Most likely that means I'll run a Linux laptop for programming, and have a partition for Windows on a gaming computer, cuz I love me some games. I know Steam is gradually approaching Linux, but most AAA games still run best under Win. Plus it's an easy platform (outside OS X) to run multimedia production tools. Sorry, I just don't think Gimp or other Linux tools for multimedia production are good enough yet, but the hope remains that they will someday compete with giants like Adobe. For real. And not just as free but woefully inadequate alternatives. Please correct me if I'm wrong here, though. I'd love to be surprised, if you are able!
While there is some merit to this claim, I don't agree with it entirely. In my experience using these systems side-by-side for over 10 years now, it's pretty obvious that Microsoft has stabilized while "stealing" Apple's good parts, and that Apple hasn't really evolved any further than they got in about 2010. In essence, Apple has allowed Microsoft to close the gap, although by about 2005 Apple managed to become so high quality on the computer market, and so ahead of its time (by "stealing" the good parts from Linux) that it's hard for me to say how they could possibly keep that position for long. (I'm not saying that they literally stole things. Obviously they've done a lot of innovation themselves, but there are also some pretty obvious signs of "inspiration" going on too.)
There has for sure been downgrades with Apple too, but not really in regards to pure stability. In my experience most of it started in the 2010's, when Apple decided to turn away from the pro market to focus more on the trend consumer market instead. At first it happened slowly with a few technical changes that put off web designers. However the first major blow was against Final Cut Pro. I guess it turned out well in the end, but in the beginning they stumbled badly and gave away a large market share to Adobe as media pros started fleeing from Apple. Soon after came system changes that made Adobe crash more often (I'm sure it was just a coincidence...), only resulting in customers fleeing from Apple as a whole. Today Apple Mac's are decidedly more of a tightly controlled trend brand than the prosumer brand it used to be. (Kind of like Hasselblad has gone from the photo engineer's brand to an almost purely luxury brand by now.) (Also I really miss the MagSafe lol.)
100% agreed. And I would even go so far as to say that Steve Jobs had such a strong vision of how things could be, that it was his greatest mistake to put someone in charge who did not (Tim Cook).
But apart from that it is a bad deal.
Windows degraded itself with its bad store, telemetry and PaaS dream, but yes, as soon as they could Apple developed in the same direction. Microsoft suffers from bad decisions on some management level.
> continuing to use Apple/Google/Microsoft
That is probably 98%+ of devices that most typical people use for everyday computing, across phone, laptop, and desktop. Whether it is an android device, an iPhone, a Dell laptop or a new M1 macbook you are beholden to a corporation that doesn't care about privacy. I would argue that Apple cares a bit more, and I really hope they respond to the most recent shit show with some changes, but I'm not holding my breath.
And before "have you tried this *nix distro??" comments appear, they are still too hard to setup and nowhere near as user-friendly for most people on an everyday basis. And hell, if you setup Chrome and Gsuite as your default tools of choice, as many do (or are forced to because their job) how much are you really breaking free anyways?
I don't know the solution, but its clear that in the war between privacy and convenience and usability that privacy is on the ropes and its the last round of the fight.
However, in the developer sphere, GNU/Linux is way more represented. In the Stack Overflow 2020 survey, 26% of people said they were using a Linux based OS [0]. This number has been gradually increasing over the years so further growth is expectable. It's less than one percent less than the Mac OS share of 27%, but I'm not sure how much noise there is.
So Linux is usable enough for a growing community of developers, and many laptop/computer vendors targeting the developer market offer GNU/Linux as a preinstalled option.
As a result, at least for software people, Linux is a real privacy preserving alternative on the Desktop. HN is a software forum, and the blog post was also made with people educated about software as the recipients. So I think the post you are replying to should be understood not in a global context but in a context of the IT crowd.
Of course, it's not beautiful that Linux is less of an alternative to people who need to use complicated niche ISV software, but generally any industry can make the move if there is a subset of users pushing towards GNU/Linux.
[0]: https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2020#technology-de...
Linux is fine, but it doesn't just work, and it needs to in order to gain a foothold not just in the developer community but with the general public -- that's the lesson Android has taught us. Until it does it will not budge the numbers. It just won't.
The real apologism here comes from the Linux community, who believes that by virtue of existing, and not being an Apple or Microsoft project, it should be widely accepted in spite of being a distant third in usability. Linux needs to step up its game or it will forever remain a distant third. The general public does not care about "free and open source" -- heck they barely care about privacy at all. That's just us, the HN crowd.
I love Linux in theory, I use it a lot, but my daily driver is macOS. Frankly it likely will remain so even as I transition to being an Android engineer in the coming months.
I haven't used MacOS for a couple of years but I can say for certain that Linux is not that far behind Windows and sometimes even ahead. I think the main problem is lack of application support but specifically for developers most applications are already there.
There are no multitouch gestures, there's screen tearing, 4K video playback on a 4K screen is choppy, sleep and wake up both take a long time, deep sleep doesn't work properly and I HAD TO DOWNGRADE MY KERNEL because of the stupid "Resetting rcs0 for hang on rcs0" bug that would freeze the machine for five solid seconds every minute.
I work on dotnet. I've not been able to run my azure functions on Linux at all. Even on windows, I have to start the azure storage emulator directly and then start func (using the full path). On Linux, azurite is not the same thing as azure storage emulator.
So I must use windows for dotnet development. Even after four years of dot net core. That being said, Linux isn't the problem. Gnome 3 isn't the problem either. Flatpak works great.
There are a few regressions once in a while though. For example, I'm unable to use my lenovo flex 14 (and ryzen 3500U) built in mic since I upgraded to Fedora 33. Looks the issue well be fixed in kernel 5.9 but for the moment I'm on 5.8. But it has been great mostly. If I could use it for work, that'd be great.
Someone has to say this literally any time someone mentions problems with Linux Desktop, along with "it works for me", "my grandma uses it!", "you just have to buy the right hardware", and "you're using the wrong distro". It is incredibly tiring.
It's extremely tiring to watch this happen for as long as I have been watching it happen.
Also if you have to argue with someone that linux does work for them, you've missed the point.
In some aspects, the hardware on high-end-insh laptops have moved nowhere in the last few years. Yeah, they've got slightly better GPUs to handle 4k, Vulkan/SPIRV and new media codecs, and faster SSDs once they've got rid of SATA, but the CPU performance moved just in percents and it comes with the same memory. My wife still uses 2012 i7 Thinkpad (T430s) with 16 GB RAM, and there are not many cheap machines that could be objectively called better. Certainly not in the $300 range. Heck, until Ice Lake, you couldn't purchase a laptop with more RAM unless you went into luggable workstation segment, so it is no wonder that MacOS works relatively OK on 5yo machines. They are still way better than $300 Acer, despite that Acer having possibly some better paper specs.
There are probably also plenty of companies which exclusively develop on Windows. You can have an entire career in the embedded industry, target Linux all the time, but never use it for development. Development is not all Linux based, I never said that. What I quoted were percentages.
> it should be widely accepted in spite of being a distant third in usability.
As you shared your anecdote, let me share mine. Recently I had to set up a new networked printer on both Windows and Linux. On Linux it worked immediately, on Windows it didn't and required installation of a manual driver. That installation was partially botched and removal didn't work. Only after a few attempts it did, at which point I've spent an hour with the problem. It's the same old crap that you had with Win 95, but now on Windows 10, while Linux has a proper IPP driver and no need to install outside software. Maybe Windows has an IPP driver too, no idea, but it didn't work which is what matters :).
Also, there are definitely distros that are more usable and ones which are less usable. I think there is a true core in the meme of people being lured to linux by "use linux it's user friendly", then being told that Arch isn't that much harder anyways, and then ending up using one of the expert distros which often break in subtle and hard to debug ways.
But yes, in many ways Linux could do better usability wise. For example, it's a nightmare to target GUI Linux and then expect your binaries to work for years. It's almost easier to just ship Windows software and then use Wine. Nvidia also has shitty drivers, and in general, the driver situation isn't perfect. But things are improving I think and the gap is shrinking.
Also note that there is an effect when more people use a piece of software, there is a larger market for people who make a living with improving that software, via support contracts, consultancy contracts, etc. So once desktop Linux gets adopted widely, it might improve in many ways from the current state, simply due to ecosystem size.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24831162
Anyways, the claim was that Windows and Mac are way better than Linux and it doesn't even compare. My anecdote shows that it's not always the case :).
I switched from Mac to Linux, and it's been fine, partly because I used a laptop that has Linux installed by the manufacturer. If you only ever used Hackintoshes you'd think MacOS was a mess, too.
Every researcher I've met in the last 10 years needs some version of Linux to get their job done effectively. Largely because tools like Python/Numpy have replaced stagnated (due to years of monopoly) tools like Matlab and they are much easier to setup and use on Linux.
Mind you, I am not talking just computer scientists. Biology, physics, maths, all use linux based setups.
The thing about Android, it was essentially foisted on people, not chosen because it just works. Also, many Linux distributions today "just work" on typical hardware - almost as well as Android on your phone. And if you were using a hardware config chosen by someone else, and a Linux-based distribution pre-installed and pre-configured for that hardware - then Linux very much "just works".
It is true, though, that this is not enough to expand the user base far enough. That needs a lot of coordinated, collective, public activity.
Counter-anecdote: I have had a Linux computer on my desktop for over the last twenty years, have used Linux primarily for maybe the last eleven, and exclusively for the last eight.
I do not get the near-religious love for Apple products. Pre-OS X, they really were wonderful, best in class without a doubt. I kinda get the attraction back in the early 2000s, when Linux could still be a chore and Macs were a decent choice to get a computer which had a shell and ran real software. But now? They are just not for me. I want to own my own computer, write my own software and control my own destiny.
You may want some idea of controlling your own destiny, but it’s a mirage.
However using a Linux desktop simply is not a step in any particular direction. It is especially meaningless for non-developers to do if one of the other platforms just works for them.
Steps in the right direction involve developing software to solve the problems that the corporate operating systems have in fact solved.
The first step in solving problems that corporate OSes have solved is identifying them. For example, one of the problems is stable/versioned/sandboxable/distro-agnostic ABIs and that is something that is being worked on and they are quite usable nowadays. The related problem is, that the corporate-software is ignoring them (how many conference solution support Pipewire for desktop sharing? Or Wayland in Chrome? Heck, VA in Chrome? Exactly... but whatever Apple comes with, they support within weeks).
How would I even begin to know the answer to these questions when it comes to the Linux technologies you are naming.
Based on what I read here, the community of people who do use them isn’t even sure.
So excuse me, I'm going to look for a new release of Cisco VPN that works with Big Sur. Of course, it is customer's VPN, and they don't care that their vendors might use Mac, so no help from them, it is my problem now.
But more importantly - you verified my assertion.
Even if a small number of security related technologies have a smaller deprecation window, the others have very long ones.
More importantly - we can even find out what they are!
With Linux, can you even tell me whether Cairo, the graphics library behind GTK and for which there is no alternative is even still supported?
It uses mechanism that was introduced in Mojave, so that deprecation window was very fast. Definitely faster than Cairo, which has already more than decade and half under it's belt.
There are alternatives to Cairo, but not drop-in ones; they would require porting (Skia, for example). Other than that, Cairo is basically "done". Yeah, there is occasional need for release with small fixes, but as a software-based rendering library it is not going anywhere. Not that announcing deprecation is otherwise widely respected; the Xorg-server was declared obsolete years ago, the last major release was in 2018, but hey, some still think there's a future and in a few years are going to be surprised by "sudden abandonment".
But you are confirming the point - nobody even knows what is deprecated or what the alternatives are.
You still haven’t answered the question of how someone is supposed to tell whether Cairo is supported or not.
Is it done? How do you know. Does it need to be developed further? It sounds like it does since people say it’s very slow compared to skia.
It seems like you think you know what the status of things are, but other people don’t. How can that be?
This is the reality of Linux.
2 years/2 releases is small window. Alternative was delivered, but it also is no drop-in one. Just lika Skia vs Cairo, requires porting/reachitecting and might not have 100% coverage for what the old solution did. You might have noticed, that in Big Sur there is a list of system apps that ignore VPNs and filtering. That's a problem.
> But you are confirming the point - nobody even knows what is deprecated or what the alternatives are.
Because it works differently. There is no dictator (vendor controlling access) telling you what you are going to use whether you like it or not, and present it as a done thing. Instead, it works by forming a consensus (not 100%, mind you), whether something is needed or not. The community around a piece of a stack might arrive at a conclusion that given piece is no longer maintainable, and make something new (i.e. Xorg-server vs Wayland compositors, or systemd vs sysv-init) and then it will bubble through as distributions adopt it - either because the new solution is maintained and the old one is not, or because the new one solves their problems better than the old one.
> You still haven’t answered the question of how someone is supposed to tell whether Cairo is supported or not.
Supported by whom? In this case, the original maintainer is no longer around. But that's not a problem, distributions will support whatever they ship, so if you have an application that uses it, it will continue to work.
Should you use it for a new project? No. But that was true for years. Cairo is 2000-era software library. Consider it equivalent to QuickDraw, you would not use it for a new software either. Gtk (which was issue here on HN recently) uses it for software fallback (and they've made part of their API, so they've locked themselves in; changing it would mean they would have break their ABI. On the upside, that means that there always be some support). Firefox abandoned Cairo years ago, in favor of Skia, and so did LibreOffice in the last release.
So it shows, that a library or piece of a stack might be deprecated for years, but there might be someone somewhere who really needs it and is willing to keep it on life support (exactly just like Gtk needs Cairo). So the question for you, as someone who requires support, is: what level of support you require and what are you willing to pay (not means in purely monetary sense; though when users are expected to pay for continual support, what's wrong with expecting that on different layer of the stack?) for getting that? Because you can always get it supported; or support it yourself, if you really needed. No one is going to kick it from underneath.The source will still be available, and it is always possible to fix it when needed. You will be never completely denied access as is the case in proprietary stacks.
> It sounds like it does since people say it’s very slow compared to skia.
It is going to stay slow (unless someone invests heavily into it; which is not probable). It is a software library, deliberately; if you want hardware acceleration, switch to Skia, and accept the tradeoffs that come with hw accel.
> It seems like you think you know what the status of things are, but other people don’t. How can that be?
Simple. I asked.
There are many venues, where you can ask. These people will tell you. However, due to having no dictator mentioned above, their answer on roadmap-like questions might be: "depends on the community adoption".
And so if the answer is always ‘it depends’, you are making my point for me.
Others may have specific reason, why they are still using it (like the Gtk example). Your new project doesn't.
I understand the general public, but the developer community? Why can't the "professional-computer-whisperer" demographic be arsed to setup their computers?
In all seriousness: The extent to which you have to manually configure / fix stuff in Linux is seriously overstated, especially w/ the "easy" distributions like Ubuntu and Mint. I've installed both of those on other people's laptops and they've had no complaints at all.
Choosing examples from the UK so people can search for them in English, they care when their healthcare data isn't secured, when dating apps leak information, when local councils abuse the rules to "snoop" on people.
If you explain that without a blocking extension (or Firefox's built-in one now?) most pages they visit are sent to Google, and Google maintains a detailed profile, they will ask how to install the extension.
You can say the common man doesn't care about free speech, but enough do care that we maintain it in Western countries.
Uh, no.
There are many reasons why people don't use Linux. The easy of setup and use lines are pure nonsense. Many Linux distributions have been easier to setup and use since at least the introduction of Ubuntu, and perhaps earlier. Just pop in the live installation media, try it out for a bit to ensure your hardware is compatible, then run an installation program that asks questions that make sense to people rather than marketers. Getting the applications you need installed has involved using a store-like interface for longer than software stores have existed on commercial desktop operating systems.
So why is it perceived as harder? One reason: users typically have to install their operating system, while end users rarely see the process on commercial operating systems. Second reason: those who do install their own OS typically dedicate their system to commercial operating systems, yet use dual-boot for Linux (which will add technical steps). Third reason: those making the transition may try to install commercial applications via a VM or WINE due to compatibility, familiarity, or (periodically) the lack of an open source alternative. In other words, it is perceived as harder because people make it harder.
As someone who has been using Linux for decades, I find the setup and user friendliness of something like Windows far inferior to to Linux. Yes, part of that is due to familiarity. On the other hand, some of it is inherent due to there being fewer restrictions with open source software.
Non-tech people don't want (or don't know how) to "setup". The most user-friendly setup won't ever beat "no setup" (e.g., macOS).
Besides, marketing plays a huge role as well. Ask people to name a few "computer" brands: Apple, Microsoft, Google. No one would name "Linux". So, it's not just that people should be able to buy Linux computers with no setup (Dell is selling them, I think), it's also that these kind of computers should get enough marketing so people know about them.
I don't like this line of thinking because it is condescending. More importantly though, there are plenty of competent technical users like myself that would love to be using an open operating system but are fed up with dealing with the systemic problems Linux Desktop has that its developers and community keep papering over and pretending don't exist.
Strictly speaking, Windows is a usability nightmare. Most people don't notice simply because most people learn and use a tiny subset what is there. Beyond that, there is an entire industry to support Windows (which is part of the reason why people like it). Apple isn't much better. They tend to paper things over by simply dropping support. An example was brought up by another commenter when they mentioned that some ix programs use raster fonts. Strictly speaking that can happen under Linux yet not macOS since Apple dropped support for legacy software while some ix software is decades old. Linux will have its own issues, but I'm not the best judge of that since it is my operating system of choice.
At the end of the day, any operating system will be a compromise of some form or another. Which you choose will depend upon what your wants and needs are.
My problem isn't so much that there are tradeoffs, or even that those tradeoffs are not ones I want to make, it's that there are people out there who seem to insist that Linux Desktop is the one and only proper choice and everyone who doesn't choose it is either stupid or misinformed. If Linux Desktop people were more willing to listen to why people don't use it and take criticism to heart instead of as some kind of personal attack, it might have evolved into something more people would actually want to use.
That's fine, and I agree that advocates sometimes detract from progress.
I may be an extreme example in some ways, but everyone only has so many fucks to give, and most people have legitimately exhausted their budget by the time they get to tech policy.
This year is different though! I'm going to make it work. Also looking at Pinephone for my mobile.
That's the problem: non-tech people don't know they can do that. Besides, why would they buy a PC with "GNU/Linux" preinstalled if they don't know what "GNU/Linux" mean to begin with? Almost everyone out there knows what "Mac" or "Windows" means, and so they buy Apple stuff. Again, marketing.
I have used Linux as a daily driver desktop for years, but I don't just buy random hardware and expect it to work. I do some research first and make sure what I buy works well enough with Linux to meet my needs.
If by "people" you mean "Linux Desktop developers". They have taken relatively simple things and abstracted them two or three times until they are so complex and fragile they need special programs and standards to automagically manage it all for the user. As soon as you step outside the box of what they expect (hey, why can't I install a program on a different disk than my OS?) it is revealed for the Goldbergesq garbage pile it is.
Apple user here (had Linux on the desktop for 5+ years and windows for a longer time):
Why would I care whether my program is on one disk or another? Why would I even "install" something, instead of dragging/dropping a single "file" (yes I know it's a directory) like I usually do. Do Linux applications all self-update using Sparkle like Mac-applications do?
I also love Apple-music where I can listen to everything on all my devices, can I have that in Linux?
Does linux have the same beautiful font-rendering that I get in OSX, or do I have ugly non-antialiased bitmap-fonts now and there?
I also haven't used installation-media for operating-system installation in many many years, everything just works via the internet. I input my apple-id on a new mac and everything sync perfectly without any issue. Do I get that in linux? One login and my mail, notes, calendar, photos, music, files, backups, keychain sync across all devices?
And also simpler UI-questions: Can I rightclick on a file/folder and it says "Compress to zip?". I can have that in windows, can I have it in Linux? Can I easily create a encrypted bundle and mount it in the UI? Can I drag the little icon on top of any open window into any filedialog to rapidly access that file?
Can I easily configure keyboard shortcuts system-wide?
Can I have a photos-app that is as good as Apple Photos?
I think OSX is great. It feels more and more locked down, that is true, but I haven't had any real issue with this yet. I still can develop whatever I want and run it if I feel like it.
There are like 7+ different file managers that you can install and use. One of them probably has compress to zip. Some of them are much more powerful than finder in OS X. I use `mc` and I don't even need to click. I just select a folder <F2> <Enter>, and the folder is compressed. Two pane file managers are great. I love them ever since MS-DOS times.
The fact that I can use bitmap fonts is the major benefit of Linux to me, because I don't use hidpi screens. I can have small fonts that don't suck to look at, and are perfectly crisp. I like that I have that choice.
All of those automatic sync things are an anti-feature to me. I was given an iPhone for webdev testing, and was snapping an odd photo or two with it from time to time, including photos of my ID documents, without realizing that it by default uploaded everything into some stupid cloud. Great, now my state ID is with Apple.
A few times I had to use Mac OS for development had me running the other way since then. Why would I search online and download files to drag and drop them around to "install" them, and sometimes click through next next next finish dialogs, like on Windows, when I can just type a list of programs I want installed and they just get downloaded and installed for me with no fuss, and meanwhile I can do something more meaningful? I can install 10 different programs I need for some project in a single command, and it's such a time saver.
To some people Mac features may be great, to some they suck horribly.
Answer to your second question is very similar to the first one. Why should user drag anything anywhere, and decide to which folder put the applications? It is much easier to click on the install button in the store-like application.
Many users are confused by dmgs and they keep launching apps they downloaded from their ~/Downloads folder.
> Do Linux applications all self-update using Sparkle like Mac-applications do?
Linux applications were auto updated by their respective package managers before Sparkle was a thing. I consider keeping a Linux system updated to be much easier, than Mac one; even if it is updated by multiple mechanisms underneath (apt/dnf, ostree, flatpak, fwupd), from the user's POV it is unfied in the form of Gnome Software or KDE Discovery. On Mac, you have Apple App Store, Sparkle, brew, Microsoft Update, Adobe Update, Eclipse updater, and myriad of other mechanisms, specific to each app.
> I input my apple-id on a new mac and everything sync perfectly without any issue. Do I get that in linux? One login and my mail, notes, calendar, photos, music, files, backups, keychain sync across all devices?
I don't get that on a Mac. But then, I'm not locked into their products.
> And also simpler UI-questions: Can I rightclick on a file/folder and it says "Compress to zip?"
Yes, you can. In Gnome (default for Ubuntu, Fedora), you can right click a folder and there is a "Compress..." menu item. It will give you a choice of .zip, .tar.xz, .7z. I'm sure KDE has something similar.
> Can I easily configure keyboard shortcuts system-wide?
Easily? There's no system that would do that. Some are more flexible, but more difficult to configure, and vice-versa. MacOS goes into the less flexible one, for example I've never managed to have the media keys controlling VLC instead of launching iTunes, or Apple Music nowadays.
> Can I have a photos-app that is as good as Apple Photos?
This is about the first time I see 'good' and 'Apple Photos' used in the same sentence.
A lot of reasons. Maybe your OS disk is on a ludicrously fast SSD but is space-limited and you don't want to waste that space on applications that don't need it.
> Why would I even "install" something, instead of dragging/dropping a single "file" (yes I know it's a directory) like I usually do.
Agree wholeheartedly. It makes perfect intuitive sense: the application is exactly where I think it is, and if I move it somewhere else then it is exactly there, and if I delete it then it is exactly gone.
I didn't find it particularly difficult to set up. Some things are much easier (TAP drivers for connecting to multiple VPNs and running side by side remote sessions to difficult workstations across different networks, for instance). Even setting up a Windows virtual box was no biggie.
There's two reasons I switched back: 1) lack of consistency across applications is hampering to productivity, and 2) lack of stability in the application/tooling is hampering to productivity.
I gave myself 6 months to let myself get used to it, and there's a great many things I loved about it, but in the end it was less of a hurdle to deal with Win10's oddities than it was do deal with various inconsistencies and "usage maintenance" of getting having a suitable, productive workspace across Linux (and yes, I realize a large part of this was due to the fact I essentially run an MS-development shop and therefore have to work with MS tooling, but on the other hand, everyone working in any end-user business scenario has to work with Office documents, etc.)
I have tried moving over to linux several times throughout the years, but setup was always a huge issue. Installation was easy, but things like trying to get my aging peripherals to work properly, and trying to get font rendering not to look like absolute ass were always a huge hindrance.
So... way harder than Mac OS.
In fact, that’s literally impossible on my computer.
But seriously, I guess it is possible to use a USB thumb drive on my Mac with only Thunderbolt ports, but I never have and it’s never occurred to me. I suppose I still have one somewhere and maybe a dongle that would let me do it.
If you want to power the device, you do it through a thunderbold. If you want to connect a USB that is not USB C, you have to use adapter and/or USB HUB. So you would have to connect to your USB through adapter/hub, and if for some reason whatever installer wouldn't support this you would be screwed (but I guess most of the time it would be doable, just inconvenient).
This isn't true. This perception continues to hurt the Linux community along with others. Use a properly supported -buntu distro and you are good.
Honestly it sounds insane but I've started recommending Manjaro KDE. Stuff breaking due to rolling release seems to happen less often than me avoiding having to do other stuff that newcomers to Linux are unfamiliar with.
Like adding a ppa or struggling to find a package since it lets you easily add the AUR, snaps, flatpaks, what have you without a care about the competition between those. The install is painless. KDE's stuff feels intuitive and familiar to windows users and is customisable enough you don't have to deal with some minor personal preference annoyances.
Every 2 years or so, I give Linux another try on the desktop, and it always ends after a couple of weeks, because I'm just tired of fixing mouse and keyboard settings, touchpads, HI-DPI and multi-monitor settings, font rendering and video codecs.
I've tried Ubuntu, Mint and recently Manjaro and – don't get me wrong – all of them had great stuff in it and worked fast out of the box, but it's always the last little details where desktop linux fails for me.
I spend enough time changing config files for my job, I’m not spending my own time doing it just to get basic functionality working for workstations.
Same as with mac really.
Parent must be very unlucky, or in fact not realise it is their tweaking and tuning that causes issues.
Yet the problems remained. Maybe when people say they had lots of problems and it wasn’t worth their time, take them at their word ?
I definitely encountered this on my mac work laptop from three years ago. (Left that job and have been Linux-based since then.)
Choose a mature/stable distro and that is it. Be prepared to trade a bit of convenience for privacy in case of weird/non-free hardware/firmware.
The continual denial, constant evangelism, and needless condescension, which I have watched for 20 years now, is what hurts the Linux Desktop community.
And yet, unvariably people aren't good, and when they complain, they are told, "use this other distro" or whatever...
I suffer through all of it because I need docker with gpu support, but it's honestly a lot worse than what I expected.
I would generally recommend Kubuntu over Ubuntu -- it seems like Gnome aims for minimalism somehow, and has thrown out a lot of functionality that used to exist, and generally tends to emulate OSX for a lot of things. (E.g., OSX doesn't do alt-tab for multiple windows of the same app either IIRC.)
BTW, Kubuntu's default image viewer would likely be Gwenview -- You can get it to show a lot of information by clicking "More..." in the Meta Information panel and selecting stuff in the resulting dialog window. Here's a screenshot I found on the nets: https://www.fossadventures.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Gw...
Thank you sooo much.
The office suite is easy to use. Thunderbird is as easy to setup as Mail. Networking and devices are easy to configure from the gui, and Firefox and VSCode run without crashes. Proprietary video drivers for common hardware can be downloaded and installed via the gui. It's at least as usable from an admin standpoint as Windows 10, and from a user standpoint as Mac OS, albeit with a much smaller "app store" experience.
You need to open a burger menu in the top right corner. And then the new folder button is purely an icon and it doesn't show a folder.
One thing with Nautilus is that if there is no empty space to right click on, you can't get to the context menu, because you always end up in the context menu of one of the icons. There is no dead space between them to click on. In this case you can click the breadcrumb to get the context menu or use the icon in the overflow.
Look where fighting Facebook and political influence got us. Nowhere.
I think why Apple, Android, Windows has the advantage is none of those 3 OSes require installation by most people. Why treat Linux differently?
>>> and nowhere near as user-friendly for most people on an everyday basis
User-Friendliness, I think, is more on day to day interaction. It will be interesting if there is a study in an area with low computer/smartphone interaction. Split them into 4 groups. Each group has their own OS. Later on they will be tested with some tasks.
Actually even easier because there's no "You must have an AppleID to use this machine - if you don't have one go and register now" step, and no associated problems with that.
Have you read the article?
Spoiler: They don't.
Your style of comment is also quite the meme at this point, though.
I always reply with: if my dad, mom, grandfather and other 10+ members of my family can use Mint and I have to do minimal maintenance for them, much less frequently than with Windows, then so can you.
Ugh.
> [..] they are still too hard to setup and nowhere near as user-friendly for most people on an everyday basis.
I think my comment is a fair rebuttal of nowhere near and most. If it was true, all of my family members would have to be outliers, which is statistically improbable. The more credible explanation is that it is not really true (and in my opinion, it clearly isn't).
Yet Dell and Lenovo offer computers with Linux pre-installed, but so many technical people ignore them because Apple is shiny and fast.
If this trend continues then Linux and other open source OS will eventually exist only as a virtualized guest inside a locked-down proprietary system.
There is genuine choice in the market now, but in ten years there won't be if people keep chasing baubles.
I got a Lenovo last year with Ubuntu preinstalled. It was he "blessed hardware". Wifi didn't work after wake / sleep and my connection via usb-c to my monitor was unusable. I switched back to a mac because I wanted to work, not fix my tools.
These aren't one off anecdotes, there are dozens of people in this thread with the same story slightly different. This isn't people going to Apple because it is shiny, it's going to Apple because managing hardware isn't their job.
Either verbally address that meaningfully or drop the condescending attitude.
Legislation and regulation are the only fixes for these practices. The EC have a lot of kettles in the fire here - on multiple fronts. I trust that, although it will take time, "fairness" will prevail.
I didn't. I encouraged friends and family to ditch IE for Firefox and nowadays I encourage them to ditch Chrome for Firefox. I never cared that Chrome was a little faster for some time.
One person that only uses the (very old and underpowered computer) for mail and printing documents I helped install Linux (not Ubuntu ;)) and since then they are much happier, because it doesn't get slower with each security update and needs less maintenance help than with Windows.
You should probably start advising that they ditch Firefox for IceCat.
Antitrust entities bashed microsoft for shipping IE and look where that got us.
If anything, it's worth keeping in mind that volumes of regulations written for big corps may indeed force them to behave, but are an impediment for tiny companies to enter.
Corps like microsoft do call for regulations and copyright laws all the time, the have an army of lobbyists, they know that even without regulatory capture these extinguish competition.
I found myself being one of those people, so I made a commitment to no more Microsoft or Apple for my personal devices[1]. I'm eagerly awaiting PostmarketOS to reach full functionality on the PinePhone and I'll give up my Android phone at that point, taking Google out of the equation as well.
I'm even considering trying to learn C so I can contribute to OpenBSD for my hardware that is "rough around the edges".
[1] My wife's PC with Windows 10 is exempt for now; she's not a techie person at all and I don't want to force her into something alien. She tends to borrow my Thinkpad with Linux every now and then and is getting more used to it, so we'll see how that goes.
I think we are handing over the future of tech to these few tech giant megacorps.
With better design and products of course, none the less the business practices are the same. Much this is enforced by the current economic and political system.
Otherwise, here's Windows 10, have it for free, hell, here's Linux on Windows, just stay on the OS, buy apps on the Store and see these ads! Also give us telemetry.
Side note: no one cares, but I finally tracked down the cause of a really annoying bug, hibernation due to "thermal event" (CPU "overheating") in Windows 10: It's because of using dynamic disks in mirror mode (perhaps in other modes, as well). Makes Windows 10 hibernate randomly. Converted disks back to basic, no problems. Took me a long freaking time to finally solve this.
Their backdoor put a really bad taste in my mouth. Will try to avoid them if I can.
They're doing it because the cloud is Linux and they need to get into the cloud because Nadella's vision for the MS OS going forward is a unified system that spans PCs, phones, tablets, IoT, everything, not just a desktop OS.
Define "much". Windows 10 is a mind-boggling privacy invasion. It's just the other offenders attract more attention, that's all.
How would you get around the problem that many vocal Linux users think easy-to-use software is for weak losers, and consider difficult software a sign of manliness and an identity, even a religion? This is like saying Buddhists would be the best suited people to disarm gun-lovers, without considering that said gun-lovers don't want to be disarmed, and see pacifists as weak and unmanly.
I agree that it's not as much as a polished experience, but that's the point as indicated - trading off polish for ownership.
I'm excluding from the discussion professional documents editing - compatibility with Libreoffice is mediocre (at best) in my experience, but having very good compatibility is not a consumer requirement IMO.
But it's also just as likely that you're using a browser made by Google, and using other services made by one of the big companies that don't care about your privacy. Where's the difference?
> The alternatives are still completely unusable by most people.
Otherwise the statement wouldn't make sense.
Or their smartphone, which is a hell of a lot smoother experience. So why does Linux Desktop continue to pride itself on being "good enough" for an "average user" [0] that doesn't even use a desktop?
If all people need is a browser, they should buy ChromeOS or an iPad.
Ironically, one of your two suggestions is a Linux distribution.
There is nothing ironic about that. Users don’t know and don’t care.
Are you equating the presence of the Linux kernel with some notion of software freedom or independence from corporate control?
If all people want to use is a browser, Linux is irrelevant.
Browser apps need connection. Most of the services are also subscription based.
Whenever someone says “I don’t get computers” or gets angry at their smartphone they’re just leveraging that expectation and conning themselves out of a gain they could make. Same problem - laziness and expectation. At the end of that path is a life of a sharecropper and a cow to milk.
Macs are shiny and their marketing department is fantastic. Windows has a monopoly with OEM preinstalls. Those are the main reasons why macos and Windows are so popular.
I've tried using Windows, it's "completely unusable" to me. I couldn't even figure out how to install it without creating a Microsoft account nor could I figure out how to turn off "telemetry".
While it sounds nice in theory, is just unrealistic.
We'd also need to educate people why they cannot use random proprietary rental application on their mobile device that's not google or apple, or connect to a university vpn that doesn't support linux properly. Many workplaces use zoom for meetings, or google suite, etc etc
Exclusively switching to open/ethical software starts to resemble living like a hermit in the woods, and in reality makes ones life more difficult, reducing the impact the person can do on others.
The fact it happens to use the Linux kernel is like saying MacOS is based on FreeBSD.
Most people are using their (personal) computers for browsing, maybe an email client if they're not using one of those web-email abominations, the odd bit of word-processing and watching movies/listening to music. Linux works just fine out of the box and the install is substantially simpler than anything I've ever seen over in the MS world.
Today we just tell auntie to buy an iPad.
I mean, this is just plainly not true.
Apple has done many things, things they did not at all need to do, in order to protect user's privacy. They have shown, repeatedly, that they do in fact care.
This is the only reason I had to move away from (arch) linux and it saddens me every day.
Or we like what Apple/Google/Microsoft are putting out, including the "walled" nature of the iOS/macOS. People's homes are also "walled" for a reason.
Your concerns are not everybody's concerns.
That said, I don't like the telemetry and information leak as described in the article, and would want Apple to stop it and allow disabling it.
But I also don't care for using another OS just because "it's actually yours and you can do anything you want with it". That's also true for TempleOS, but I would't want to use it (to use an extreme example of an alternative), and simililarly, I prefer macOS and the app ecosystem to any Linux distribution I've seen (and I've used UNIX when there were still UNIX wars and SunOS workstations with black and white monitors, and Linux for close to 25 years).
Majority of iPhone users are women and HN/reddit are primarily men dominated. It should be no surprise that apple caters to aesthetics over thermals and you see people complaining about that on these platforms.
Apple customers put status and prestige when deciding to purchase something above cost. They are rich. They care about environment that's why apple "care" about environment. They care about privacy which is why apple "care" about privacy.
So for them, it's reasonable to change the device than allow it to be repaired at some shady shop. It's consistent with their image. They can't compromise on privacy or safety because that's why they bought into apple ecosystem.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/feb/26/apple-doe...
I sold iPhones for years and never noticed this trend. I highly doubt it is true in any significant way. I would also challenge the assumption that women want aesthetics over some other factor. In this day and age, that's an incredibly 'old fashioned' statement to make.
From what I could tell. People bought iPhones because they were:
a)Cool and of good quality. (Your everyman can just go buy an iPhone and KNOW it won't be junk. They don't know the other brands and researching stuff is a pain in the ass)
b)They were used to using them and didn't want to use android/didn't like using android phones
c)They had shit experiences with other platforms and just wanted something 'that would just work'
d)The iPhone really was the first good smartphone on the scene. They have inertia associated with points a->c above.
If spending in cosmetics industry is any indicator, women definitely cares about how something looks over men. There are hard number even if you don't believe in the various evolution theories and biological differences which makes women more prone to noticing subtle visual and design cues.
From 2010: https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/01/women_want_apples...
From 2013: https://www.statista.com/statistics/271204/android-vs-iphone...
From 2015: https://www.statista.com/statistics/513995/smartphone-user-g...
I am not aware of any large scale recent surveys focused entirely on that but there are many dating surveys which reports women having preference for men with iPhones. Likely dubious at the numbers most of them report (70%?) and could be influenced by other factors but still it seems women do prefer iPhones more.
I don't think this should be odd. iPhones have the best overall cameras every year and are huge on Instagram and Pinterest (platforms dominated by women) so I can only extrapolate the difference would be bigger now with social media booming.
In addition to that... I actually sold the damn things to actual human beings! I KNOW who is buying them! I've met them by the thousands! It's like approaching a mechanic about why Ford's don't break down by pointing vaguely at some tables.
Your data doesn't particularly support your views either.
As such - men spend a lot on fashion and grooming, while the same can be said about women and cosmetics... but that's mostly about cultural customs.
PS: Only the latest iPhone has best camera. They traded places with Pixel, Samsung, etc... over the last few years.
PPS: Your stats are a little bit out of date... Let alone - the 2013 data contradicts your claim. Women are distributed between Android and iPhone equally in 2013. There would be a shift towards iPhone, if women wanted iPhone more.
> The 2013 data contradicts your claim.
It doesn't. Men want iPhone less than women. My initial point was simply that people here and on reddit (men dominated sites) are not reflective of apple's focus.
31% of men wanted Android while only 24% of women wanted the same.
> PS: Only the latest iPhone has best camera. They traded places with Pixel, Samsung, etc... over the last few years.
This is misleading. While iPhones fared worse than pixel in photo department for 3 years, they make up to it in other aspects especially video. As for Samsung, it depends on what you consider better camera. iPhone arguably has the best color profile and accuracy while Samsung phones does beautification and increase contrast which does make them look nicer but overall, not accurate.
You're trying to make a biological preference claim out of what is customary in the Western European cultures.
Sometimes it's better to say that "we don't know", because that is exactly it.
> This is misleading.
No... Your original was misleading, I just forced you to correct yourself.
In times of strife, at least there's one thing you can always count on: Democracy. It never fails. If you can just remember that one thing, you should be able to sleep soundly at night. (It works for me at least, I used to be a constant worrywart until I learned this trick from my therapist, and I've been golden ever since.)
Are you serious? Since you're using the term bipartisan, I'm going to assume you're also from the US. Have you been following the news/current events recently (and by recently, really I mean any time at all over the course of the past forty or fifty years)? Almost nothing actually gets "bipartisan" support these days. Our government is in a constant state of gridlock and it is next to impossible to get anything done.
> In times of strife, at least there's one thing you can always count on: Democracy. It never fails. If you can just remember that one thing, you should be able to sleep soundly at night. (It works for me at least, I used to be a constant worrywart until I learned this trick from my therapist, and I've been golden ever since.)
I'm really having a hard time telling if this comment is sarcastic. I'm not trying to cause you to lose sleep or anything, and honestly, I commend your optimism if you're serious, but the fact is that democracy is an abstract concept that is almost never put into practice perfectly. Even if democracy's promise of "most people being happy" meaning 51 people are happy while 49 people are not is actually sufficient, even that idealized version is very far from our actually political system in the United States.
I think one thing most Americans actually would agree with is that the way we do things here, right now, in terms of government, doesn't work so well. I think there is a lot of disagreement about what should change, and how, but it seems like very few people are satisfied with the current state of affairs. The more I think about it, the more I think this comment just has to be sarcastic, so this reply is probably a waste of everyone's time, but in any case, wow. I wish what you were saying here were actually true. That would be a nicer world to live in than this one (although, frustrating as it might be at times, this one is also not so bad).
There is bipartisan support - for breaking encryption: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EARN_IT_Act_of_2020#Legislatio...
These companies have repeatedly shown that they don't respect people's privacy and people have resoundingly responded that neither do they.
I would suggest that the users here are probably some of the best suited in the world to help smooth those rough edges and even surpass the features and usability in the privacy respecting alternatives I just hope we collectively notice this before it's too late.