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Comment by benihana | Hacker News Reader

Get real. Linux needs a better user experience to explode. The amount of work needed to get even a 'user friendly' distro like Ubuntu up and running is ridiculous when compared to getting OS X and Windows in the same state. Simple things, like listening to music, watching video and browsing the web are harder. I haven't tried to set up a gaming rig with Linux, but I imagine it will be like trying to play games on DOS 3.0 back in the 90s. At this point, it's easier to just buy an iMac and boot into Windows to play games.

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When was the last time you actually installed Ubuntu? It mostly installs itself with little to no input from the user.

>I haven't tried to set up a gaming rig with Linux, but I imagine it will be like trying to play games on DOS 3.0 back in the 90s.

Install Steam, install game, play game.

>it's easier to just buy an iMac and boot into Windows to play games.

As someone who actually does dual-boot a Mac using Bootcamp for gaming purposes, and who also games on Linux, the former was far more difficult to set up (installing Windows on a MBP from a USB stick is a fool's errand).

In short, you simply don't appear to know what you're talking about. The trouble with gaming on Linux is selection, not anything intrinsic to Linux itself.

Well my attempt at running Ubuntu 12.04 convinced me that Ubuntu is Satan:

- Both network and wireless drivers weren't working, so I had to go to a different machine and dig up some some sources from some obscure blog, copy them to a pen drive, go back, compile and install.

- What's that, you want to update anything? Well fuck you, I'll rollback the network drivers you installed.

- What's that, you're trying to watch more than 5 youtube videos in a row? Fuck you, Compiz has crashed!

- While you were sleeping last night, I threw away all the stuff that you had on your desktop. Also, you can't right click on it anymore. What's that, did you right click more than 5 times in anger? Fuck you, Unity has crashed!

- You're trying to search the web for solutions to all these crashes? Fuck you, Compiz has crashed! Also, your mouse and keyboard don't work anymore. Have fun rebooting by holding your power button.

- What's that, you didn't pay attention to me for more than 5 minutes and I went to sleep? Well I'll just replace your screen with gibberish.

- What's that, you want to step out without people replacing your desktop background? Well I'll just hide this password prompt and show you a nice picture of your desktop background instead.

- What's that, you're trying to listen to music? Don't you just miss the old days when the cd would skip on a regular basis? I sure do! Besides, I don't like your music so as a bonus, Compiz has crashed!

- What's that, you're in a dark environment and you want to reduce the brightness? Well fuck you, everything has crashed. But here, I'll just run this awesome flashlight app that maximizes your brightness. Have fun going blind, asshole.

This last occurrence is the moment when I decided to format this hellspawn and go back to Mint.

In short, you simply appear to be an active-aggresive douchebag. Just because something works for you, doesn't mean it does for everyone.

You still have to actively check Ubuntu's hardware compatibility list [1] before buying/building new PC's, and avoid hardware that hasn't been confirmed. Sounds like some or all of your system - the network drivers especially, maybe video too - didn't have support yet.

Definitely still a user experience problem inexperienced Linux users, but on fully supported hardware the user experience is good as Windows.

>In short, you simply appear to be an active-aggresive douchebag.

Yeah, a lot of that going around these days, isn't there.

[1]: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport

I was using an i7-3770k with an HD4000. It doesn't get any more generic than that. I'm not going to go out of my way to check if hardware is "Ubuntu cerftified", unless I'm going to lose my mind someday. There simply is no benefit in doing so, as long as other distros such as Mint (at least for me, I've heard of people having lots of issued with Mint too) or Windows work pretty much flawlessly

I run Ubuntu daily, on hardware like yours, and have had none of your issues. Weird.

Sounds like you're using a motherboard that isn't supported, TBH.

>I've heard of people having lots of issued with Mint too

It's based on Ubuntu, so probably shares some of the same problems, especially when it comes to driver support.

Network and audio hardware is most often the main culprit, lots of no-name brands out there that mobo makers toss on to keep costs down, unlike CPU's and GPU's where there are only a few well known, well-supported options.

That Ivy Bridge processor may be completely mainstream now, but it was released after the code freeze for the distribution you were trying to install. That basically guarantees that you'll have at least some driver related issues, either due to immature drivers or undiscovered quirks in the new hardware. But you can also expect things to get much better in only a few months time.

I've installed a variety of Linux distributions on a variety of machines.

The experience has been similar to that of Windows. Some combinations are really easy. Others are fucking awful.

I've never had the problems you describe, and I'm an idiot.

I've been trying ubumtu since 8.04, revising it every year or so. Just tried 13.04 and it's the same old pile of... I encounter problems everywhere - updates crashing some program, alt+tab not working, drivers crashing, removing myself from sudoers file by accident, problems with flash, java is a pain to get going, etc. I need to do work and the OS gets in the way. I need to google a problem every day and that breaks my workflow. It's a terrible experience honestly. Very disappointed, because I love the idea, but hate Cannonical - so many years and so many supporters and they cann't figure this thing for 7+ years.

As a general rule, it's important to remember that Linux is an OS made by amateurs and hobbyists. If a 5-year old kid shows you a drawing, you would say it's great, while it's actually piece of shit. Same mentality should be applied when reviewing Linux distros.

Linux has been hacked on by some of the most brilliant men and women of our generation and powers an enormous amount of the world's network infrastructure. Calling this an "amateur" project just demonstrates a staggering level of ignorance.

Either your comment is dripping with sarcasm of hidden depth or I wandered off news.ycombinator by accident for a second and have stumbled over some fine /. style flame-bait or you are trolling or you are unimaginably ignorant.

On the off chance (though I find it hard to believe) that it is ignorance it may be of interest to you that this site runs on Linux. So I guess you'll be leaving our piece of shit forum now that you know.

Wow, this comment just appeared through a time portal from 2001! Linux is firmly established in a variety of professional markets here in 2013. Please educate yourself before wasting time commenting.

Join a Linux User Group or find someone who can help. You need hands-on help my friend.

As someone who just yesterday spent 90 minutes on the phone with Microsoft Tech Support just trying to get his legitimate copy of Windows 7 activated, I feel like Ubuntu's user experience is now miles ahead of Windows'. If it wasn't for Netflix and Blu-ray (to some extent, it's still a bit better supported in Windows), there'd be no reason not to remove my Windows partitions entirely.

Ubuntu is really easy to install - not sure when you last did this. It will find the Nvidia binary driver for you and get it. Browsing the web is easy, you've got firefox and chrome right there, youtube works (which is all the video most want).

Windows 7 on the other hand is hard, it installs with virtually no drivers leaving you to find them from all over the web, it's a awful experience.

P.S. I played DOS games in the 90s it was harder than Ubuntu is now.

DOS was actually pretty simple itself.

1. Insert disk (as always) 2. A: 3. DIR.EXE 4. Type in the name of the exe

Precise commands were often printed on the label. Having to manually figure out a correct SET BLASTER command was rare but sound cards came with a useful manual to keep you going. No one seemed too bothered by the lack of a GUI. Now people ask me if they should click the left or right mouse button all the time and I have to tell them to single-click hyperlinks and buttons. Heck, some don't even see them until I point them out. Does a GUI really enable them to use a computer more easily or would they more easily adjust to a written language akin to commandeering a dog?

HIMEM.SYS :-P

Was the last time you set up Linux in the 1990's? The hardest part of installing Ubuntu is downloading it and burning the startup disc.

The installation takes about 15 minutes (less with a USB stick). Installing media codecs is an option at install that requires one box to be ticked.

Installing Steam requires downloading the Steam installer from their website, double clicking it, and hitting the 'install' prompt that Ubuntu sends you (ie. at least as easy as Windows). Once Steam is installed, it's the same experience as on Windows.

As far as things like Nvidia drivers go, it's also very easy with Ubuntu. Peripherals are mostly plug and play.

As long as you don't have extremely old, obscure hardware, it will be a very easy, smooth experience.

And installing Ubuntu on a computer is much easier than setting up OSX/Windows to double boot...

You sound like you have never installed Ubuntu on a computer with a wireless card.

No, I just run it full time on a laptop...

Whatever. That hasn't been an issue for me in literally years; even my unsupported AMD APU with a weird wireless chipset worked on first boot (though I did install my own drivers for better performance). I've had more issues with Windows and drivers in the past that Linux for the last few years.

My experience: I have a completely stock Linux Mint, grabbed Steam.deb, installed it by double clicking on it, logged in, installed Left4Dead 2 just like I would on Windows, and played a campaign without any problems. That's about as good as you can expect things to be, in my book.

I have an different experience. When I install Ubuntu or Fedora I have things like an office suite, a PDF reader, Photomanagment, etc. If not I tick a few checkboxes in the software app and "Install". With Windows i have to download a bunch of setup.exe files and click through... every time. I admit that i have not used windows 8 so far, so maybe it has become better nowadays...

I haven't had the need to use it in a while, but Ninite was great at addressing what you're talking about:

http://ninite.com/

> At this point, it's easier to just buy an iMac and boot into Windows to play games.

I've personally had really bad luck doing this. The Mac Windows drivers seem to be very sub-par, and my recent Macbook heats up like an oven and the fans go nuts. I've only attempted to play a few games on a 2011 iMac, but the performance hasn't been very good as a whole (TF2, StarCraft 2) and there still appear to be heat issues. Meanwhile, I can fire up my 2010 gaming rig and play brand new AAA titles without so much as a stutter in Windows, and performance is decent under Linux as well.

As far as the games I have purchased on Steam, I actually have more that are compatible with Linux than Mac OS. I just don't think gaming has been a high priority for Mac OS (they make a ton of money with it on iOS). They seem to be very sluggish about updating their GPU drivers, and they fell pretty far behind in OpenGL support (10.9 is supposed to bump this up a little).

Comparing it to OS X is a little unfair because it's literally impossible to buy a Mac that doesn't have OS X pre installed, but compared to the average Windows bootstrapping on a clean system Ubuntu is far more user friendly and it's been that way for many years.

Whilst I agree with the broader point that there is room for improvement in the Linux user experience I find that the "out of the box" experience on a modern ubuntu is far more complete for many uses than Windows is.

For example after a Windows 7 install you need to go and install a plugin before you can watch youtube videos and you need to install a viewer for PDF documents. Both of these things are provided by default on an Ubuntu machine.

Windows 7 shipped in 2009. You're comparing a current product to one that's 4 years old. For reference, both of your complaints are addressed in Windows 8/8.1.

You have missed the point.

People on this thread that did move to Ubuntu a few years ago found it far better than the naysayers would have them believe - smooth install, better GUI, more useful software with a repository. They haven't had to look back or 'need' this new Windows thing you use and they don't cling on to legacy Windows programs. So Windows now able to open files without having to install arcane plugins first is a bit 'meh' to those that can't be bothered with Windows cruft any more.

Is there a reason that in 2009, Microsoft thought it was t necessary to make it convenient to watch YouTube videos or view PDF files? As far as I recall PDF and YouTube have been pervasive for years proceeding 2009.

To install Ubuntu, I insert a usb stick, boot, and answer a few questions. It auto-detects all my hardware, unlike Windows which has no clue what to do about my printers without downloading dozens of MB's of drivers.

If I want something I don't know whether comes as default or not, I press the Windows key, start typing a keyword. If anything matching is installed, it shows up, or I pick the "applications" tab to get a list of not-yet installed applications available from the software centre.

I'm listening to music now, browsing the web of course, and regularly watch videos, none of which took anything more than the above.

(I don't know about a gaming rig either, as I don't play many games)

It sounds to me like you last tried a Linux distro 5+ years ago, or hav been extremely unlucky.

Mind if I ask you to clarify?

I know several people who are your average users (use their PCs as a VCR and Facebook machine) who were convinced to switch to Ubuntu a few years ago and have since been enjoying it much more and have found it more intuitive than Windows.

Ubuntu has everything set up out of the box for you, and the feature that everyone seems to like the most is indeed, a Unix advantage: centralized package management.

In Windows, they had to hunt down binary installers from all over the web to get some piece of software. Now they just head over to the APT/dpkg frontend (Ubuntu Software Center) and do everything in a flash.

How is listening to music and browsing the web harder? You have a graphical DE that makes it point-and-click just like any other OS intended for consumer/mass use.

Perhaps you were installing a minimal Ubuntu without X11?

I recently installed linux mint 15. It has been a bit problematic.

One problem is that it wouldn't shut down. I had to edit the grub2 config to get it to shut down.

Also, at one point the sound randomly stopped working. Would only see the dummy output. Had to reboot to get the sound back. So I don't think I fully fixed that issue.

I was using xubuntu before, and it's really hard to resize the windows. There's a weirdly small area to click on, which is frustrating. There was also a problem with the right mouse click which needed to be fixed with a config change.

It's just buggy, where I would expect things to work.

I will say, sound issues I've had with every OS I've run, Windows Mac and Linux. Sound drivers are shit in general. Your other issues are completely valid, though I've not had issues like that for about three years now.

I switched my mother to Ubuntu 3 or 4 years ago... No more wiping viruses every month. Actually, support calls dwindled from every 2 weeks to basically never. Ubuntu does everything she wants (browser... Email... Watch videos... Download camera photos... View them...) without any problems.

Isn't that what SteamOS is attempting to be?

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