For my money, the year of the Linux Desktop was 2008. It's just that nobody noticed.

Since 2008, Linux has had the best combination of performance and hardware support on older machines, and the advantage has only grown since then. Windows and MacOS keep falling further behind in usability on machines older than four years, and that's the only hardware I would purchase for personal use. Why throw your money away on planned obsolescence, on an OS that keeps getting worse and worse, when you could use Linux on an older machine and have things keep getting better and better?

I noticed! I've been using Linux for decades, and Ubuntu since... 12.04 I think? It's the Linux Desktop for me. I game, I work, I watch movies, play music, connect to wireless stuff, I do pretty much everything I want -- it's a joy. (I always like telling how my wireless HP printer is easier to set up on Ubuntu than on OSX. It simply works on Ubuntu, but the Mac has trouble discovering it...)

I've been slowly moving that way for years. I started dual-booting Windows and Ubuntu, Ubuntu for coding and Windows for everything else -- but over time I've been spending more and more time in Ubuntu, until I looked up one day and realized I used Windows for gaming and Ubuntu for everything else. I was going weeks without booting into Windows.

And then last week after getting my computer back from repairs I did a clean install of Pop!_OS. No more Windows at all -- I have a fully Linux desktop.

Granted I ended up leaving unallocated space for a Windows partition (shrinking a LUKS partition was not very fun, it took me two attempts) for when I eventually want to play some game, but who knows when that will be.

Anyway, yeah, point is, for a sufficiently tech-savvy user, the year of the Linux Desktop has arrived. (And I could be wrong, but I think that threshold is actually pretty low. I'd guess that as long as you're not afraid of technology, you can handle installing Linux. Pop!_OS has a great installer and app store, too.)

> MacOS keep falling further behind in usability on machines older than four years

The huge user base of folks running thunderbolt 2 based MacBook pros from 2015 or earlier seems to disagree and a vocal minority of them say you can pry that model from their cold dead hands here on HN. It’s supported by the latest OSes with zero penalty, performance or otherwise.

I'm using a 2012 model, won't ever replace it unless it breaks. Has been working perfectly with all updates and upgrades for 5+yrs

In terms of usability, yes, but the problem with Linux in recent years has rarely been usability, it's the lack of workstation-level applications that are readily available on Windows and MacOS.

As long as Linux lacks native support for Autodesk, Adobe CC, Office 365, FL Studio, Pro Tools, etc. and dozens of other niche programs by ISVs it will never approach the mainstream with any sort of widespread appeal. Currently Linux on the desktop is suitable for people who are aware of these limitations and either circumvent (through technical means such as WINE, which are opaque to the typical end-user) or tolerate them, acknowledging the limitations and doing nothing to mitigate them while embracing Linux's strengths as a web and educational medium (think Chromebooks).

I legitimately have tried going Linux-only several times in my life and I've just come back to Windows every time. I know it's not ideal from a security perspective, a privacy perspective, etc. but there is just zero competition with Windows in terms of a software support perspective. Windows' backwards compatibility and range of software support is a masterclass in how to enable productivity. Even MacOS doesn't come close, with how frequently Apple breaks stuff that's expected to be supported (32-bit app support, Rosetta, etc) and how frequently they change architectures (68k > PowerPC > Intel > RISC, vs Microsoft with 32-bit Intel > 64/32-bit Intel)

That seems like a moving goalpost to me.

First, it wasn't usable. Then, it didn't have drivers. Then, it crashed a lot. Now it doesn't have Autodesk stuff? For the record, my mom doesn't know what Autodesk is. A "desktop" for me is where you can play movies, edit documents, browse the net and check email.

And Linux is fantastic for that, until you come across a use case that is outside those typical bounds.

Say your mom decides she likes photography one day and decides to buy a camera and take some lessons. Say her teacher says "we use lightroom and photoshop so you'll need to have these because they're industry standard" and she has no idea what to do and why the Adobe CC launcher won't load on Linux. Then she'll call you up and ask why it won't work, you'll respond with "there's no photoshop, you can use GIMP though" and your mom being a regular computer user won't be familiar with the eccentricities of GIMP as editing software and will be lost and unable to follow through on her new hobby.

This has literally happened to people in my life I've recommended Ubuntu to. Too many times to count.

That is a real problem, but in my opinion unrelated to whether an OS is "ready for the desktop". That's just a business problem, not a technical problem: Adobe cares about platforms where the money is.

It's not a technical problem because people like my mom can learn to use GIMP (note: people who use photo editing software are "pros" of a kind, anyway; "regular" users don't know how to edit photos, either) or Krita or whatever. But even if you fix GIMP's UX issues, it's still not Photoshop or Lightroom, so the problem remains: there's no Adobe software for Linux.

But that's not what being ready for the desktop is about. That's not what a desktop is for most people, either. All in my opinion, of course.

PS: if Lightroom magically makes it to Linux (hypothetical thought experiment), but then it's Overwatch or some other high profile AAA game that doesn't run natively, is it still a problem of the Linux desktop?

>That is a real problem, but in my opinion unrelated to whether an OS is "ready for the desktop". That's just a business problem, not a technical problem: Adobe cares about platforms where the money is.

Only back in the day part of the idea around "Linux for the Desktop" was that everybody would use the "better" FOSS programs, and not wait for MS/Adobe/Autodesk/Avid/etc.

But, as you note, this hasn't happened, and "even if you fix GIMP's UX issues, it's still not Photoshop or Lightroom".

>But that's not what being ready for the desktop is about. That's not what a desktop is for most people, either.

Well, pragmatically the desktop is a Windows machine, which just works, doesn't require them to think long and hard about which cpu/memory/laptop/peripherals/etc to buy, has drivers for all of their devices, has all kinds of apps they might use (beyond email and web), and so on.

> Only back in the day part of the idea around "Linux for the Desktop" was that everybody would use the "better" FOSS programs, and not wait for MS/Adobe/Autodesk/Avid/etc.

That wasn't really like I and many others envisioned, no. Free software have other benefits that make them "better", not merely technical issues.

Valve has been making amazing in-roads into the Linux gaming sector with Proton.

I'd say gaming is basically there now and it only gets better each year. I often buy games without checking if they are compatible and they run flawlessly.

If she gets seriously into photography the cost of a Windows machine is the least of the expenses she's heading into, but I understand that a main machine running Windows is a good insurance. And yet I didn't have one, even a backup, since 2009. I won't be too worried.

Those are just the common stuff that everyone does with a computer, but I think most people ends up adding one special thing to that list. For some that is gaming, others it's doing tax, photo editing, programming, or some specialty software for a niche hobby that few people think about.

Even my mum ended up using specialized software software for her knitting hobby.

I'd say you can do almost anything except the specialist software stuff. By specialist I mean "brand stuff"; for example, the problem with a photo editing course is that instead of teaching you the principles, they often teach you how to do stuff in (say) Lightroom, essentially compounding the problem. I understand why they do this -- it cuts corners and assumes a common ground; supporting a multitude of editing software the instructor might not be familiar with would be a nightmare -- but it doesn't help the situation.

If they taught you the principles of editing photos, without using brand specific names, you could do this with GIMP or Krita.

I do hobby stuff with my Linux laptop, by the way :)

If they didn’t show how to do it in specific software then I don’t think the majority of people would get it.

Agreed. Though I think the main problem is that an instructor cannot be expected to provide guidance for a dozen different tools. I understand the problem, I just wish they could approach this from an angle of general principles instead of specific tools.

This is something I don't think enough people consider. There's a very long tail of niche software for niche use cases, and even "casual" computer users are likely to end up needing something from that very large set.

The problem I see is increasingly that people who want to do the non-professional things lean towards tablets instead of desktops for them. Most people use their “desktops” for work and hobby things where what software can run on them is incredibly important.

Totally! I have to say in this regard, a Linux desktop is very satisfying. I game, watch movies, code, do videoconferencing, print stuff, edit photos, all without much tweaking -- if at all.

>That seems like a moving goalpost to me.

Reality is a moving goalpost itself. The desktops (Windows, macOS) aren't in some standstill waiting for Linux desktops to catch up.

But what you described isn't a "moving goalposts" case anyway. It's problems that need to be solved one after another and which all were initially present as issues.

Since at first, it wasn't usable, it wouldn't matter if it has Autodesk apps. Usability was more important.

Once it got usable, it still didn't matter if it had Autodesk apps, when it didn't have drivers.

Then, when it got the drivers, that only meant you could use your printer, wifi, bluetooth, etc. But the "crashing a lot" would be a problem greater still, greater than the lack of commercial apps.

>A "desktop" for me is where you can play movies, edit documents, browse the net and check email.

And for billions of people it's those things, plus work stuff they need to be able to run, multimedia creation they need once in a while, game stuff they like to play and so on...

Now that it does have most things in order, the lack of commercial apps is another problem it should work on (when it comes to people's needs).

> the lack of commercial apps is another problem it should work on (when it comes to people's needs)

I think that's a losing proposition. People like me who use Linux have mostly everything they need -- and there really is a lot for the Linux desktop these days. The people who need "commercial apps" are on Windows and MacOS already, and for them, the Linux experience will always be subpar (I'm assuming for them the vast quantities of FOSS are either not enough, or not easy to use). Moving to a "commercial desktop" like Canonical seems to be trying to do will result in a failure and alienate the current userbase who loves Linux for what it is. Attempts at gatekeeping, doubly so... just look at the reactions against every move Canonical does in this direction.

> Linux lacks native support for Autodesk, Adobe CC, Office 365, FL Studio, Pro Tools

I understand your point but I've been using Ubuntu since 2009 and never needed any of those programs. I do another job (web development, mostly backend.)

Actually I had to run the real Excel (not LibreOffice) for a project many years ago. I created a VM with VirtualBox, got a license for Excel from my customer and installed it there.

> As long as Linux lacks native support for Autodesk, Adobe CC, Office 365, FL Studio, Pro Tools, etc. and dozens of other niche programs by ISVs it will never approach the mainstream with any sort of widespread appeal.

Meh, I think it's not an all or nothing situation. My client uses exclusively Windows on the desktop but basically the most "advanced" applications they use are Excel and Outlook. Practically all their line of business software is web-based. Most run on Windows for some reason, but as far as the user is concerned, it's just a web app.

I bet that the situation is similar for most companies, and the other tools you mentioned aren't all that widespread. Of course, for the companies that use them to make money they're important. But I would say that's "specialized use" territory. I bet most of the people working for my client (> 3000 employees) have no idea what Pro Tools are, and they are more or less in the media sector.

I personally use the Adobe CC photography suite as a hobby. And although for the moment only lightroom is concerned, I get the feeling that adobe is looking to move the products to the cloud. Microsoft has already done this with Office 365.

For my (admittedly limited) use case, installed Office is dead. It's a pain to install, takes forever to update, and most importantly, works way, way worse than the online version. Outlook online doesn't lag and the messages scroll while I move the slider instead of waiting for me to let it go. Just like it used to before they switch to the new interface around 2013 or 2016 with all the white space. The online version even works on Firefox on Linux. Teams works on Linux too. Remoting to windows servers is way more practical on Linux (Remmina) than windows. So I would say that for my client, the reason they still use windows is basically inertia. I'm using Linux full time and never had an issue interfacing with the other people working there.

I am not quite sure it was that early, but I agree it is in the past. Specifically, I contend that the year of the Linux desktop was some time before 2015, when Microsoft made (a version of) Windows (10) available gratis.

The only cloud accounts users care about are logins for all their web based services which are synced by Firefox or Chrome.

They already have for example an email any web based services that come with Ubuntu are just something the people who actually use Ubuntu have to click through.

Normal people who by and large do not actually use Ubuntu would probably be more likely to sign up for such options if they are the default option but no more likely to actually use them.

The comparison to side loading is particularly badly made. On mobile platforms you need a platform specific account to install even free apps because ultimately also the way you consume paid for content.

Linux desktops all come with a platform specific app store that requires no particular integration because it is used to consume free content.

Paid content is consumed in the web browser.

Games are largely consumed via steam.

Paid apps are a harder sale because of the Linux desktops 3% market share and major apps that do offer support not wanting to give 30% to and platform.

Only people trying to make hundreds of thousands to millions of small sales via access to the massive ios or Android markets are willing to give up 30%.

Normal people don't know or care which cloud accounts they're logged into. I don't think I've ever heard of anyone talk about a (personal) Microsoft Account as a positive. People care about syncing their photos between their computer and their phone, sure, but neither Microsoft Cloud nor Canonical's whateveritis does that. People don't know how to get their emails from these extra accounts, iCloud included.

These OS-cloud-account systems may make sense for businesses but they absolutely don't help home users.

> A desktop without a cloud account is

...ideal? Desktops have always come without a cloud account in all computers I've used since my first Commodore 64. The thought that a cloud account is somehow a requirement for a "desktop" environment seems so alien to me I can't even begin to see what our ideas of computing have in common.

An internet connection is required, sure. But a "cloud account" is the invasive thing I try to avoid or remove, each time more frequently, from my home computers.

There are millions of people using Google sites on browser(no apps) on windows. There is no silver bullet "make it cloud ready" to make Linux desktop happen.

My “cloud account“ is on linode and it’s cheaper, less of a hassle, and more feature complete than Microsoft’s/google’s/apple’s offerings.

Nope - setting up an iCloud account is filling in a username and password. Your approach doesn’t even come close to being anywhere near that easy.

It also requires buying an iPhone and almost none of the features work with your desktop (unless it’s a mac) so IMO that’s not so easy.

Actually there is a web version of most of the service and also a native Windows client.

It doesn’t require buying an iPhone. Nor a Mac.

Honestly I think it’s simpler than that. The Linux desktop experience is just terrible... I have never successfully installed a Linux distro without having to fiddle with some boot flag or some config file. Every major Linux desktop environment has been unreliable at best. Software support is fragmented across dozens of distros.

I think WSL has been the biggest win for Linux on the desktop, but ironically it’s on windows.

What year is this? Linux desktop experience is fantastic in 2020. It has been for several years. That's bordering FUD you're spreading.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, I've had it on my machines in many different flavors, ever since 2010. However for at least the past 3 desktops I've had, there were always some issues during installation or fiddling to do after installation to get things running smoothly.

For example, my current home PC has a Intel i9-9900ks on a nice gigabyte motherboard and a NVIDIA 2070 Super. When I try to boot into Ubuntu 20.04, the display driver always fails (black screen / a mess of pixels). I had to boot with some grub flags in order to get to a stage where I could install the proprietary drivers. This is because of the open source drivers for NVIDIA GPUs being terrible, it's not the fault of Linux but that's not the point, it's a bad user experience for at least half of the users with a fairly modern discrete GPU.

A few months ago my girlfriend (who has a degree in computer science and is currently getting her Phd in mathematics) tried to install Ubuntu on her Razer Blade 15 (2018). Initially the she had some trouble with getting the NVME drive to show up (it was an issue with UEFI settings), we eventually fixed that but after installation, the wifi didn't work. At that point she gave up and ended up going with WSL, she was up and running 30 mins later.

Maybe if you buy a dell developer edition or thinkpad, you will have no troubles.

The average user is not going to want to hear that they have to either return their NVIDIA card and get a AMD one (a nonquestion for people who need CUDA / tensorflow) or go read some wiki about how to resolve the issue. They will just go back to windows/mac.

People who need cuda will be running the nv blob anyway, not the noveau driver. Linux's obsession with open-source is holding it back from usefulness.

Same here, and I prefer Linux systems that give me more control, so I take the time to install Void and Gentoo on all my machines (and even my primary dedicated server runs Void).

But whenever I try to install Ubuntu or Fedora on a laptop, it just installs and boots fine.

I recently noticed how severely is Android limitted in this during the recent Android Firefox update fiasco.

On desktop linux I could have just backed up the profile folder and downgraded the package & it might not have hit the repositories at all due to negative user feedback.

Example from 2020: Running Ubuntu with two displays each of which has a different scaling factor requires switching to Wayland, because on X11, any window that touches the edge of one of the displays will run unusably slowly. (I don’t know why.) A non-technical “typical desktop user” would never have figured this out.

This is on a fully supported Linux machine (XPS 13 9300 Developer Edition).

Well, thats mostly due to Ubuntu still defaulting to X. Fedora switched to Wayland by default back in 2016 and even RHEL 8 (released 2019) defaults to Wayland.

I feel like that just reinforces my point. Figuring out which random unsupported distro to install on the Linux laptop you bought is even less feasible for non-technical users than choosing a different login session on Ubuntu.

This guy isn't looking for solutions.

Is there a way to use Wayland in Ubuntu? I run Kubuntu, not sure if that comes with Wayland by default.

Ubuntu ships with both, so you just need to choose a different desktop session at login time.

Install Linux Mint and be done with it

Linux desktop experience with tweaking is in my humble opinion best in class. The linux desktop experience out of the box is acceptable on systems where it works.

Fantastic is a matter of opinion and I have a feeling that the majority wouldn't share that opinion.

People with your opinion are most likely used to buying hardware that is supported or at least not buying stuff that almost certainly wont work and installing and moving on. You think the parent poster is full of it.

People with the parents opinion are used to buying something that works well with windows trying to install Linux finding 3 things that don't work well fixing 2 out of 3 and quitting in frustration. He thinks you are full of it or willing to devote far more time to fixing broken shit.

No it isn't. It's still garbage. Mutli-adapter, multi monitor setups are still a nightmare. Graphics performance is still atrocious.

I guess if you need a thin client to your cloud services, linux desktop is great. Not really for lots of other things.

What distro are you using? I've been using multi-monitor setups for years, and it works with zero configuration on Ubuntu and Debian.

With more than 1 (high end) video card?

Graphic performance is excellent if you don't insist on say using Nvidia hardware with the open source Nouveau drivers everyone knows sucks. Open source AMD and closed source Nvidia both provide good performance.

Going with just US figures the average spent on a computer in 2020 is 632 usd total. A high end card on the other hand is $400 to $800 each. a 2000-3000 pc with 800-1600 in graphics hardware is probably somewhat up there in the 99th percentile of configurations its pretty niche even so I cannot imagine any even technical challenges whatsoever with all the monitors hooked to the same GPU whereas a high end card ought to support 3 monitors.

So now are we talking about a 2000-3000 dollar pc with 2 dedicated GPUS with 4+ monitors?

Brief research seems to suggest this is challenging. Improving it would also seem not to benefit many users. Even talking merely about windows gamers only 1% used crossfire or sli.

There is even a plausible solution for people who want lots of displays so long as they are ok with a single gpu.

Although supporting 2 to 3 monitors is incredibly common there are actually cards which support 4-6.

For example

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-5700-xt-rx-5700-xt-t...

There is probably no good solution for multiple GPUs + multiple displays because virtually nobody uses it now and longer term it seems even less will.

The logical decision is to go with the strongest single GPU with enough outputs for the monitors you plan to drive.

I appreciate you proving my point. High end desktops are not viable on Linux, which is a shame, because I really wanted it to work.

I give you a variety of points and all I get back is a single flip quip. This is a disappointing rejoinder.

You CAN have a high end desktop. You can even have 3-6 monitors if it makes you happy. The only thing you cannot do is plug your monitors into the outputs of both GPUs. You must purchase GPUs wherein a single GPU has sufficient outputs and let the secondary GPU serve to aid in your favorite GPU compute or game playing adventure.

For example

https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-radeon-rx-vega-64-gv-rxvega6...

This supports 6 displays and crossfire so it plays well with lots of displays and multiple GPU.

Stepping up further in price

https://www.newegg.com/evga-geforce-rtx-2080-super-08g-p4-32...

Supports 4 displays and SLI

Is it possible to have two cards and have the second card do computations for the first one to render? I would have thought the time it took to move the data would make that hard.

Generally one actually runs games on one monitor in the first place so this is the only way it even could work. Work can be divided up by frame for example.

Crossfire and SLI rely on a high speed interconnect and game specific support.

Dual GPU is a much smaller niche than "high end desktops".

Multiple gpus are even supported just not outputs hooked up to both GPUs as a single X screen.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/NVIDIA/Tips_and_tricks#...

My experience aligns far more with parent's than yours. The Linux Desktop experience is still pretty garbage.

Here is an example : take an Intel nuc : Ubuntu, everything works out of box. Win10 ? Let's download a WiFi driver on Intel site ! Let's hope you have Ethernet or a windows 10 supported wifi device. And no, the wifi dongle lying around is too old, windows 7 only...

What is your example ?

Bought an Intel NUC, installed Ubuntu, no hardware-accelerated video decoding on Firefox and Chromium needed to be compiled manually with a patch.

This functionality works out of the box on Windows (not that I installed it, as Windows 10 is a dealbreaker to me so I ended up returning the NUC and choosing something else).

Here's a counter example. Buy a thinkpad and try to put whatever distro you want on it.

Have a thinkpad X1 Carbon Pro and have run fedora, ubuntu and Qubes OS on it at various points. Have Ubuntu on it now (as that's the distro my company wants everyone to use). In all of those distros the install has been completely trouble-free and everything works completely fine.

Also I don't use wayland and don't have the scaling perf problem that someone else was talking about.

Have an X1 Yoga here with Arch on it, it was painless.

Bought an X390 for my mom last year, tossed Ubuntu on it after putting in a larger NVMe. (she prefers to use a more 'mainstream' distro so she can follow tutorials to setup new dev environments for things she's tinkering with) Her Macbook Air is weighing down paper now.

The Air is actually a quite good Ubuntu machine, I used it for several years, years ago.

I just did. 202p Lenovo T490. Installed Linux Mint on all three of them, one for me and the rest for family members.

Everything works out of the box

My guess is the contrast in experience can come from difference in hardware. Drivers can be a big hassle for desktop if you're unlucky. Occasionally when I get new hardware that's not a laptop it can be frustrating with GPU or (curses) Bluetooth drivers. It's been improving a lot, though. Lenovo and Dell have really gotten better over the years.

Funnily enough, Windows is going to phase out drivers from Windows Update, so I can see the scales shift.

My pains with Linux rarely have to do with hardware. It is a gigantic complex incongruent mess of an operating system where software routinely requires hours of my time to make it work properly, google searches have a tendency to land you on 5 year old pages, which in Linux terms means they are now 3 major revisions out of date, and the community is full of condescending evangelists.

I'm thinking it's been a few years, and/or you and the parent decided to install arch/gentoo instead of ubuntu/fedora.

Maybe Linux would get wider adoption if its evangelists weren't so condescending? Maybe instead of assuming everyone who's had a bad experience with your OS must be missing something obvious, you should give the benefit of the doubt?

Until earlier this year I ran Lubuntu on 4/5 of the PCs I own. I've tried other distros but that one worked the best for me and it was still a giant pain in the ass. There's only 1 Linux PC left in my fleet now and it is mostly because I haven't turned it on in 6 months.

You are of course correct. I'm sorry about my outburst.

I've had too many experiences with "Haha linux on desktop bad nerd haha" people, and let it get to me. I apologize.

Not sure if the replier was only specifically talking to you. I don’t like Linux [on the desktop]. Most responses in geekier online communities do seem to be smug and/or assume you don’t know things.

That was happening in this thread too outside of you.

For reference, I too have spent a decent amount of time with Lubuntu. I doubt I’ll switch from Mac for foreseeable future.

> Not sure if the replier was only specifically talking to you.

> That was happening in this thread too outside of you.

I was guilty of it as well though, and would rather accept responsibility and change than carry on perpetuating the current state of affairs.

My experiences with Debian have been pretty clean outside of needing to pre-prepare the binary blob package for the ethernet and wifi drivers on the slightly older laptop that I wanted to install it on. This was expected due to Debian's stance on non-free packages on the install media.

Pretty much any other modern distro install has gone 100% cleanly with no prep-work needed.

That pretty closely matches my experiences as well. The only exception is that my first experience with Linux on something other than a raspberry pi was an optimus laptop.

NVIDIA issues aside, I've never had any issues with using a desktop oriented distro as a desktop. Way fewer issues than I've had with Windows.

Let’s hear some specific examples.

Installing software that isn't in your distro's repo, either because it is too new, too old, or was just never adopted by a maintainer, is usually a pain in the ass.

Software routinely requires tiresome google searches that largely land you in out of date non-documentation in order to get basic functionality (like say, drag and drop) working.

Getting help from the community is basically impossible because whatever you're trying to do you're "using the wrong software/distro" or "don't really want that".

Oh yeah, and any time you bring up these sort of things someone like you shows up to do their damnedest to dismiss these complaints. Often by comparing these problems to similar problems in Windows, as though that is somehow changes anything.