> what's missing from a modern Linux desktop

Networking, printer stuff, graphics stuff that works immediately after installation, without one having to search for various problems & fixes on the Internet. And that doesn't randomly break after kernel upgrades.

Because of running into networking & graphics driver problems every now and then (and having to revert to older kernel versions), and problems with printers & drivers, I feel I would never never never recommend Linux to people, unless they enjoy troubleshooting things and learning new stuff.

I have used Debian almost exclusively for ten years, not counting the last couple months where I've been doing Windows 10 for some contract work. I can't remember the last time I ran into problems with networking, printer setup, or really anything except suspend/hibernation, barring one astonishingly cheap ($168 at Walmart) machine that had a weird integrated Bluetooth/wireless/something else card without a free driver.

That being said, Windows 10 is great for regular-user stuff --- really great, in fact. It's only for development that it's sometimes a little awkward, and it's really not bad. If I were working with .NET/MSSQL/IS more, I'd love it: Visual Studio is a nearly perfect IDE on a powerful machine. Debian is still better for me, though.

Well I suppose there're lots of people who never ran into any problems. I've been using Ubuntu and Mint mainly, and usually that works fine for me too (with most laptops & desktops I've had). In one case though (maybe 3 years ago), on fairly new hardware IIRC, I've had to test various kernel versions, until I found one that was compatible with the graphics stuff on the laptop. And then take care to not accidentally auto-upgrade to another kernel version. In another case, networking in Ubuntu didn't work after installation. I installed another distro instead and then everything (incl networking) worked fine directly. Finding printer drivers that doesn't just print random garbage characters, is usually super frustrating (I think), largely because the printer company webites' UX is terrible.

I think one is safer, if one use a bit older hardware (laptops and printers), because then the Linux people have had time to look into bug reports and incompatibility problems and fix them?

Nowadays when buying a new laptop, I always websearch for the laptop name + "Linux problems" or something like that, to see what bugs & incompatibilities other people have reported already. And then maybe I decide to avoid that laptop. But ... I wouldn't expect my parents or most other people to do this. Instead they'll buy a "random" laptop with new "unknown" hardware, and then there'll be a 20% ? risk that networking or graphics won't work for them? And I think they'll need help to get the printer working. ... And with all that in mind I feel I need to slightly warn them about Linux.

Um I have never had to download fixes for networking / graphics Ubuntu worked out of the box for me.

with amd open drivers or even intel ones there is virtually no more support issue for graphics on Linux.

I'd be amazed if you even managed to break networking after kernel upgrades in the recent 5 years.

You know that OSX and Linux both use the same printer stack (CUPS) right?

> I also don't get what's missing from a modern Linux desktop

Adobe software, for one.

I have also yet to find an IDE as nice as Visual Studio...

Many of JetBrains IDE's are better and they're cross-platform. I've switched to Rider after getting sick of constant white screen of deaths, crashes, locking and perf issues in VS.NET. Rider is on par with VS.NET/R# for C# and superior for pretty much everything else except for visual GUI designers - although I haven't used one seriously in over a decade.

I'm very skeptical but I will try out JetBrains, thanks for the pointer! :)

EDIT: These all seem to be .NET development? I use Visual Studio mostly for C++... for that would you recommend CLion?

Yeah you'd use CLion for C/C++ development (tho AppCode includes C/C++ support as well), although haven't used that variant myself, but they're all built from the same high-quality core platform and share many components so I'd expect it to provide a quality experience for C/C++ as well.

I just gave CLion a whirl. It's decent, but unless I'm missing something massive, it's nowhere close to Visual Studio in terms of being a good experience IMO. The debugging experience is so rough in comparison. Aside from the fact that the shortcuts are pretty non-standard (F5 is "copy" instead of "debug"??) here are some issues I can see right away:

1. Artificially long delay when I hover on variables before I can see their values. This drives me insane.

2. I can't view the "raw" values of a variable; I can only see whatever it decides to show me. (So if there's an std::string, I can't examine its fields; at least not by default, if there's any way.)

3. The first time I tried running the debugger, the process stays hanging in the background. I couldn't kill it; I had to manually detach it from the debugger. This was literally the "hello world" example it came with.

4. The completion database for their hello world (all it includes is <iostream>) took quite a while longer than Visual Studio's did. I can't imagine what it's like for actual projects.

5. It initially told me I can't debug because I didn't have a project? So I had to reload the CMake project. This makes no sense.

6. There seems to be no filtering of private variables that I can't access (in the completion UI)? Maybe I'm missing something here.

7. There seems to be no obvious "immediate mode" in the debugger. I'm not well-versed enough to know if GDB has this feature, but regardless, whatever you have to type into GDB to get this feature would be more painful than in Visual Studio (where you literally just type the expression into the Immediate tab and press Enter).

8. Even the cursor hiccups repeatedly. Not that Visual Studio's is perfectly innocent in this regard either, but CLion's stuttering is far more pronounced, far more frequent, and far less excusable (see https://imgur.com/a/Huo2V).

This is just after a very quick use. It seems to "work" in the same way Eclipse does -- the functionality is "there" (maybe even more than what Visual Studio has), but it's just clunky and doesn't feel smooth or "integrated" (the 'I' in IDE).

I watched the CLion sales pitch video after reading the recommendation. Binging around for the features shown I then discovered Visual Assist[1] which seems to add comparably nifty code completion/generation etc features to Visual Studio. I'm demoing it just now, it's definitely worth a look if you have an itch that needs scratching.

It's better to add bells and whistles on top of a rock solid foundation such as VS than the other way around imo.

[1] https://www.wholetomato.com/

I used Visual Assist X with VS2008 actually. Functionally it made things better but UX-wise it was a bit sluggish and glitch from what I remember. If I get a chance I'll check out the newer versions (thanks for mentioning it) but somehow I expect something again similar this time around haha.

Interesting, okay thanks! I'll give it a try.

I don't know if its still the case, but I can honestly say with a straight face that at various points in the past decade I've used Netbeans for C development and it was fantastic. My understanding is that a lot of the Netbeans C/C++ code was ported over from Sun Studio, which is why it is so solid and mature.

Microsoft released Visual Studio for Linux [1] a little while ago. I find it to be excellent; it gives comparable functionality to Atom but with a lot of the stuff you get with plugins already built in.

[1] https://code.visualstudio.com/

That's Visual Studio Code, not Visual Studio.

VSCode is a good text editor, but it doesn't compare to the full Visual Studio IDE.

Out of curiosity, what are the killer features of the full IDE over Code?

I'd probably suggest debugging being one of the main killer features.

I'm not a VS/VSCode user but I am a Sublime Text and PhpStorm user. You can debug in Sublime Text but I'm not sure you'd want it to be your primary debugger. I'd guess VSCode/VS might be similar.

And again taking Sublime Text and PhpStorm as an example, PhpStorm knows your code far, far better than Sublime Text ever would do and this makes navigating your code quicker and easier.

> There's no way to run userscripts/WebExtensions on IOS. Your device is no longer a user-focused tool to access media, your browser is closer to being a "smart tv" than a customize-able information explorer and augmenter essentially controlled by no one.

I have (personally) never had the desire to write/run a userscript on iOS. If my device being a “smart tv” lets me focus more on other areas of my life (i.e. projects, hobbies, and career) rather than fiddling with my tools, then that’s a trade off I’m more than happy to make.

I suspect many other people share this point of view.

As usual, a lot of the innovation you probably take for granted happens through side channels, user-favouring features that would never appear unless they can be "unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking. I understand that some people value convenience above all else, but maybe you never experienced the bad old days when everything was locked down. It's good that Apple still has competition and others are conscious of what might happen.

>"unauthorized" add-ons. Like ad blocking.

There are iOS ad blockers on the Apple App Store, and extensions for MacOS Safari. I'm not sure how much more authorized it can get than that unless you want Tim Cook to hold your hand through the process.

The point I didn't make clearly enough is ad blockers probably wouldn't exist if others hadn't introduced this kind of feature through userscripts and add-ons. If only Apple can enable these abilities, it's up to other ecosystems to innovate and define access.

In my opinion, the most important branch the Web could take right now is going from transparent content to opaque content. Now I can filter, transform, organize and augment content accessed through my browser, and even remix it, all enabled by the inherent organizing of the technology, which suggests to the larger society more can be done. It's an open question though, and that technology could be changed to restrict what can be done with content.

that only works with safari of course because they don't want chrome having feature parity or, gasp, being better!

It also works with any app that uses the Safari View Controller - like Feedly.

If Google wanted to include their own ad blocker with Chrome they could - it is highly unlikely that they would want to.

For instance, Firefox for iOS's settings screen indicates it offers some sort of "tracking protection" in Incognito Mode by default. I remember reading about how this works on the desktop[1], but I've not had a chance to understand how well this is implemented on iOS.

Still, it's clear Chrome could offer an adblocker if they wanted to.

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection

Add blocking is something Safari (and Apple) does better than the any other browser vendor, IMO.

A good ad blocker for Safari (on Mac or iOS) just uses the Content Blockers system, and provides essentially a JSON blob with a bunch of rules in it to Webkit, which will then take the requested actions (mostly block, sometimes hide elements, sometimes force a URL to https) internally - the Ad Blocker "app" never knows what sites you're visiting and is never involved in actual blocking.

> I also don't get what's missing from a modern Linux desktop

A user interface that isn't ugly and laggy.

You know not everyone actually likes the Apple desktop experience either.

What's ugly or laggy?

It's not like there is a defacto user interface but there are plenty of them that sure doesn't lag or look ugly!

I bought a system76 bonobo with their pop linux distro. I'm perfectly happy with my desktop experience.

- decent video calling

- imessage (signal is getting warmer, but the integration is still lacking)

- adobe creative suite

- video editing

- audio production apps

- photo management and post processing (darktable is still garbage)

- sleep/wake and connecting/disconnecting external displays

- not-ugly fonts

It’s kind of funny to compare Linux vs. macOS if your experience of macOS primarily comes from using a Hackintosh. (No sleep/wake support for me! Unplugging my HDMI cable causes a hard-reboot! Etc.)

Which is to say: Linux is pretty good on Macs, whereas macOS is pretty broken (after weeks of intense debugging with other Hackintosh folks) on hardware that would run Linux just fine.

That's to be expected, of course. Linux maintainers care about the fact that it can run on just about anything. macOS maintainers only care about whether it runs on Macs.

You admit you're using a hackintosh, and then blame Apple when stuff doesn't work?

That's one heck of a mental disconnect.

I didn’t say I blame Apple. It’s not Apple’s responsibility to write drivers for machines they don’t claim to support.

I’m more saying that—although Linux’s support for things like sleep/wake on random machines might be sometimes wonky, the best efforts of the Hackintosh community don’t get macOS to support those same machines any better. It’s the machines that are wonky. (Usually by having horrible off-spec ACPI tables that get patched over with drivers the manufacturer releases only for Windows.)

Which is further to say: it’s not really a failing of macOS or Linux if your hardware won’t sleep/wake correctly, or won’t connect/disconnect from external displays correctly. In either case, it’s because your machine is nonconformant to the specs the drivers were written to follow. The only way to succeed in such an environment is to spend man-decades (Linux) or at least man-years (Hackintosh) reverse-engineering the brokenness and writing heuristics into your drivers that patch over it—or by being such a monopoly player that the OEM does that for you (Windows.)

Breaking news: An OS with a limited set of drivers for the hardware it's specifically designed to be used on, doesn't work very well on hardware it was never intended to be used on. Full story at 11.

OP is nodding to infamous problems with actual macs freezing and rebooting when waking if external displays are connected, which is a pretty common occurrence on high sierra devices.

Audio production on linux is pretty good, well not for everyone, but it's got a lot to offer. I spent years with logic / Ableton live on OSX. I'm moving to a more barebones approach these days with linux and supercollider.

Still nothing for the creative suite except for wine though.

You might be interested in looking at Bitwig Studio for audio production. I've heard it's similar conceptually to Ableton Live and it runs natively on Linux.

https://www.bitwig.com/en/home.html

I agree that audio production on Linux is pretty good these days. Ardour is a pretty good DAW. The only problems are jack being a PITA sometimes and the lack of plugins.

I got bitwig as soon as it came out. It does some things fantastically! The apt-like package manager is badass. I haven't tried again in about a year but every time I've used it the massive instability reminds me of mediocre DAWs that drove me to live in 2003.

The reason I went with bitwig was to support anyone doing anything that wasn't quite Live because everything is made with Ableton now and I can hear it. Also the collaborative features that didn't work when I last tried them. Moving to Supercollider has solved all those issues for me. It's also cross platform and free.

I suppose you only have looked at free Linux software, as opposed to paid-for software?