Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enough to handle 90% of users' needs, the only exception is gaming but that gap is also rapidly getting filled.

> It's simply too much work without a paid, focused, and highly-skilled product team consisting of more than just developers.

Consider that the OS that powers all kinds of devices from satellites to embedded devices is Linux, an open-source project where payment isn't a top-priority for developers, but merit is!

> And they're still fighting the chicken-and-egg problem of user-adoption.

All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development.

> I don't like the spyware "features," but I don't think I'll be going back to Linux any time soon and giving up all the great software I've come to depend on.

Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Unless you are heavily dependent of Microsoft Excel worksheets and their arcane proprietary macros, I don't see a reason not to switch (besides just being lethargic to learn something new).

Woah, really? There are plenty.

Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately.

AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one).

Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstruments, including sample libraries which sometimes are the reason why you need KONTAKT, and not some other sampler. U-he Zebra. Hundreds of various VST plugins from different developers: reverbs, phasers, limiters, etc. Often this stuff is quite trivial, but there just is some amount of domain knowledge which random opensource developer just doesn't possess. That's why free stuff available sucks or even doesn't exist.

Decent speech recognition and text to speech. Nonexistent.

OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.

To put it shorter: pretty much any software which isn't trivial to write or requires domain knowledge. The only decent examples of these in the FOSS world I can remember are Blender and Krita.

Ardour is the basis for Harrison consoles which are fairly well respected. I would also comment that open source audio plugins tend to look much worse than they actually sound. Totally vanilla UI for an audio plugin doesn't inspire much confidence in the audio quality (watch Century of the Self for more on that). I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason. Cubase is far less programming work than Reason IMHO.

Sample libraries aren't "source code" and in that sense they cannot be truly "open sourced". Creative content such as this is more on the Creative Commons side of matters -- for better or worse.

UI is usually bad indeed, but I wouldn't really care that much if the actual effects would be done alright. They are not.

> I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason

Well, doesn't really matter: the point still is there's no decent FOSS DAW. Ardour is not terrible, but… just no. And there still is no real use for DAW without any instruments or effects anyway.

But, as a side note, I've never heard of a musician writing some more or less sophisticated music (that is not Prodigy) with Reason. I've used it for a while, and it's pretty nice, all this "hardware interface" concept is really cool, but it's very limited and very limiting. It's like, well, using Mac or Windows vs using Linux — what I can do is strictly defined by the developer, no much freedom out there. Cubase is complicated and glitchy as hell, but with it I really can do pretty much whatever I want. Simpler (and much cheaper) alternative to Cubase I would say might be Reaper, but not Reason.

> Sample libraries aren't "source code"

No, that's not the problem. Sample libraries for KONTAKT are sample libraries for KONTAKT. It is not a bunch of .wav files, it's a proprietary format, which wouldn't work with some other sampler out of the box — unless you specifically make it to, which (I guess) might be not trivial, as it's made specifically to avoid competition. So even if you buy sample libraries for that, or download it from torrents or whatever — it's not about library licensing, it's about being unable to use it with anything but KONTAKT.

Nuance Dragon SDK runs on Linux, it's not FOSS but it runs there. Just no GUI / Command Line App.

> OCR is quite better, but still loses to commercial alternatives like ABBYY. Understandably so.

Nuance and ABBYY SDKs running on Linux. Quite well. Just no GUI / Command Line App.

Oh and you don't need to use FOSS only just because you are using a FOSS OSS.

And yes Audio / Video is pretty weak on Linux, thats true. However for most other things there are good enough tools. Especially LibreOffice is really really great. It's better for Users migrating from Office 2003 than to migrate to 07/10/13/16. However there are weaknesses, too, like the Dictonary.

Also some bigger Office's Macro's aren't easy replaceable. However Linux is good enough for the most.

Yes. Photoshop and Lightroom.

And before you all jump in and slather me with suggestions of Darktable, Shotwell, GIMP, ASP, RAWtherapee et al please know that NONE of these are a true substitute for Lightroom and Photoshop.

Individually you can put together a decent work flow with Linux programmes but it's slow. Particularly for wedding photography as there's just nothing that can offer the same level of speed AND quality that you get from Adobe's programmes. Running them on WINE is hit and miss and very slow for me, and the newest CC versions don't seem to be supported as far as I could see.

I ran Linux Mint for the last year and switched to Windows 10 a few days ago. I absolutely love Linux Mint and would switch back to it immediately (especially as Windows seem a lot more long-winded in terms of 'developer' stuff so far) if I didn't need Lightroom and Photoshop but I just couldn't get a fast enough workflow together.

I'm a massive Linux fan, and I'd literally jump back to it this evening if someone can show me in the comments below a workflow that can match what Lightroom/Photoshop offer. But the reality is there are certain types of requirement that Linux just can't provide yet and, tough as it is to swallow, that's the truth of it.

Have you tried PlayOnLinux (a very, very good and very easy to use WINE wrapper).[1]

It supports CS6 (including PhotoShop) and Creative Cloud installs on Linux.[2]

[1] https://www.playonlinux.com/en/

[2] https://www.playonlinux.com/en/app-2316-Adobe_Photoshop_CS6....

I'm always surprised how Photoshop is the first thing that comes up when naming software not available for Linux.

Truth is, unless you're in the business, regular people don't need more than what Gimp offers. Never speak of CAD software etc...

They make terrible examples as to why not use Linux. Additionally, as a Linux user I can't think of working with Windows because all the things that it lacks: freedom, software quality (no one sane would trust software from an appstore as you can trust a distro repository), the shell, the efficient use of memory/cpu, the simple software that does the job, all the tools at hand for anything, the fact that 99% of the times the solution to your issues is in stack overflow already, the fact that you're not a customer, but a user. Linux has KDE/Gnome for those that prefer shiny heavy desktop, xfce/lxde for those that like it simple. So many things that Windows just can't offer because it tries to monetize you, regardless of it's countless teams of well paid devs. So I personally can't switch to Windows because it lacks basic functionality that I'd expect from an OS.

Maybe you prefer a terminal and maybe your terminal can do what my GUI tools can do or maybe they can't or vice-versa. There's going to be a lot of bias when you work and give your life to these things. To me, Linux is a really nice server or device that I use to run stuff but that's all it will ever be until it has a plethora of high quality GUI apps that I want to use.

There are some pain points and growing pains. It could take a while to put together the kit that works for whatever you're doing. One thing that really annoyed me about VS was that it was adding UTF-8 BOM and CR/LF to every file. I had to install and configure extensions like "line endings unifier" and "fix file encoding" to change it. But I always just stop what I'm doing and lookup how to change VS or Windows if it does stuff that I don't want and I usually find an acceptable solution.

IOW for most users, including me, gimp 2.9 will be good enough for most anything we're likely to throw at it. And BTW I think xfce works well, reasonably complete (except for controlling Wacom drawing tablets). To me KDE/Gnome, might as well be using Windows...

So... you're saying that there are substitutes, but that they aren't as fast, you don't want to use them and that (getting back to the discussion) you don't view the privacy concerns with commercial OSes as sufficient incentive.

If so, why not just say that and avoid all the pointless flamage.

I'm not hating on Linux, I have just used it totally as my daily driver for the last year, I prefer it and would go back to it as I said but I actually need the speed and quality that Lightroom and Photoshop afford.

They cannot currently be replicated by FOSS alternatives unfortunately.

Partly I think the UNIX philosophy gets in the way slightly, as Lightroom offers both catalogue, RAW development, printing, book creating and galleries in one place. This is important as when you manage multi terrabyte catalogues and hundreds of thousands of photos, having a single tool to keep track of everything is a real speed boost.

There are some pretty awesome options in Darktable and RawTherapee but it takes longer to get to the same place as Lightroom and neither tool offered the same ease of noise control.

GIMP on the other hand isn't Photoshop, doesn't aspire to be and is no substitute for the full power Photoshop gives you. It's just got non-destructive layers in the latest release hasn't it? Maybe it'll start to be a bit more of a contender if that's in place now.

I wish Adobe would just bite the bullet and release on Linux, there are tens of thousands of votes/comments for it on the various forum and feedback sites calling for it stretching back probably 10 years.

If you'd kept going, speed was only his (comparatively minor) opening bullet-point. Most of his comment discussed quality issues.

That's sort of the story of desktop Linux, to be honest.

And Ubuntu was keytracking in searches, collects data on its users usage, and does centralized update authority as well. It's marginally better for a substantially inferior experience with much worse hardware support. Especially if you're on a modern laptop.

Perhaps privacy isn't their exclusive value. I think that's also a perfectly valid argument in this discussion.

This is not really true. For example, high-dpi is still a complete crapshoot, font rendering is often bad bordering on terrible. Unity itself is a usability disaster that hides some of an applications most important elements (menu bar) most of the time. Network manager (Ubuntu) breaks frequently. I could go on...

And Unity works well for me, my wife, and daughter.

I don't know Unity; are you referring to it using a global menu bar, as OSX does? Because the latter is a wonderful idea as far as I'm concerned - it save screen real estate, reduces unnecessary distractions, and has no negative effect on functionality.

Don't say that thing until you try something for yourself! In the latest versions of unity, the global menu is integrated with the title-bar of the window itself. It means, you move the mouse pointer to the title area (which the user naturally does to invoke a menu anyways) and the menu appears there. Moreover, once you get into the habit of doing this, it comes naturally, so the above point that it is non-intuitive to user is just ridiculous. And speaking of:

> Is there any advantage to that as opposed to the OSX method

The advantage is that unity makes a more sensible use of your screen-real estate. Firstly, by combining both title bar and menu bar into one, you have just one bar on the screen when the window is maximized (which is how about 95% of users use it about 99% of time).

Secondly, since menu bar is hidden by default, the only thing you focus on is the window or app content, and the title which also relates to the content. I personally find this kind of workflow much better to work.

IMO Windows is a primitive development platform out of the box, one needs to install many tools, a lot of them commercial to replicate what's available on Linux. I've done my share of development on both and strongly prefer investing more effort and time into open source tools instead of some proprietary solution that I have to pay for and which I am not guaranteed to be able to use in future projects.

I can't even find a diff/patch tool on any platform as good as BC. It has all sorts of heuristics and plugins for different file types and a ton of really advanced features that are easily accessible from it's UI. And those are just 2 of my most basic tools that I use heavily (and I use the keyboard to do everything).

Moving onto text editors, I think the choices on Linux are basically like having to choose between learning Klingon or Vulcan. It's exhausting just thinking about it.

I think it'd be hard to argue that a fresh, clean install of windows isn't an absolutely primitive development platform.

Not that I think it's too relevant of an argument in this discussion, as no developer runs an "out of the box" install as a dev platform, but countering arguments that were never made doesn't seem too productive.

I get that and I don't want to denigrate contributors. I've contributed to FOSS of one stripe or another over the years myself.

However I'd probably do a much better job at it if I was paid a decent salary and allowed to work on it full time. And the software would be better for it if I had a team of similar developers, user experience and design people, etc.

Being all things to all people is a great way to be nothing particularly amazing at one thing... something a desktop experience needs.

> All endeavors are like that, not just software projects. More the user participation, better the product focus and development.

It's tough! I think that's the primary reason for porting games to Linux. It'd be great if there was more to the gaming world than Windows. However for small studios there's no incentive to develop for Linux: there's just not a market big enough to sustain a business.

How do you break out of that? I dunno. A black swan maybe.

> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux.

Wacom drivers. There aren't any shipped by Wacom for Linux. The open source ones are a stop-gap and better than nothing but aren't as good. Ergo Gimp is a marvelous piece of software but not comparable to Photoshop for professional uses.

I'd add that any alternative that wants to gain traction must provide some benefit over its contemporaries. Software freedom just doesn't cut it for more pedestrian uses of computers.

I can think of several applications provided by the Omni group which have no real analog in FOSS that I'm aware of.

I just suspect if I load Linux to revive say my aunt's old laptop, it'll probably struggle with wifi, have printer issues and she'll be annoyed if she bought taxcut at the store and gets home realizing she can't use it.

a big plus is I think netflix runs natively in the chrome browser now, or pretty soon. Netflix was a hassle for years that made it so I knew I couldn't just recommend Linux to the common man.

Of course, something that satellites and most embedded devices have in common is minimal need for user interaction. It would be perfectly unsurprising if the world's best embedded OS turned out to be the world's worst desktop OS.

That makes nice PR to bad it isn't all that true. According to the linux foundation more than 80% of kernel development is done by people being paid for their work.

1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now.

2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don't believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it's straightforward to disable them.

3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out.

4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX.

5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle's java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.

I've done "Windows" development for about half of my 20-year career, and PHP/Rails for the other half. (It's all mixed together; I'm talking about overall effort.) My job, for the past 2 years, has been 100% Visual Basic .NET. (Personal projects continue in Rails.) I'm sick to death with it, and eagerly await a side gig in Rails and OS X, which should lead to a massive side project in Java. I can't wait. I'll take development on OS X and Linux every day of the week and twice on Sunday over Windows and Visual Studio. Some days, like today, I don't know what I was thinking taking this job.

I guess it all comes down to personal preference, but today was a perfect example. I spent half the day fighting updating packages with NuGet, from one machine to another, and a sudden incompatibility with Azure database exports with my local version. Sure, there are problems with every dev environment, but it just seems so much MORE of a hassle with Visual Studio on Windows, since, for all their money and effort and marketing and the fact that they own the whole stack, the pain ought to be much LESS than the alternatives.

And I mostly HATE IntelliSense, always popping up and covering what I'm trying to type, and Visual Studio's stubborn way of screwing up my code with its auto-completion of IF statements. Yet I leave it on, for the 5% of the time I want to actually use it.

It also doesn't help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run. (So I do that work on my home PC.) And they run their own DNS system, which doesn't know that about half the internet exists. Oh, and the proxy has recently started killing my application for one user at random. No, these aren't Windows or Visual Studio's problems, but these SORTS of problems are frequently part of a "Windows development ecosystem" found in large companies that pay a lot of money to rubbish consultancies.

I know, I know. Horses for courses.

Well I mean... I could tell you my java/maven nightmare stories as well. Dependency hell is not something anyone gets to escape, even if you're using newer hotness like NPM or Go. Oh god, Go's dependency management is a trap.

> It also doesn't help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run.

There is no escape for us, except to burn our way out.

That seems to be subjective. I like the debugger in Visual Studio but I much prefer emacs and Makefiles. Even if emacs is often slow to highlight large C files.

To each their own.

> 2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don't believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it's straightforward to disable them.

The article is fairly light on comments regarding retention policy.

> 3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out.

The surface book is intriguing to me due to having the built-in pen support. I love my Wacom but I hate lugging it around.

Otherwise, meh. Apple has the better hardware design that fits my preferences.

> 4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. When I can hand off calls from my iPhone and get the same level of integration you get in the Apple ecosystem the deal will be sealed.

> 5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle's java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.

This is an interesting turn of events. It's also the new black it seems: Apple with Swift, CLR.

I mainly want it because hardware vendors support it. You most likely can't get better than OpenGL 4.1 until the next major update to OSX even if your hardware supports 4.5!

You can use makefiles. I use leiningen, without docker.

> Otherwise, meh. Apple has the better hardware design that fits my preferences.

Specifically referring to Surface. In general, Microsoft makes pretty good hardware. But uh, Apple's hardware isn't good in anything but a relative sense. Their build quality has been on the decline for a long time.

> I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. When I can hand off calls from my iPhone and get the same level of integration you get in the Apple ecosystem the deal will be sealed.

That's not something Apple will let happen, though. We both know that. Android though? Already works via Skype. I'm not sure I like that tech stack either but... it's not like google hangouts is exactly "good."

A dearth of something is a lack of it (see http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dearth). So a dearth of problems is a very good thing. I think you mean a plethora or an excess.

I think these "spyware features" actually help a ton with that. Without some level of usage data (anonymized is great) how are you supposed to know how your product is actually being used.

I need to support Windows for a paycheque, but I use Linux and free options wherever I realistically can, and it has improved my quality of life drastically. Even before I cared about privacy, I grew sick of the constant licensing treadmill. The privacy concerns, however, have long-since passed my tolerance, and I now consider proprietary software itself to be a backdoor. If I must run proprietary software for some practical reason, I will use tools like firewalls, virtualization, and proxies, to limit its potential.

I don't quite understand this. I've been on the bleeding-edge (using testing packages) of Arch for quite some time now and have had fewer problems than when I used, say, Fedora or Ubuntu.

What sort of problems were you having?

I'm glad to hear this "out there." I've run Linux on the desktop for 20 years now, and just concluded, as of today, that I was done forever. It was my main OS at home AND work for probably 15 of those years. I've done many years each with Slack, RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. I know them all very well. When I ran them on my desktop, I was running them on all my servers too, and getting both sides.

With all the kerfuffle, I decided to reboot out of my work-from-home Visual Studio gig into my Ubuntu install yesterday, and I did the apt-get update and upgrade bit, and then COULD NOT LOG IN. (It would think about it, then kick me back to the lightdm login screen.) Simple reading of the logs showed me that the nVidia kernel module was out of whack. For about an hour I purged the packages and tried reinstalling. I tried the x-edgers PPA packages. Then I remembered that I had had this sort of trouble before, and had concluded that Ubuntu's graphical "restricted hardware" driver-installer widget does things outside of the normal package management, and decided that I didn't care any more. I scraped the whole thing off my machine.

But I couldn't just NOT HAVE a Linux installation, so, today, against my better judgement, I installed Fedora. Within 5 minutes -- FIVE MINUTES -- of trying to install software, I had 2 SELinux error messages. Why in the world would installing native packages cause SELinux errors? And trying to install the Chrome browser RPM gave me some cryptic Gnome library error. I decided that was enough of THAT too.

I've fought this kind of stuff for a couple of decades. I was using Linux when getting it going required asking for advice from the most pretentious jerks on the internet -- #linux on EFNet -- because the "internet" wasn't big enough to have a lot of documentation about it yet. I've learned the ins and outs of RPM, apt, and portage. I'm just done. I have enough trouble with Windows, and Linux is at least 2 orders of magnitude worse. (I'm typing this on OS X, which an order of magnitude better than Windows.)

I BRIEFLY considered trying Arch, since that seems to be the only other viable alternative for Linux besides Ubuntu or Fedora, but my experience with Gentoo leads me to think that, like you say, it's just going to be a hassle. Even more of a hassle than either Ubuntu or Fedora, and I'm already DONE with them. So I guess that's that. Linux will be ready for the desktop just in time for everyone to stop running desktops in favor of tablets, phones, and -- according to Cringley, recently -- gaming machines in the cloud.

If handing my activity stream to Microsoft and Apple is the price to NOT have to faff about with tweaking package management systems, then I guess I'll pay. As Murdoch said, in the Lethal Weapon movies, "I'm too old for this st."

The initial setup takes about an hour if you've never done it before (I keep the installation guide open on my tablet and go through it step by step.) Once you've done it once, reinstalling takes maybe 15 minutes on a fast internet connection.

That said, if you've decided your tinkering days are over, then your best bet is OSX. Myself, I have to use OSX, Windows and Linux for dev work, and Arch is the only distro I can tolerate these days. The lack of a graphical installer means it's certainly not for everyone, however, once the initial setup it's a breath of fresh air, compared to the constant buginess of Ubuntu and ($god forbid) Fedora.