Maybe more importantly redefining the goal isn't helping Linux much. I remember everyone raving about Android, but now look at the lack of vanilla graphics drivers for embedded platforms.
That said, I have nothing against WSL.
Maybe I just have less time and patience nowadays :-)
Maybe people just get fed up with the same grating pain points and need to spread the frustration around. Periodic changes in scenery are healthy. :)
At least on Linux I can fix the things that are really making me nuts.
In fact I would recommend it for anyone who only uses their computer for general, basic use.
We are far, far past the point where the general population is going to spend effort to learn about something as simple as using apt-update or even a GUI application update manager, ever. Phone operating systems give the user everything they care about (mostly content consumption, a little creation) without having to read or learn anything. If you ask that of people (to read and learn about an operating system) it's a non-starter for >80% of users.
For general, basic use I would recommend a chromebook or ipad. That's what most people are looking for - something that lets them do the handful of things they want to do with as little overhead as possible.
>For most purposes, it has been ready for years.[...] Most people, however, could switch to one of many Linux distributions and be just as productive if not moreso.
If "most people" includes non-technical users, I doubt they could switch to Linux without difficulties.
E.g. a typical non-geek user might be my friend that runs Windows. Some examples of showstoppers that makes Linux totally a non-option:
- Intuit Quicken which she's been using for 20 years. Yes Linux Mint was a possible alternative but its early releases (inside of your 15-year time period) didn't have reliable online downloads from financial institutions. Mint's later partnership with Yodlee api for transaction downloads still didn't make it equal to Quicken. Yes, Quicken is terrible and buggy software but early Mint was even worse for online banking scenarios.
- Netflix streaming was not easy to run on Linux until recently[0]
- AAA games (including recent ones like Fortnite) don't run easily on Linux. Valve Steam Proton is a recent effort.
- iPhone sync with Apple iTunes - running on Linux requires googling for articles of running a Windows vm or Rhythmbox on Ubuntu which may not work with certain iOS updates
- sewing machine embroidery software all runs on Windows and not Linux or even MacOS. The software also requires a dongle for copy-protection and the hardware drivers for the dongles only exist for Windows. Running Windows as a vm inside of a Linux Desktop and exposing the host USB port to the client vm won't fool the dongle software. If the ultimate solution to "Windows in a virtual machine" shortfalls is to dual-boot Windows and Linux, that advanced configuration adds more complexity and it contradicts the ideal of "run Linux desktop exclusively".
For people to run Linux without issue, the person would need to possess technical skills equivalent to you (e.g. a HN poster) -- or the person has a "guardian angel" as on-call tech support (e.g. a son/daughter/friend) to get them over technical issues (like Netflix) with workarounds.
I don't doubt you've been able to run Linux exclusively and there are more examples like you. Nevertheless, it still required a very atypical usage profile to run a Linux desktop exclusively for the last 15 years.
Even today in 2019, I would not recommend the Linux desktop to any of my non-programmer and non-sysadmin type of friends & family unless I was willing to be their on-call tech support to handle their inevitable Windows compatibility issues.
For Linux to work in a mass-consumer-facing situation, it has to be an "appliance" type of installation and "invisible" such that the user doesn't realize they're running Linux. E.g. as the underlying os in Android smartphones, or the os in smart TVs, or the os in Tesla cars.
The tech community doesn't realize that there is more than just office applications and browsers that people use. I can not install BIM (Revit) software on Ubuntu for example. I can't install Lightroom on Ubuntu. I know that there are alternatives and work arounds to software, but consumers only understand what they understand and is easy and mainstream.
The tech community can't expect consumers to spend time looking for alternative software. I feel that this is why the Windows Phone failed, because there was a lack of mainstream software (apps).
The day that BIM (Revit) is available to install on Ubuntu is the day I switch.
Yes, a lot of Linux desktop enthusiasts only include "web browsing and email" scenarios in their mental models. Therefore, they are not aware of how the Windows os is an unavoidable platform dependency in many critical workflows. This perspective is why "Linux desktop exclusively" appears totally realistic to them.
A similar scenario to yours just happened to me last month. A land surveyor gave me some 3D laser scan point cloud files. (Trimble RealWorks files which are ".rwcx" files generated by the Trimble SX10.) The software (Trimble Business Center) to import those files only runs on MS Windows. I tried running it on VMware but the Trimble software required DirectX 11 so it crashed with an unrecoverable error[0]. Well, VMware only supports up to DirectX 10[1]. It's another example of "just run Windows in a vm" on Linux Desktop doesn't always solve the problem.
This also highlights another underappreciated and unseen difficulty with Linux desktops: You often don't know you will have a roadblock with Linux until you encounter that roadblock. It's not easy to predict your future incompatibilities!
Yes, unfortunately, architecture CAD and BIM are not among those fields :(
Gaming is still very game dependent. Think of it like a console. Some "exclusives" just wont run.
If someone is using their computer to surf, write emails, watch netflix, alongside lite gaming, I find linux to be more enjoyable. I don't have to do any command line oriented stuff at all for general use. The initial install is also very simple. On a desktop :)
We will have to agree to disagree. I think it is more an issue of framing perspective than anything.
Now, does using Ubuntu cover some of these glaring warts? Perhaps. But that often opens its own set of problems. Each comes with its own set of workarounds. Where macOS and Windows excel, is their sense of "polish". Most happy path things just work, and work 99% of the time.
All that said, I'm die-hard Linux ALL THE WAY! I just couldn't say that it's ready for most purposes. For the things that I'd use a tablet for? Sure.
But as far as I know that is this case. That Microsoft's offering is much stronger when it comes to large scale corporate deployments. Unless you want to make the claim that e.g. RedHat's offering is on par or better, which isn't something I have heard in the wild.
I don't see why you couldn't run x11 in the window manager with the new Linux kernel in Windows.
AMD, ARM (CPUs & Mali GPUs), Intel, VIA, Qualcomm (Adreno) all have support in kernel 5, whereas Microsoft is still stuck subsetting a small group of ARM GPUs and branding Windows 10's OpenGL ES support as DirectX 11. This is a repeat of the troubles Microsoft had with supporting Windows Phone, but now the userbase is significantly smaller despite a wider array of hardware to support.
Still, my old desktop scanner that the manufacturer stopped publishing drives for during the Windows Vista era? Yeah Linux runs it like a boss. No looking up drivers or config parameters on the internet, it just works.
YMMV, but as far as I know that's more or less a solved problem by default (for X anyway) with DRI3.
This particular complaint echoes folks (I was one) who booted Ubuntu desktop a decade ago and couldn't get wifi to work, and proceeded to complain about shoddy driver support (to present day, clearly), using only that single outdated* example as an argument. Of course this is compounded by a ~months to ~years delay in most desktops getting those improvements thanks to the glacial pace at which the mainstream desktop distros update their repos.
Was there a point when Optimus/Bumblebee/Prime was a shitshow? Yes. Is that still reality? No.
What this ignores is that Linux driver support is generally fantastic, works out of the box in a way that desktop architects at MS dream about and is infinitely more current in practice since you go to one place to update all your software, including driver software, something MS hasn't been able to get right in a decade of trying.
Regardless, mobile battery life's still worse on Linux. And as much as some things are super convenient compared to the Windows/Apple world, the truism a friend told me as I wrestled with Ubuntu ten years ago remains true today: Linux is for folks that enjoy configuring Linux.
* I have to use a combo of DKMS and an AUR package to get WiFi on my one year old IdeaPad, so outdated may be the wrong word there. Better to say that realtek and broadcom chips have gotten hit hard by Intel's move into consumer networking.
Worth pointing out that 'year of the Linux desktop' probably predates that.
Generally, yes, it's pretty decent on first go and there's a nice default happy path.
Unfortunately in my own experience, that path isn't particularly wide, and there's a huge number of gaps.
Version compatibility is a major issue, imo. One driver or package works great on one kernel version is completely broken on the next.
A few hours ago I tried to install the official AMD drivers for Ubuntu. It's not until the install script has already gone and screwed up my system that I get told that they don't support 19.04.
I just don't have that issue on Windows as a rule. I'm not claiming Windows is perfect by any means, it's got it's own set of issues.
Expected by whom, though?
I could understand it if it was major kernel versions or something like that, but it seems that a whole bunch of things are really tightly linked.
> Which now explicitly and clearly says the driver is for Ubuntu 18.04 only - did you not see that?
I honestly didn't. I went back and checked - yep, it does say for 18.04[1].
I have to say though that I wouldn't have automatically assumed it was ONLY for 18.04 though without it being more explicit about that. If the official drivers are available within the repo from now on, then it'd be great for AMD to actually say that. (I realise this isn't Ubuntu's fault)
[1] https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/amd-radeon-hd/amd-ra...
Advice to Linux users: one would best get their the graphics driver and a matching Linux kernel from the same source, either the Linux project, or the OS distribution. Mixing versions downloaded from AMD website with random kernel is supported by nobody and is testing your luck. That is a Windows model and kind of works with Linux only with nvidia drivers for their hardware, although it brings a lot of headaches too.
I agree that the installer should have warned you about the incompatibility at the beginning of the install, not at the end. That sucks.
With graphics, it is usually best to run the newest drivers with Linux, that means the newest kernel possible. Except for the older cards, which are not supported by AMD anymore (which sucks), where one can only use old drivers with appropriate old kernel.
I think the folks using Catalyst for better 3D acceleration have probably moved on to cards supported by amdgpu by now.
I'm running a quite current Dell on an essentially unpatched kernel (just includes Gentoo's default patches) with no additional modules involved and everything I tested up until now works, even fancy things like Dell's mini-dock.
I think that's a bit of a difference though. Vista came out nearly ~13 years ago, and we're talking things breaking a year or less later.
Heck, for more obscure drivers[1], it seems necessary to recompile for every kernel patch. Perhaps that's the fault of that driver's developer for not following the correct way to build kernel drivers, or there's something unique about this particular device - I don't know.
[1] an example: https://github.com/milesp20/intel_nuc_led
> I think that's a bit of a difference though. Vista came out nearly ~13 years ago, and we're talking things breaking a year or less later.
I'm not. I'm talking about the fact that drivers for devices older than me that have been merged into the kernel keep on working today while on Windows for some subsystems (like graphics or sound) you can't expect things to work after "just" 15 years. I admit that this is a long time, it's still a huge difference.
And yes, on Linux you are expected to recompile drivers for every new kernel version, that's intentional (https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...). Since the driver API is reasonably stable, the code doesn't need to be adjusted for every version, and if the driver has landed in the kernel, this is done while changing the API.
Many manufacturers contribute drivers to the kernel.
For linux, I am in control. For windows I am a puppet of Microsoft will.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dell_XPS_15_9570#Graphi...
Especially when the relevant part of the wiki is correct.[1]
[1]https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PRIME#PRIME_GPU_offload...
Optimus is definitely not a "solved problem", unless you know some method I didn't find in my dozens of hours of googling how to get it to work on a system76 laptop (Linux preinstalled) and a 2012 MacBook.
Nvidia meanwhile has stated they will not support Wayland, and has sandbagged the integration of their Linux Kernel patches for their single board computers (like the ones that are used in Tesla's cars). They don't give a fuck if their clients are stuck on broken, insecure BSPs, and frankly they operate as a malicious vendor: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/03/nvidia_server_gpus/
And there is a very simple reason for that. All desktop PCs and laptops are sold with windows, if no support exist the hardware as a whole will not exist.
Meanwhile in linux land I still can't use my three monitors because displayport MST doesn't work with the open source AMD driver. Support has existed for quite a while, but it seems none of the five people on the internet that have actually tried it has gotten it to work. Just one of the many driver issues I currently have on a couple of machines with linux.
> YMMV, but as far as I know that's more or less a solved problem by default (for X anyway) with DRI3.
Just no.
Maybe I shouldn't have started with an "obscure" example. Maybe that the driver crashes if displays are awakened from sleep? Mind you - only waking the screens from sleep, not the entire system (that doesn't work either, but I don't know which driver that is to blame for that yet).
Or that ubuntu LTS are just incapable of turning off most machines I've installed it on? (machines that did exist for a while when the LTS version came out).
Under the 'GPU Offloading' heading (the feature most folks want in dual discrete/integrated laptops):
> Note: This setting is no longer necessary when using the default intel/modesetting driver from the official repos, as they have DRI3 enabled by default and will therefore automatically make these assignments. Explicitly setting them again does no harm, though.
I had to do nothing out of the box to have a working PRIME setup on my work laptop over a year ago, and I'd never used a laptop with discrete graphics prior. My only driver issue was with DisplayLink (proprietary), where I had to pin xorg because it wasn't compatible with 1.19.
It does work, but it's not very nice, which is what we are upset about.
eGPUs in a laptop format is a bit silly, you sacrifice the mobility of the laptop to get a very cut down discrete mobile GPU. AMD has started to eat this market alive due to the performance per watt advantage: https://redd.it/bc5hkg
Consumers are much more likely to bring a sub-5lb HP x360 everywhere than a bulky 8+lb laptop.
Anyways, I'm pretty happy with the weight of my Dell XPS 15 which has an Nvidia card, but I regret buying it because of the lackluster Linux support.
I haven't seen any laptops with dedicated AMD cards at all lately, and until recently I had no idea that AMD's integrated cards were so competitive, so that's why I didn't. I plan to buy AMD next time I'm in the market.
+ Network Effects
+ Brand recognition in the general public
+ Indifference to FOSS principles
+ Resistance to changeMicrosoft still plays dirty and has done that for a long time.
If this really is the year of the linux desktop, it's not what I had imagined.
Unsurprisingly, the latter case gets truer for low computer litteracy adults for who investing in a decent smartphone has a better ROI than buying a meh phone with a cheap laptop.
Anecdotally we bought our aging parents each an ipad two years ago.
They were decent but not that proficient at Windows, but got comfortable very fast at viewing/saving photos, printing, email/messaging and browsing on the ipad.
From there they gave up on their budget “my carrier gave it for free” phone to move to the iphone Xr and started doing all of the above on their phones most of the time. The laptop is now a third rank device they use to check their savings once a month.
For most of their lifes PC were the only way to do some tasks, including photo management (and we were sharing them tons and tons of photo, they also filled SD card fter SD cards in the summer), and it’s only recently (basically the ipad Pro) that looking at us they though they could give it a try.
I have a hard time believing this, do you have any studies to back this up?
(And I mean the desktop version. O365 is dumbed down half-way to Google's Office Suite level - which is cool for an occasional document or spreadsheet, but is lacking both features and efficiency for professional use.)
99% of my job requires nothing more than a web browser and a terminal with a SSH client. The remainder is mostly Wireshark.
Indeed it does. At her last-1 job, my wife could probably do most of the spreadsheet-related stuff in GSuite, except for that one spreadsheet that brought desktop Excel to its knees, and would totally explode the browser if you've ever tried it.
My experience from watching other people and occasional summer jobs is mixed. Some of the stuff you technically could manage on GSuite. Others you wouldn't, not because the files were too big/complex, but because the office computers were underpowered.
And just as the Mac Mini is a laptop without screen and keyboard, the latest Macbooks are more and more iPads with a good keyboard. Well, good keyboards is questionable even these days...
https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/stable_apis
So it is meaningless.
https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/packag...
Second, iOS being based on UNIX hardly matters, no one is doing shell scripts and writing UNIX daemons on it.
Thirdly, no one was talking about macOS on that comment,.
Finally, even if you want to bring macOS into the picture, while macOS is a proper UNIX, what matters for Apple community developers lives in C++, Objective-C and Swift libraries, hardly POSIX related.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_...
It's just progressed very far, and their latest moves are only desperate efforts to "embrace the cancer" before it completely consumes the market.
It took years for Microsoft to take iPhone seriously. They never predicted the “byo phone” era and figured IT pros would insist on enterprise features. Years after iphones were out the Windows phone OS code names were bears that ate blackberries.
Oh wait...
Microsoft brings integration not possible in VM. You can actually make Linux tools part of your complex heterogeneous workflow.
How is their WSL2 integration is different from something like shared folders?
Also, while I think it is useful. I imagine much of the hype here is also from the weirdness of it all. Would you agree that it is noteworthy that Microsoft is publishing a Linux-kernel for Windows? It think it is.
The next step is fully locked down hardware that requires a signed OS. Linux will not run on it, but MS will pretend to support you by allowing linux apps to run on their kernel. Then, once no hardware will allow you to run linux natively they will depreciate it and get people to migrate to better supported APIs of their own.
People are just walking right into this as if none of Microsofts history ever happened.
The only OK scenario is that MS becomes a larger version of Redhat and migrates users the other direction. Is that happening? No. It's all about bringing your toys to their house.
In that line of thinking you also want costs of running your own cloud solution as low as possible, so it kind of even makes sense to phase out Windows because all competitors are running their cloud on Linux based systems, where they get all upsides of collaboration on Linux. Where MS trying to run all their stuff on Win pour money into something they could have for free or just also investing a lot less into Linux than what they spend maintaining Win.
I don't see this in reality though. Any kind of corporate office IT is still firmly in the hands of Microsoft and Windows and I don't see any change for that on the horizon. Quite the contrary as IT departments have to double down on applying the Microsoft way with Windows 10 Enterprise and its changed licensing scheme. Where you've been able to dodge having a machine dedicated to license management (Windows Server, of course), you now are forced into a different licensing setup with Windows 10 Enterprise. Why Windows 10? Because Microsoft forbids you to use anything older on new hardware. Why Enterprise? Because you can't reliably make Windows 10 Pro stop phoning home about the documents you are opening. The only offer here is Windows 10 Enterprise.
All this futzing around with open source and Linux subsystems is just for the developer facing part of Windows. All the other areas, those that developers rarely encounter unless they talk to IT, are still shaped by the same Microsoft of 10 or 15 years ago.
Microsoft has seen that there was a huge brain drain towards apps running on Linux servers, developed on Macs (webdev, containers, deep learning, ...).
The new strategy is to get developers back on Windows via Linux. Once it's the new norm to run your apps in Linux containers that run inside Windows Server 2022, developed on Windows 10 machines, they are going to edge Linux out of the equation again. You won't be able to switch your containers away from Windows after that.
Believing that it doesn't matter how your end user devices fit into corporate IT or ignoring what steps Microsoft has taken to make Windows Server the default in the cloud is really dangerous.
In other words, I'm not worried about WSL as a vector.
And I, personally, will never forgive M$ for Elopcalypse, burning platform and death of nokia.
They don't need to do this anymore, pushing Windows is not their priority, they want to get people on Azure, Office 365 and Xbox live. Everything is about services these days.
It's not very sane to run anything on Windows.
Using Linux on a personal machine is primarily so you can trust your machine to serve you and no one else. This is defeated if Windows or backdoored firmware is running below Linux.
Note that the no lock-in benefit also exists on the desktop and because of that it makes sense to switch to Linux on a machine that requires proprietary firmware as an intermediate step to moving to a better machine like those from https://puri.sm/
Chrome and Windows using the Linux kernel as a POSIX support layer is only going to diminish the Linux desktop community and the quality of its modern hardware support.
Maybe if ms makes an nvidia driver too. :/
Edit: To those questioning if this really counts as Linux on the Desktop. Yes, I understand what you're saying, I too am a bit of a blowhard about Linux and prefer to use the real deal, not some kernel on a kernel bs. But I think this is still a huge deal in terms of the accessibility of Linux, think of how many young programmers will be able to dip their toes in the Linux pool on their gaming rigs without having to go through an Ubuntu install process (I write, thinking in the back of my mind that I had to go through that, and so maybe they should too.) Yes there is something of an ideological compromise here, because the Linux they're running is sitting on a binary blob and not truly free... but Linux still exists in it's gloriously free form for them to use when they decide that's important to them, I see no harm in them reaping some of the other benefits of Linux without the freedom, it will hopefully become an on ramp to more Linux adopters and programmers.