some truth to the security and funding challenges, I find taking the article seriously difficult given the current alternatives.
Both Microsoft and Apple are openly trying to force you into their vision of computing, which is pedicated on their control and profit.
I have machines that run Windows and MacOS, but those both get worse every year, while Debian (and other distros) get slightly better.
I can run many AAA games on Proton, have access to the best development tools available, and am granted choice everywhere.
I can't even log in with a local only account on the latest version of Windows, and MacOS makes it harder and harder to install my own software (unless I pay them a tax, via a yearly dev account payment.
Linux is closer to the way forward, we just aren't there yet.
It is though. Go ahead and find me any distribution of Linux on which this binary of the Zig compiler does not work:
https://ziglang.org/download/0.13.0/zig-linux-x86_64-0.13.0....
You can't, because it's a static executable whose only runtime dependencies are a file system.
And if kernel devs would bless us with a stable graphics ABI, then we could do this for games, too. Unfortunately, the way drivers work currently relies on dynamic linking in a way that drags in a dependency on differences in distributions, which is completely unnecessary and maddening.
Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pq1XqP4-qOo
P.S. Just bought my wife a steam deck for christmas and she loves it.
1. Linux is a software ecosystem. Varying flavors and options to fill almost any need of computing solution.
2. Bugs and Regressions are crowd-source community solved. Bugs don't last long if it's keeping something from working.
3. There are so many open-source games native to Linux/Windows/Mac that don't get enough attention. Most of them are free too.
4. Filesharing on linux is as simple as a command line operation. See rsync. Also there are countless GUI apps that use rsync.
5. Funding is everywhere in Linux and open source software. See IBM, RedHat, Google, Microsoft, Amazon among a few.
6. Hardware drivers are plentiful for Linux. Hardly have any issues.
7. The community will help you. They've helped me for years.
2022: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33951719
2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28960330
2020: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23368115
- You're using the wrong Linux distribution
- You're using the wrong Linux kernel version
- You have the wrong hardware
- You're using Linux incorrectly
- You're asking for too much
- Go debug or fix it yourself.
Edit: This is sarcasm by the way. These bullets come from the article.
In all seriousness though. I think another poster had the right idea. Linux requires a mindset shift. You must be willing to be a master of your own destiny. I've used Linux largely problem free for 10 years. I took some time to learn how to do things "the Linux way" but once I did it's been smooth sailing.
I recently have had to use Windows for work and it's annoying as hell. Every day after lunch one of my monitors just turns off and rearranges all my windows. On Linux, I could dig into the problem, and worse case just have a xrandr script to hack a solution together. On Windows I'm just SOL looking and dead Windows message board threads.
It's giving a mix of "You're holding it wrong" and Stack Overflow's "Question Marked as Duplicate"
Based on my experience on Meta, and various random Reddit threads where people complain: in like 90% of cases where someone complains that a Stack Overflow question was unjustly marked as a duplicate, I could go take a look and then write out a clear step by step explanation of not only how it is very obviously a duplicate by Stack Overflow's standards, but exactly how to apply the advice from answers on the target to the original problem.
Even if I didn't previously know anything about the technologies involved.
Please keep in mind that it is not the purpose of Stack Overflow to solve the problem you are currently encountering. The purpose of Stack Overflow is to answer a question that can be useful to others. If your program doesn't work, it is explicitly, by policy, your responsibility to debug first; the point of creating a Minimal Reproducible Example is to demonstrate that you have found the problem and have a legitimate question about why it is a problem.
Someone who closes your question as a duplicate is doing you a kindness. You immediately get answers and don't have to wait for someone else to write one. Closing duplicates is also doing everyone else a kindness, by helping to make sure that, when people use a search engine to find an answer on Stack Overflow, they all end up at the right place with the best-stated version of the question and the best answers for it. In many cases, the person who identifies a duplicate has gone out of the way to figure out the problem (despite an unclear explanation or an attempt to sneak in side questions about unrelated matters).
It's a shame you can't downvote submissions here, and flagging is not appropriate. We've heard these tired arguments a million times, if all of this gets fixed, the author will find another reason why he can't or won't switch.
This is the reaction from Microsoft when I want my Windows clock to display this niche feature called 'seconds'
The author mentions non technical people and I will happily say that I'm a computer engineer designing semiconductors. Linux may not be the right OS for billions of people out there but it works perfectly fine as a desktop for a few million.
Both platforms have received billions of dollars in developpment by MS and Apple over the years and both have an extremely rich and mature app ecosystems. For most people, there's no real need or desire to use anything else.
That's it.
It's not an issue of drivers, games or app compatibility. If there were serious demand for Linux on the desktop, there would be good money to be made there and these issues would get fixed pronto.
In my experience, users are spooked by 2 things:
1) Lackluster hardware support (not entirely Linux’s fault, but the distros could have a qualified vendor list, for example)
2) Incomplete UI for the OS. Not a single time in the past 20 years did I set up a Linux desktop without the need to spawn a terminal. This is completely unacceptable and user-hostile. None of the other platforms (even Android) require this.
When I think about all of what I do in the CLI and what would be needed to have a GUI, even a basic beginner version, I'm not surprised no one is doing it.
I believe that computers are like cars and should be treated as such. Driving one is easy, but any maintenance requires being knowledgable into how it works. If you don't have an IT dept, go grab a book and learn how to use the computer.
The main reason Linux hasn't proliferated on the desktop is that businesses don't use it on the desktop and that's because they prefer to pay for a license so they get support if something goes wrong, and because Windows has always dominated business software (much of which isn't even available on other platforms).
The second reason is because Mac blows most everything else away when it comes to laptops; it's almost rare these days to come across someone that doesn't have a Mac as their laptop (unless it's a work-issued laptop in which case it's a Dell or something like that, or they want a budget laptop).
Linux is not likely to be mainstream for the desktop because there's not really a business model that drives it like there is for Windows and Mac. And that's fine. I use Linux as my daily driver for work (by choice), though for my personal laptop I have a Mac.
Just bought an HP omnibook flip with an Intel 258v. From what I've read I expect most things to work, or work soon with kernel updates. All applications I care about work well. Would be nice to see OpenAI make a desktop app for Linux, or some other open source equivalent.
I know I know it's been around 2 or even 3%. It's laughable. And 99% of its users are hackers (programmers/developers/engineers/scientists/etc).
1. This section is basically pedantry. "you cant use the same software across multiple Linux distros". OK? And PC software doesn't run on a Mac. They are different OS's "Linux" being confused as it's own OS, is just, whatever.
2. Windows and Macs have plenty of bugs too. So much so that we don't do in-place server upgrades, it's a full rebuild each version. I mean look at the Windows 10-11 upgrade situation, it's not great.
3. Lack of general software and games - What? You can play AAA games on Steam on Linux out of the box for the most part. I will concede that industry specific software is likely going to be Windows only, but you can run Windows in a VM. There are options here.
4. Network file sharing isn't any different than on Windows, this is just nonsense.
5. Lack of funding - hand wavy and again, whatever.
6. Hardware support - I haven't really had hardware issues in years. Every Lenovo laptop I've installed Linux on works flawlessly, even Wifi drivers are present in setup.
7. Nonsense again. The Linux community is super helpful.
Applications for Linux are underfunded. Linux itself is one of the few open-source projects that attracts enough money that a significant number of people could in principle actually be employed and properly paid. (Although a huge percentage of Linux Foundation money is going to things that... are not the kernel.) Funding Linux more isn't going to fix those software titles, because they're developed independently. Even desktop managers etc. aren't the Linux Foundation's responsibility. It's not like imagining a world where Edge is developed by a separate company that isn't Microsoft; imagine if Windows Explorer were separate from Windows proper.
I think Chromebooks will continue to get larger market share, as plenty of people just need a web browser, but that's about it.
I can't imagine trying to manage 1000's of users, file access, permissions, etc from cobbled together bash scripts.
M365/Azure/AD is how all large orgs are run. The only time I see Linux in this space is for some one off VMs running apps in Docker or something.
If people are still asking "Which distro should I use?", I wrote a Linux distro recommendation framework article for beginners based on my experience.
The idea is that if you don't like my recommendations, I hope you can find a distro that meets your needs with the knownledge in the article. Something that I wished I had when I started with Linux.
https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/01/2024/a-linux-distro-r...
A relevant discussion would be if an OS built on Linux such as Fedora workstation, Ubuntu desktop, RHEL or even ChromeOS is ready for general desktop use. But that would be more work because you would actually have to test and evaluate different features and eco-system support.
I've never used Windows for anything. It's not ready.
Would it be right to use the above devices with no additional installs as a benchmark? And then just compare ongoing updates & upgrades to macOS & Windows.
It seems like all modern OSes ship with the core apps you really need. Yes, if they do that you might have some bloat; and need or want to uninstall. But maybe the best OS is as opinionated as the author…
Or it's a gaming handheld? Only why would you call it a desktop OS then?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/KDE_Plas...
Guess which not-a-desktop OS ships with the Asus ROG Ally X.
2. Can you install an average Linux distro on the said two devices and have them work flawlessly? Nope.
Ping me when you find a way to play modern online Windows games with a kernel level anticheat.
Oh, and people don't care that Linux can play games from 2015. People are interested in AAA titles and something that OTHER people play. Leave obscure indies to yourself.
Linux runs (emulates!) Windows games just fine, except when it does so horribly or doesn't do at all.
Yeah, great, kudos to Codeweavers (a commercial company) and Valve (a commercial company). The Linux community has done barely anything to make running Windows applications under Linux a reality.
So much for Open Source.
You are welcome to "no true scotsman" and "move the goalposts" about this but I still think it's a silly position to hold that "desktop Linux can't into games".
It’s running the “KDE Desktop Environment” on top of Arch Linux distro. So, that’s definitely desktop Linux in my view.
There, i fixed it for you. This is not specific to Linux. See Microsoft, Mozilla, Google.
Linux desktop is fine since the first release of XFree86 for it.
Quality of software has decreased.
It feels really good to get rid of WSL, Docker in VM and other hacks that kind of make Windows work for development, but always cause various issues. Developing natively on Linux just lets you forget all those hacks.
One thing I also did was switch from NVIDIA RTX to Radeon RX. I haven't had to worry about GPU drivers and settings and heat issues in Linux after that.
One may argue that running an application means you have to trust the developer/distributor/etc. But no, I don't trust a single binary because I don't and won't have a full knowledge of what it's doing.
Linux is great at emulating something. Yeah.
Mind the word "native" though.
With windows, that's a completely different story and yet you can't even complain, my tickets to Microsoft were resolved in ~2% of cases.
There are already many Linux "desktops."
A question with merit would be: How can we collectively best bring the advantages of Linux to broader audiences.
I've been using a linux desktop for well over 20 years...
Is Arch the exception?
The Mint forums are helpful enough, but they tend to demand tons of ultimately irrelevant system info up front, commonly misdiagnose problems, and give blanket advice that often ignores more detailed concerns. (Also, the site has been very unstable lately.)
The PC is more or less dead and Linux on desktop is even more dead.
> 6. Hardware support and compatibility
Consumers will eventually follow. (see android).
On the other hand I see lots of people using linux on laptops just fine.
They are probably counted as windows because it comes preinstalled and there's no choice to give it up and get money back.
So you might be wrong on your prediction.
If the people you see using Linux on the laptop are developers, then I don't think they count as "consumers" - they're on the production side of things! I don't know any consumers who use Linux on a laptop. I last gave it a shot in 2018 but decided it's not for me.
Embedded systems?! :D
is somewhat true. State of the video drivers from AMD are not good on Windows and atrociously bad on Linux. NVIDIA are drivers are barely of the acceptable quality on Linux.
It's not necessarily the kernel's fault but it's something that does happen often using distros like say, fedora.
I think the main difference is that Linux supports and runs on almost everything, but in a lot of use cases it will be a specific version of the kernel that will be used for a product's lifetime (for embedded products) or have every update very heavily curated through a third party like Red hat. In those cases, Linux is rock stable, far more than Windows can be.
But for regular, personal usage, I genuinely think that Linux does break more often.
> But for regular, personal usage, I genuinely think that Linux does break more often.
How do you feel about windows forcing ads and monitoring what you do?
How do you feel when windows updates ignore your privacy choices to push the boundary even more?
Do you even have a choice now to stop ads and telemetry entirely as a consumer?
Is that a breakage? (nobody wants ads/monitoring yet here is microsoft forcing it on you via updates)
I would argue that is worse then whatever technical issues might appear upgrading linux and you cant fix that.
I personally know enough to fix or even prevent those issues, but for the vast majority of desktop users, even less casual users like gamers, they really don't care about the stuff you listed. It's sad, because it absolutely ruins the experience of what would otherwise be a great OS (the core of windows is great imo, just not everything on top of it).
> Compare this to Windows 11 64, where the vast majority of software titles released in the last 30 years run almost flawlessly.
> QA/QC, bugs and regressions
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2020/02/15/micro...
> Lack of general software and games
> Poor file and folder sharing situation on the local network
> Linux doesn't offer a native technology similar to Windows file sharing that is easily configurable, discoverable, encrypted and password protected. What does exist in Linux, Samba, is quite painful to set up shared folders, even more so in distros that use SeLinux (advanced security mechanism), create users, assign and change passwords, and not worry about folder permissions.
> Lack of funding
> Countless software tiles in Linux have a huge number of bugs and missing features. That's because Linux is severely underfunded on the desktop. While Linux is unrivaled on servers and has been the world's most popular operating system for over two decades, the situation on the desktop is quite bleak.
That said, the Linux desktop has been a fairly good experience for a number of years.
> Especially when it comes to brand new hardware, you may find that your laptop's Wi-Fi network card, webcam, sound, and even keyboard do not work.
* I needed a SATA driver since SATA was made after Windows XP.
* I needed a NIC driver since my NIC was made after Windows XP.
* I needed a graphics driver since my graphics card was made after Windows XP.
That said, most hardware is supported by Linux these days. It is a very different situation than it was in the 90s.
> You will have problems with Linux, I can promise you that.
Metaphors like "files" are OK. But I have never liked the "desktop" metaphor.
For example, Windows or Android software from ten years ago will still work in Windows 11 or Android 15 or whatever their current versions are. For Windows, software compatibility is actually excellent: a lot of 32-bit Windows 95 software still runs perfectly on Windows 11 64 almost 30 years later. Nothing remotely close exists for Linux.
Android applications made for older versions DO NOT work nowadays. Windows applications usually do not install and to run them you have to install them on old version and upgrade. Backward compatibility is no longer the key point for OS creators, and I would say they event want to break it somehow (like Android new set of permissions and removing old apps from the store)
Correct, there are some Gnu/Linux-en, and there is Android/Linux.
Which may not be a classical desktop OS, but some platforms like Samsung phones emulate floating window management and multitasking, making it an okay desktop OS. And Android has a huge market share, so perhaps "Linux won over Windows" already, just not on the desktop.
Did the author do any fact checking, proton (developed for Steam OS) runs so many games, it is unbelievable.
Trollish opinion piece behind the link.
In Wine/Windows I run Windows applications from the 90s. In Windows 11 64 you can install and use Office 97.
In Linux nothing even close is possible. People do care about old applications. They really do.
By the way, any Android applications using Google’s old messaging APIs no longer work and need to be rewritten to use fire base. I know people who were bitten by that multiple times since Google had to keep reinventing push notifications.
Again, 0.01% of people in the world could do it, 0.0001% would do it.
That's all you need to know about Linux compatibility.
And don't get me started on LD_LIBRARY_PATH not working for glibc but you conveniently "forgot" about that.
Compatibility "exists" except when it doesn't and it's extremely hard to achieve even if you're a professional.
In other words it doesn't exist.
By the way, when someone makes an assertion that something is always true, it only takes 1 counter example to disprove it. The assertion that you cannot run old Linux binaries on a newer system has been disproven by a counter example.
For 99.99% of users this "ability" does not exist. End of story. Period.
I don't care about hacks on tops of tricks on top of hacks. People are not interested in this madness.
Every second comment in this discussion comes from a hardcore software developer who desperately tries to vindicate core Linux flaws by providing workarounds which would work only for people like you.
This is NOT how the world works. This is NOT what people care about or interested in. If cars, refrigerators, microwave ovens worked like that no one would buy them.
If it's Linux? Ah, totally fine.
I'm done with this exercise in futility.
I dare you to grab a Linux distro from the late 90s/earlier 00s and run any application that uses GTK1 or Qt1/2 on your Ubuntu 24.
Without spending insurmountable amounts of time. You will fail miserably. Your 0.0001% example is pure BS.
That said, you refuse to recognize that you are wrong no matter how much evidence is presented and even go so far as to present evidence debunking what you say while claiming it supports what you say. If I were to run a graphical application from the 90s on my machine, you would accuse me of making up the result. Since you will say the same thing even if I did this exercise, why should I bother?
some people like BMWs because they are well engineered and relatively easy to fix if you don't mind reading a manual and getting your hands dirty.
neither is better or worse. it's just taste.
> Says you should run Linux programs via WSL
Okay
Yeah, I get that this is called out under business / professionals, but I've also used Ubuntu (more recently Pop!_OS, and Fedora before that) as a daily driver for >a decade and given small-form-factor PCs with Ubuntu to relatives who have successfully used them for web and basic LibreOffice work for years without major issues.
When people ask me for recommendations for a family PC these days, I tell them to just get an iPad or Mac Mini though.
Duh, because you don't need desktop, you need WM
Some people seem to want a deep-pocketed daddy to come and fix it, but even if such an entity existed, I fail to see how they would achieve any return on their investment. And the community is so fractious/holds such high standards (take your pick) that whatever they do is sure to be criticized from the first byte to the last. It's a rare PM who would relish that fight inside the executive suite and out on the mean streets of the mailing lists.
Other entities? Eh, not so confident. Bodies like the Linux Foundation feel like places where projects go to die (corporations pay a small tax to get a Gold badge, dump some deadweight code, take some tax relief, and burnish a resume). Not seeing any mileage here.
Smaller UI shops like Zorin and PopOS? Doing the Lord's work cleaning and polishing, but in the absence of a clean and stable set of interfaces, it's all very fragile.
HW vendors have no incentive to care since desktop linux is a tiny market. (I find the requirement that desktop linux must work on anything mystifying because there are probably only 5 pc makers that really matter in terms of volume and anyone else can wait and see before committing.) If you are dell, all you really care about is linux on poweredge, and if some weird state government insists on linux to you, well, fine, youll freeze the BOM on a few rounds of Dell Latitude, charge extra, and it'll be fine.
It would be a delicious irony if the best Linux desktop environment ends up being WSL2 after all these years.
Use one of the following:
- Fedora
- Fedora Silverblue
- Ubuntu
- openSuse Aeon or Micro Leap
Next, don't modify anything. Use the DE it comes with, never open the terminal, treat it like it's MacOS or Windows and you're your grandma. Then you'll have a good, solid desktop.
The problem people have is using hobbyist distros like Mint, some flavour of Arch that's just a buggier Arch, some terrible DE that's riddled with bugs, or using distros that I'd only recommend to actual developers, like Debian or (real) Arch.
Or they modify shit because they saw it on some YouTube or blog. Then they break things and don't know how to unbreak them.
Lots of distros are poorly funded and buggy. That's a thing. But the big, corporate money distros are ultra stable, especially in their default configuration.
Also the thing about games, just look at the Steam deck catalogue... That's not an excuse anymore in the current year.
> Or they modify shit because they saw it on some YouTube or blog.
The Youtube content about modifying Linux is overwhelmingly how-tos rather than advocacy. People are watching those videos and following those steps because they already wanted to make the modification.
Early on, you had a lot of weird config stuff and cryptic error messages you had to figure out to get it up and running normally. Then it was OK until something weird happened. The chances of something weird happening go wayyy up if you don't heed your advice:
> Next, don't modify anything. Use the DE it comes with, never open the terminal, treat it like it's MacOS or Windows and you're your grandma. Then you'll have a good, solid desktop.
But even so - occasionally, weird stuff will happen. Just like it happens on any OS over time, the farther you get from a clean install. Software Entropy, if you will. May god have mercy on your layman's soul if that is the case.
Immutable distros solve this. Your base OS is basically always in the state the developers intend (as long as you don't mess with it). Applications are all containerized and if you do dev stuff, that's also in containers.
I mean, that's just false. Most drivers are done as kernel modules and you can push/pull them in without missing a beat.
if he's talking about graphics cards or similar subsystems - you might need a reboot, much like Windows does.
IMO, this reads like a gamer reviewing Linux because they thought it would be cool without knowing much about to use it as a workstation to get shit done.
0.1% of people in the world could that. 0.001% of people in the world would do that.
That's not false, your understanding of a decent OS is just lacking. In Windows you can swap drivers however you want given they support your Windows version.
Windows is installed on 2 billion PCs, give or take. It works great on them, too. Long gone are the days of malware waves or driver failures that break the system.
Linux is on 40 millions.
And the amount of pain I see daily on Linux-related forums trumps Windows' woes by an insane margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...
Windows systems often suffer from cryptolockers, which could be considered malware waves.
You have a stratification bias by looking at forums where people are asking for help. I have installed Linux for a number of non-computer people to solve Windows problems and it has served them well. They all like it better than Windows. The average person really is fine with a Ubuntu install. The only reason Windows has such usage is that it is installed by default due to history. If a Linux distribution were installed by default, there would not be many Windows users.
2 billion users don't notice too much "limping" and "telemetry".
1. This entire post is whataboutism, the article is about Linux
2. NSA/CIA/FBI and pretty much all governments of the world use Windows that is ostensibly riddled with spyware and telemetry
3. In the past 20 years not a single person with WireShark and MITM has proven that Windows leaks any personal data (e.g. files). This can be set up in less than 10 minutes. Go produce a single shred of effing evidence I dare you!!
Parroting BS on the Internet doesn't make your post any more valid.
That's disgusting coming from an "IT specialist". You have issues with basic logic.
> Parroting BS on the Internet doesn't make your post any more valid.
> That's disgusting coming from an "IT specialist". You have issues with basic logic.
It leaked a while ago that Microsoft Windows automatically uploads WiFi passwords to their servers, which are sensitive information. This was after the WiFi sense debacle.
As for not noticing limping, of course they would not notice it when they have never seen the machines run faster. Install a Linux distribution on the machine and they will be amazed by the speed. It happens every single time I do it.
I am not sure what you think the your TLA and governments remark achieves. It just seems to be the ravings of someone spreading FUD to me.
I've challenged you a couple of times already. You keep writing walls of text without proving anything you claim.
You've not proven that you can "easily" run old graphical software in your modern Linux.
You've not proven that Windows is leaking data left and right.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557373
Knowing that Microsoft uploads WiFi passwords to its servers does not even need wireshark. You just need to log into the same Microsoft account on a different machine and observe that your WiFi passwords are synced. Given that the upload is likely encrypted, it would be difficult to observe the passwords being uploaded to Microsoft servers using wireshark. While you would see the packets, you would not know what they contain unless you somehow get the encryption keys out of the system encryption library.
Your prior remarks on running old Linux software did not require that things be easy, which is a matter of opinion, or graphical. It is possible with the right libraries as modern Linux systems (minus Android unless you install a X11 server) can display X11 applications.
Eh? Linux is a great alternative for gaming in 2024, with more and more titles released natively.
There are things like fedora's media writer, which is good, but even that is kinda needlessly buried under several clicks, because their website just isn't regular user oriented, I guess (which is a real common thread) - there's server and enterprise stuff, which is just a distraction and would be irrelevant to such user, so why is it even there, or why isn't there a "consumer" fedora website...and it's just stuff like this. Take a look at ubuntu's website, and you'll see a similar (but also worse) situation. Just literally, where would a regular person even start there? They'll see all this enterprise stuff and just leave. Debian, there's a huge download button - great! that just downloads an image and uhhh...what one is supposed to do with it? there's bizarrely not even an 'installation instructions' link next to it on that page. there's a "help" link, but it doesn't lead to installation instructions, which are actually under 'other downloads' link, and buried under several overcomplicated pages, with the manual itself being so overly long it'll make anyone give up on using it, simply because it has a poorly usable interface.
It falls apart before someone would even get on, cause there kind of isn't a solid path for them. Like, back to basics. How about making stuff easier to get, really basic stuff like unburying download links and making stuff easier to understand...well, that is, if those distros and companies are even interested in 'consumer linux' anymore, which barely seems that way sometimes. Maybe a user friendly way isn't to just throw an iso file at someone (if they'll even find it) and have them go figure. Maybe that's exactly why linux user base is not growing substantially.
Also, just try to not even tell people to use terminal. Like, don't even start with 'you can apt get anything'. They won't. Just say 'get apps from an app store'. That's actually user friendly, and it already just exists in distros. As a further challenge, one might wanna consider any time a user has to use terminal and/or blindly copy some commands they don't actually understand in order to do or fix something, a usability failure. (cause it is.)
And.. what exactly do you think Windows is doing to achieve this same feat? Isn't "Windows on Windows" _precisely_ what you describe?
You can very easily find the same faults being decried in that post for windows.
I was thinking about adding a "Security" section but I wasn't convinced it was necessary. Security in Linux is horrible in general.
* People use `sudo` for anything and everything all the time. * `git pull whatever_crap_from_the_web` and run it happily. * Tens of thousands of pieces of malware via NPMs and other frameworks. * No AV of any kind (the one that actually executes code in a sandbox and verifies its safe). * Permissions/users/groups/pam.d/logind/selinux/apparmor - it's a huge intricate mess.
Linux on the other hand has absolutely nothing and it's still "OK".
"Windows is not perfect and thus Linux is OK". I've heard that way too many times. Sorry, doesn't work for me.
Nothing (!) like that exists in the Linux world aside from PGP cross singing which barely any projects use because of its sheer complexity.
Don't lie about Windows and don't lie about Linux.
And Windows 10/11 both mandate that installers are signed before you can even launch them, so there's a very decent first line of defense which is TOTALLY missing in Linux.
Also, "trusted sources"? Who and why would you trust? Seasoned engineers in my company git pull any crap from the web and run it happily without thinking twice because AGILE and things like RoR. Who do you trust among thousands of modules?
God damn it.
Linux fans will make up all sorts of crappy pseudo-arguments to portray it as a decent/secure/stable OS and it's none of that.
On servers where you don't touch anything and never install third-party software? Yeah, surely. No one cares.
As for Windows, there is no signing requirement according to Microsoft:
> Windows doesn't require software developers to digitally sign their code
You are the one making stuff up.
This is how it works and looks:
https://docs.anythingllm.com/installation-desktop/windows
https://github.com/gitextensions/gitextensions/issues/7738
I never said it was a requirement.
What's more you can enable GPO policies to prevent the user from running any new/unknown apps.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/so...
Good luck implementing that in Linux.
Continue to use a crap pseudo-OS with no security and believe everyone around is a geek who is willing to learn CLI, bash, vi, git bisect, reading mans, etc. just to use it.
You have now accused me of saying something I'd never said, you crossed the line and goodbye.
> Windows 10/11 both mandate that installers are signed before you can even launch them
glibc has worked great except there's no forward compatibility :-)
NOT GEEK SQUADYeah, you're absolutely right, I'm going for quality content, not shiny crap.
I can vouch for every word in the article except maybe the last section but this discussion alone speaks for itself, so even that part is not totally wrong.
Here in this discussion we've got all the falsehoods that I've heard a billion times already: * It works for me it must work for everyone else (never mind other people have different hardware and use different software) * I've not had any issues it's all made up (the same) * I can show this, that and that exception (yeah, exceptions normally prove the rule).
Have fun with a no-os. I mean your specific distro version with a specific set of libraries and applications that you're using today that is not compatible with anything else under the sun.
I think we're all in agreement with this part.