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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

This is the money quote:

> The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use.

Linux on the desktop suffered from a lack of coherent, strategic vision, consistency and philosophy. Every engineer I know likes to do things a particular way. They also have a distorted view on the level of customization that people want and need.

I like OSX. Out of the box it's fine. That's what I want. I don't want to dick around with Windows managers or the like. Some do and that's fine but almost no one really does.

Whereas Windows and OSX can (and do) dictate a topdown vision for the desktop experience, Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows? Whatever the case, this really matters for a desktop experience.

I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. Or I guess I should say it moved to the center of the two screens so is unusable. I have no idea why. It could be an update gone awry. It could be corp-specific modifications. It could be anything. But the point is: I don't care what the problem is, I just want it to work. In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work. In many others too.

I can't describe to you how much torture it always seems to be to get anything desktop-related to work on Linux. I loathe it with a passion. I've long since given up any idea that Linux will ever get anywhere on the desktop. It won't. That takes a topdown approach, the kind that anarchies can't solve.

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> I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. [...] In this regard, both Windows and OSX just work.

Just because it's never happened to you on OS X or Windows doesn't mean it doesn't happen. OS X 10.6.7 broke the output on my 13" Macbook for either of the two external displays I own. Both worked fine previously, when booted from the install CDs, or from Linux on the same machine.

Plugging in my Firewire audio interface on the same machine spun the CPU up to 100% and kept it pegged there. A lot of good having a nice mic pre-amp does when you get a high pitched fan whir added gratis to all of your recordings.

It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters. In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all. And with Linux you have some hope of finding a solution, whereas for OS X you're pretty much hosed.

To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see what I mean..

Hardware? What hardware? Frankly, I havent bought nothing over last 10 years. I have laptop, you see...

Laptops are not hardware now?

I bought Samsung Galaxy S3 recently, plugged it in via USB and was not able to browse it because, as far as I understood, MacOSX has no support for "media devices" whatever that is. I had to download some obscure Samsung "Kies" software through which I was able to get to the filesystem and upload some files. Wasted hours.

Oh my

This is 100% to blame on Samsung, sorry.

Even though my Samsung phone is seen as a USB device (and it works on MAC OS X), but maybe in the newer models they removed this functionality (and called it a feature)

People may complain that iPhones need iTunes but then again it's iTunes not the gigantic pile of crap that is Kies

No it has nothing to do with Samsung. In ICE Google changed how the partitions are handled: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11714077&...

It was pure engineering tradeoff to improve things in the long term. If anything OEMs would have preferred the old 'just works', sub-optimal, gives-an-excuse-to-obsolete-a-phone, lower support issues, solution. The ball is now in operating systems' court to support this standard in a way it wasn't envisioned to work a few years ago.

Even ubuntu has been slow on this front.

Nice explanation, if it's to facilitate upgrades I'm all for it!

That's the thing about samsung. They copied the bad stuff as well: weird connectors, itunes / kies.

This is samsung not following USB standards.

OS X has perfectly find support for media devices, and has worked fine with every digital camera, SD Card or other card reader, etc, that I've attached via USB in the past decade!

Actually it's lack of MTP support in OS X.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

Everything under the sun supports UMS, that OSX does is nothing special. That is not what his device was using though.

Wrong. It's Google's decision to abandon direct mounting Android drives in ICS in favor of the MTP standard.

Which is the right move in the long term, although it's certainly causing some pain in the short term.

This is not an issue with Apple or Samsung, it's an Android decision.

Support for the USB Mass Storage protocol has been deprecated in Android in favor of MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) starting with Ice Cream Sandwich.

The experience in Windows and on Linux is just as poor with this phone. (I love the phone, though.)

I haven't had any trouble using a Nexus 7 with Windows, it's worked like a charm. What's supposed to be the huge problem with MTP, exactly?

I take that back, my Galaxy S III does work as expected using MTP with Windows 7. Previously my workplace was using an older Windows.

Why can't Apple support MTP? Linux gets cited for lack of hardware or protocol support (MTP to an Android device works fine in Linux, btw), but it's not Apple's fault when they can't or don't provide drivers for common, standardized consumer electronics?

It seems fairly obvious that the reason is that facts which do not fit the narrative are not talked about. Confirmation bias in action.

MTP does not work fine in Linux (specifically, Ubuntu 12.04). You can read the files but not write arbitrary files into arbitrary folders.

Starting with Honeycomb the storage partition is exposed through MTP (or PTP), this way it can be accessed concurrently by both Android and your computer. Before Honeycomb, said partition could be accessed as an USB mass-storage drive but that required it to be unmounted, thus making all data unavailable to Android while it was connected to a computer.

In my experience only Windows 7 has passable MTP support. On Linux I had mixed results with gvfs and mtpfs (slow and crashy). jmtpfs [1] is a nice replacement, though. Google also released an application for OS X [2] but I can't try it since I don't own an Apple computer.

My solution to the problem was to install a WebDAV server (such as [3]) on my device (Galaxy Nexus) and access it wirelessly.

  [1]: http://research.jacquette.com/jmtpfs-exchanging-files-between-android-devices-and-linux/
  [2]: http://www.android.com/filetransfer/
  [3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.theolivetree.webdavserver

Printer drivers seem fine. Scanner drivers seem fine. USB mouses and keyboards work fine. Most Apple products can't really be expanded in many other ways.

I'd say the hardware support is fine for what little customisability Apple allows on the hardware that they sell. Perhaps the Mac Pro might have some issues with internal cards (I honestly wouldn't know ...), but those devices are not affordable for 99% of the people.

Wait what? Every scanner, printer, tablet, mouse, and even color correction device I've bought has worked on my Mac.

Then you've been selective about what you've bought. It's trivial to find devices that are Windows specific and/or have only gotten Linux and/or OS X support after extensive rounds of reverse engineering.

Low end printers and scanners in particular are notorious for skimping on the logic in the device itself and depending on a large blob of Windows driver code, with manufacturers that couldn't care less about supporting anything other than Windows.

I've been using OS X going back to the betas. I've never seen OS X have problems with third party hardware that conformed to standards.

I have seen problems with third party hardware that required its own driver (poorly written generally) or that was half assed crap that was designed to work with windows but marketed as supporting standards like "USB".

Meanwhile, Linux has trouble dealing with the computer itself, let alone getting hardware attached to it. Constant pain in the ass.

Currently I'm in a country in a different hemisphere from the USA. I walked into a store and bought and off the shelf no-name brand displayport to HDMI adapter. Worked no problem.

I've gotten used to being able to do that... and haven't had much trouble getting things to work with OS X in years.

Course, I also stopped buying things that require custom drivers-- that's a clear sign you're not going to have a good time.

To claim that Linux is better in this regard is, quite frankly, asinine.

In my experience, Linux works great with standards-compliant hardware. Linux is typically the first platform with support for a new standard. The problem is there is so much hardware that is not standards-compliant.

Your comment looks about as asinine to me as the as the parent comment does to you.

Being the first platform supporting it in the kernel - and then you have to wait for another few months (or years in case of Debian) until you finally have the driver in your distribution. The alternative is compiling kernel-modules yourself - which then get broken again by the distro whenever it updates the kernel without warning. And to even compile you have to follow hints on several websites until you figure out the way to compile a module just for that kernel-version you are having (this all is from experience trying to get a Wacom tablet running - I gave up on it when it broke again after a distro update and the compiling mechanism then also no longer worked for some reason. Now waiting for Debian Wheezy to save me).

"Currently I'm in a country in a different hemisphere from the USA. I walked into a store and bought and off the shelf no-name brand displayport to HDMI adapter. Worked no problem."

That really has nothing to do with the OS you're running. The OS isn't driving the DisplayPort<->HDMI protocol conversion in any way (your 'no-name' brand adapter is probably relying on DP++ and just passing through the HDMI signal anyway).

This is like saying your VGA cable is compatible with Macs with a VGA port. Of course it is.

> I've never seen OS X have problems with third party hardware that conformed to standards.

The problem is that hardware often doesn't really conform to standards, even those it claims to.

One of the reasons device support in Linux (and other OSes which target a wide range of platforms) is difficult, is that it's necessary in practice to cope with and have workarounds for buggy and out-of-spec hardware and firmware. Just "coding to the standard" isn't good enough.

Such buggy hardware/firmware is rarely documented as such, and finding these problems and the appropriate way to handle them is painful and difficult work. In some cases the only practical way to figure out what actually works is to reverse-engineer what Windows does (the hardware manufacturers generally make sure that Windows works with their hardware, but rarely make such information public).

Apple's main goal is their own hardware, over which they obviously have a lot of control and information, so they really don't need to worry so much about this.

If the hardware conforms to standards, Linux is the most likely to be able to support it of all three - and that's even without having to install a driver.

>that was half assed crap that was designed to work with windows but marketed as supporting standards like "USB".

A device can follow the USB standards (and be labeled as such) while still requiring a special driver. The two are not mutually exclusive.

I have no idea where this sentiment coming from. I'm typing this from an MBP with a das keyboard, navigating with a razer mouse and viewing with a samsung monitor, everything works fine.

I have no idea where this sentiment is coming from. I'm typing this from an MBP with a das keyboard, navigating with a razer mouse and viewing with a samsung monitor, everything works fine.

All keyboards are the same, all mice are the same, spectral analyzers are not the same, software-defined radios are not the same, USB-Serial adapters are not the same, FPGA interfaces are not the same, sensor boards are not the same, laser cutters are not the same, need I go on?

The real difference is that on OSX is if something doesn't work it doesn't work. Under Linux it may work, or work badly, or you can probably hack it to make it work well. I used to think I liked the latter but there's something appealing about the binary clarity of OSX.

Part of it is you won't spend as much time thinking about it. Say you have a wireless keyboard that is a little dodgy on Linux, but works most of the time. But every now it fucks up and really pisses you off. If it never worked on OS X you wouldn't even remember it because you would have sent it back or resold it.

Thank you, that's exactly how I think, it's even this way with Windows. On other systems I would waste days after days of my life to set things up 'just the way I want' only to find that it's never gonna be quite that way. Macs just let me accept the things as they are and get back to work. Very often, I'd get to see after a while, why things work the way they work (say, Window management).

Anyway, this has been almost 100% true up from 10.3 through 10.6.x. Recent developments both on Apple's as well as on MS's side have closed the gap between the two systems quite a bit. I still prefer OSX but it's gotten close. The real reason I continue to buy macs nowadays is the hardware quality.

>On other systems I would waste days after days of my life to set things up 'just the way I want' only to find that it's never gonna be quite that way. Macs just let me accept the things as they are and get back to work.

This. It's almost as if Linux is a collection of parts and tools from which a sufficiently good designer can build a usable desktop whereas OS X is a usable desktop. That's an exaggeration, but for me there is some truth to it.

Note that Linux was my only desktop from 1997 through 2009.

OSX seems to have had this design paradigm: 'Make everything work in the most streamlined way possible for the default use case (80%). Give some limited options for a few more specific use cases (18%). Cover everything else with CLI integration / defaults system, such that the final 2% can get around with a bit of googling'

This has been highly successful, only I'm afraid that the Unix people inside Apple are loosing influence. The sandboxing in ML looks like a mess to me. Not that its a bad idea per se, but look what it did to our beautiful '~/Library/[ApplicationSupport|Preferences]'! It's tacked on and it's obvious that this has been a political decision from management rather than engineering. Makes me angry.

On a different note: I've never really used it extensively because I switched to macs in '05, but wasn't Ubuntu pretty close before they switched to Unity? I remember last time I installed it that for the first time I could have a Linux that worked out of the box, including network and graphics drivers.

I've actually switched to doing my work on Ubuntu (using xmonad - I can't stand unity) and iOS (iPad as SSH client) as OSX only cares about the 80% use case now.

Which is fine, it's Apple's decision to take, but it's no longer for me.

(As for Ubuntu - I'm using pretty standard hardware and never had a problem)

Oh well now that you said it the argument is settled. You can't just say OS X has the poorest hardware support ever and not back it up with anything except "go buy some hardware and see what works and what doesn't". Is there maybe a table online that lists these incompatibilities you can link to? Please don't say "do some research" because the onus is on you to prove yourrself right, not on me to prove you right.

You also said "even compared to Linux". That's interesting. That statement there gives the impression that you're more interested in defending your own beliefs and/or choices rather than being truly interested in explaining to us what OS has objectively terrible hardware support. "even compared to Linux" sounds like something an apologist would say. Then when you added in the "think different" line you made it seem even more like your comment was based off some kind of blind loyalty to Linux rather than loyalty to facts.

Me? I've used Mac, a handful of Linux distros, and Windows for a long time. I don't know which has the best or worse hardware support but I do know when someone says something based on what camp they're in rather than what the facts are.

OSX was the first system where a printer worked without not even a popup saying that "drivers were being installed" (and I'm not even the biggest Mac fan, I'm typing this on Windows 7...)

> Then when you added in the "think different" line you made it seem even more like your comment was based off some kind of blind loyalty to Linux rather than loyalty to facts.

Don't read too far into things, and "...loyalty to facts" eye roll.

Anyway, It's pretty common knowledge to Linux users that hardware/driver support on Linux can be a challenge. Sometimes things work right out of the box, other times you have to do a lot of work and a lot of Googling.

That being said, I don't agree with the parent. For basic hardware needs, Windows and OSX have a fairly high success rate of plug-and-play functionality. For me on Linux, it's about 50/50.

On windows, a fairly high success rate? This must be a joke. Try installing a graphics card without driver, you will see how well it is supported under windows. I consider that basic functionality. Same for wifi dongles, they usually need drivers to be installed in windows, while this is all taken care of at the kernel level in Linux.

In Linux you very rarely have to install any driver. True, some hardware remains unsupported, but the list of compatible hardware without any installation required is pretty long. On windows, you'll need to install stuff for most of new hardware you try to plug in, no matter what.

The fact that you have to install some driver is irrelevant. I'd rather install drivers for Linux than be unable to use the hardware at all.

I've installed both GTX 580s and 570s with absolutely no problems.

> It's silly to pretend that Mac is somehow perfect in these matters.

Straw man. Nobody said OS X was perfect.

> In my experience it's only been marginally better than Linux, if at all.

I used Linux on my desktop for several years and have now used Macs as well for several years. I won't say this is bullshit because I don't think you are lying about your experience, but I think you are extrapolating way too far.

> And with Linux you have some hope of finding a solution, whereas for OS X you're pretty much hosed.

Forums and mailing lists are "hope for a solution" while the genius bar is "pretty much hosed"? How on earth did you arrive at this conclusion? That just doesn't seem reasonable.

Genius bar solution: Wipe device.

Every time.

That's the genius of it.

Really? That reminds me of Microsoft technical support circa 1993:

Step 1: have you tried rebooting the machine?

Step 2: have you tried reinstalling Windows?

I thought those days were over.

I don't see any material difference between "hardware compatibility just works" and "hardware compatibility is perfect".

As for fixing the issue, both of my issues were kernel issues, as are most hardware compatibility issues. On OS X reverting to a previously working kernel would have meant backing up all of my data, reinstalling the OS from the DVDs, installing the combo update to the last working version of the complete OS (10.6.6), restoring my data (but not using Time Machine) and then never allowing another OS upgrade, including not updating the apps that come with the OS.

On Linux it would have been a matter of downloading the previous kernel package and installing it. That's it. The package managers are usually smart enough to figure out that you've forced a previous version of the package and won't replace it in future updates.

Neither solution would have been doable for a novice, but the Linux solution is far easier for an expert and a generally more palatable solution. And note, this was Apple's OS breaking Apple's hardware.

Since you mentioned using Time Machine, why not revert to a good state using that (instead of a re-install)?

I still hold that Linux has a lot of "usability." It is extremely useful, extending itself into every possible use I can think of. It is an extremely useful tool.

That said, maybe Linux in it's current stage isn't destined for the pickup approach of Windows or OS X. I believe that Linux is not following the same path as Windows or OS X, and because of that it may not end up at the same destination.

I agree with the original article; Linux is produced differently, often with different goals than Windows or OS X. Trying to shoehorn it into the same path as Windows or OS X may not prove fruitful till we see someone with the drive to change everything onto the design path that Windows and OS X are taking.

I really don't want to have to think about the kernel when I'm plugging in a new monitor.

Neither does anyone else, but when faced with a kernel issue that's what you're stuck with regardless which OS you use.

Strawman argument invalid: Mac being marginally better is a valid point because GP builds his argument on Mac being better.

See, according to me, you don't get the point. Things DO break in OSX as well. Just that its a bit less. Apple has the liberty to control both the (primary) hardware as well as the OS which runs on it. Therefore it has an edge over Linux in terms of compatibility.

Having said that, barring a few "recent" desktop distros, as they call it, like Ubuntu, Linux has always been a bottom up approach. You need to install the base, then the userland and so on. For someone who is looking for ultimate customization, Linux makes sense.

But when I am running a notebook, I seriously want everything to work, albeit at a lower performance/customizability.

I always run either FreeBSD or Gentoo on my servers. But my notebook/desktop continues to be OSX.

I had a similar 100% CPU issue with an ExpressCard on a MBP... it was even labelled Mac Compatible.

Among non-ultra-geeky Linux users I know (mostly part-time users), "Linux" does seem to be reasonably standardized as far as desktop components go, because by "Linux" they mean "Ubuntu". It's possible the Ubuntu desktop dominance came a bit too late, though, and still isn't entirely complete.

My own experiences aren't great with Windows, though they're smoother on OSX than Linux. The problem I have with Windows is that stuff does break, but it's inscrutable how and what to do about it, whereas at least on Linux there is usually some way to do something about it if you're tech-savvy. If anything gets borked in Windows, it's wipe-and-reinstall time; back when I used it full-time I probably did that once a year on average.

I find OSX to be poor for package management, though. I've gotten so tired of headaches with installing and managing updates of stuff, and badly interacting upgrades of the OS and separately installed packages and system versions of python/ruby/etc., that I do most of my dev work in Debian in VirtualBox now. In that aspect, it's Debian that's centrally managed with real release-engineering and integration tests, whereas OSX is an anarchic mess of 3rd-party software that nobody's responsible for integrating and testing.

There was always a dominate player it seems. Most people used RedHat (before Fedora) over Ubuntu.

Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed. Linux (Ubuntu in my case) and OSX just work sanely mostly, but OSX is a horrible dev environment, so I moved back to Linux.

I thought Windows was a joy to develop on until I moved to Linux... then I realised MS had to develop all these wonderful dev tools to disguise the fact that the API's are disastrous and the command line is useless...

Amen. That's the thing. You don't realize how many hoops you've been jumping through to do the same things that devs on Linus or OS X do effortlessly until you make the switch. But people don't make the switch because they have this blind loyalty to whatever theyre using. So whenever they see someone else loving a different OS they dole out ad nominee attacks, call the products over priced, or too complicated for normal users, or elitist. It's all to do with justifying one's decision to use X despite evidence that Y may be better or just as good and possibly some jealousy in some cases.

In any case it's all dumb blind loyalty the vast majority of the time. And that applies to Linux, Mac, and Windows. You can't have a discussion about operating systems with 90%+ of people because everyone just defends their favorite and facts are distorted to suit those preferences. It really is just about useless to have a discussion about operating systems as "substantive" or "meaningful" discussions about the subject are about as rare as unicorns.

>Windows is horrible to use, everything is poorly designed

Without qualifiers, that statement is meaningless. Perhaps you mean it's horrible for some devs? (Millions of others are doing just fine with Visual Studio).

For regular users, dropping them to Linux will be like replacing your mom's car's controls with the controls found in an airplane cockpit(command line) or playing "who moved my cheese ?" with the Linux desktop. Granted, everything is moving to the web these days, so why not just give them an iPad or a Chromebook?

Ubuntu works just fine for two kind of users:

1.) Grandmothers and the like who just want to read their mail and check the news.

2.) People like me who can and will use 4 + 2 + 1 + 0,5 hours to customize it over the course of 6-12 months to have an almost perfect working environment instead of living with a slower OS without virtual desktops.

The only thing I can think of that needs tinkering is some online banks that require applets to work, but then again even Windows doesn't come with Java preinstalled.

I think you mean Debian.

I know lots of people who successfully installed Ubuntu that don't know what a boot sector is but are still happy with it. (After all most people use web apps anyway.)

Wasn't talking about visual studio, I mean the UX as a whole. It is hugely inconsistent, slow, and hard to get sane information about whats going on. Once you are in an application, then generally its ok, its just up to that application, other than things like where new windows are created which are also broken. Oh and focus and switching, as things are always getting hidden.

Application UX inconsistency is a Mac thing AFAIK. Yes they all look 'pretty' and 'likable', but not consistent. Most decent Windows apps are modeled one after another and are very consistent. They have such things as status bars, sidebars, menus, list views. Usually standard controls, though times are changing with the advent of XAML and web-like interfaces.

And man tell me where should I have gone to get any information about why my _wired_ Ethernet connection wasn't working on Mac when it worked everywhere else?

[UPD: I'd give iOS apps 2/5 on consistency scale, Android, Linux and OSX 3/5, Windows 4/5].

Lots of programmers were doing just fine with punched cards and teletypes. That doesn't mean that punched cards and teletypes were not horrible. People just learn to be comfortable with their tools.

Actually OSX development environment is only horrible to cross-platform / open-source application developers.

But if you are Apple pet developer then you'd just use XCode/XCode projects/etc for all your needs. And would be very happy with that.

As a cross platform open source developer that uses Mac OS X and Linux about the same (Mac OS X on desktop, Linux on laptop) I don't see what's so horrible about Mac OS X in this regard. At worse, it's the same. I don't prefer either for programming (I do prefer Mac OS X for other things, though).

Well, developing using native toolchain is horrible. Because of legacy gcc 4.2 and unstable and often broken clang. At least about a year back it was the case. No. Scratch that. It is still the case. I just remembered helping a coworker hack some open source package to make it compile with clang. We lost an hour or so, completely unnecessarily. Would have taken him 30 seconds to apt-get it on linux.

And well, not using the native toolchain, and using something like mac ports feels like I'm under cygwin all other again. No, thank you. I love 13" Air, but as a development environment Macs are quite broken.

Plus that home key on the full desktop keyboard... If you are linux+mac user, you know what am I talking about :)

Curious, what package management system are you using to install libraries/packages? Ports? Fink? Homebrew?

Okay, our use cases are very, very different. I mostly do Go now and used to do lots operating system development and embedded work. For Go, your compiler complaint does not apply, and for embedded work you need to build or install a cross compiler anyway. There are some cross compilers which you can get with apt-get, but in practice for the work that I do, there are no distribution provided tools, and you need to maintain your own toolkit.

Same applies to libraries, you can get everything you want with apt-get, as long as you only want things for your architecture. If you need them for another architecture, you are out of luck.

For operating systems you use virtual machines. I use the host just for running my text editor and for my Unix environment needs. All operating systems I've worked on (Solaris, Windows, BSD, QNX, some other real time embedded stuff) have their own tools and compilers used to build the system.

MacPorts, Fink and even Homebrew are FUBAR, I'm glad I don't have to use them.

>badly interacting upgrades of the OS and separately installed packages and system versions of python/ruby/etc., that I do most of my dev work in Debian in VirtualBox now

Well, sure, but (unless I am mistaken) that is no longer on the topic of the Linux desktop.

I really haven't found that that be the case at all with package management on OS X. Homebrew is almost always a joy to use, and on the few occasions I've had build errors using it I've found the Homebrew community connected to the official GitHub repo issues page to be one of the most responsive, friendly, and genuinely helpful open-source communities I've ever encountered. I agree things were a lot rockier back when the only package management choices were MacPorts or Fink, but Homebrew's a monumental step forward.

I can't say I've really touched Python at all, but as a relative newcomer to the Ruby world I found getting RVM set up and functioning properly on my Mac to be a complete non-issue.

Discovering Homebrew was wonderful after suffering the broken-by-design ports systems of Fink and Macports (a retrograde step from Darwin Ports). But it is not really strong competition for Debian's APT. For example, a day after first using Homebrew, I discovered that the Qt port simply didn't work. I fairly frequently have to install by hand software for OSX that has stable packages in Debian.

It's also true that Homebrew (and Macports, but not Fink) are doing something fundamentally less ambitious than the main Linux package managers: it offers a simple dependency system and scripting for compiling stuff, not directly installing the end product.

One significant difference between linux and windows/mac is the planning around features and the outreach. I work for a large organisation. The number of times a linux group has come round to our office to discuss what features are up-and-coming, or should be developed? None. The number of times Microsoft staff have done the same? Some.

Now I don't really expect linux volunteers to do this, but equally I don't really expect any linux distro to provide a coherent business desktop because they are not talking to their "customers" in the same way that their competition is. And the business desktop is a large market, if a bit unsexy.

I'm experiencing similar frustrations after having returned to using Linux (Ubuntu) at work recently. I've spent a fair bit of time having to customise a window manager (awesomewm), just to get a somewhat usable desktop environment. I work at a university with centralised mail handled by Exchange and struggle every day with flaky, buggy mail clients Evolution/DavMail+Thunderbird. Under linux my macbook air only sleeps reliably half the time, and occasionally I find that unbeknownst to me some process has woken the laptop (with lid closed) in my bag, with the battery near critical. The latest apt-get update broke my sound. Empathy hangs for a good 2-3 minutes on load, but eventually recovers. Something mysteriously reverts my xmodmap keybinds mid-session. Other little things such as LightDM not starting until I hit enter at a black screen post boot contribute to an overall experience that feels frustratingly incomplete.

I know that many of these are trivial complaints and that all of these things can be fixed. I no longer want to have to do this however. In my teens I loved tinkering with the linux desktop, designing 'awesome' Enlightenment themes and enjoyed tracking down and fixing these little problems. Now in my 30s I really just want the OS to get out of the way and let me code. OSX does this well, linux really does not. I say this with a fair bit of sadness as there are many things that I like about linux a great deal - the cli, the excellent package management, the ethos behind the OS and the open source community.

I had nothing but trouble w/ Ubuntu when trying to use anything non-Canonical tested. I suggest using something like Archlinux where you're not forced to stick with buggy software for a 6 month cycle.

And I've been really, really impressed with the latest Thunderbird/Lightning releases (14-15). Haven't had any problems at all, like I had with the older releases from several years ago. I used to be a Mail guy, but Thunderbird blows it out of the water these days.

> Linux can't do this. Or maybe there's been no one with the drive, conviction and gravitas to pull it off? Who knows?

I say Mark Shuttleworth is doing this, and no one is paying attention. Unity was a unified vision, it was just different and no one wanted different. And that is fine for a new target audience he wanted for the OS, which was everyone else in the world. Look at what they are doing now, Ubuntu on tablets, Ubuntu TV, they are pushing a unified vision, and nobody is getting behind it en masse in the Linux community because it isn't everything they wanted. They want Cinnamon, they don't like Gnome 3, where is my Gnome 2, etc. The inherent strife is the proble, not a lack of visionaries.

Yes but most of the people who are "leaving Ubuntu" are just switching the desktop environment or using a system downstream of Ubuntu. It makes for a lot of drama but it doesn't much hurt Ubuntu community support (which is their greatest strength, and why I use Ubuntu) because so many of the packages remain the same.

Two years ago, when it was experiencing a considerable upswing in use, Canonical was in the position to at least partly dictate some standards. And an Ubuntu install also would "just work" (and still does in my experience).

Unfortunately, I think they kind of snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by attempting to go to a "modern user interface". The big problem is that neither designers nor programmers really enjoy incremental progress (designers want a big canvas and programmers want clean code). Gnome2 really was/is good enough for most people use easily AND it was/is simple and powerful not to stand in the way of the existing users (programmers, Linux Geeks, Linus himself,etc). Whether Unity and Gnome 3 work for average people or not, they certainly alienated the existing Linux desktop users and that is an important segment.

Yes, yes that' is it right there, Unity and Gnome 3 both are terrible compared to Gnome 2. I wish the Gnome 2 team would re-materialize and come out with Gnome 4, just Gnome 2 with a higher version number.

Coming from the perspective of a developer:

I used linux as my only OS sans VMs from roughly 2008 till 2011. I finally gave up because it handled monitor switching, multiple monitors so poorly (using Nvidia GPU). I begrudgingly switched to windows because I owned the hardware already, and it was the only option. Windows sucks, the lack of a usable shell kills it, full stop, nothing else windows does matters. And no, cygwin doesn't cut it.

Fast forward to now, the only computer I manually interact with is a macbook air. The old desktop hardware became my file server(running FreeNAS) despite being many times faster than the air.

Through this experience I realized what I actually cared about...I run four 'apps' 99% of the time: chrome, sublime text(everything non java), iTerm and IntelliJ(java). That is really all I care about, anything that prevents interacting with these applications as quickly as possible fails. The support stuff, git, a database, a message queue, etc. Runs anywhere. I _rarely_ interact with the 'OS' in ui terms. I rarely use finder, I only use the dock to empty the trash (launch everything through Quicksilver). At the end of the day I love OS X not because it has 'awesome' UI paradigms, but because of all the options I see it the least, it may as well not be there.

OS X is the only OS i've ever used that I just don't think or care about. It sleeps, it wakes up, it deals with new screens, it does all the OS shit so I can just use the apps i want to. Thats why I am hooked using it as a dev machine.

As for the "lack of a usable shell" part, have you looked at Powershell? It comes bundled with Windows, and has a lot of the features that are missing from the command prompt.

It does have some rough edges that may cause you to dismiss it as unusable, but it offers tab completion, colored text output, and a real scripting environment (not DOS batch scripting). Every serious Windows developer I've talked to nowadays uses it exclusively.

> As for the "lack of a usable shell" part, have you looked at Powershell?

No, and I have zero reason to do so. I don't deploy on windows, I have no reason to ever deploy on windows, so why would I bother learning another syntax just to develop on windows? It really doesn't make any sense. Powershell only makes sense for IT admins whom have to manage windows networks, it makes no sense at all for developers deploying on *nix.

I usually have firefox, a terminal, sublime text, ftp client, irc client and a file browser open. All I use is openbox for a windows manager, tint2 for a task manager and dmenu for a launcher. I very rarely have problems with my linux computer.

"using Nvidia GPU"

Yup, still no xrandr support which makes any on-the-fly monitor config changes very difficult or impossible.

Sometimes, if you use twinview and nvidia-settings from the start and if the moon is aligned just right, you can dynamically configure monitors / video ports. Sometimes.

Your needs are strikingly similar to mine, down to the choice of apps and launcher. What I noticed after a week of full time Gnome3 Shell use was that it was similar enough to OSX (but with the niceties of a proper window manager) that I'm finding myself hooked. Makes my ThinkPad a reasonable facsimile of my MacBook from a keyboard-nav centric, "keep out of my way" perspective. I love OSX on the MacBook, but hate it when docked. Gnome Shell gives me a reasonable OSX-like Linux experience on the laptop, but with a great docked experience to match.

Can't speak to the seamless suspend/resume support, etc on your choice of hardware, and I acknowledge that if that kind of stuff doesn't work, it'd be a dealbreaker.

Just saying, Gnome3/Shell is at least worth checking out if you like the OSX workflow and use just a few apps day to day for development.

Thanks for the writeup of your experience!

Linux on the desktop suffered from weak developer and industry support. It was until some years ago, Linux sound system latency was as powerful as Windows 3.1's. Using proprietary drivers for X or even worse for the Kernel is a mess.

So obvious... Linus promised Linux on the desktop 2000 or so. The reality was different: influential groups just ignored the desktop. Now it's too late, web is becoming the predominant platform, Operating Systems are just commodity. For me it's no big difference whether I use Linux or OS X (with coreutils etc. installed). In fact I wouldn't even mind working on Windows, unfortunately I don't have the patience to setup a reasonable Unix-like dev environment.

The irony is: it has never been less painful to switch to Linux.

> The irony is: it has never been less painful to switch to Linux.

This is so true. Linux has a bad rap. I gave up on it a couple of years ago due to the infamous "hidden cost of linux". I switched back a couple months ago and have been pleasantly surprised how smooth things are now. A lot has improved in the last couple years in Linux land.

>have been pleasantly surprised how smooth things are now

Which version of which distro?

I have two monitors on my Linux desktop. A month ago full screen on video stopped working. Or I guess I should say it moved to the center of the two screens so is unusable. I have no idea why.

Is this in Chrome on sites like YouTube? If so, I believe it started with Chrome 20 when Chrome switched to its native Flash driver (see http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/chrome/Mi-YgjN...). This happened to me too, and I still haven't resolved it.

If that was the only problem though we would have expected FreeBSD to overtake the desktop. the larger issue, unfortunately is just that people are afraid to switch from Windows to anything other than Mac. Android is helping there, but it will take time.

Never underestimate the fear of the consumer that they will break stuff on a computer they are unfamiliar with. The fact that Windows is actually getting better may actually be a good thing regarding other possibilities of desktop software.

As a FreeBSD user since 2007 I found the desktop options to be just as clunky as Linux if not more so. It was the only part of the OS that didn't just work when I used it in my travels, so it's stayed as server duty. If there was an open source windows managing system that was on par with Mac's version...whole new world. (There might be, I havnet' looked since 2009 so)

"Every engineer I know... They also have a distorted view..."

cletus you are one of the few people with enough karma to always grab and hold a top post spot who _actually says things worth saying_.

Right on.

As for "someone with the gravitas", never say never. But they might not use the Linux kernel and GNU as their "clay" or "base material".

I've thought about such a person and one thing I believe is that they would be foolish to try to "sell" such a simple to use system to Linux users (and many of those users would, alas, include engineers like the ones you describe: set in their ways) nor to those engineers who worship Apple, with their belief in some mythical "user experience" [translation: _their_ experience]).

In my opinion, a person with the gravitas would also need to the vision to see that the target user base who is open to change lies elsewhere. The users need to come with an open mind.

I don't know what will happen to Linux. But the binary blob problem keeps getting worse. Too many Linux users are happy to accept the blobs. They don't want to read source code. They just want working devices. That's understandable. But in my opinion it's not a small problem in the long run.

Apple, on the other hand, is flat out abusing its power. Not only over end users but over developers (who are of course just a particular class of end users). They are standing in the way of people's general education about computers. Keeping everyone dumb may give some developers a warm, fuzzy feeling as they watch their bank accounts grow to new levels, or dream of it, but I do think Apple's conduct, seen for what it is, will trickle down past just us fanatics on HN and elsewhere on the web. People are going to figure it out.

If I was a monopoly-lover, if I loved to see "winner-take-all" in IT, as if that improved the lot for any of us (I am not and it doesn't), then my money would go on Amazon. They seem to be making the fewest mistakes. Great things will come from AWS. It is the democratisation of hosting - a sharing of power, risks be damned (unfortunately, it may also mean the monopolisation of hosting as we've never before seen). In "Dropbox", we are only seeing the very beginning of what's possible.

In my view, Apple is a "disabler" (everything they introduce is restricted) while Amazon is an "enabler" (generally: they open many more doors than they close).

> I just want it to work...

We must be doing different things, because I've been on Linux desktops with zero-to-minimal effort since 1999.

Agreed that things should just work. In case you're still looking for a fix for the dual monitor full screen issue. I had the same problem on Chrome. It was when they introduced built-in flash. You need to disable Chrome's built-in flash and everything is back to normal.

Maybe by designing a set of base interfaces, with extension (ala opengl, w3c)

relevant (and funny cause it's true): http://xkcd.com/963/

Nvidia card?

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