Most of my frustrations come down to these three basic things: printing, power management, and wifi.

I was excited to delve deep into OS internals to troubleshoot in the beginning, bit now I'm just annoyed.

Add Printer shows the printer. Great! I hit Add and it says "Here's the OpenPrinting driver for it". Great!

I click "Use this driver". It spins. And then acts like nothing has happened. I click it again. Same. I hit Cancel. Oh. Now my printer is installed... with the Generic Text Driver.

So I go to OpenPrinting.org directly and download the driver myself. Oh, now I see the issue. A whole bunch of dependencies that are prompted for here, but weren't prompted for or installed in the printing dialog.

Okay, let's try this again.

Printer Found. Great. Add it. Okay, my driver is in the driver list. Progress. Select, and Add.

"Success!".

I hit Print Test Page. Nothing comes out. "Processing..." Nothing.

Then I look.

And despite having found my printer on the network, Add Printer has added it "connected to localhost". WTF?

Alright. Delete printer.

Add printer. Ignore the found printer, find my printer's IP address manually, and add it that way. Go through things and now I am actually able to print, and everything works great.

But holy crap.

It's 2017.

It's Ubuntu.

How the hell is something this simple this broken?

http://localhost:631

Comparing those to Windows installs on the same hardware at the time I bought them, the HP was lovely, the Lenovo was about equivalent, and the IBM and Sager stank (it'd be cheating to say that loading modern distros on them would be much nicer ;-) )

Debian in particular won't work OOTB on most computers because their philosophy excludes proprietary drivers in the base install... and wifi loves proprietary drivers. That's a 'Debian-philosophy-specific' issue, not a 'linux' issue.

Have you tried Xubuntu? It fills the gap that Ubuntu used to, and it's my go-to desktop OS now (apart from on my MacBook because only OS X is usable on high DPI displays). I've also installed it for non-technical friends and family and they've found it much more familiar than recent Windows versions.

In an age when the family computer is just as likely to be running Android or iOS, I think the Linux desktop has a niche and we need to start evangelizing it again. Even for the typical home user it feels more powerful than ever when you compare it to such "appliance" operating systems, which Windows and OS X seem determined to become.

That's my choice as well

Yes! Ironically this was what a lot of people hated about Microsoft, and why the XP->Vista and 7->8->10 changes were so unpopular. Everything moves around and works in a different way, imposing a re-learning cost. But the developers like it because they're bored with the old system and think the new one is better.

Why is there no such thing as LTS for GUI interface paradigms? There should be an LTS interface version of every GUI.

Ubuntu won't change the GUI during LTS (5 years).

If by "LTS" you simply mean "more backwards compatible" well I agree and pray for the day.

I want to install SomeApp. My options are:

* `apt-get install someapp` and get v0.6.0.1abzrhotfix2 from 5 years ago

* Google to see if a third party repackaging repo exists, decide whether I trust the maintainer of that repo with root access to my machine, `apt-add-repo blah blah`, `apt-get update && apt-get install someapp`, hope that apt works and doesn't spit out a bunch of "Depends: blah blah but it is not going to be installed, you have held broken packages"

* Go to someapp.com, download someapp.deb if it exists

* Try to install it with the GUI, get an error, use dpkg -i instead, find out it has a bunch of dependencies, install them and hope they're abi compatible, also hope I don't get "Errors while processing:"

* Download source code, learn the flavour-of-the-month C++ build system, try to compile, fail, try to install dependencies, some fail because my distro only provides incompatible forked versions for political reasons, have to download the source for those too, have to either build statically or use LD_PRELOAD hacks

Meanwhile on other OSes, I can download the latest someapp.dmg/someapp.exe and a nice GUI guides me through installing it. It will probably work even if I have a rather old version of the OS, it almost certainly won't conflict with anything else I have installed, it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate, and I definitely won't need to google any command line flags. And when I do upgrade my OS, I probably won't be forced to upgrade the app too if I've found a specific version that works exactly how I need it to.

I much prefer the repo system to the Windows "I wonder if I can trust this site to deliver a safe .exe, and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad?"

> it will include everything it needs and handle updates in whatever way it thinks is most appropriate,

Yes, because every application needs its own phone-home updater (with questionable security), with bonus "value-add" crapware popping up to remind me it exists.

Your first point is only applicable if you are downloading unknown, untrustworthy software from tophotfreeawesomedownloadsnow.com.

>and which of the four 'download' buttons is the real one and not just a malicious ad

I agree that this is a severe problem for non-technical users. For those users, there is a lot to be said for a walled-garden app store (which could take the form of a GUI apt wrapper, I suppose). More experienced users know what the link and download should look like, rendering those ads a mere annoyance. I doubt anyone reading hackernews has fallen for those things.

>Yes, because every application needs its own phone-home updater (with questionable security)

For what it's worth, I usually disable auto-updaters for any desktop app that isn't network-reliant. I manually update if I find a bug or want a new feature, knowing that I can always re-install the old version if I find the new one is worse. I appreciate that this has its own downsides (especially if the user doesn't keep themselves updated on security advisories), but the point is that I /can/ do this whereas it's pretty much impossible on desktop Linux. I would have to choose between several undesirable alternatives, as I detailed above.

>with bonus "value-add" crapware popping up to remind me it exists

I don't have this issue with software I use. If I noticed it, I would try the following steps in order:

* Block network, if the reminders are fetched from the web

* Disable any reminder features in the app's own settings menu

* Revert to an older version of the app which didn't do this

* Consider alternatives, of which there are probably several

Your first reaction is probably "none of that should be necessary and there is generally no crapware on desktop Linux", and this is true. But as soon as you try to use anything that isn't the version in your distro's repo, you are in for a world of painful incompatibilities and package manager hell. For every app you want to do this with.

You have /less/ freedom to set up the system how you want it than you do on Windows/OSX, because even though you technically /can/ install whatever you want, it is horribly time-consuming and aggravating to actually do so.

You can also use the Chocolatey package manager for Windows.

https://chocolatey.org/packages

On Windows I wind up using http://ninite.com/ for my "package manager" equivalent and hope the software I want is there.

openSUSE + Xfce is my go-to for installing a desktop system for a new Linux user. While openSUSE moves a couple things around relative to a typical Xfce installation, they tend to feel a bit more natural to Windows XP users (which, amazingly enough, still exist). Users can typically be relatively productive after some basic education to cover the day-to-day usage quirks ("use Writer instead of Word; use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer; etc.").

The only thing I significantly dislike about it for non-technical users is the scary warning that pops up if you drag a menu item to the desktop and try to run it; sure, it's easy to fix (click on "Mark Executable"), but that's still very unusual and unintuitive, and your average user doesn't know or care what "Mark Executable" means (they might know what "Launch Anyway and Don't Ask Me Again" means, though).

I used LXDE until they removed the tree panel in the file manager, many years ago. After having left KDE because another update that killed my workflow and reading that GNOME was not any better for this matter, it made me abandon Linux desktop completely, after two years of exclusive use.

I wonder if they brought the tree back, but... too late.

Of all the window managers and desktop environments I have tried the last years on Linux, Unity, Gnome3, and Cinnamon are the only ones that don't look and behave as if they are from fucking 2003. Those others might be enough for those people who have stopped adapting and like to be left alone under their rock, but for me it's just frustrating having to use Desktops that are basically some half baked variation of Windows XP.

Let me put it this way: if the desktop environments you so eloquently despise wouldn't exist, I would be writing this comment on a Mac and not on Linux.

You cross into incivility when you do that, so please don't do that. I'm sure you can make your point principled instead of personal.

As opposed to, for example, macOS, whose UI has changed almost nothing since OS X launched in 2001, and even then was not a dramatic departure from Classic which dates to the 1980s.

Because it's not broken and change for the sake of change is not an improvement.

There is nothing wrong with creating UI experiments, the problem is that they keep discontinuing support for the existing one which is not broken and people want to continue using. (Microsoft is even worse than Linux in this regard). If you want to create a new UI, create it independent of the old one and let people choose. If more people continue to choose the old one, you have lost. Try again until you have something which is enough better that it actually justifies relearning everything.

An example of this is that a few years ago everyone seems to have decided that 3D transitions are inherently necessary. Not "nice to have but you can turn it off if it causes trouble," but "if you don't have working 3D hardware you can't run this anymore."

Which would be almost excusable if the state of Linux 3D drivers wasn't notoriously bad and installing Linux on older PCs wasn't extremely common.

And they justify these things by pointing to Microsoft and Apple, but those companies have ulterior motives. Microsoft rearranges everything on a regular basis to pressure people to upgrade. Apple increases the hardware requirements for newer versions of their OS because they want you to buy a new Mac. This is not behavior worthy of being emulated.

FWIW, I noticed recently that I've been using xmonad for 5 years (+/- 2 weeks) and still 100% happy. It lets me work efficiently and nothing has changed.

When I started using Linux, it was about thinking out of the box and about change. It had many exciting window managers that put everything in Windows to shame when it came to customizing and style.

Nowadays I have the feeling, Linux has become the resort of the grumpy and disenfranchized, clutching to whatever was cool when they were young. The levelheaded and progressive jumped ship to OSX and are now probably contemplating switching to Windows 10 after Apple dropped the ball for them. This leaves all Linux progress like Gnome and Systemd maintained by inept pompous hipsters.

/rant

You are making a fallacy in saying that old equals bad/ugly. XFCE is keeping it oldschool and can still look amazing (xubuntu looks great IMO).

There's much to talk about when talking about GUI things. Much indeed. Many things are even quantifiable, instead of being pure personal preference. Just remember that Microsoft spent a lot of effort into studies in what culminated to be windows95, while many other projects did not (the study that ended up being gnome3 is a joke in comparison).

i want to bring this to lxde someday

I think UIs should either change very gradually and only in ways that literally are better, but also have a way of ensuring the options aren't removed entirely, or at the very least if the option is obscure ala options removed in Gnome 2, then they should be kept and allow someone to create a tweaking tool to change them.

If a huge change is to be made, like the Gnome Shell, then it should be done in a development release and ALL of the compatible UI should be kept on the desktop, with an easy UI option to switch between the modes. It turns out that Gnome Shell could do this - but only after a time.

UX and UIs are one of those things you really should be incredibly careful about foisting on anyone. If you do it, you need to do it somewhat gently.

Some developers even uses accessibility interface to add custom overlays & controls (Steam for instance).

For Windows there is Taekwindow, at least:

http://taekwindow.net/

Because the people who were willing to run a Linux desktop in 2003 are not in any way a representative sample of the population. That's like saying "if assembly was good enough for the first batch of programmers, why would we need higher level languages?"

I've made peace with Breeze Dark at the moment, it's not so bad.

But optics aside KDE5 is mighty powerful. Dolphin is a great filemanager and I'm missing it on Windows. On the fly ssh/sftp/webdav is also a great feature.

The Plasma NM applet for NetworkManager is also great - especially if you often change settings for interfaces.

The menu works fine, searching is almost instant. I'm using the current KDE from Arch Linux and it's pretty stable for me.

Overall I'm happy and I'm not looking at Unity - that also has it's merits but the whole Nautilus/gvfs ecosystem was kind of unstable for me. YMMV.

What I dislike about KDE are the widgets - besides the essential stuff like time,battery everything feels clunky and slow - the system for adding them is also not so great. I've also never used 'Activities' the whole concept feels pretty much out of place. I'm also setting up my Desktop as background and ignore the "folder in a plasmoid widget" story that is bullshit IMHO.

I'm also avoiding akonadi/kmail/korganizer etc.pp - these might have improved but still felt clumsy last time I looked.

IMHO it's getting better but it's no silver bullet. For most users the default presentation and UI and settings are just confusing and ugly IMHO - if you look past that you will find a lot of good, stable and well thought ideas.

I'm running KDE now on all my Desktop Linux boxes and I can't remember the last time I had some hassle with it. It does what I want, it goes mostly out of my way and it doesn't look too bad.

For all the stuff it only uses 300-400MB RSS memory after a fresh reboot with a few Konsole windows running.

But to be honest my perfect linux enviroment was kde 3.5. And I don't think "regular" people had any problems with uncanny valley. When I left for university I installed kde 3.5 on my parents' and my sisters' computers. My sister switched to windows 8 years later because of some apps she needs for work, parents still use Linux (but recently I installed them kde 5).

2003 desktop environment was fine. Actually, there weren't significant benefits after Windows 95. On the contrary, modifications simply confuse users. I'm a big LXDE & MATE fan for this reason. If it works, don't fix it.

https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685

Note the wording of the bug - they aren't just asking the app to adapt to a GNOME 3 change, they're asking it to do so by removing a feature that remains fully supported on other DEs. And if you read the comments, the justification is, "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately".

It was that incident that made me conclude that GNOME is a destructive force in the Linux (and, broadly, Unix-like) ecosystem these days, at least if you don't like monocultures.

I think more than anything it's good old nostalgia. The applications menu is no more, instead it's a grid where you have to search for what you want or whatever. There's a massive screen overlay instead of a nice little dropdown.

Multiple desktops was a good feature that's come with Gnome 3, though.

If I recall, perhaps some indication of the intentions of Gnome 3 can be seen by the fact that you are prompted to drag up (really?! on a desktop?!) in order to unlock after you've entered screensaver or something. So there could be some of the same reasons why people initially disliked the Win 8 view.

But mostly, Gnome 2 was just so simple and familiar, though I don't know if that's my hindsight or whatever. Point and click to what you want to run, put things on your desktop, do whatever. No BS.

The application launcher for me is universally used by hitting super, typing what I want, and hitting enter. I never actually click on anything. Same with swiping up on the login screen, you can do that on a touch screen, but you can also just start typing your password.

I used Gnome 2 because it did what I wanted. Gnome 3 felt like style over substance (I'll agree wholeheartedly on "downright pretty UI"), and it couldn't be configured to act in a way I liked. I felt like I wasn't the kind of user they were targeting, so I switched to Mate when it came out.

Depending on who you ask, Gnome 3 was either a long-overdue redesign with great results or a dependable tool ditching its legacy to chase after some UX designer's dream.

It's been enough time. Might be time for me to look at it again. My patterns have shifted some, and it's possible that it would be a better fit for me now than it was then.

For me it's been much faster and smoother than my 13 retina Macbook Pro and Window 7 Desktop and this on an ancient i3 2100 system with 4GB ram and old 6770 Radeon card.

My only regret is I didn't try it earlier because of all the negativity floating around about it. I suggest anyone interested in Linux desktops ignore the negativity and try Unity on Ubuntu 16.04 with an open mind. Its fast, lightweight and reasonably sleek and minimal.

You would like the MATE desktop.

Http://ubuntu-mate.com

> Inside, it had plenty of power, an 850MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of RAM, and 802.11b for wireless networking (if you could find a wireless network, that is). Plus it had 20GB of storage, FireWire and even one USB port.

This was an issue because where I used to work, we installed old computers with Ubuntu and gave them to poor families and schools. The SECOND Unity arrived, we were fucked. We had to go and build our own image with Gnome as the default and install that. It was really stupid, and I never saw our users have any easier a time with Unity than they did with Gnome. It was a gratuitous change for change's sake.

That said, IMO the problem is not so much that Unity exists, but that they didn't have the resources to get real end-user feedback that might have told them how much a stinking pile of poo it is on many machines. To be fair, what Google and Apple do to mobile devices more than a year old or so is every bit as bad IMO so I can cut them some slack.

What this has achieved for me is a migration back to desktop machines from IPad and Android tablets. My 2013 IPad Air is now pretty much a brick with IOS 9 and my Nexus 7 from 2013 is unusable. Compare and contrast with my 2009 Core 2 Quad desktop that's still going strong.

Finally, consider the hideous electronic waste we generate by effectively forcing people to upgrade HW every year or two.

If you want to be inclusive and spread technology to those that don't have it and can't afford it, you HAVE to support very, very low grade hardware.

They actually did; they just ignored the feedback and insisted that Daddy Mark knows best, completely throwing away all of the reasons that Ubuntu is actually named Ubuntu (namely: they stopped listening to the community).

I was willing to forgive Unity, though (hell, I kinda liked it, at least on systems that could actually run it). It was the combination of repeated awesome-looking but inexplicably-stifled projects (Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android) and the Amazon Lens that resulted in me swearing off the community in which I was once happy to be a part.

I have ironically had similar-to-worse results with running 2015 Android on 2011 hardware, which has 512MB of RAM. The cheek!

XP on such machine is not responsive. Maybe it could be usable, if you uninstall half of operating system, and replace most programs (IE with Opera 12.X....). Or better is to use Win2k.

No! Lightweight Linux distro, is your best bet to revive such junk today.

EDIT: fixed typo; I restored a few netbooks in EE, but whatever.

256MB RAM is actually pretty generous for Windows XP, as is the Pentium III; neither were unheard of in "Made For Windows XP™" systems.

General minimum recommended for XP was/is 512MB.

Completely agree, and as a user of Desktop Linux for a very long time - I always felt that Linux GUI have been inferior to the options available on Mac and Windows.

It's not for everyone, but I found a personal solution with tiling window managers (Xmonad, I3) and related tools (suckless' dmenu). They restore sanity by providing lightweight, shortcut focused GUI systems, that don't intrude but provide enough functionality to get things done.

For anyone searching and testing GUIs like XFCE, don't dismiss tiling window managers as being too complicated or a bridge too far. My experience is that they work wonderfully in practice.

I used Windows 8 and 10 on friends' laptops and I'm not impressed. BTW, everybody hated 8 because of the changes in the UI. They tend to be OK with 10, but it looks so old to me, like a window manager for some 16 colors home computer in the 80s (I used them back then) with 1080p resolution. Control Panel's dialogs in most cases are still the same from XP and I can't understand why they didn't redesigned them. They feel more and more out of place in the UI.

Mac's UI is somewhat similar to Gnome (actually the other way around, I think) but I never liked the menu at the top and the top bar. That's why I removed both from my Gnome and I never bought a Mac since the very beginning (I moved everything from the top bar to the bottom one.) Mac's UI feels zippier though, that's the advantage of building both the hw and the sw.

But if you want to try a different experience, or if you think that setup is inefficient (as I do), then try moving to something else!

What works for one person likely won't work for another.

You have always been able to mix and match apps from a different desktop.

Vim and emacs are awesome.

Package formats have never ever been compatible, not even all distros that use the same format are compatible in fact. For open source software this is less of an issue than it seems basically the production of a package is 1/100000 of the effort required to produce the program itself and can even be done by individuals far less skilled than the original dev.

This means with only a relatively tiny additional input of labor a program can be packaged for all the most common distros.

I don't prefer unity but I think you bazaarly overstate the case.

You can literally install anything on any Linux distro. Some things might take a bit of work, sure, but they're all just a Linux system underneath.

Install the right dependencies, get the app somehow (through a package manager, or source),put the files in the right place, and bobs your uncle.

LXDE is my favorite desktop environment for being clean, modern looking and lightweight.

[1] http://lubuntu.net/ [2] http://lxde.org/

Yes mass basic users like their eye candy, and the diversity which is a strength in many area's is equally a weakness when it comes to desktops. GUI's and the overhead add so much in complications to code that if they keep changing then they tend to get ignored or badly utilized and that gives the user a mixed half-baked experience.

  This and they tend to be the epitome of feature-creep.

I don't think very many people care about running 2001 laptops anymore.

This use case is an edge case, and you could still serve it by using a non-default desktop (like lubuntu). Laptops from 2001 have super-weak cpus and gpus, and aren't a representative sample of desktop users.

At one of the two companies I work for, more than half the developers use Ubuntu, and all-but-one (me) use Unity and like it. I use KDE there because of old-school configurability, but after a couple of years of dealing with KDE's bugginess, it's time to move on, methinks.