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Comment by samolang | Hacker News Reader

The first comment I saw said it was impressive. The second said I should use Gnome instead of Unity. The third said I should try something called localepurge for a leaner install. The fourth said KDE was better than Gnome and Unity. The fifth recommended Xubuntu over Gnome.

This is the sort of fragmentation that makes popular adoption difficult, but is also what makes Linux awesome.

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Most HN readers are developers (who all have unique and specific tastes in their machine setup), and have enough experience with Linux to find it easy to install alternative window managers.

For "popular adoption", I'm sure the completely standard Ubuntu install is just fine.

I sometimes feel like I'm the only developer who doesn't want to spend all his free time fiddling around with his operating system.

To me, that's not developing. It's just extra work that's completely orthagonal to building cool software.

Yeah. I used to screw around with that quite a bit. At the time it was fun. Now I'm all about minimum time to productivity.

Turns out there are technical terms for the behavior. For OSes, you and I are satisficers: we just want it to be good enough. I used to be a maximizer, where I wanted it to be perfect.

Learning to choose which approach to take in a situation has been really great. For example, restaurant menus. I used to be a maximizer, trying to pick the best thing. Eventually I decided agonizing over my choice was a fair bit of stress for little or no gain; it was easy to finish my meal and think, "Damn, maybe I should have gotten that other thing." Now I just skim the menu and go with the first thing that looks good to me.

Customizing your OS to your needs might not be "developing", but it comes from the same place of dissatisfaction with the status quo that is the reason we all develop the things we do. It's just a matter of where that dissatisfaction is, and to what degree it bothers you.

Fiddling?

Usually I just copy my configs over to a next box / laptop that happens to become my workstation, and continue nearly where I left. It worked more or less smoothly for last 7 years.

Yes, sometimes I do fiddle with my settings to make my experience more comfortable and thus my work more productive. I don't think that spending 5-10 minutes a month on it is such a waste.

No, there's plenty of us who feel that way: I (and most of the people I work with) just use OS X on the desktop, and Linux on servers. This way you get the perfect desktop environment that "just works". The linux boxes never have a window manager installed in the first place.

How is OS X more "just works" than a clean Ubuntu install? And both are far from perfect.

Yeah, I really don't understand why this OSX monopoly on "just works" still persists. A plain old Ubuntu install just works, lots of Linux distros do, but if you want the additional customisation, it's there.

Except when you have some graphics card on dual monitors. Or you want your laptop to sleep and wake up. Or when you have some funky WLAN card.

What has this to do with the desktop environment.

You can install and configure a suitable operating system in like 4 hours, that's not a lot of time.

I hate when people say you "should do X". It'd be a whole lot nicer if they de-compiled their opinion and stated something more like "Doing X gives you Y benefits". I ignore the "shoulds" as noise and seek the pro/con breakdown.

I don't think those that would contribute to "popular adoption" are reading HN comment threads. They would also probably not be able to download, burn, and boot an ISO live disc either, which is the principle issue with adoption - it needs to be default.

I was once a big fan of KDE. Of late, it has started becoming fancier and fancier and I got fed up of the fanciness. On the other hand I used to hate unity when it came out but go so much used to the unified menu bar that I have never been able to use anything else.

So far the only other serious contender seems to be elementary OS, it is the BEST looking linux distro.

Ubuntu is still the best looking distro to me, particularly after a bit of customisation. Elementary just looks like a cheap OSX skin for Linux.

What parts do you think contribute to looking nice? (I am more interested in things that look nice before customization).

Is this a case of better defaults? Or is it just as simple as different themes and window managers?

Personally, I don't think Windows 8, OSX, or Ubuntu look nice out the box. They're all pretty average, but I think Ubuntu defaults with the overall look and feel is the most pleasant. The Unity sidebar and blurred glass search background is much better looking than the boring startmenu/metro or tacky faux 3d launcher and grey gradients all over the place. Granted, it's been a while since I have seen the default.

"This is the sort of fragmentation that makes popular adoption difficult, but is also what makes Linux awesome."

I agree with this in principle, but it confuses me as to why FreeBSD is not, then, much more popular...

We use FreeBSD exclusively at rsync.net, and I used FreeBSD as my personal workstation from 2000 - 2007. Perhaps all the other FreeBSD people just switched to OSX, like I did.

I have hardly had any problems with installing alternative window managers on Ubuntu 12.04. For me, I don't see the need for installing leaner Ubuntu variants as long as the laptop/desktop I'm using is 4 years or younger.

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