Until Linux fixes its desktop story I'm going to stick with my Windows PC.
Valve joining the Linux Foundation does have more to do with the next Valve console and less with the desktop. If Valve wants support from vendors and kernel developers, this is clearly a step in the right direction.
Nobody cares about your desktop. Linux runs way more machines than Windows.
In case you do not know what the Linux Foundation is, I will quote it here:
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the
growth of Linux and collaborative software development. Founded in 2000,
the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and
promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system and
collaborative software development by marshaling the resources of its
members and the open source community. The Linux Foundation provides a
neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Collaborative
Projects, Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original
research and content that advances the understanding of Linux and
collaborative software development.A Linux enthousiast will forgive these mistakes and find a way around them but Linux noobs wouldn't know what to do.
I have two issues with sound: 1) Sticking my headphone connector to my laptop's headphone jack does not work. I have to reboot in order to get headphone sound (works on Windows). 2) Connecting my PC to my TV via HDMI and playing a YouTube video ... Last time I heard a scratchy sound like that was when I tried to play a heavily damaged 45" record on my parent's turntable back in the early 80s.
Alternatively, it's possible that you might need to reload pulseaudio after plugging in the headphones.
My wife switched in one summer night in 2007, she hasn't looked back, she's a casual user, her laptop came from Dell with Ubuntu pre-installed. I guarantee you, she is the typical, non-techie user.
What does that mean? X11R7.7 was only released last year! How is that antiquated?
People seem to continually blame X11 as the source of all of Linux's woes, completely ignoring the history of computing.
Most high-end workstations were UNIX-based at one time, and the graphical interface ran on X11. People forget that Photoshop, Internet Explorer, and Adobe Acrobat Reader used to be produced for UNIX and UNIX-like systems.
X11 is not the primary issue at hand with Linux; nVidia has proven that repeatedly.
At most, I'd be willing to agree that X11 is not optimally architected for local rendering context, but again, I don't think that's going to make the huge difference that people seem to imply.
Do you actually know, or are you just repeating something you read somewhere but didn't really understand?
Clearly you're passionate about X11 and I would like to hear why it is not antiquated.
1. You misunderstood the full-screen thing. X11 does have proper full screen. The trouble is that it's a bit too proper: the full screen app receives all the keyboard instructions, so how do you switch to a different app? The app needs to release some keys to you, or you need to exit or kill it. This isn't so good for games where you might have a chat program running in the background.
2. The client-server architecture is not really relevant since it uses sockets when it's on localhost.
3. Ugly hacks? Anything more specific?
X11 is a modular architecture and the very fact it's still in use suggests it's an effective one. Look at the difficulty Microsoft had getting compositing working (XP -> Vista), but it was added to X11 without having to invent a brand new windowing system.
I'm not quite as passionate about X11 as you might think. It's not so long ago that I was arguing that I'm excited to see what Wayland and Mir can produce. But it's not because X11 is bad, it's because I think things can be even better.
Please list the "10 main desktop managers" so I can familiarize myself with them. Thanks.
I could live with slightly wooden DE, I could live with the fact that my speakers are buzzing while there are phones connected.
The only real dealbreaker is lack of decent file search in Linux. I want something that delivers the speed of search of Everything and has realtime update. No luck so far.
EDIT: This is an older post, but I think it shows exactly that: http://www.afiestas.org/nepomuk-is-not-fast-is-instant/
I've love to hear a single specific complaint about an experience you had with KDE that isn't "it was different from windows", especially given that it's the closest to the Windows daily interactions.
First - it is different than windows is absolutely valid complaint. Having to tweak muscle memory is highly unpleasant.
A single problem with KDE - windows key cannot be mapped to show the start menu without extension.
Second is that all the taskbars that I found for it were just worse than the windows one in multimonitor setup or ugly.
Also Alt+Tab worked inconsistently.
AFAIK, that's an X limitation. Already fixed in KDE5/KF5/PW2. Very annoying though, I've retrained myself for Super+Space as my hotkey instead.
>Second is that all the taskbars that I found for it were just worse than the windows one in multimonitor setup or ugly.
Hm, not sure what's up there. My KDE setup is identical to my work Windows setup. Taskbar on each monitor with "start" menu button and the icon-only task manager. Then the panel on my main monitor has my sys tray. Other than obvious icon differences, it's damn near identical to Windows (at least the way 8.1 does the taskbar on all monitors).
>Alt+Tab worked inconsistently
o_0 in KDE? KDE's default alt-tab is identical to Windows's. In Gnome-shell, it acts like OS X's Cmd-Tab. But either way, you can tweak the window switcher to work exactly the way you like- include all windows, only restored windows, switch between apps or windows, etc, etc.