Recently, I decided to start making music again after a decade of hiatus. I got a nice audio interface and some hardware which can do nifty things. The catch?
None of the supporting software for my hardware runs on Linux. I either need to run a VM to configure these things, or use the macOS versions of the software. I chose the latter because it's not meaningful to passthrough all the devices to change some parameters and give device back to Linux. I also don't use Wine. I don't want to install something that big into my daily driver.
While Linux is great for many, many things, there are some things still sorely lacking in the ecosystem. Why can't I adjust monitoring/routing in a class-compliant audio device? Why my effect processors' USB protocol is not open so I can't play with it parameters from Linux?
We still have a long way to go in some areas.
For photography and graphic arts, Linux can handle many if not most of the work (I use Digikam and Darktable with great success, for example), yet when it comes to audio for example, it falls short due to a thousand papercuts.
Yet, Darktable allows me to process my RAWs to a point which I like. Similarly, my audio equipment allows me to create some music which I like, too.
I didn't push Darktable to professional levels, but I believe it can match bigger tools for what I want to do with it. I don't do photo manipulation, for example. Just process RAWs. I expect the same from my audio equipment for my music endeavors.
You don't have to be everything to everyone. You just have to satisfy a need.
https://support.focusrite.com/hc/en-gb/articles/208530735-Is...
I haven't actually tested it, but it seems like it works for people, and it's solid enough to have the kernel component in the kernel. I found it while researching a possible move with my Vocaster One.
If it's one of those and class compliant, you might be able to access all of it through alsamixer or one of the many frontends (maybe too many, maybe one for you): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alsamixer
The Audient situation appears to be a proper nightmare realm with non-class compliant stuff, but there is a tool with a list of caveats longer than you might want to deal with: https://github.com/TheOnlyJoey/MixiD
It's more best case scenario as an escape hatch and less problem solved, but it's something.
I didn't expect Audient to work, actually.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1qdgd73/i_mad...
The problem is that I can't get one in a store. It's a product that is only available to those in the know.
In the ideal situation a lay-person would be in a store, and there would be two versions of the same machine, one with ads on the lock screen, one without.
And that doesn't even get into gaming.
It's not 2016 anymore, you don't have to switch to LibreOffice if you need an office suite of apps.
That obviously would be preferable, but if you're an avid Microsoft ecosystem user, just use WinApps. It's simple enough to the point that a child could use it.
Linux is an important operating system, but anyone under the delusion that it is desktop ready right now needs to actually watch someone use it. I say this not because I hate linux, but because I love it. I want someone to make it usable for a desktop, and people claiming that it is usable right now are not helping that.
It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the argument that many people don't need to "know" what a file is, to benefit from their computers - that as long as they can "save" their work, and "send" it from one app to another, they'd be able to get all the productivity that they are looking for.
On that note, I remember how absolutely ecstatic I was when I first set up Sublime Text and discovered that unsaved editor tabs always reliably survive restarts; it essentially flips the script, whereby I've lost multiple saved files by accidentally deleting them, but I've never accidentally lost work in unsaved tabs, and I've never actually had any interest in figuring out where and how these tabs get persisted - it just works.
Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.
I agree with most everything else you said, but would slightly push back on that. I actually quite like the idea of non-hierarchical blob storage searchable via arbitrary indexed metadata, as well as the idea of content-addressable storage (e.g. with magnet links). While folders are an elegant abstraction, I really feel that we shouldn't be beholden to it.
Without an OS, you've got a CPU and memory-mapped hardware devices. You certainly don't have files.
The people doing the former use computers for ‘real work’. They are using a computer as an end in itself, care about operating systems and have strong opinions about systemd. The people doing the latter couldn’t give two shits about any of that and just want to get their presentation finished on time.
Problem is, both sets of people have to use the same machines. It’s also why software like GIMP will never become widely adopted in professional environments because it’s designed for a completely different userbase.
If we had a giant influx of computing illiterate people, the platform would enshittify. They would move towards android-type lock downs and user hostile stuff. More and more binary-only proprietary software, they might fork systemd etc and make sure that the proprietary binaries only run under certain unmodified setups etc. Of course there would be escape routes to various other, nonpopular distros, so the skilled people would be fine again, but there would be a barrier again.
I think this is fundamental. Once the general public starts entering an arena, it won't stay the same. Eternal September etc.
I strongly disagree with this; I believe that an OS should be whatever the user needs it to be. In my case, I am a power user that loves the command line, and while I agree that I may not represent the majority of users, I do not care for your assertion that my way of doing things is somehow invalid.
Your critique should be channelled into a productive direction and point the finger at the maintainers why this is not packaged yet. https://repology.org/projects/?search=winapps https://pkgs.org/search/?q=winapps
Gaming on Linux is a mostly solved issue for anyone that doesn't do competitive multiplayer gaming. If a game isn't using some root kit level anti-cheat or copyright protection, it is going to run just fine. Same with running most other software.
The only part where Linux is sucks is for certain creatives fields. If you need Adobe products you are out of luck. Video editing well you use Da Vinci or free software. There are some good DAWS but no Ableton.
Yes, you have to compromise but Linux is definitely getting there. Not everything runs on Mac either and people cope just fine.
Turns out, a lot of people do exactly that. Hundreds of millions of people play CoD, Fortnite, Battlefield, Apex and many many other games which won't work on Linux at all.
I think the state of gaming on Linux is absolutely incredible - what used to be a very esotheric and "roll of the dice" process 20 years ago now is extremely simple and it mostly just works. But when I play games with friends every week it's almost never a game that would work on Linux.
Especially Affinity imho. A lot of the people studying graphics design in the last 3 years or so, that I know of, saw the benefit of not paying for an Adobe subscription.
You may have to spend extra work to get things running; but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.
I know, I use Slackware. It's regarded as a very technical distribution and some manual configuration is expected but once it's done, it's done. I have configs from > 20 years ago that I still use without a hiccup.
Yeah... no. If you're dealing with changing systems, you'll need continued support from maintainers. And there's a lot of stuff out there in the business world that is commonly used and breaks all the time. Stuff will break. If not, it is not getting updated. In that case I'd be more worried about security than compatibility.
Claws-mail has all my email for over 15 years. My inbox is several gigabytes in size, which claws handles flawlessly. And the software is continuously maintained. I'm using version 4.4.0 now, which was released 16 days ago on March 9.
So... yes.
Uptimes of half a year are not uncommon, the record so far is 400+ days. I just don't shut it down unless there's a serious kernel or hardware upgrade.
It just works, non-kernel updates, stuff being plugged/unplugged, couple times I swapped sata hdds without turning off power (which is simple, they are hotplug by design, just don't drop the screws onto motherboard and don't forget to unmount+detach first).
Now, when I used to and test some cross-builds for windows (win7-win10 era), I had another dedicated windows machine for that. And even though I tried to make it as stable as possible, it was a brittle piece of junk, in comparison.
So in my experience, yes, linux is fundamentally different usage philosophy: you don't need to think about what crap Microsoft will break your workflow with next Tuesday.
I guess you want a Mac. That's fine.
I value freedom and things not mysteriously breaking and functionality not disappearing, and am quite happy investing a the time and knowledge upfront, so I use Linux.
And then there are people who want to have a system which works out of the box initially and who don't want to learn anything and don't mind it breaking later, and they choose Windows.
To each their own.
Have you seen liquid glass? "Don't notice it's there" does not at all apply to the latest UI changes. Everything is bouncing and jumping and sliding in ways that deliberately call attention to itself. MacOS does not stay out of the way anymore.
To solve the chicken/egg problem, the GNU/Linux distributions should generate some very (in particular binary) stable interface for writing applications (including GUI applications) on GNU/Linux - like WinAPI on Windows. With "stable" I mean "stable for at least 20-25 years". This interface must, of course, work on all widespread GNU/Linux distributions.
An operating system is a style of thinking about your work. WINE is a way to get Windows applications to run (by now run decently) under GNU/Linux. These Windows applications are nevertheless foreign bodies in the whole kind of thinking which GNU/Linux is built around.
It's sad because it's true.
"Build musl libc statically, set up a toolchain to use it, build libc++ for that toolchain, get libwayland, link that statically (which their build scripts don't support, roll your own), get xcb,libxau,libxwhatever and build those statically as well, and implement TWO platform layers, dynamically checking for wayland support. There's like 5 different ways to set your window icon. Yes, you need to implement all of them. Now for loading the graphics API......."
On Windows it's a call to RegisterClassW followed by CreateWindowW.
Without Windows they probably would have been written for whatever else was most popular instead.
Hard disagree. Not that it has to be FOSS, but you have a product that is predatory towards you and you refuse to change your ways.
Leaving an abusive relationship is hard, but sometimes you have to do it.
And honestly it seems like you refuse to learn even the smallest bit about human nature.
Very, very few people want to "learn" how to use their computer. Walk into a room of 100 graphic designers who have spend the last 20 years using Photoshop exclusively and put GIMP in front of them and and at least 98 of them are going to say what the hell is wrong with you, they have work to do, take this uncanny valley garbage and get out of here.
I'm typing this on a System76 laptop right now but I understand expecting people to use Linux writ large is ridiculous.
For a remote or a car there is no benefit to changing. For Windows there is.
Idk, it's more of a philosophical perspective at this point. I see where you're coming from.
The tin foil hat interpretation of this is that it is all by design, by whatever cabal runs everything, to subjugate the masses and control them directly or indirectly. The generous interpretation is closer to an extreme version of Sturgeon's Law[0] where this is just a natural, even inevitable, byproduct of most things being garbage. Like most things the truth is almost certainly somewhere in the middle.
[0] "90% of everything is [crud/crap/shit]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law
I see this point being missed over and over again in this thread. To people like you and I the computer is often the entire point. To normal people it's a tool. It exists to get the job done so they can move onto something else.
The solution that requires the least effort is objectively the best solution. Most of the time that still means Windows, and it won't change until the required level of effort changes.
They aren't looking and they aren't interested in looking. At this point they have no one else to blame.
I do agree with your larger point though. It’s the same reason everybody doesn’t change the oil in their car on their own or cook their food every night over ordering out. Only it goes even further because by this point most people expect a computer to just do what it’s supposed to do (or they think it’s supposed to do) the first time they try. I can’t imagine asking my parents to start inputting terminal commands. Even just the process of something like running etcher and prepping a usb drive to install linux is a whole thing.
I'm interested in where that estimate + number are coming from. And I'd like to point out that I don't nearly see as many people pushing back against say MacOS for "not being Windows", despite the fact that the same issue would be there. I wonder why Linux gets special treatment in that regards, when modern distros make usage very accessible.
> And that doesn't even get into gaming.
Gaming on Linux works very well. And if something doesn't, it's usually by choice (e.g. BattleEye customers not enabling it on Linux) or by sheer incompetence / malevolence (e.g. EA Games and their shitty EA App that breaks often even on Windows, and even worse on Linux in a Wine environment).
Just as nobody is pushing back against Linux when it comes to server software, or pushing back against PlayStation when it comes to games.
Mac users paid money for their choice, so ironically they are more forgiven for the inability to run some Office VBA macros, work with that random MST dual display dongle or whatever. They rationalize their expensive purchase as a good decision and that it's good enough and possible to solve issues encountered like spending 5 times as much on Thunderbolt dock to do what the $30 MST dongle did or learn some entirely new $10 app to do what they did on Windows with something else.
I suspect that most people don't run much software at all outside of their web browser and wouldn't notice any difference between using chrome in windows and using chrome in linux. Gaming is not the barrier it used to be either.
It is getting tiring, I don't say Linux is perfect, but KDE has been better than Windows for years, Linux doesn't bit rot like an average Windows install and Linux is in practice surprisingly more stable, but no-no-no, Linux can't be this time again. Quick... ehm "there is a piece of software that only works on Windows". Have you ever thought the reverse holds too, but times 1000?
If you call yourself an IT-professional, you only run spyware.exe in a vm or in a box with all networking gear ripped out and you don't making stupid excuses.
All of these issues go away with Mac and Windows. I'm not giving up on Linux, I'm just a realist.
If I remember correctly dell never provided drivers/firwmare/docs upstream to drive the subwoofer. ref: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215233
Also quite a few inaccuracies - what the heck is 'bit rot' on windows? I had 1 same Windows 10 install running on desktop for 8 years as primary personal PC and installed tons of software and games, both official and... some other types. 0 issues.
On laptop whole lifetime with original install is the default for everybody I know, for me 6-7 years (simply the length of ownership). We don't talk about Windows 95 or ME era here where frequent installs were basically mandatory and a well-practiced chore.
I actually have a desktop still running that got a launch party host Windows 7 Steve Ballmer edition install that's just been upgraded as time has gone on. Very much a Ship of Theseus machine but technically only ever migrated the OS image around, never reinstalled. That's 17 years of a Windows install so far, and its perfectly fine. That one install has made it through multiple motherboards and OS upgrades. It'll end up dying and being replaced once I get too uncomfortable with 10 EoL, this board is still useful to me but it doesn't have a TPM so Windows is dead to this machine.
In the past a good "registry cleaner" would help - but those are no longer reliable with newer versions of Windows - there are many virtual entries that get cleaned-up by overly aggressive utilities.
It actually is. It may not be the best solution, but it absolutely is one of available solutions. = Not being able to ( or wiling to ) learn ( and adjust ) as needed is part of the reason we are here.
I am not being nitpicky here. Reasonable people don't hope things will change; instead, they change things they can.
Or Accessibility, which the Linux desktop is notoriously bad with, since, what, 20 years. The constant push to rewrite things typically forgets making Accessibility a priority, for the sake of "progress".
Perhaps ironically, Wine may be the best stable API on Linux. I'd like to see a concerted and well-funded effort to make Wine run certain Windows applications well. We might not be able to replace the Adobe Suite short-term by a FOSS alternative for most of its users, but we might be able to get Wine to run the Adobe Suite, Affinity Suite, and whatnot well enough to make it possible to switch and keep running these applications.
It is a solution. Once you do it, your problem is solved, that makes it the solution. If you aren't willing to go with that, you can stay with Windows and just accept the constant abuse.
As for gaming, I've been on Linux for two years now and I haven't had a single game not work.
Why is that argument always applied against Linux, and never against for instance macOS, which also can't run Windows software?
There's a certain type of technical user that gets joy from coming up with arguments, good, bad, or just pulled out of their butt, explaining why people can't use Linux. I'm not going to spend my day trying to understand people's unusual preferences.
If they want to edit a photo, and they're used to Photoshop, then Photoshop will be lower effort than a competitor just as Photoshop is lower effort than darkroom editing film. Competitors have to be lower effort or offer significantly better features than incumbents. Product cost is a part of the effort needed to use that product, but far from the entire thing.
I made a decision I didn't want to make: I bought the Macbook Pro. If I was retired or completely cashflow positive in my endeavors, I'd pick the machine I want.
That being said, there were so many ecosystem, hardware, power management, GPU throughput and compatibility advantages with the Macbook Pro at the moment, and given that I'm firmly in founder/launch mode, I went with the safety option. My biggest risk is Apple making another anti-consumer choice.. I don't see the ads they've started pumping into their product, but I do miss GNOME.
I made a work decision, not a technology decision. That said, Windows never entered the equation.
My “nice” mechanical keyboard is sitting on my old desktop, which is now a container store. It’s easier to not go back and forth.
Both installing Windows and installing Linux can be difficult for most people. I have done both professionally and when installing Windows I have encountered frequently more serious problems, which required much more time to solve than the problems encountered when installing Linux.
For those who have someone else to install and configure Linux, it is at least as easy to use as Windows.
My parents, more than 80-years old, have used for many years Linux without any problems and they have no idea what Linux is, they just know the applications that they are using for viewing and editing documents, e-mail, Internet browsing, music or movies listening or watching, TV watching or recording (with TV tuner) and so on.
Would have they bought such a configuration on a random computer store?
Most people also don't buy laptops from some online store that only HN readers know about.