The use in government would mean running it in centrally administered form. The end user would just as well just click on the icon on their desktop and the application opens where they do their work.

There may obviously be other problems, like the application not being available on Linux, or needing administrators with Linux knowledge, but that's nothing the end user has to deal with.

The Problem (atleast in my opinion) is that there will "never" be any change in this if people are not willing to sacrifice just a little bit of usability. Why should companys write software for an OS that does not get used?

Sure, getting stuff done is a high priority, but has it to be number one? Can't we put ethics (or call it whatever you want) above it? We definitely need a lot more competition

None of the parties that are involved in Linux actually care one iota about the desktop. At best it is a side project. It is phones, servers and embedded,

Only a very small percentage of what is a shrinking market uses it uses it on the desktop.

It will never happen. The only company that has really invested into anything close to Desktop Linux is Google and it is Chrome books which are pretty much a walled garden.

While it was better than it was 15 years ago, there are still dumb problems like "Why doesn't by usb headset work?" or "Oh X shat itself again with my GPU". Whereas with Windows I can reinstall the GPU drivers while playing a youtube video. The only thing I haven't had work is some cheapo chinese Serial PCI card from fleabay.

>Why doesn't by usb headset work?

>The only thing I haven't had work is some cheapo chinese Serial PCI card from fleabay.

You are contradicting yourself here. Besides, linux hardware support is incredible nowadays, and most of the time if you have problems with linux, you would have them with windows as well (aka, oem drivers for crappy nonstandard custom hardware).

Nowadays most of the soundcards, gamepads, headsets would just work, at least their standard functionality.

Also, RedHat cares about desktop, and canonical cared a lot. Nowadays RedHat is involved in a proper hybrid graphics support, gnome desktop etc. In some areas linux is lagging behind, for example accessability is still not the best, though gnome people are very concerned about it (that was one of the major reason for using a full gnome shell for login).

> You are contradicting yourself here.

No I am not. I was just saying that the only thing I've hadn't have work out of the box was some dodgy PCI card from China. It is literally the only thing in the last ten years that wasn't a video card that didn't work out of the box for me.

> Besides, linux hardware support is incredible nowadays, and most of the time if you have problems with linux, you would have them with windows as well (aka, oem drivers for crappy nonstandard custom hardware).

I've been using *nix now for about 20 years. I still have the same problems with plugging in things like headsets that I had 10 years ago. The headset I am using is a £30 headset that you can buy in almost any supermarket and that is just an example of the problems that you will face on a daily basis.

I have a bog standard Dell Latitude laptop (refurb business model). Everything is intel. Yet I still have problems with Power management on popular distros like Ubuntu and Fedora. Everything works fine in Windows Vista and Above. I get screen tearing on my desktop machine because X is utter crap. Also any application can completely kill X, I had it happen the other day.

I am sure I could fix some of these issues. But I just don't care enough anymore.

> Also, RedHat cares about desktop, and canonical cared a lot. Nowadays RedHat is involved in a proper hybrid graphics support, gnome desktop etc. In some areas linux is lagging behind, for example accessability is still not the best, though gnome people are very concerned about it (that was one of the major reason for using a full gnome shell for login).

Redhat used to sell the distro as a desktop Linux that you could buy in a store like PC world, so did Suse and quite a lot of other distros (Mandrake, Lindows, Corel). Very few people bought them, they didn't make any money and they vanished in about 2004/2005ish IIRC. The vast majority of income that Redhat makes is support contacts.

As for the gnome team, they threw away years of work when they moved to Gnome 3. That must be 10,000s of man hours. That is nuts. I don't trust a team that throws away years worth of code, user testing and bug reports. I know it been forked into Mate, but that is besides the point.

You confuse your subjective experience with the overall picture. The list of devices which kernel does support is not only incredible, but higher than that of any other OS safe Windows maybe. And even in windows you will have pretty the same hardware problems, just with the different set of hardware, which you were lucky to avoid. Shit like this [1] [2] is pretty common in windows world as well.

>The touchpad and touchscreen don't work during install, so you'll need to plug in a mouse or fuss with keyboard-only navigation. After installation you'll only have 2.4GHz wifi, so you'll need to install the Lenovo driver. There are probably other Lenovo drivers that will be required - but I haven't taken the experiment any farther yet.

>Intel GMA 910 and 915 series released in 2004 and 2005 respectively didn't get WDDM driver which means they only work with Windows XP, Vista and 7

Most of the time you just have an OEM preinstalled for you or even an OS preinstalled on a very particular hardware (macos).

[1] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Lenovo-Yoga-Series-Notebooks/Yo...

[2] https://communities.intel.com/thread/123273

> You confuse your subjective experience with the overall picture.

No it is a common complaint that has been happening for years (over a decade) with all manner of consumer laptops.

> The list of devices which kernel does support is not only incredible, but higher than that of any other OS safe Windows maybe.

Yes and I would wager quite a lot of these devices are for ancient hardware, embedded devices, servers, micro-controller etc and other stuff THAT IS NOT ANYTHING TO DO WITH BUSINESS LAPTOPS and a reasonably priced consumer usb headsets from well known manufacturers.

It is a fallacy that just because there is a large number of devices it also means:

1) They are supported well.

2) They are my devices.

3) That there are other parts of the distro (Pulse Audio, ALSA or whatever the nonsense they are using for an audio stack these days) will interfere with how the device works.

The situation will never change. It will never change because

1) Device manufacturers don't care about Linux. They will care about MacOS, Windows, Android and iOS.

2) None of the large corps that basically contribute to the kernel really care about Linux on the desktop. They don't make a lot of money if any from it. Redhat kinda bother, but they've been bought by IBM now so that won't last much longer.

3) As demonstrated in this very discussion on this topic. Most Linux users will trot out the same tired old excuses why shite doesn't work. They will blame it on Microsoft, the User, the hardware anything other than the accepting the fact that because everyone has their own idea what a distro looks like, the whole community is fragmented. Fragmentation causes problems, instability and compatibility issues.

I've heard it for 15 years now. If I have to use Linux (I do unfortunately), it is whatever the latest LTS of Ubuntu is because it mostly works (it is still shite though).

> And even in windows you will have pretty the same hardware problems, just with the different set of hardware, which you were lucky to avoid. Shit like this [1] [2] is pretty common in windows world as well.

Cherry picking nonsense. The only driver I've needed to install in the last 5 years is my video card driver (I am rocking a 1080Ti, which is rather nice) and a wireless driver in my laptop which took all of 5 minutes to install.

Windows will download the drivers from the internet if it can find them.

> Most of the time you just have an OEM preinstalled for you or even an OS preinstalled on a very particular hardware (macos).

No I installed Windows myself. I always wipe and do a clean install. I've done my own install of MacOS in the past as well (not much point though as they don't fill the OS full of shit).

I've heard all of these arguments before. They are all deflecting blame away from what is the Desktop Linux community. I'd heard these arguments back in 2003. Nothing has changed much in 15 years.

Maybe in 15 years time when Desktop Linux still doesn't work correctly you might get wise to the myriad of reasons why it will never work.

Hopefully I will have retired to somewhere like Cambodia by then.

> Maybe in 15 years time when Desktop Linux still doesn't work correctly you might get wise to the myriad of reasons why it will never work.

Yet, here I am, having used Linux on the desktop for over 15 years. Unlike all the years I used Windows, I've never had to reinstall Linux. No BSODs, booting into safe mode, restoring registry backups, manually installing cryptic INF files, anti-virus software, etc. Works For Me. Sorry that you didn't enjoy it. Hope you have fun back in Windows land.

Well I have a stalker.

Lies. BSODs are Kernel panics. These happen in every OS. They can be caused by failing hardware, iffy drivers etc. Are you going to claim that you never had hardware fail? never had a dodgy capacitor on a video card? I don't believe that. Also the last time I had a BSOD on Windows is because one of the SSDs in RAID 0 failed.

Dependant on Linux distro there maybe no safe upgrade path between version of the distro (Fedora recommends a full reinstall last time I checked).

I haven't backed up a registry ever. I haven't installed 3rd party anti-virus software since the Windows XP days which was 15 years ago. Windows has improved quite a lot in some ways (and in other ways it has got worse).

> Works For Me.

Which is exactly the attitude problem with most Linux users when discussing the topic. It is whataboutery at its finest.

> Sorry that you didn't enjoy it. Hope you have fun back in Windows land.

Linux works absolutely fine on my Phone, VPS (Digital Ocean) and as a XBMC machine. It just doesn't work properly as a Desktop Operating system.

I am just not a zealot when it comes my Operating System Choice and I don't pretend things that are real problems aren't.

The only way to have good hardware support is to buy two computers, and send one to a developer.

LTS (Long Term Service) versions of Linux OS' are now breaking even, or even sometimes ahead, of Windows. Office is easily on par (actually better IMO). You can have the UI exactly as you want it to be. You have GIMP. The home of Apache/PHP, and many other improvements!.

Word is light-years ahead of any open source alternative. Gimp is not a photoshop replacement. These guys don't care about Apache on their desktops. :)

Most people do not use any advanced features, neither in Writer nor in Word. You can congratulate yourself, if your colleagues know what are styles, most just hard-code the formatting.

The problem is not whether YOU use the advanced features. It is whether someone else does.

I generally don't require any better than Markdown and for larger documents I just LaTeX.

However I am normally sent work documents with all sorts of macros from other companies (embedded forms) to fill out for things like payments, right to work etc. These require Microsoft Office. Originally when I started I thought I could get away with Libre Office. It worked at best 50% and these weren't complex macros (I inspected them myself).

None of these forms are outside the norm of what a HR department, University faculty office or most medium to large companies use.

It's mostly _ME_ who uses the advanced features, not people around me. In cca last 10 years, I've seen exactly one Excel with macros that someone wanted other people to use. (No, you can't use VBA with LibreOffice, just like you cannot use Python UNO scripts with MS Office).

The reason is mostly security: nobody wants to run random macros on their machines (where nobody means their IT departments, the users wouldn't care) and for the uses that you mention, for random forms, web-based forms are used and links to them are getting send.

At least in my corner of woods.

If this “normal users are stupid” thing is supposed to be in favour of Linux then it’s a stale argument.

Normal users are not stupid. They just don't care.

How can you tell when the end result is identical? /s

Unfortunately, Word is light-years behind any alternative, open source or not. Styling is a half-assed inconsistent mess. Bullet indentation jumps around like crazy. Changing your default printer might cause reformatting. There is no decent separation between content and formatting. The menu ^h^h^h^h^h^h ribbon is such a mess you need a search function. Word is the kind of product that should be taken out and shot. I speak as someone who used word competitors back in the days when there were some left.

Now if you say Excel, however, we might start to agree.

BTW, while Gimp is not a photoshop replacement (please fix the window behaviour, guys) but krita is getting really nice, and plenty good enough for your average corporate user.

> BTW, while Gimp is not a photoshop replacement (please fix the window behaviour, guys)

If you mean the multi-window behaviour, as of 2.10 the default is now set to single-window.

If you don't have 2.10 in your distro yet, you can toggle that on in the menubar: Windows -> Single-Window Mode

Lucky you can use Word in a browser these days, then.

I'm not sure which government departments are using Photoshop but the few that do could just as easily use Macs.

Don't tell the ChromeOS team (and tens of millions of Chromebook/box) users that... though I doubt they'll be on any corporate IT wishlists (then again, they require very little support...).