Ask HN: Can AI soon make the Linux desktop a first-rate user experience? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can AI soon make the Linux desktop a first-rate user experience?

3 pointsamichail9 comments

And more generally, can AI make open source software just as polished and full-featured as commercial software?

Free software could reach parity with commercial software if commercial software gets degraded by ceaseless nagging about unwanted AI features.

At work Slack is nagging me to nag my IT staff to subscribe to their unwanted AI features, but we have a top-down policy that we need a contract with any AI vendors to respect privacy... I wonder if IT can turn off the nagging without buying...

I think the AI in Photoshop is useful, but I sure am sick of hearing about AI features in Acrobat, particularly when they are a hassle to dismiss on mobile devices, where I just want to read a frickin' PDF.

I don't understand the question.

KDE Plasma is easily on par with the two leading commercial desktops, except it is also vastly more powerful and configurable.

A first-rate desktop experience would include first-rate GUI apps.

Which first-rate GUI apps do you think are missing?

It’s not just about features but also a uniform and intuitive GUI across all apps and the OS.

What calendar year did you just crawl out of? The majority of Windows and Mac users rely on cross-platform Electron apps and web browsers more than any other type of software (including native apps). The only constituent market that demands native OS APIs is PC gaming, which has had commercial-quality Linux alternatives for years now.

Furthermore, anyone that used Windows or MacOS in the 90s will gladly tell you that today's preinstalled apps are either garbage (Apple Music/Groove), adware (Apple News/MSN News) or entirely useless (Candy Crush/AppleTV). If users actually cared about uniformity, intuition and quality then they'd be using the software from 30 years ago.

Guess what? Users don't actually care about native software quality that much. They want a web browser and an Electron runtime, if people needed "first-rate native GUI" anything then nobody would know how ChromeOS or SteamOS worked. Clearly it is not a problem for the overwhelming majority of customers today.

Only when a set of mainstream elf/linux distros will be massively pre-installed on sold computers.

Look at android linux... it showed how to do it: get massilely installed and be the default.

The question sounds a bit botish. Like the boss asking where can we slap some AI/Blockchain to help raise capital

Linux UX is much, much better than OSX and Windows, if you are a power-user. There are plenty of open source software that are much more polished than their commercial counter-part. They only lack the marketing budget.

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