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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

One would've expected one of the many desktop-oriented distros (some with considerable funding, even) to have tackled these things already, but somehow desktop Linux has been stuck in the awkward midway of "it technically works, just learn to live with the rough edges" until finally Valve took initiative. Go figure.

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Please don't erase all the groundwork they've done over the years to make it possible for these later enhancements to happen. It wasn't like they were twiddling their thumbs this whole time!

That's not my intention at all. It's just frustrating how little of it translates to impact that's readily felt by end users, including those of us without technical inclination.

It did and was, it was just something that built up over time as more and paper cuts and small things got fixed. So even if it didn't feel like things were changing, they were.

I've been "gaming" on linux for a long time, and you could see the slow march of progress as more and more stuff worked, and more and more stuff got faster.

This is a good point, the fact that you can just download some video games and run them on your linux desktop with a working desktop environment and so on, even while getting a ton of papercuts, was basically unimaginable 15 years ago.

that's what i was doing 15 years ago! I played a pretty decent amount of games. Every year got better and better.

It's not just Valve taking the initiative. It's mostly because Windows has become increasingly hostile and just plain horrible over the years. They'll be writing textbooks on how badly Microsoft screwed up their operating system.

I'm a Mac user, but I recently played around with a beefy laptop at work to see how games ran on it, and I was shocked at how bad and user-hostile Windows 11 is. I had previously used Windows 98, 2000, XP, Vista, and 7, but 11 is just so janky. It's feestoned with Co-pilot/AI jank, and seems to be filled with ads and spyware.

If I didn't know better, I'd assume Windows was a free, ad-supported product. If I ever pick up a dedicated PC for gaming, it's going to be a Steam Machine and/or Steam Deck. Microsoft is basically lighting Xbox and Windows on fire to chase AI clanker slop.

In defence of Windows . . .

(I've been a cross platform numerical developer in GIS and geophysics for decades)

serious windows power users, current and former windows developers and engineers, swear by Chris Titus Tech's Windows Utility.

It's an open powershell suite collaboration by hundreds maintained by an opinionated coordinater that allows easy installation of common tools, easy setting of update behaviours, easy tweaking of telemetry and AI addons, and easy creation of custom ISO installs and images for VM application (dedicated stripped down windows OS for games or a Qubes shard)

https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil

It's got a lot of help hover tooltip's to assist in choices and avoiding suprises, you can always look to the scripts that are run if you're suspicious.

" Windows isn't that bad if you clean it out with a stiff enough broom "

That said, I'm setting my grandkids up with Bazzite decks and forcing them to work in CLI's for a lot of things to get them used to seeing things under the hood.

Bazzite is nice but its not very CLI centric I think because of the immutability. Its a great OS, but I found Cachy a lot better if you want to work from CLI in normal ways

That isn't it. Generally whatever the majority of users tend to use that where the majority of focus goes.

The vast majority of people that were using Linux on the desktop before 2015 were either hobbyists, developers or people that didn't want to run proprietary software for whatever reason.

These people generally didn't care about a lot of fancy tech mentioned. So this stuff didn't get fixed.

There’s some truth to that, but a lot of (maybe most) Linux desktop users are on laptops and yet there are many aspects of the Linux laptop experience that skew poor.

I think the bigger problem is that commercial use cases suck much of the air out of the room, leaving little for end user desktop use cases.

What laptops though? Most people end up getting either Thinkpads, old Dell business laptop or something like a framework.

Most people learn that using some crap top will leave you with stuff on the laptop not working e.g. volume buttons, wifi buttons etc.

All of these just work with Linux.

There's far more of that, starting with the lack of a stable ABI in gnu/linux distros. Eventually Valve or Google (with Android) are gonna swoop in with a user-friendly, targetable by devs OS that's actually a single platform

The enterprise distros do provide that, somewhat.

That's why, RHEL for example, has such a long support lifecycle. It's so you can develop software targeting RHEL specifically, and know you have a stable environment for 10+ years. RHEL sells a stable (as in unchanging) OS for x number of years to target.

And if you want to follow the RHEL shaped bleeding edge you can develop on latest Fedora. I'll often do this, develop/package and Fedora and then build on RHEL as well.

I don't have a whole lot of faith in Google, based on considerable experience with developing for Android. Put plainly, it's a mess, and even with improvements in recent years there's enough low-hanging fruit for improving its developer story that much of it has fallen off the tree and stands a foot thick on the ground.

Except that Android doesn't have a fixed ABI either. Google Play requires apps to rebuild targeting the latest Android ABI all the time. They have one year after each release to update or be removed.

Mobile in general is a disappointment. iOS is better but not great. It was a real chance to get a lot of things right that sucked on desktop, and that chance was mostly squandered.

Mobile is completely hamstrung, all of the effort went into creating as much vendor lock-in as possible rather than into creating a useful pocket computer. There's all this cool tech on and adjacent to mobile that you can't actually use in any meaningful way because every aspect of it is someone's money patch and they don't want to work together.

At least iOS made the deep and robust AppKit/Cocoa the foundation of its primary kit and then over the years made sensible QoL changes, resulting in something reasonably pleasant to write for. That, and it doesn’t fight you and make you jump through hoops if you’d rather use some flavor of C, C++, or something else LLVM can handle instead of a JVM-something. That goes a long way.

I'm absolutely not a normal user, but I love the experience on the Pinephone, because I can use the same stack as on desktop.

Ubuntu LTS is currently on track to be that. Both in the server and desktop space, in my personal experience it feels like a rising number of commercial apps are targeting that distro specifically.

It’s not my distribution of choice, but it’s currently doing exactly what you suggest.

I just installed Ubuntu again after a few years, and it’s striking how familiar the pain points are—especially around graphics. If Ubuntu LTS is positioning itself as the standard commercial Linux target, it has to clearly outperform Windows on fundamentals, not just ideology. Linux feels perpetually one breakthrough release away from actually displacing it.

The problem with any LTS release is lack of support for newer hardware. Not as much of an issue for an enthusiast or sysadmin who's likely to be using well-supported hardware, but can be a huge one for a more typical end user hoping to run Linux on their recently purchased laptop.

Canonical has demonstrated a willingness to work with vendors to get their software preinstalled or supported.

So they already are the major player in this game and will have a leg up on others trying to enter the same space.

Is that true? I did just that on my newly purchsed laptop in 2023. It was a thinkpad though.

That may have been from a generation that’d been out for many months or a year, or was built on a CPU and chipset that’d been out for quite some time already.

The problem is that Linux can’t handle hardware it doesn’t have drivers for (or can only run it in an extremely basic mode), and LTS kernels only have drivers for hardware that existed prior to their release.

Valve has been pretty clear that Win32 is the platform.

Isn't that the steam linux runtime? Games linked against the runtime many years ago still run on modern distros.

What desktop Linux distro has “considerable funding”?

Red Hat, SuSE, and Ubuntu.

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