Just means I won't be playing on Linux since if not all most of the good games live on Windows. If I take your perspective, that Linux is separate platform, like console vs PC. Then the battle is already lost and there is no point for me to care in the slightest.

Many, many great games are available on Linux, and the platform has a lot of compelling reasons outside of games to choose it over Windows. And unlike any other gaming platform, Linux has software like Wine to expand its game library into those of other platforms. And unlike the typical console vs PC wars, Linux is still a PC and has all of the benefits of using one. But it sounds like you're just looking to justify your confirmation bias, and so be it.

The console wars are not won by the games available on both, but by the exclusives.

Unless Linux has exclusives (which it doesn't afaik) then it has lost the battle completely and utterly. Windows is the default choice for gaming PCs and unless something drives a significant change that will continue to be the case as linux is clearly a second class citizen.

Exclusives are increasingly dying out. For independent developers, there is no point to limit their distribution to some specific platform. It only decreases their profits.

Most games I play do not have Linux port, so by definition I would be spending most if not all of my time in Wine, which drastically lowers performance. All examples people have thrown at me have been single player story driven games which do not interest me in the least.

I only play multi player games with my friends, since single player games rarely keep my interest (last single player campaign/game I finished was Portal 2 since it was so short)

Then there's always "will this even work with wine" question. Like take any Blizzard game, the downloader/launcher simply does not work on Wine (or at least it did not when I last tried it). When a new game comes out that I want to play, I don't want to think if I can play it, I want know I can if I choose to. This is even bigger concern since most interesting games now days are not AAA titles, but various smaller games, mods, and early access titles. Game we've spent most time playing last month is easily Playerunknown's Battlegrounds and with quick look at Wine DB it's status is "garbage"

If I look Linux as separate platform then there is no hope I would be using it to play games.

> Wine, which drastically lowers performance

I have had performance decreases and increases with Wine. I would not call the change drastic. The larger issue with wine is that not every game works.

I encourage you to measure both and see what the performance looks like in both places, then see which one gives you better options for improving that if performance really matters.

>Most games I play do not have Linux port

This is exactly the stupid mindset I'm talking about. You can play different games! It's okay, really, to play different games! Other games are fun too!

Here's an incomplete list of multiplayer games that run natively on Linux, sourced from my own steam library and the popular linux games on steam:

- Rocket League

- CS:GO (and CS:Source)

- Rust

- Garry's Mod

- Terraria

- Insurgency

- Borderlands 2 (+ pre-sequel)

- Civ V

- Left 4 Dead (1 & 2)

- Dota 2

- Torchlight II

- Team Fortress 2

- Battleblock Theater

- Natural Selection 2

- PAYDAY 2

You like multiplayer games? Great! There's loads of them on Linux, and they're all super fun. You don't need to play the same games as Windows to have fun.

But most (I think all) of those are on Windows. It's not just different, it's strictly inferior.

You're missing my point. Does Linux have fewer games? Yes. But Linux is absolutely a viable gaming platform and the other benefits to using Linux over Windows are extremely compelling.

You're missing his: that he feels (or wishes to explore the possibility) that it's a strictly inferior platform because it's not "extremely compelling" unless you've already bought in. You do not get to tell him that those benefits are "extremely compelling". That is a relative thing and you don't get to tell him what he finds compelling.

This arrogant prescriptivism is what you did last time, too. You did this last time this came up by trying to slag me because I didn't want to waste hours of my life debugging weird edge-case issues with Linux as a desktop operating system (and, funny story, Ubuntu 16.04 hard-locks on my desktop when I plug in a bog-standard USB sound card, that's cool, and has DVI timing and desync problems between my monitor and the graphics card--this is fiiiine, everything is fiiiine). You have decided it's compelling for you. That does not mean stating "it's compelling" makes it so for a single, solitary other soul.

You are frothing and should chill.

I'm pretty sure I said this last time, too - don't buy hardware that doesn't work with your software. Do some due diligence on the shit you buy.

Or don't care and use something else. I now run a literally problem-free Hackintosh dual-boot and life is great. With hardware better supported on a literal hack system than on Linux. (Didn't buy hardware intending for a Hackintosh, either; I just happen to tend towards Gigabyte motherboards and Intel processors and everything shook out great.)

Linux isn't "my software", so why would I buy hardware for it--especially when nothing else has a problem with it? Your OS is not special no matter how much you yell at people on HN about it. Your OS doesn't matter to anyone else no matter how much you yell at people on HN about it. Attempting to put the onus of "due diligence" on the people you want to do something is just straight-up nuts--and, tbh, the same rhetorical evasion that's come out of the Linux zealot camp for decades now because it's easier than acknowledging problems and that the things you like aren't universally appropriate.

And the thing is, you actively are providing great rhetorical reasons to not listen to people who do have a sense of user empathy--which you lack, it seems, as you would rather browbeat people into using it than understand why they don't and maybe make it a better value proposition--and want people to use Linux. You're literally, precisely acting against the interests you purport to hold!

When you're in a hole, just...stop digging, dude.

I'm not in any kind of hole here. Maybe you're projecting your experiences with other Linux users on me. I'm clearly explaining my viewpoint and reasonably giving answers to critiques of it. If Linux is not for you, then so be it, but I disagree with your reasons and I am free to express that.

Re-reading this discussion only shows one of us being unreasonable and abrasive. I don't care to engage you any further unless you change your attitude.

Every time you post about desktop Linux here the starting point is "people should be using this because I like it." Criticisms are deflected with "well, don't do that"--guess what? People are gonna "do that" because they do it with literally everything else. "Do some due diligence on this thing I want you to use" is as unreasonable as it gets, champ.

But it's me being unreasonable. And abusive--I laughed aloud, dude.

Okay, but when did Linux become my software?

The implication here is that should you find the advantages of Linux compelling, you would factor that into your consumer choices. "I bought a hundred gallons of desiel but I couldn't get it working in my sedan so I'll just stick to the truck"

And if I don't buy a Fiat 500e because it only has a range of 84 miles, do you think "you can go different places!" would be a persuasive argument?

What are the other benefits from your perspective?

To me, they are:

- license cost (a small hurdle if you're buying $60 games)

- open source (mainly a moral/ideological advantage rather than a practical one)

- developer tooling (minimized if you use tools like Docker or Vagrant)

Refer to my list of Windows shortcomings here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819706

I'll also add:

- WAY more customizable and flexible

- Can enjoy a smug sense of satisfaction as Windows users are hit by ransomware

- Does not spy on you

- Runs great on everything, including >10 year old hardware

It's also not driven by corporate interests. The #1 goal of Microsoft is to make money, and they'll put that before the needs of the user. Things like Windows 10 forced upgrades, spyware, ads in Windows explorer, etc - none of this would fly on Linux because Linux is made by people who just want the best possible operating system, not the one that monetizes uses the most effectively.

Linux is an amazing server platform and mostly sucks as a desktop and I'm okay with that. I've been using Linux professionally for well over a decade and I've used a Linux desktop a handful of times. I don't expect that to ever change.

In my opinion, that's complete bollocks. Windows is awful as a desktop platform, especially for a developer. The dev tooling sucks compared to Unix tools. The package manager is brand new, has very few packages, works poorly, and 99% of the time you install something it won't use it. You can't dig into the tools to fix any issues you find. The terminal emulator - and the shells - suck.

As a user, it depends on what you're looking for. I bet most end users would have no problems on a Linux desktop, especially one like Cinnamon or KDE Plasma.

I have no idea what you're talking about, Linux on the desktop is great.

Anything up until Windows 10 - I'd have agreed with you. But Windows 10 is a whole different ball game. PowerShell is finally where it needs to be, native Docker, they have an official Ubuntu sub-system with various tools.

Honestly, this whole "WinDoze is lame" attitude is so 2008. Windows 10 is a great platform. And I say this as an Arch Linux user who just wasted 2 hours dicking around with DBus and NetworkManager because there are still 3-year-old unfixed bugs regarding Cisco VPN connections.

I will not use any OS that serves me ads and I have to pay for it. I will not use an OS that spies on me. I will not use any OS that is not open source so I can see what it is today should I need/want to (and I will gladly investigate it for others if you can convince me... $).

I really don't know why people like windows beyond having their applications (That really is enough). It is limited, the tools they make are clearly more for checking off boxed on some marketing list somewhere because they rarely work right and often limited in their core performance. Even their tools like their expensive compiler and database does work as well for my worklaods as their free and open source counterparts.

It wasn't that long ago we saw the remotely exploitable flaw in Windows Defender that allowed arbitrary execution of code in a security product! Or more innocuous but no less annoying, the guy with the umpteen core ryzen getting blocked by some random mutex deep inside windows so his build was being throttled and he couldn't use his own CPU the way he wanted. It buggy, its lower quality, but they succeeded in having many make their software for it exclusively so it is

Then we can start talking about the ethical issues with it, like giving money to a monopoly that has tried to bribe standardization bodies and has been convicted several times of anticompetitive practices.

I've used Linux on the desktop since about 1999. It's not "great"; it has a lot of problems. But it is indeed better (IMO) than the alternatives, which are MacOSX (proprietary, tied to limited and expensive hardware), and Windows (a complete horror show, esp. now with Win10--spyware, ads, a ridiculously horrible UI when you click "start", and of course the total lack of decent utilities and shell and the horrifically bad-to-nonexistent package management you mention).

The main problems with desktop Linux as I see it are 1) crappy DEs (namely Gnome3, the most popular and pushed hard by Red Hat) and fragmentation in the DE space, video driver problems, and power-management problems (particularly on laptops, esp. with suspend/resume). My laptop also has a lot of trouble going from docked (w/ dual monitors) to undocked and back. This stuff actually works pretty well on Windows, but on Linux it's a real PITA and frequently requires reboots IME, and that's on a not-new Dell business laptop that's generally well-supported.

So... Linux is the worst desktop, except all others.

I agree with most of your gripes, but fragmentation is more an more just becoming a reality. UIs won't look the same anymore, it just doesn't make sense to. So people will experiment with different things and try to find something better, the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have.

Fragmentation, can be restated as "Community diversity" and it ain't going away because its a huge strength. Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it.

UIs don't need to look the same, and there's no reason they should. Choice is a good thing. The problem, however, is a lack of interoperability: Gtk apps look like shit in KDE and vice-versa. There's no good reason for this; it's possible to make it so apps with different toolkits blend in seamlessly, but the Gnome devs are infamous for being completely unhelpful here and having a "our way or the highway" approach to everything.

>Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it.

Not true; if Canonical had their way, everyone would be using Unity. Honestly, I don't begrudge them making Unity; it's good to have some diversity, but I do begrudge them switching to Gnome3 recently and abandoning Unity altogether. A lot of people liked Unity and its concepts. Instead of throwing in the towel and becoming yet another me-too Gnome3 distro, they could have adopted KDE, and then created a custom KDE theme or version of Plasma which looks and works like Unity and allows them to continue to explore those concepts which leveraging the existing KDE underpinnings and the superior Qt toolkit. The real problem IMO is the horrible Gtk toolkit: it's in C but bolts on a hacky OOP concept, it's undocumented, and it's constantly changing. I know of at least one commercial project which had to abandon it and switch to Qt because of the constant API deprecation, and there's at least one FOSS DE (Lxde I think) which also switched from Gtk to Qt for the same reasons, and got a performance boost in the process IIRC.

>the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have.

I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs. Lots of people were perfectly happy with Gnome2, but then it was deprecated and they were pushed to Gnome3 and it was terrible and they hated it. As a result, not 1 but 2 new DEs were created, just to satisfy people who wanted something more stable: Cinnamon and MATE. It's a complete mess. A lot of people were similarly pissed when KDE4.0 was released and they couldn't use KDE3 any more because the distros all deprecated it, and the new version was filled with huge bugs and didn't work. At some point, you need to aim for product maturity instead of constant churn. I've been using ssh for many, many years and I don't see that being deprecated any time soon and having to switch to some other standard, but somehow we're supposed to accept this as normal for DEs?

> everyone would be using Unity

3 months ago I would have agreed but they have announced that for their next LTS 18.04 they are dropping unity in favor of Gnome3.

I agree that improved interop would be good, but I am grateful for how well it does work. Copy/paste and other common shortcuts and features work. But, I use KDE and it sucks when I click something and it tries to open nautilus and clobbers my wallpaper. A "killall nautilus" later and everything is fine, but its annoying and a non-power user couldn't do this. The new the changed right click menu on the desktop would be really weird for the uninitiated too.

> I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs

It's not just Linux UIs Every UI is advancing; my friends and family are constantly asking me for help with win10 or whatever crazy mac/iOS/android shit they dig up. I explain I never used it, but I can form better google searches than them so I can figure out how to do what they need (I also don't mind this because I like learning this stuff too).

The root of this is how does a UI designer improve the UI while keeping it familiar enough for previous users? How do you keep power users and people on the cutting edge happy without losing the technophobic grandparents and those slow to learn?

>3 months ago I would have agreed but they have announced that for their next LTS 18.04 they are dropping unity in favor of Gnome3.

No, it's still true. They didn't want to drop Unity at all; they did it because they were forced to. Didn't you read Mark Shuttleworth's blog postings about it? He was clearly unhappy about things. They gave up on Unity and Mir because they weren't working out in the market and it was costing them too much money to pursue that direction. If Mark had his way, Unity would be the most popular Linux DE.

>I use KDE and it sucks when I click something and it tries to open nautilus and clobbers my wallpaper.

Huh? I don't know what to say to this. Nautilus is Gnome software, not KDE. Why would KDE try to open Nautilus for anything, unless you've explicitly set it up that way? Now if that's what you've done because you like Nautilus, the problem is probably with the Gnome/Gtk devs. As I said before, they're infamous for not being amenable to cross-toolkit efforts. I would encourage you to ask them for their advice on this problem; they'll probably tell you "switch to Gnome3". :-/ I use KDE too, and personally I avoid GTK software if I can help it.

>A "killall nautilus" later and everything is fine, but its annoying and a non-power user couldn't do this.

I agree entirely. It's garbage, and it shouldn't be this way. The Gnome devs are entirely to blame for this mess, along with all the distros that push Gnome3. They don't even want you to use a wallpaper with Gnome3; Jon McCann said so some time ago, saying that customization (even wallpapers) is bad because it makes different Gnome installations different.

>It's not just Linux UIs Every UI is advancing; my friends and family are constantly asking me for help with win10 or whatever crazy mac/iOS/android shit they dig up.

Oh I entirely agree; all the UI people across the industry have gone collectively nuts. But I expect better from FOSS, for multiple reasons: 1) FOSS isn't for-profit (well, I guess Red Hat is, maybe that's part of the problem), so they shouldn't need to push unnecessary churn to justify pushing customers to "upgrade", and 2) FOSS is usually very resource-limited compared to commercial software, so unnecessary churn is a waste of developer time that's better spent fixing bugs, improving docs, making things more stable, etc. If I want to use the latest fancy BS, it would stand to reason that I'd go for commercial proprietary SW, because those vendors are all in favor of making "new" shiny stuff to get me to spend more money to do the same thing. The same shouldn't also be true of FOSS, but for some reason it seems to be.

>I also don't mind this because I like learning this stuff too

I don't. I consider it all an unnecessary waste, and I really don't like these new UIs at all. Thankfully I'm still stuck on Win7 at work for the moment, and minimize my use of Windows whenever possible as I do most of my work in a Linux VM (and don't use it at home at all), and I never even see any Macs up close. I put up with Android because it's the best of 2 bad choices, but also IMO it's not that bad: it's a touch UI designed for a handheld touchscreen device and it's OK at that, unlike PC stuff that they seem to be trying to tablet-ify.

>How do you keep power users and people on the cutting edge happy without losing the technophobic grandparents and those slow to learn?

Whatever it is, the answer isn't trying to tablet-ify PCs, or using garish and nauseating color schemes. Everyone was doing just fine with the WinXp-7 style UI for the most part, and why do we care about grandparents? Today's grandparents were using Win95 and XP, so they're perfectly used to that kind of UI. Grandparents today are not starting to use computers for the first time; that was 10-20 years ago. Anyone left now who isn't familiar with PCs to some extent isn't going to be alive for very long, and isn't interested in learning PCs now. And most older people with simple needs would be perfectly happy with an iPad or other tablet anyway, which is why the PC market is no longer growing.

> Nautilus is Gnome software, not KDE. Why would KDE try to open Nautilus for anything

It wasn't KDE software opening nautilus. It was random 3rd party software that decided to launch nautilus instead of asking what it should have launched.

> Everyone was doing just fine with the WinXp-7

Sounds like someone who never worked on a help desk. There is someone new using a computer for the first time everyday. I would be confident this was true even if it were just grandparents, but there are poor subsistence farmers settling into cities and luddites turned everyday. I think you are letting your tiny view (we all have a tiny view) of the world make you think that every hold a decent professional job in a decent western and industrial nation.

And no matter how much you long for it the past is not coming back and any UI that requires clicking "start" to shutdown is in wastebin and rightfully so.

>any UI that requires clicking "start" to shutdown is in wastebin and rightfully so.

Citation needed. Windows 10 still requires this, they just don't label the button "start" any more (nor does any other UI I've seen in the last 10 years). Mechanically, it's basically the same.

The win 10 is an all around mess and the typical user gets ads in their start menu.

It still has a few dialog from the nt4 era, some that use the snap-in nonsense, regedit is still a thing. Then for about half of what a typical user does they can use the nice pretty UI, as long as there are no unexpected errors.

> somehow we're supposed to accept this as normal for DEs?

No, but it is the normal result of an open source development process. Being able to fork at any time is exactly why the fragmentation exists. Don't like it? Use a commercial product.

I think it is even more extreme. It is the normal result of having multiple teams making UIs. Each team is going to try things that are different.

Consider how different the iPhone and windows 10 are. Or windows 7 and windows 8. Because the community driven teams don't stop when they run out of money they stick around, but they also have really small marketshare.

The problem is too many people with too much time on their hands. For the commercial teams, they're in-place and receiving a paycheck, so their managers want to make themselves and their teams look like they justify their salaries, so they come up with New!! stuff to do. For the FOSS people, it's partly the same: the Gnome3 devs are largely employed by Red Hat. For others serving in a volunteer, it's a lack of discipline and too much time on their hands which could be used for more productive stuff (like documentation, fixing bugs, etc.).

You imply being able to write code for fun in your leisure time is bad, but so many great things have come out of leisure time.

Writing code in leisure time has given us some really great FOSS applications. But like many things, it's a double-edged sword: it's also given us Gnome3 and a lot of today's unnecessary churn. However, unlike little 1-man projects, Gnome3 isn't just a leisure-time project, it's largely led by paid developers at Red Hat. So honestly, I'd say that the volunteers really aren't the problem, and if you eliminated the salaries of the Gnome devs working for RH, maybe we wouldn't have some of these problems; the volunteers aren't going to sustain all that effort on their own. The commonality I see with UI churn across the industry (proprietary and FOSS) is that UI people are being paid to do UI work. That means they have to justify their pay and their existence by doing more such work, even when it isn't needed and it's downright bad.

Windows and MacOS aren't even close to something like KDE.

I disagree so strongly. I hate os x and windows on the desktop. even just the window managers are awful. the lack of a package manager is super dumb. there's a fundamental lack of power.

I used Linux for over a decade exclusively while good friends told me how great OS x was now. I finally had to support building an iOS app so I bought a MacBook.

Great hardware. the os is awful compared to Linux. the window manager is worse.

they have some really nice apis available. increasingly to use those you must sell your software in their store and give them 33% of your revenue.

I think a world where one or two companies get 33% of all software revenues is roughly maximally dystopian.

I absolutely agree that Windows needs a better package manager. But it does have one: PowerShell comes with one, and the Windows Store is finally getting serious attention from major players now that MS has made it easier to port Win32 apps to it. The huge advantage of the Mac and Windows app stores over Linux is that installing a Linux app allows an app to vomit files all over your PC, while MS followed the Mac model with packages that install into a single location. Much cleaner.

That's funny, I find the linux package management far cleaner than windows. There's nothing that prevents an MSI or EXE installer from dropping files anywhere on your PC. Sure it may ask whether to install to a directory but it can install anywhere. In particular rooting out a random bunch of numbers from your registry is no simple task when you decide to uninstall an app and the uninstall author chose to leave behind remnants.

On the other hand unless a linux package has a post-install script that moves things around, I can just dump where everything landed by a simple package query. To each his own, I suppose.

I totally agree that the install model that most apps use right now is mostly horrible, despite MS's efforts to clean it up for the past few decades. But registry cleanup is pretty rare, in my experience. I haven't had to do anything in the registry since Windows 98, probably, although I have chosen to.

However I was comparing the newer package manager and Windows App Store install models to Linux's package management, since that is the most comparable model. Both installation models are closer to the Mac model, where an app package gets installed to a single location. Universal apps are containerized, and don't use the Registry at all[0]. The PS package manager installs packages into a single location, where you can pretty easily remove them using the package manager, or manually, if you want.

[0] http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/windows-10-app-development...

Could I get a link to the package manager and list of packages?

This is news to me, unless its another one microsoft's crappy marketplaces, and I would like to do some reading.

It uses NuGet. You can install packages from the NuGet repository, or one that is hosted elsewhere. You can find more info here:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/nuget/tools/package-manager...

mac has two package managers.

Windows and OS X have both gotten progressively worse over the last 10 years. Everything past Windows 7 is terrible, and the iOS-ification of the mac OS X platform has killed it for me.

I much preferred the UI/UX of the old Classic Mac OS. Apple should have just plopped that on top of Darwin (I would probably still be a mac user).

Fedora is good enough, and definitely breaks less often than a Windows install (which is a big change from even a few years ago).

>Fedora is good enough, and definitely breaks less often than a Windows install (which is a big change from even a few years ago).

My experience is completely different. Not with Fedora, but with Linux in general. I've never actually managed to hose my Windows system. Closest I've gotten is when installing custom themes on Windows 7 and done fucked my explorer.exe, so my GUI was gone, but I was able to fix it with cmd. On other hand I've mauled multiple Linux installations to a point where screens are just black or login screen won't even show or system doesn't even recognise MBR on the disk.

OSX so far I haven't been able to break, but it might be just because I haven't actually tried to tweak it in many ways. Currently I'm kind a tied in the Apple ecosystem, so I just run OSX on my laptop/hobby machine and Windows on my "gaming rig", but I use Linux daily for work.