The brutal fact is commercial software is essential to the success of any desktop or mobile platform. That’s because it brings massive investment. The total ongoing investment in commercial applications dwarfs that of open source desktop applications, in developer-hours terms, probably thousands, or tens of thousands to one. Getting to that scale means paying people money, and not just developers. Artists, designers, QA and domain experts in the specialist fields niche apps serve. There’s just no way open source apps can possibly compete.

By failing to provide compelling support for commercial application development and distribution, the Linux desktop has starved itself of the breadth and depth of apps needed to succeed. When you’re competing with the Mac, Windows, iOS or Android you’re not just competing with Apple, Microsoft or Google. You’re competing with the hundreds of billions of dollars in app and service ecosystems that have been built around those platforms.

I don't want corporations like Apple or Microsoft controlling my hardware. We can see where that's got us and it's a disgusting dead end of the user not truly having control or ownership.

Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering. Tinkering is the point. It's all about building random crap for the sake of building it and hand-editing config files.

On the desktop 90% of the projects are second rate clones of commercial software with a weird GUI, poorer features, and added user hostility.

As for corporations - they already control your hardware. There is no such thing as open hardware, and won't be until chip-level designs can be fabbed at home. (And even then, because chip design is far beyond the skills of the average hacker and won't be practical without AI doing the heavy lifting.)

But worse - Linux and corporations have both locked down your imagination to the point where you cannot imagine that your experience does not generalise.

Access to source doesn't change that, because access to source code and tinkering aren't a substitute for being able to imagine original, beautiful, and useful new things for end users - not just an endless churn of half-finished clone projects and infinite dev tools.

No, it isn't.

"I'm not like the normies, because I am cool and underground." is a hipsterism.

"I'm not like the normies, because unlike them I happen to possess the skills to escape from a situation we all hate" is not an hipsterism.

> Linux is the OS for people who like tinkering. Tinkering is the point.

This is also completely false. Improvements were made, things generally work out of the box. Polished and user friendly user interfaces exist.

_But_: interfacing with those commercial products/services that spoiled the fun of mainstream systems generally sucks. Because those only work if you give up control to them. Which was one of the main reasons you went to Linux anyway.

No. You can do it if you want, but you don't have to.

I used to have a huge .emacsrc, .Xresources and what not in the far past. Today I have just a couple of lines that help me avoiding stupid mistakes, but nothing at all to try to tune look and feel. I use Xfce on some machines and i3 on others. Both just work out of the box. The former for an average user, the latter of course needs a certain attitude and some learning initially. I am sure you can also work with Gnome or KDE without starting tinkering.

Maybe one exception: hdpi support on Xfce does not seem to be ready, at least not on Xubuntu LTS. So one step of tinkering was needed: Turn off the nonsense. And never look back.

Bollocks. I use linux for my work every day and like my privacy and the confidentiality of my data.

This is just flat out wrong. I spend more time waiting for OS X to "upgrade" than I ever do with package management and kernel upgrades in Linux. Ultimately upgrades in Linux are easier, there's no tinkering required. For odd configurations, sure - there may be some tinkering you can do to make things work more how you'd like. For example I have a SFF desktop machine that runs an eGPU. I only want the eGPU for some OpenCV use cases and I run the iGPU for my desktop window manager. Sure, in that case I did have to tweak things a bit, but I actually found an eGPU manager [0] in the process and everything now "just works".

But printing, window management, software installation, etc are all simple and just as easy (if not more so) than what you've described - "...hand-editing config files". I'd say you are not a Linux user or have not tried any notable Linux distributions in a long time if that's your perspective.

> As for corporations - they already control your hardware.

No, they don't. While, yes, Intel and AMD may have things in their hardware that I don't control - the Linux distributions I use don't have copious amounts of telemetry being fed back to corporations like Apple/Microsoft/Google.

> But worse - Linux and corporations have both locked down your imagination to the point where you cannot imagine that your experience does not generalise.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here but I'd have to say, in my opinion, the comment doesn't seem to make any sense given my long-term experience with Linux on the desktop.

[0] https://github.com/hertg/egpu-switcher

I would rephrase this as "Linux is for people who like to customize their experience without compromise". Sure tinkering is fun but its the tool to get to your destination. When I first started using linux I spent maybe a year tinkering and playing with things. This would be along the lines of "XYZ isn't working how I want it to, let's find a way of making it work the way I want" where XYZ is anything from my screenshot tool to my window manager.

Over time this has meant switching DEs, writing glue scripts, swapping out bit and pieces here and there to build the desktop experience I want. Now I have things to my liking I just have an Ansible script which I can apply to a minimal install and have everything just the way I want it in a couple of minutes. I've not made any major changes in the last 10 years. I might add things as I find I need them but that's maybe a couple of dozen minutes a year.

I can however totally understand if people don't want that experience, most people just want to turn on their device and have it "just work" even if that "just working" means you have to conform to the way the developer thinks it should work. This is why people love Apple products, and the reason I don't.

Linux is not a puzzle, it is an extensible tool.

http://www.islinuxaboutchoice.com/

A lot of free/open-source software is created by a single developer in their spare time, because they want an open & functional version of their favourite commercial app.

The weird GUI is what you get when you can't devote unlimited man-hours and millions of $ to the project.

A lot of good has come from the Linux and open-source movement, let's not pretend otherwise.

I will take weird or unpolished GUI over polished, dark patterns, thank you very much.

Because that's the choice that we really make.

I wonder why people would conflate those two things? Sure, not all free desktop software is bad, but enough of it is that people prefer the commercial alternatives.

So more people use free desktop software? Hmmm

Also, that is the most confusing statement I have ever read.

I don't tinker on my Linux machine. I bought a supported Linux machine (System76) and haven't tinkered with it at all since I bought it. I just wanted a machine that worked and I didn't have to deal with all the ways MacOS terminal experience was different from Linux terminal experience. Simple things like not having docker running in a hidden VM and many more.

GUI and features aside: I thought "added user hostility" was a big-corporate feature?

Free software is exactly what kept Linux free, the moment it would get locked up it would go the same way that Windows and MacOS have gone: consumer oriented platforms rather than computer operating systems. Ideal for pushing ads and for-pay software down your throat rather than tools for you to use as you see fit.

But there is nothing more valuable to me than my time. It takes me less time to be productive on Windows and OS X and remove all the junk, than it does to waste countless hours trying to get a Linux DE configured "just right" based on whatever combo I'm using and feature parity I need.

I'll chose my time over my money, and I'm OK with that. Turns out paying professionals for quality goods is an alright business model, and I'm not losing any sleep by not having source code access.

Yeah, I agree.

But the major difference might be that once configured a linux desktop environment is "just right" for quite a lot longer than you think -- and once it is "just right" you get marginal productivity gains in small aspects, which in aggregate, is probably a lot of time saved.

I'm a bit biased because I already sank the cost into my desktop setup in 2011. But frankly: my desktop environment very much gets out of my way.

But this is just an upfront cost. With Windows, which I've tried to use regularly, there are many annoyances which introduce friction in the day to day. So the "opex" if you will is much higher.

Just this morning I started my Windows machine to play a quick game and wanted to check out something on the internet beforehand. It started bugging me about some "recommended browser settings" in some Edge window that showed up half off-screen that I couldn't move. Then there's the Windows Terminal app which sometimes takes forever to start up. And windows that pop up and look active but aren't.

Then there's a bunch of other little annoyances which I now forget but over a work day end up aggravating. Of course, YMMV as they say, and I know people who aren't as bothered by those. But in case you are annoyed, the upfront cost of setting up your Linux DE just right may be cheaper in the long run.

I've spent a while setting up i3 a few years ago, just out of curiosity. I had been a MacOS user at the time for a very long time. But then something happened, and it grew on me. Now I only use my mac from time to time when idly watching a movie in bed, because I find it slower to use. I hate having to hunt around for windows, move then around, click on some Dock icon which sometimes doesn't show, others shows up while it shouldn't (in the full-screen Mail window usually).

I guess the point is that different people have different needs and are willing to pay different prices for those. There's also a case to be made about high upfront cost + low maintenance vs low upfront cost + high maintenance.

> Turns out paying professionals for quality goods is an alright business model, and I'm not losing any sleep by not having source code access.

Well, of course. Only issue is how you define quality, as related to what you need. For me, the price of the Windows license was lumped in the same bin with the GPU. Have to buy it to be able to play a game I wanted to play. But I'd feel robbed if I had to pay for it and than have to use it for my job. In my case, I haven't looked under the hood of the Linux kernel or the DE or the terminal app or anything, for that matter. It just works better for me. And I'm also OK to invest some time if it means I'll be more confortable down the road.

Wouldn't be surprised if I've spent more time alone on Linux just figuring out network file sharing than all other DE-related configurations combined.

On the other hand, I wouldn't deploy software against any other OS (unless it's an app). There's no world where I don't want or see Linux. I'm just not sold on it's DE experience so far.

There is no customization you can make to a DE that saves me so much time and energy long term that it makes up for all the other time and energy needed to invest in Linux DE as a daily driver. Most of my energy seems to be devoted to task-specific regiments, more influenced by that tasks software.

In twenty five years, I've probably spent less than $3,000 on Microsoft products personally. I've got my moneys worth.

I have never gotten inter-OS file sharing like SMB/Samba to work right other than using rsync or scp. And the only intra-OS file sharing I've ever had a good experience with is Mac AirDrop.

That's weird. I usually just fire up Samba and everything works pretty much as expected. Granted, I don't use GUI tools, but one of the examples in the default config file is pretty much what you need (share the homes, or something to that effect).

Mounting remote file systems can be done easily in the GUI, as can sharing. Like any such software, it's going to have a learning curve.

I can't remember the last time I was on Linux and didn't have to start off by installing cifs-utils, and then hunting down instructions on writing an .smbcredentials file.

Windows also makes it (relatively) easy to administer file sharing if you're on a AD domain. All said and done, I personally use Unraid for my home NAS.

Both macs and linux can handle this fine.

NFS is simpler and easier to manage.

There is a solution for that, dsclient, but it is still missing Kerberos support, so you have to account for that.

I went through exactly the same experience after trying i3. Also a Mac user. I couldn't move to Linux at the time because apps, so I did my best to recreate that experience on a Mac. Rectangle+Karabiner+Hammerspoon did the trick, and at this point I'm so used to it that when I set up my Linux desktop, I actually recreated the same shortcuts in i3 vs. the default i3 config.

So I would say if you _have to_ stay on a Mac, there are ways to customise and tinker too, with the end result much better than you expect.

I was more or less in the same boat app-wise, as for work I use Office 365 and at the time the web apps were barely usable. I also loved Apple Mail, and to me, it still is the best email client I've ever used (disclaimer: I don't tend to do anything "fancy" with my email). Nowadays, Outlook online works well enough for my needs (I'd say it's actually better than when I was using the 'heavy client' on the Windows machine I was given). Teams works well (as in no worse than elsewhere) on Linux, too, so all my work-related needs are met.

Hammerspoon is just an automation tool for Mac, you can do a lot of things with it, including moving windows around and a lot of other stuff (just look at the docs to get a feel). I use it as an app switcher: I found that it's more efficient to do "show me Slack" or "show me VSCode" than "move to workspace 3 where VSCode should be". I don't use workspaces at all nowadays. So, with the help of Karabiner, I mapped my most-used apps to combinations like "caps+g" for Google Chrome, "caps+s" for Slack, "caps+c" for VSCode etc. And for cycling through windows of the same app, there's a built-in cmd-` on MacOS.

One thing that people fall into is the ability to tweak things endlessly. If you simply don't do that and use a good default install then you are going to do just fine without all that tuning.

For me my main tools are shell, browser, various audio related programs (audacity, midi editors, score editors and so on) and installing a new linux machine takes about as long as copying the data off the medium takes. Then I copy over (or mount, depending on the circumstances) my homedir and get to work.

The other systems did not react the same way; they still consider that doing it is fine.

Plus, notwithstanding the CSAM detection thing, Apple has been steadily introducing a stream of really sweet consumer privacy features for the ordinary user, such as Sign in with Apple, Apple relay (basically TOR lite for grandma), email aliases, etc.

[1]: created with https://www.windowsafg.com/win10x86_x64_uefi.html

Say someone implements an appstore for Linux, and start selling apps. This could theoretically be enough to get commercial developers onto the platform, opening up for wider popularization of Linux. That doesn't mean you have to install that appstore.. Heck of Linux ever becomes popular, it's probably gonna be Ubuntu. If you don't like that, well, use fedora then. Or nixOS!

Look at nvidia. They release proprietary drivers that do things in the opposite way things are supposed to be done. It's supposed to be integrated, they do their own thing. It's supposed to be open, they close it. They only do things if it's on their terms. They don't contribute to Linux as a whole, they merely co-opt it for their own purposes. They don't believe in making Linux a better system for all, they do just enough to satisfy their customers and call it a day.

If that's what commercial software means for Linux, the other platforms can keep it.

It would be a benefit to Linux adoption.

Once your default distribution starts shipping with built in ads, and every other distribution follows suit because it makes them boatloads of money, your linux desktop will be well and truly dead.

Is there some idiom or trope to this that I'm missing that makes it obvious sarcasm? Because that's literally not possible without some inconceivable laws being passed, so I'm confused as to what you're trying to communicate.

Both got forked a bunch, but the mother project remains the popular one due to user stickiness and, frankly, sheer amount of (paid) effort invested compared to small-scale volunteer efforts. Users can still choose to go with Iceweasel, disabled Pocket integration or Ungoogled Chromium or whatever fork de jour, but generally they don't because "the ecosystem keeps moving". They generally get more desirable things added than annoyances. Unless a company gets it wrong and you get a WhatsApp-level backlash to make another competitor viable.

With constantly moving goalposts, commercial interests can keep the upper hand as the community (and much other competition) can't keep up fast enough. That's why Google keeps pushing the web into ever new directions, and why standardized APIs got replaced by ever-changing Electron apps with mandatory auto-update.

If the popular distributions ship with ads, I'm not afraid as long as there is competition out there that does without. I can always do Arch or Debian instead of Ubuntu and I know they'll do the right thing.

Where it gets dangerous is when the base technology is controlled by commercial interests. Microsoft owning secure boot certificates, Android not getting drivers upstreamed, Apple deciding who gets to compete by owning the App Store. Linux may end up in this spot at some point if a particular vendor (or consortium of commercial interests) becomes too powerful compared to the community and smaller competition. Once it gets there, the only escape is having viable alternatives.

If you rely on commercial software, your alternatives come with huge switching costs. Chromium to Firefox is a little tedious, Mac to Linux is a major disruption. The more you rely on a particular piece of commercial software, the more they can control you.

But competition generally does the trick. I don't mind games being closed source, there are so many quality alternatives that the game studios simply can't lock most users in. Now, app stores for games? That's where you want to be cautious, because they control what competition looks like. Operating systems and drivers? If they turn on you, better start swearing and leaving investments behind. Chip-level DRM? Zero leverage, ask your government for help and if they're not willing, you're screwed.

So really, commercial software isn't that much of an issue high up in the stack. The lower you get, the more careful you want to be about end user communities retaining control. Let the companies make apps, let them sell apps, don't let them grow platforms. The platforms should belong to users.

If a company comes along and makes a commercial platform out of Linux, run.

The trouble comes from a slippage in expectations and the increased incentives to do bad things.

Once some (e.g.) spyware in some software is expected and acceptable, suddenly more spyware in even more apps could potentially be acceptable. Now it becomes a constant effort to keeping track of a known good application set which expends a lot of energy. And any one of those apps in the good set could spoil at any time.

And of course, the increased commercial incentives of a lot of non-technical people using the platform immensely increase the likelihood of this occuring.

So it's not hipsterism, it's just something that's been observed to happen many, many times.

> tech was certainly more enjoyable to me before everyone had to consider the “average user,”

Yeah. To people like us, computing has intrinsic value. We like the system. We want to control it. We want to understand it. We want to make it better. We want to make it ours.

Normal people simply don't care about this. Corporations make every effort to hide the computer from them. That's where the money is so we end up getting lumped together with this average person.

Why can't we have systems designed for programmers? It doesn't matter if some normal person can't use it.

So far desktop Linux has successfully repelled most commercial software simply by being very difficult to package software for.

I'm not convinced anyone actually got both right so far - see how recent sanboxing improvements basically killed Anbox on modern Android versions. Or try to get a ssh/samba server running on a Samsung Galaxy device so you can push files to it to avoid buggy inconvenient MTP - mission impossible!

A couple of guys could figure out how to package Ardour so that it runs on every Linux distro except NixOS [0]. The idea that its hard to package software in a cross-distro way is pure BS.

[0] NixOS plays games with ld.so, which breaks any packaging that relies on being able to set LD_LOAD_PATH. It's the only Linux distro that does this to my knowledge.

In general you can probably get a program to run on just about any Linux platform by providing X86 and ARM binaries, statically linking everything, and having fallbacks in case you need to use a certain subsystem (graphics, audio, etc..) and you don't know which one the user is going to want to use.

My experience with software development for big enterprisey customers is that you figure out what distros most of your customers are going to be using, and you test on those distros. That's a fair bit of work, because you might have to release both apt and rpm packages and maintain them, and the test environment is complicated and it doesn't cover the case where some random person wants to run your product on Arch/Mandriva/Gentoo/Mint or whatever. Testing every Linux distro is just not practically feasible, so a lot of people will end up running on platforms you didn't test. Maybe that's fine.

I wasn't addressing the fallbacks in any way.

> My experience with software development for big enterprisey customers is that you figure out what distros most of your customers are going to be using, and you test on those distros.

This is their mistake. If you instead understand how applications run on Linux in general, you can do what Ardour (and Firefox and many, many others) do: create distro agnostic binary installable versions. We don't test every distro - we don't need to. We design the package so that if certain extremely minimal conditions are met, the package will run. Firefox has done the same (even if many people use the distro version instead).

Distro-agnostic tarballs or self-extracting archives you can just expand and run can work, but it's also not ideal because it subverts the package manager. Package managers allow you to install, remove, and update all the software installed in a system in a consistent way, and a tarball exists outside that ecosystem and lacks its benefits. In that sense, a binary tarball is a second-class citizen that doesn't integrate well with the rest of the system and is probably a security liability. Maybe that's an acceptable trade-off for a few applications, but it should leave a person with a "there's probably a better way to do this" sort of feeling.

If your bundle contains the application and its libraries, it's not a part of that ecosystem, and it makes sense that it exists outside of it. In the case of Ardour, since a number of the dependency stack libraries contain patches that will never be upstreamed (or are for EOL'ed libraries), it makes even more sense.

Yes, there is the risk that if the bundle contains a security issue that has already been updated within the package manager's ecosystem, that's a liability.

But the flip side is that "integrating well with the rest of the system" is precisely what makes 3rd party packaging for all (or even many) distros challenging. I note that most of the efforts to address the situation all essentially bypass the package manager ecosystem (flatpak, for example), and that macOS has used the "standalone application folder except for core system libs" for decades now. The liabilities are real, but small, and seem to be an acceptable tradeoff for software that developers want to run on all (or even many) distros.

To a product manager, this looks like a black hole where money and engineering/tech support resources get chewed up with very little value creation to show for it.

It’s also how some very mediocre distributions became enterprise standards for Linux - their value proposition basically being, “we’re not a moving target, and the Fortune 500 can buy a maintenance contract from us”. But this only happened in server land, where the hardware ecosystem isn’t so chaotic.

"significant commercial application": you have no idea how many downloads or users of Ardour there are.

"mercurial set of cross-platform moving targets": precisely what is addressed.

"nontechnical users": that's a new constraint not present in the original description, but probably not much of an issue if you're discussing a specialized tool rather than a "desktop" application.

"hardware ecosystem": completely irrelevant to the case in question.

By all means, though, all the best with your startup.

The question wasn't "why it’s super rare to target Linux for desktop applications". It wasn't a question at all, in fact. It was an assertion that it's hard to package 3rd party applications for Linux, and I am asserting that this claim is incorrect.

As to whether or not the packaging situation explains why it's super rare to target Linux for desktop application, that is indeed a different question, with multiple answers.

GNU Linux was specifically developed, to escape the Softwarmageddon that is currently playing out in the other centralized eco-systems. To weaken that, would be to re-invite disaster. In my eyes, linux should ban commercial software like Teams from running, if there is a open source alternative. Chop of a limb if you want to survive the infection of end-stage-surveillance capitalism. Let the corpo-borgs eat one another.

Isn't any given distro's package repository basically the same thing? I mean, sure you can go around it but the same is true of Google's Play Store, it's just a pain in the ass in both cases.

This is the problem with living in a techie bubble like HN. Meanwhile in the real world billions of people are happily using Windows and MacOS, and would have no idea what you're talking about.

You remind me of the dyed-in-the-wool Marxists I knew in the 80s sitting tight* waiting for capitalism to collapse, and those before them in the 20s and 30s. And those before them in the 19th Century. Still waiting. Any day now. The signs are everywhere.

* Almost literally. One friend at the time quit college to pick potatoes in Norfolk because when capitalism collapsed having practical skills would help him live off the land. That was about 1987. I wonder how he's doing.

The Tax-idermy, were a society pushes ridiculous amounts of stabilization money into collapsing external peripheral "shell" societies who in return send refugee waves in convulsions, while slowly sinking into the civil/war/crime collapse accepting end-state is in full, brutally visible progress.

The politicians, leering for the authoritarian toolkit, because they doubt they can stabilize the mess that is to come.

How bad does it have to get, before you take a step back and acknowledge, that yes, this is un-subjective worser and even local recovery is unlikely, due to interconnected nature of global society and nature.

Sorry if things are bleak, but software seems to be one of the few levers i myself can pull towards a positive outcome, a better place, by allowing others to escape the dystopia of government eating the cooperated monopolies for societal control because government needs to be in control of something- anything and its definitely not in control of anything that would change outcomes.

You can actually do this right now. Go back and see what critics of the developed world economic systems were saying 30 years ago, or 50 years ago, or 150 years ago. What predictions were they making about growth and employment, what signs of failure did they see, and did those things actually matter in the long term? Doom mongering about the collapse of capitalism has a very, very, very long history.

Please, please try to find out, and let us know!

The top comment for you right now makes a snipe about hipsterism. Well yes, but that shouldn't be a pejorative. It's great that this ecosystem exists in all it's hipster geekery. It's a hobbyist community serving hobbyist and techno-geek purposes. We need that.

Where the cognitive dissonance comes in is thinking that this has anything whatever to do with mass appeal and serving the needs of ordinary non-technical users. That's a very different and in many ways mutually incompatible objective. What non-technical users need is a radically standardised, easy to use platform with a wide variety of highly compatible software and devices with solid QA, services and support. Only the commercial market has proved capable of providing these at anything like the scale needed because that means paying a lot of people to do these things every day as a job.

This is why mass market Linux projects like OLPC fail. They think 99% of the work has been done by the community already and they just need to package it up and deliver it to users. The problem is making all that work seamlessly and efficiently for users, developing a complete high quality product, delivering and selling it and building services around it is a huge ton of work. It's not 1%, it's more like 50% and you need people doing it day in, day out.

This has already brought along the 'commercial parasites' that have spoiled the original experience, pushing in a thousand different directions with a thousand different things that need to be done quickly to meet business goals, elegance, clarity, and simplicity be damned.

That one is 90% gone and Apple will likely kill off the remainder before long. They're in the consumer gadgets business now, that there is accidentally a computer in there somewhere is more of a historical artifact than the main business driver. It's all about eco-systems and lock in, not about productivity or creativity.

You'd be surprised. Creatives aren't going anywhere...

The stories of its imminent death are just that stories. 1 for every 1000 users who remain and 100 than come in.

Citation needed...?

Everything you've listed still works and works very well on macOS.

Developers used to prefer Mac because it was Unix when the UI on every other Unix-like was bad. Now the UI on Linux is better than it used to be, and Windows has WSL et al, and Mac is full of "pay for a license annually and deal with code signing nonsense" that developers hate.

If you said Photoshop 3.0 was clearly better on Mac System 7 than Windows 3.1 in 1994, you might have a point (that was before my time using Photoshop or Windows, so I can’t comment).

I've used both (PS on macOS/Windows) recently and find them to be more or less equivalent. Given the choice of using macOS or Windows, I'd still take macOS.

Not sure what the point of your line re: hardware is when a standard M1 Mini runs very well for this use case. If you want a bigger monitor... just buy the bigger monitor with a Mini.

>Now the UI on Linux is better than it used to be

I ran Desktop Linux for years before going macOS, and I check in periodically. I remain unimpressed, it's still a jumbled mess of an ecosystem. UI is also not the stumbling block to Linux adoption - hardware support alone, while better, still isn't up to what you get with the big two.

>and Windows has WSL et al

This is a fair point, and was an incredibly smart thing for MSFT to do.

>and Mac is full of "pay for a license annually and deal with code signing nonsense" that developers hate.

Have you ever code signed anything elsewhere, where you buy certs and such? It costs money. Apple's setup is a flat $100/year and "just works". This is also only if you're shipping software, you can run homebrew/etc just fine if you're doing dev work - there's tons of developers working on macOS who never pay Apple the $100/year for membership.

Can you actually refute what I'm saying, which is that macOS is still very usable by developers? The OP I responded to originally is claiming that the macOS devs loved is "90% gone", but outside of HN/Reddit echo chambers I don't see people switching en-masse.

But to Apple's credit, it can be done, and done using the native toolset. It took me awhile, but my relatively simple Makefile is building fat binaries (x86_64 + arm64), building and signing the application package, submitting the package for signing, and stapling certificates. Not monolithically--it's not a giant shell script posing as a Makefile. I have proper, correctly defined build dependencies for every real target up to `make submit`. So `make submit` will effectively build and submit a package both from a fresh checkout, as well as incrementally from an existing tree where only a few object files need rebuilding. But `make submit` and `make staple` themselves are .PHONY targets; they're not idempotent, but invoking them multiple times is still benign.

I would not call it esoteric and/or opaque. It's one or two shell scripts and an API key through App Connect for the notarization pass.

Once you figure things out, it's not nearly as bad. The tools can work well. And that's hugely valuable. But documentation and consistency are significantly worse than common open source projects. And at least with open source you can also resort to looking at the code to figure things out. I find myself constantly doing that for Keychain, actually. Fortunately older versions of Apple's Security.framework are open source, which helps me diagnose and analyze API usage problems. Want to figure out how to retrieve the usage constraints (i.e. SecAccessControlCreateFlags) used to generate a T2 Secure Enclave private key? Or even simpler, want to figure out if its even possible to derive those constraints? Only the code is going to tell you.

I recently bought a Huion tablet only after checking that it works on Linux.

Install on Linux couldn't be easier: plug the thing and ready to work, pressure detection and all.

I did the same on Windows. It got detected, Windows told me that it was downloading the drivers, and after 10 seconds it worked... kind of. Any trace waited like 1 second to start drawing, and long pressure was a secondary click. What!? How can anybody draw with this? Pressure didn't work, it just worked as the mouse. Time to search: disable something called "windows ink", but directly in the register so it doesn't re-enable on boot. Ok, the secondary button issue gone, but the delayed draw still there. Maybe some stabilizer? Disable Krita stabilizer... Nope. Go to Huion web page, download an app to configure the pen: windows ink still enabled some how, the app allows you to disable it for real. Pressure still unseen. More tweaks on the app... Yes, finally, after two hours the tablet behaves just like in Linux after two seconds, and I only have to keep open a third party app that is probably calling home, just to avoid Windows to mess things up again.

Yes, hardware is a breeze in Windows, except when it isn't.

Ugh, not this again.

Apple's hardware support is fine because they only have to support a few bits of hardware. Microsoft's hardware support is fine because everyone (aside from Apple) sells their laptops preinstalled with Windows, and so of course they design them with Windows in mind, and test to make sure things work.

Linux's hardware support is also fine, if you buy your hardware with the intent to run Linux on it and look for something that's supported well, or buy something the manufacturer has built with Linux support in mind. All the "Linux hardware support is bad" stuff comes from people who already have a random Windows laptop or Mac and decide they want to run Linux on it, despite the fact that if they just did a quick web search they'd find a list of problems with their hardware.

Saying Linux's hardware support isn't good enough is like saying macOS's hardware support is not good enough, because you tried to run macOS on a random HP laptop. Run an OS on hardware that it supports well and your experience will be fine.

> UI is also not the stumbling block to Linux adoption

I agree that it's not the stumbling block, but it's a big one. The GNOME developers seem to like to completely change everything often, and break a bunch of things in the process. I don't know much about KDE; last time I tried it was in the late 90s. Xfce (which I use) is ridiculously stable (it's hardly changed at all in the 15+ years I've used it, and I think that's a good thing), but it's built by a very small team, and so it's always a bit behind on polish and covering all tasks with GUI tools. But I love it[0], and it works well and stays out of my way.

The other major stumbling block is commercial software distribution. Go check out a commercial software package's website, and unless it's Electron- or Java-based, you'll see one download each for Windows and Mac, and 10 different downloads for various distros and versions of Linux (if you're lucky!). I would hate to be the person who manages releases for all that.

I don't particularly mind, though: most of the software I use is open source and in my distro's package manager, and the few commercial apps I have work fine (because I run Debian, and most commercial apps will have a Debian download, or at least an Ubuntu one that can be made to work without much trouble). But that's just me, and an average user wouldn't want to put up with this.

Honestly, I'm afraid that too much desktop popularity would destroy Linux (and turn it into the ad-laden garbage that is Windows or the increasingly-locked-down prison that is macOS). I'm fairly happy with its current popularity, where hardware support and software availability are good enough for my purposes, but without the platform becoming too commercialized.

[0] Full disclosure: I was an Xfce core developer for 5 years in the aughts, so I'm a bit biased.

Of course you would, because macOS is better than Windows. That has always been the case. But then you have to deal with Apple's hardware segmentation strategy.

> Not sure what the point of your line re: hardware is when a standard M1 Mini runs very well for this use case. If you want a bigger monitor... just buy the bigger monitor with a Mini.

The M1 Mini has 4+4 cores. Creative work typically involves software that will use arbitrarily many cores, and on that kind of workload the M1 compares quite disfavorably with 16+ core x64 processors. If you want a Mac with the equivalent processing power of a Ryzen 9 5950X, you're paying $8000+ for a 16-core Mac Pro.

Which they do on purpose so that people doing professional work don't buy the Mini.

And it's the same problem for developers for the same reason. Compiling a big project on a 4+4 core machine is a lot slower than doing it on a 64-core Threadripper, but you can't even get a 64-core Mac.

> I ran Desktop Linux for years before going macOS, and I check in periodically. I remain unimpressed, it's still a jumbled mess of an ecosystem. UI is also not the stumbling block to Linux adoption

Many years ago the UI on Linux systems was basically unusable. It was the stumbling block to Linux adoption.

Now it's "good enough" and the stumbling block is... nothing. Millions of regular people have a Chromebook (i.e. Linux) and they use it just fine, and there is nothing superior about ChromeOS over Ubuntu et al, it just has a bigger corporation marketing it.

> Have you ever code signed anything elsewhere, where you buy certs and such? It costs money.

You're comparing it to alternatives which are also a pain in the butt, when the better alternative is to not do it at all because it's totally useless.

They'll give basically anybody who pays a code signing cert. A nobody who nobody trusts for anything can get one. Attackers can steal one from any of the millions of people who were forced to get one. So it's not providing any trust at all, so it's completely pointless, but it's still paying money and wasting time for no benefit.

> Can you actually refute what I'm saying, which is that macOS is still very usable by developers?

It's not that you literally can't use it. It's that it's worse now than the alternatives. And it's also worse now than it used to be. It would be hard to beat Snow Leopard on a modern 64-core workstation, but you can't get that anywhere. And the closest thing is the same workstation running Linux.

Huge disagree, the 2021 MBP's that will launch later this year will bring back lots of creatives. Digital Content is going to scream on ARM Macs. I think Apple Sillicon has brought back a renewed focus on the Mac and performance and customers will follow.

(Which, (1) of course is the creator's right, but I still miss the old mindset, and (2) "why not just keep using the old software?" doesn't work because Apple's commitment to backward compatibility is, umm, not high.)

Also their moving Big Brother onto the iPhone is a pretty good sign where they are taking all of their systems. No, I don't want my computer spying on me for the sake of my government. Not so much because I think that they will do me wrong, as because it provides a way to target inconvenient people who I don't want targeted. (Think Snowden.)

I am not saying this makes Linux bad. What I am saying is, making it easier to charge for software is not going to “spoil” Linux with commercial parasites. If anything, paid software could help undermine the surveillance economy by providing a more direct way to support the creation of good software that doesn’t spy on you, like the default Google Android apps or the Google web apps many people use on Linux desktops. All that stuff is commercial too, you just don’t pay for it in money, and maybe the source code is open, but you darn sure pay with your personal data.

Office 365 provides good enough Web Apps to get by without having a native Office installation. I don't have any commercial Desktop Software that I'd need specifically for my work: CRM, issue tracker, Documentation, Figma,... - all available in the Browser.

At that point might as well make an app.

Offline is one of the biggest reasons to ship a full PWA. This is what service workers are for. The biggest reason to not ship a PWA is Apple barely supports them and you can't siphon as much user data if sandboxed in the browser.

I would LOVE if I could get a basic PWA from my bank that didn't have all of these permissions like trying to read if I'm rooted or not, location access, storage -- none of their business what I do with my device or where I am -- and I could still scan QR codes, check balance, do transfers.

I think once you're in this other territory then you should consider full native instead of Electron. Why you choose to use an editor housed in a browser engine with tracking baked into the application is your decision. There are plenty of other native editors, both GUI and TUI, a user can choose.

Any app can send network requests, so any app can incorporate tracking. This has nothing to do with Electron either.

But to your original point: yes, the more Electron apps that are really just web apps and can be gotten as PWAs, the better.

Ah but Google is taking over the Web and such, blame on all that help them achieve their goal.

FTFY.

Linux accounts for about 5% of my users, and for whatever reason the community thought it would be a good idea to fragment that minority further into Arch users, Debian users, CentOS users, OpenSUSE users, Ubuntu users (14, 16, 18 and 20, all with different glibc versions).

Modern tools like AppImage make this at least somewhat standard, but Windows has had sane, standardised installers for almost 3 decades now.

I have and it's not really that different from what works on Windows: Compile against the base system you want to support and then ship your own libraries for all other dependencies, statically linking those that you can.

Could there be things to make this more convenient? Sure - one thing I'd love to see is for glibc to support a WINVER analogue to target older versions with the same installed headers. But that is only for convenience - you can just build on older (LTS) distros or assemble your own toolchain if you need newer compiler versions (not as hard as it sounds, there are plenty of resources out there).

> fragment that minority further into Arch users, Debian users, CentOS users, OpenSUSE users, Ubuntu users

How does this matter to binary software distributions? What Distro-specific issues have you encountered that weren't just Arch-has-a-newer-library-so-I-get-an-early-warning-for-compatibility-issues-that-Ubuntu-will-have-in-the-next version.

> all with different glibc versions

So? Compile against the oldest glibc you want to support. All newer ones are backwards compatible and will have no problem running your program.

> Modern tools like AppImage make this at least somewhat standard, but Windows has had sane, standardised installers for almost 3 decades now.

Linux theoretically also has a standard package format (RPM according to the LSB). But just like with MSI on Windows, people tend to roll their own thing for various reasons - and it really is not a problem at all.

For me, I compiled a binary on my Windows machine, manually put it into an MSI alongside the the required VC++ redistributable, and it worked out of the box on every single system from Vista through to current version Windows 10 (and probably 11 too) - x86 and x64, with no issues whatsoever. If I had used the XP-compatible version of VS2015 I could have targeted that too.

Similar story for Mac (although distribution there has since become a minor pain in the arse with code signing and notarisation).

For Linux, I built a .deb manually on Ubuntu 16.04, specified the dependencies just like with Windows and uploaded it. Obviously this crashed violently on most things that weren't modern (for the time) and Ubuntu-based.

In the end, I fixed it exactly as you suggested - I built on an older LTS distro (on a CI server by this stage), shipped all of my own libraries and aggressively made sure that it would load those versions and only those versions. This still required some random hack to work on certain modern systems, as it needed a hack to support both modern glibc and a compatibility version bundled with the app.

These days, I could get a reliable Linux release up in a heartbeat, but this is only after learning the details of a fickle system through multiple iterations of user interaction.

If Linux desktops had a critical mass of users that were willing to buy proprietary software, the proprietary software companies would make Linux software for the same reason that game development companies make games for Nintendo's underpowered gaming hardware if it sells well (but don't if it ends up flopping like the Wii U).

To get to that critical mass, Linux desktop needs something that Mac and Windows don't offer that appeals to the average non-technical computer user. The single best opportunity for Linux was when Microsoft came out with Windows 8 with its awful new "Metro" interface. If a Linux distro had a GUI that was at least as good as Windows 7, out of the box support for Windows applications, drivers that just work and major OEMs willing to sell it preinstalled at the time, it would have drawn Windows users. Right now, thanks to Valve's efforts at getting Windows games to run on Linux, the Steam Deck is likely to be the most commercially successful GNU+Linux computer ever made because it can run most of your Windows Steam library and gaming is the main reason consumers buy Windows these days (the needs of low end consumers who just want to read email and be spied on by Facebook are best served with an iPad or Chromebook).

Linux is, on the surface, a much more appealing platform than iOS or Android for developers because there's no monopoly app store taking a 30% cut and demanding you take features out of your software. Its also more appealing than Mac because there's no Gatekeeper program that you have to take extra steps to get around. Developers tolerate these practices because the users are on those platforms and especially because Apple products tend to sell to wealthier people who are more willing to spend money on software than Android or Windows users (let alone Linux users who are generally believers in open source and some of whom are "free software" advocates who agree with RMS's views on the immorality of proprietary software). Ultimately, software companies will go where the users are. Platforms don't have to cater to them. They have to attract the users which forces the software companies to release their software for the platform. When you focus on making a platform that appeals to software companies instead of users, you end up with the Epic Games Store which has lots of software but few users.

[edit] I'd like to add that my private devices have been exclusively on Mac since the Mac SE around 1992, my company is exclusively on Mac, my clients buy Macs for internal use because we write their internal apps for them, and overall I've been responsible for purchasing somewhere around 100 Macs. I know they don't care and have never cared about my opinion as a customer, but their interests aligned with mine. Now they appear not to.

I became a convert because it just worked. I didn’t need to constantly mess with it to keep it running well. So well that my 2008 MBP lasted until 2018 until the battery swelled and cracked the case. I’m now 3 years into a MBA and this will prob carry me through to retirement.

Comparing Ubuntu 20.04 with my wife's Macbook Air M1 I do not see any differences in ease of use.

Now Windows 11 will again be the best reason to migrate, and nothing will change yet again.

Distribution to Linux has been fine so far, and hopefully we're part of the solution to the problem you've outlined.

[0]: https://cryptowat.ch/apps/desktop

[1]: https://github.com/hecrj/iced/

The reason Mac OS and Windows have more users is because of pre-installs. It is almost impossible for a regular user to find a PC with Linux preinstalled on it, so application developers ignore the platform.

Lots of companies have successfully built commercial GUI products on top of linux. However most of these products are specialist tools (e.g. EDA, video editor) or embedded. I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with the development or distribution tools.

They commit to long-term support for software distributed as shrinkwrapped binaries? You can buy a program written for Windows 20 years ago and it will work. If you try to run a program written for Linux 5 years ago it probably won't.

My employer makes commercial cross platform software for Windows and Linux (and in decades past, various commercial Unixes). If you install the 32-bit libraries, you can run our software from 8 years ago just fine on modern Linux. If you also use LD_PRELOAD to replace a couple of C library functions with ones that don't take the `restrict` type qualifier on their arguments too seriously, then you can run our software from 16 years ago just fine too.

Commercial software didn't come to Linux in the volume that it came to Windows and macOS because the users didn't come to Linux in the volume they came to Windows and macOS. And the users didn't come because Mac and Windows mostly just work, that was far from the case for Linux in the late 90s and early 2000s when the total number of desktop and laptops in service was exploding. And these days Linux mostly just works - I can't remember the last time I had to futz with an X11 modeline or a kernel module - but its too late.

AppImage just works on any Linux distribution. There are no external dependencies, since the package bundles all of the dependencies and there is no runtime required. I don't see how an AppImage downloaded today wouldn't work in 5 years.

I don't like Snap because the server implementation is closed source and controlled by a single company (Canonical), but Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (which bundles Snap) is supported until April 2030.

All the commercial (proprietary) software I run (and my colleagues run) is web based nowadays. The commercial (proprietary) software we build is also web based nowadays.

Sure there are exceptions. But for most office work: web based is the norm.

The fact that linux does fine in this area can be reduced from the fact that Chromebooks haven't flopped.

Good. Please let Linux continue to remain exactly what it is now, an amazing operating system for people who want to avoid Microsoft and Apple.

I certainly don't want it to "make it" so commercial apps take over.

You should not be running closed apps on your OS. Ever.

1. What is great about the windows GUI? Virtual desktops depend on monitors, annoying popup notifications that cannot be disabled and its resource intensive. IMHO linux has always been light years ahead of windows for as long as I remember, theres dozens of window managers better than the windows one. I am never 100% comfortable in windows, it's so locked down I feel like I am living in a hotel.

2. I do everything with the google docs these days, even on windows. So do a lot of businesses.

3. Again, most people seem to be using google calendar.

4. I actually found it easier to install on laptops back in the day. UEFI made it more painful.

5. A lot of unix tools are 2nd class citizens on windows. You can use WSL but file access is dog slow compared to the real thing.

Some might, but goodness knows I've never run into one. The corporate America I have interacted with so far (30 year career, so not trivial) is Office all the way down, and deeply enmeshed with Exchange calendaring. (I mean, as an MSFT-hater from the 90s, it pains me to admit this, but Exchange calendaring is materially better than anything else. Sometimes, Redmond does things well.)

Heck, I regularly manage to run into people that have managed to convince themselves that nobody actually runs Linux servers or that Java is the only programming language that has any traction...

The truth is that real-world tech adoption is actually extremely heterogeneous and we would all do well to remind ourselves of that from time to time.

It’s fine as a replacement for Word (I guess? I’m not much of a Word user). But Excel is so far ahead. And the ergonomics of working in a real application vs a web app is a significant difference.

Google Docs is to Word what Google Sheets is to Excel in terms of functionality. As long as what you're doing is simple, it's fine, and if what you're doing requires collaboration, it's great. But when you want to do something remotely complex, Docs and Sheets largely get their asses handed to them by Apple's free iWork apps, let alone Microsoft Office.

- Regex support in find & replace and regexextract(). - FX rates as a formula instead of as a data type. IIRC Excel requires 2 columns to display a FX rate (one to specify the pair, one to print the number); Google Sheets specifies the pair inside the formula.

I think the big transition at PWC was 5 years or so ago I think, but to this day every document I get from them is Excel / Word. Despite how much work went into those accounts - these are not complex spreadsheets either!

Example: How do you enter a cell to edit in Excel? On the desktop (I'm a mac user), it's ctrl-u (yep - ctrl). On the web I can't find any shortcut. I have to double click the cell like an animal.

Example: How do you select all the text inside a cell. On the mac it's cmd-a as you'd expect, on the web it's ctrl-a. Sigh.

The seamless collaboration of Google's apps is a joy, though as you've indicated, you give up a lot of features and power.

I'm an Excel fan as well but in our case it simply would not work due to the fact the team is spread across so many locations.

** Google Docs encountered an error. Please try reloading this page, or coming back to it in a few minutes.

To learn more about the Google Docs editors, please visit our help centre.

We're sorry for the inconvenience. - The Google Docs Team **

... It went away 10 minutes later, but I can't have that in the middle of a working day.

Sorry, the file you have requested does not exist.

Make sure that you have the correct URL and that the file exists.

Get stuff done with Google Drive

Apps in Google Drive make it easy to create, store and share online documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more.

Learn more at drive.google.com/start/apps.

....

The above is actually an error produced by me just trying to create a new blank page.

Sorry, I won't be going near Sheets for anything I care about. I'll try again in a year. The above annoyed the hell out of me.

I realize the parent question was more focused on how people find success with Google Docs, but if that success is primarily due to collaboration, and collaboration in O365 is now decent, I wonder if some of the justifications for using Google Docs still hold up.

I haven’t had many issues over the last 6-12 months, though, and as far as I can tell, they continue to improve.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m not a fan of MS products and as I said, I think Google still has the edge in collaboration. But they’ve come far, and it wasn’t that long ago that those collaboration features were unusable or non-existent.

I do a big charity bike ride every year, and track my donors in Excel (largely because the initial dump of donation data came from the org in that format).

I try to be smart about my appeals, and I rapidly ran into limitations on pulling certain sets of email addresses out of Excel easily/simply/etc., and my next-step turned out to be Jupyter. It's GREAT for that, and I can still keep my data in Excel as a source and just query against it.

But I can't imagine trying to do the whole thing in Jupyter.

Excel is an amazing piece of software esp for a power gui. But so is Python. For my work I'm either dealing with about 1k rows max... or I'm dealing with millions of rows or more, things that break excel. Or multi terra, stuff that likes a cluster.

If you've never programmed, "just use SQL" is super daunting. OTOH, Excel gives you access to that kind of data query power without writing code, and the people who are good at it can do pretty amazing things with it. It's a different way of solving that problem.

It's a powerful tool, and it's a well-built one (again, it pains me to say, bc I grew up hating MSFT). If you're on a platform that has access to a native app, exploring it can actually be fun.

It's not something most people would choose their operating system for.

Just because the average HN poster doesn't interact with these people from their tech silo doesn't mean they don't exist.

And yeah, there's a real history in computing of spreadsheets literally driving platform adoption.

In my world, Office is only used when you are consulting to companies where most data is for monthly meetings made of people that don't really care.

Googles suite of tools have been first class citizens at almost every company I've been at.

Excel is so far ahead of Google's offering - or anything else in that space -- that it's ubiquitous. It's insanely powerful, and its power is accessible to nontechnical people. That's an enormous thing.

Remember, spreadsheets were the original "killer app" that got PCs into the biz world. They're still a huge part of everyday life for vast numbers of workers -- and not just in the midwest as you sneeringly suggest.

> it's ubiquitous

it isn't - as I stated elsewhere I've never worked at a company where MS Office tools were a first class citizen, while almost every company I've worked at uses google docs/sheets frequently.

> It's insanely powerful

maybe? I mean I think if you need powerful tools excel/sheets is never the solution - they are really good at solving simple problems easily - there are better fits for problems that need "insane power"

> its power is accessible to nontechnical people

very fair point - the on ramp gets nontechnical people to become technical, but it is _not_ easier to do complex things in excel/sheets than in a general purpose programming language. It's just more accessible.

> as you sneeringly suggest.

starting and ending with a point to make the parent sounds malicious when no malice needed to be interpreted.

I think I will go back and downvote now. It's simply not a conversation that warrants much of any emotional response. We're talking about boring tools here.

2. There's no "maybe" about Excel's accessible power. You have a bias to coding, which is predictable here, but "just learn to code" is not the answer for most people who just want to ask questions of the dataset. Excel does this for them. So yes, if you need powerful tools, spreadsheets absolutely ARE VERY OFTEN THE SOLUTION.

3. The power available to someone who learned to code at 12 is one thing, but that power is fundamentally alien and totally unapproachable to the average MBA in finance. And consequently it's entirely irrelevant. OTOH, Excel with its host of data science add-ins is HIGHLY available and will allow the user to get answers without having to learn to code. This is power.

My comment re: "as you sneeringly suggest" was 100% directed at pknomad, who snarked that the only people using something as tragically unhip as spreadsheets were in the midwest -- i.e., out of step with the mainstream and tied to ways of the past.

I stand by that comment without reservation, but it wasn't directed at YOU given that it was a reply to someone else.

My observation is based on the fact that most companies in mid-west (even Chicago yes) use Office generally because they're migrating from on-premise Microsoft solutions. I'm not passing any judgements.

Cargill, Old Republic Insurance company, et al all use Office365 or Microsoft solution.

Excel is indeed ahead of G suite offering but my post never made any indication otherwise.

Sure, if you're a software company GSuite is good enough.

Our o365 was down for about half the trial period. We chose google....

And by "legacy" I presume you mean, "Have been around at least 30 years." Sorry to tell you, but the Walmarts of the world aren't so much legacy as established.

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billi...

Regarding you experience with GSuite, assuming that you have used MS Office previously, do you find it sufficient for your needs?

I worked with MS Office before. My use of Word was the same and google docs, actually, I think is better due to a lack of fancy features. I just use basic text formatting in outline format and attached pictures.

I didn't use excel before.

So yeah I prefer gsuite to office. I had to do a document with word and track changes over email a few months back. It was brutal. Gsuite destroys that workflow.

Did those 3 companies have more than 1000 employees? 100?

I confirm, my pathway to linux started with using alternative shells & apps on windows to improve on the existing ones, bblean, xoblite, aston shell... good times

Why is this a negative? This is actually one of the largest pain points for me in switching from Windows/Mac to Linux.

You can also use WSL2, which has fast file I/O. Unless you're trying to write to files in /mnt/c, at which point the comparison makes less sense, and a more accurate comparison would be trying to write to files on a remote Windows machine from Linux (also slow).

> compared to the real thing

Um, it is the "real thing". It's running in a hypervisor, on the real CPU core.

What glitches have you seen (so I'm prepared when I meet them)?

1) XFCE is the pinnacle of desktop environments: https://xfce.org/

It's extremely stable, looks good, works fast and is customizable. It works equally well on old underpowered devices, modern ones, as well as servers (should you ever need that sort of thing for whatever reason). It also has plenty of widgets without any of the modern bloat.

2) LibreOffice is great open source office software: https://www.libreoffice.org/

It started out as a fork of OpenOffice and has since become the mainstay under GNU/Linux distributions. It does word processing. It does spreadsheets. You can make drawings and visualizations in it. It does presentations. There's even a simple database offering in there, a la MS Access.

It also supports MS Office formats for the most part and can convert them to open ones with very few issues! The performance is also better than any web based offering. Plus, it's cross platform!

3) Thunderbird is perhaps the best mail client, regardless of platform: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/

It's stable, reliable and has its origins in Mozilla. It does everything i'd expect a mail client to do and i've had no problems with it to date. Plus, it's cross platform!

As for mail servers, i think that mail servers are a horrible mess for the most part, regardless of which platform you need them on. I think that your best bet in that regard is just using a Docker container that packages all of the components that you'd need: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver

4) This is absolutely true, but then again, you can say the same about any piece of unpopular hardware.

Linux on mobile phones is a mess. Then again, even FreeBSD on certain pieces of desktop hardware oftentimes fails to work as well. Many years have passed, but this can still be problematic, given that perhaps we treat drivers wrong as an industry.

My cheap Chinese netbook (i'm not too well off financially) had the mouse not work on Fedora and some other distros. Sometimes the audio wouldn't work. Now, sometimes the mouse gets stuck in a state where it acts as a scroll wheel. In Windows, function keys worked as they should (after pressing the Fn key you could access them), but in Linux distros it was flipped and i found myself having to press Fn to use the F1-F12 keys, with no option in BIOS to flip this. The fingerprint scanner just doesn't work and isn't even detected. The Wi-Fi drivers didn't work and i had to compile them from some random GitHub repository that i found online. The distro didn't have GCC and the netbook doesn't have an ethernet port so i had to suffer through doing an air gapped install, which was problematic because of the dependencies. I got it working for the most part, but it was a pain.

Things really should be better. But that can probably only be achieved by either open drivers and open standards for most of the hardware out there, or by killing off about 75% of the hardware vendors out there, which in practice simply means that you only have to buy hardware that works well (e.g. Thinkpads).

5) The choices that i find myself making are rather easy - either i use open source software, or i do less.

However i agree for the most part with the observations about Linux not being an awfully popular platform for porting applications. I do think that this has three main causes: packaging being somewhat difficult to get started with (as well as needing to support a variety of distros), the GUI frameworks across Windows/Linux/Mac being a total mess and there being no "good" options out there, and then there also really not being a large commercial effort to make the struggle of porting something over worthwhile.

Interestingly, the GUI framework situation isn't such a large issue if you go with something like Lazarus, JavaFX or even Swing for your software, but those can be ugly, so people don't. Still, i'd argue that either of those have the potential to be better choices than Electron apps.

In WSL1, access to files on the Windows host is far quicker than WSL2 and symlinks work everywhere.

To try to counteract this, I opted in to the insiders dev channel recently to try the upcoming X11 support, i.e. run IDEA inside WSL. While the performance is quite good, it's broken, e.g. try using find in project, the window disappears immediately 9 times out of 10.

In many ways, I found WSL1 more useable as I could use one shell for both the Windows and WSL filesystems with reasonable performance. I now use cygwin if I want to use gnu linux type tools on Windows.

Once the X11 support matures it will be a pretty good experience overall if people are willing to install things like IDEA in WSL, I'm looking forward to that.

I find this pretty annoying, as I need to access Windows files from WSL more often than the opposite (e.g. get stuff from my Windows Downloads folder, or use bash to quickly interact with a Windows folder). Do you know if access to Docker volumes is faster or slower on WSL2 by the way? I wouldn't switch back to WSL1 since some nix/cabal stuff didn't work on WSL1 at all but I am curious as that's the other point where my windows/wsl filesystems touch in ways I've never looked into.

If your files are stored within the VM itself, WSL2's access to them is effectively native. However accessing the files from Windows requires going through the \\wsl$ (P9) network share. This presents problems as Windows isn't going to receive file notification events if you do something like `git checkout`. Additionally, if your project utilizes symlinks, Windows only sees them as an empty file.

Users of VS Code largely will not encounter these problems as running `code` from within the WSL layer will start a remote server, it's seamless, that's genuinely very cool. However, if you use anything else, I've found it to be problematic.

The "best" solution I arrived at (other than dual-booting Linux, which is totally worth it!) is to install `xorg-server` from cygwin, install my IDE of choice in WSL2 (IDEA) and use X11 forwarding. This way the IDE has a relatively real-time view of the filesystem, receives notification events, symlinks work, chmod is preserved if using safe-writes etc.

If you need to use bash (and other tools not provided by Git Bash), cygwin is a useful addition. You can also use `mklink` from cmd/powershell to create a directory hardlink to the \\wsl$ folder if you need to copy things into WSL (although it's easier to access /mnt/drive from WSL2). Either way, I've found any direction of crossing Host/VM filesystem boundaries to be slower than WSL1's approach.

Why don't ya'll just use Linux?

This just sounds so much more difficult than using the real thing.

Real desktop linux has been, and is, a thing. I've been using Linux as my primary business desktop for more than 20 years. Yes, really.

Now, in the industry I'm in, I am forced into a windows 10 environment. Which I do the best I can to push out of the way, so I can have a real machine. MobaXterm to provide a single root X window. XFCE4 for windowing, Plank for a dock. WSL2 (unfortunately) underneath, running an older RHEL (not my choice). Looks/feels mostly like a linux box.

I use it for dev/testing/analytics/data science. File access is still as slow as sin, network performance is terrible. Windows apps are unstable, and will take down the machine from time to time.

I am pushing for a linux laptop/desktop as I am far more productive in that desktop environment. Since most of our work is linux based, this makes sense.

If you need anything Windows-related (e.g. to use a specific game or software) using WSL on top is actually really nice (I do all my real work from there fine when not on my Linux machine currently) and less hassle than dual-booting. If I decide not to use anything Windows related or do GPU-based ML (which I assume is worse on WSl) outside of the cloud I'll install Linux on another drive on this machine and go back to it fully. I honestly never expected to stick to Windows with just WSL on this machine when I put it on for trying some games.

That’s why I put up with WSL2. I hate dealing with bootloaders.

It's easier now to just maintain a single installation of Windows than setup a dual boot and continuously switch between whenever you want to edit an image in Photoshop or play a commercial game.

And nevermind doing GPU accelerated tasks unless I want to faff around doing KVM stuff.

Easier to just use Windows directly and WSL2 when I need it.

You're not sacrificing any resources, in both cases you're running a full Linux and a full Windows.

As far as GPU acceleration it's just as much of a pain inside of WSL2 than in a regular VM.

Fwiw I only use Windows for Genshin Impact now. Photoshop works well enough usig Wine, the installer won't run but that's not an issue.

Not really. For one, you are mostly fine running Linux terminal-only so it's really light and you are using less resources with Windows+WSL than Linux + full VM Windows.

Second, if you need both Linux and Windows you typically need Windows for something heavy - e.g. a Game, Photoshop, whatever, so having Windows in the VM is typically more limiting.

Also you really miss a lot of Linux if you're running it terminal only without a GPU. Being unable to use the Jetbrains IDEs on Linux is the biggest one for a developer that's universal to any field.

Also if you have to do something heavy, it's almost universally better to do it on Linux, ie, higher speed and better reliability.

What do you need it for in WSL2? Perhaps machine learning/crypto stuff?

> Photoshop works well enough usig Wine, the installer won't run but that's not an issue

If you were using Windows it would work better than 'well enough' and the installer would run.

GPU acceleration in WSL2 is useful for ML, but also accelerated video encode/decode, and some simulations I had to work on. It's also very useful for anything using a GUI, as all the major UI toolkits in Linux use native GPU acceleration.

Big no go for anyone who also want to test software in other VMs

Business apps: Google Docs & Microsoft Office both have web versions that are good enough for many people.

Mail / calendar clients: I am a nerd who prefers to use emacs for email, but I’m the weirdo—just like anyone who uses a native Outlook client. I also use Fastmail’s web interface, its iOS app, and the mail app on my iPhone. And even that is weird, because everyone just uses Gmail.

Laptop support: Yes that used to be a problem for Linux for varying definitions of “recently.” Used to be. My corp-issued laptop took to Linux just fine with nothing discernibly less functional than Windows.

The apps that don’t exist on the web are getting more and more niche.

This MIGHT be because the invite/accept/scheduling setup in Exchange is so good that it's hard to sell anything else. It also might be that most big orgs are very wisely reticent to host their email with an advertising company.

I'm also gonna push back on the "web tools are enough for most people." I mean, how effective is the web version of Excel, really? Can it easily interact with local data stores for elaborate data mining and updatable queries? My guess is "probably not". How is it for macro development? My company works closely with the finance orgs of our client parties, and let me tell you a LOT of these folks are extremely advanced Excel users. Web tools aren't to par here.

Web Outlook is also pretty awful compared to the native version, quite honestly, as is Word. Maybe PowerPoint is okay, but I'm not a power user of PPT so I don't really know.

My professional life has been interacting with very large organizations (as clients, not employers) -- think Fortune 500 firms, if not bigger. Major oil companies (I live in Texas), major defense contractors, etc.

These are not GSuite users, generally speaking. It's Office and Exchange in these places. Microsoft is VERY VERY STRONG at the Enterprise level.

Pushback -- neither excel nor sheets are the right tool for that job.

- No other tools are made available to them by their hidebound, ossified IT;

- They don't have training in SQL or other query languages, but they are WIZARDS with pivot tables and related technologies.

One thing that's hard for tech folks to really internalize is that tool choice is secondary to results for many folks. That's okay. It's especially ok if organizational factors prevent better or more "appropriate" tools.

The people you describe still exist, just like me and my fellow emacs users. But we’re not the future.

R and Pandas are cool, but they do not appear to be gaining market share from people using pivot tables and Power Query in our market.

I’d posit that customers of “high-end project management financial reporting software sold to very large customers” is starting to get niche.

Again, my point isn’t to say that these people don’t exist. My point is that “data wizard” increasingly means not Excel. Plenty of non-tech firms are happy to hire entry-level “data scientists” who write some SQL queries, gin up some reports with spiffy graphics, and bang together a dashboard in Shiny or Tableau. It used to be that this kind of basic reporting work was done almost exclusively with Excel. Even if Excel has exclusivity in some specific industries, Excel’s influence and utter dominance just isn’t what it used to be.

Put another way, I’ve taught intro R / Python skills to enough undergrad and grad students in professional career tracks to see that the future for Excel looks weaker than its past.

I setup several companies on google apps. Never had an issue. But I would be more reluctant to do so again.

> Open source yadda yadda.

This is it right here. I think this is the main differentiator. At the end of the day whether a person is happy on Linux depends on how much they care about software freedom. I'm willing to put up with the Linux jank because free software is really important to me and aligns with my values.

In the end, it gets not so bad. But GUI front ends for package managers, like [especially] GNOME Software are horrendous from my experience. Which is not so great of a look; of all the things that should be user-friendly it should be package management (IMHO). Package manager failures (conflicts, whatever) are handled horribly by GUI front-ends and even then usually require some expertise to fix, which is a pain. At least Fedora Silverblue nails the updates so that stuff usually doesn't break... but of all the things that were broken OOTB for me on my install... it was (duh!) GNOME Software.

But the GUIs are awful. The cli experience is awful, too, but better and we get used to it. They're never going to get used to it, and why would they want to? I don't know the answer; package management is a complicated problem. But maybe some sort of distributed app-store experience where the package manager also manages marketing for and forums about the apps. See, I really don't know - but having to go to a webpage and read a bunch of marketing material then download, or go to an app store and get descriptions, screenshots, and commentary by other users is somehow a subjectively better experience for non-tech types than "apt-cache search" or its GUI equivalents.

The manjaro gui tool also to you do snap/ flatpak. Those two are about as close as you'll get to a district independent package manager.

I think that holds true for anything honestly. I never cared much about how annoying it is to install EXEs on windows, visiting each website, clicking through another dialog etc. Neither did I care about the GUI.

Now that I'm using Linux on my personal devices however, I got to like package managers and tiling WMs.

But from a historical perspective, desktop Linux was only made possible by Nvidia and their closed driver. That's a sad fact. I've been on Linux "desktop" since 1995 or so. There are only two businesses that really gave much of a crap about Linux (other than Red Hat) and those were: id Software and Nvidia. ATI had total garbage for drivers for many many years. Practically up until AMD bought them. I built a HTPC back in 2005 around a passively-cooled ATI card trying to get it silent as possible. The idea was that I would use the Radeon driver on Linux and everything would just work. But it didn't. And I was stuck using Windows.

ATI shares part of the blame for why Linux never made it on the desktop. You can't have one of the two major video card vendors dropping the ball for so long and come out okay.

Intel Integrated graphics has been around for a long time now, it has open drivers and since its first release, it has been more than adequate for most non-gamers.

Maybe that's just me, but I don't really care that much about NVidia or ATI/AMD, and the state of their drives don't impact my ability to meaningfully use Linux on the desktop.

It is ultimately just way better than Windows. Windows 10 is just an embarrassment.

I honestly don't see what I would gain using Mac or windows , except that hibernation works from the start

I am in love with the fact my OS layer just does not change at all. It's boring and I like it that way.

~8-9 years of Ubuntu + i3 (and 11 years on Ubuntu in total), on 4 different laptops (3 Thinkpads), all using the same set of dotfiles and working stably for years.

Installing Linux on a laptop is pretty much painless these days. Also, the neat thing about being able to (re-)store my configs / dotfiles is that I can run my install script on any machine and 5 minutes later the entire machine is completely set up and feels like one of the machines I've been using for years. Back in the 2000s I went through the process of reinstalling Windows a bunch of times and I still remember how painful that was because after installation everything had to be reconfigured and customized in some GUI, which would take hours and never result in quite the same setup I used to have. Now with Linux I've been using the same setup for the past 10 years across machines. (Which is nice as it allows me to tweak my settings over time.)

And even that. My only longer Mac experience was a MBP (2016?) and this machine (and none of my co-workers) wasn't able to re attach a external monitor and external keyboard after hypernating. The time I worked there nobody found a solution

Desktop Linux in 2021 is nothing like it was 20 years ago. Plasma Desktop is a great experience these days, and in my opinion, surpasses both the Windows and macOS desktop shell experiences while implementing features from both systems.

One problem I do have with Plasma (though this may just be how arch packages it) - Dolphin, the native plasma file manager, is not included by default. Yes, I know it's not much of an imposition to do pacman -Sy dolphin but a file manager seems like an integral part of the system to me worthy of being included in the base package for a desktop environment.

Little choices like that affect new user adoption.

Disclaimer: very happy user

Getting KDE Connect (Killer feature IMO) to work needed fiddling with the firewall, but while annoying at the time in retrospect it leaves a good impression.

Podman is availlable without jumping through hoops, and nearly everthing i need is availlable via opi (think AUR but mostly official, directly from OBS), if it is not in Tumbleweed allready.

In my experience, Plasma Desktop runs well even on old hardware and uses about the same amount of memory as Xfce.

And ask someone who isn't familiar with it to find a setting. It's a hot mess. Just a hot mess a majority of people are used to.

Yes Linux desktops have been a complicated topic. But it's incredible easy to build something less distractive than windows 10.

True, it's now significantly more complicated and there at least 300 more distros worth of fragmentation. But at least sound finally works!... usually...

I wonder if the arrival of the 3D revolution was just a little too early for computer nerds to embrace an open source ecosystem from the get-go and how different it would've been if "If you want to run DOOM/Quake/Unreal Tournament then install OpenSUSE/Slackware so you don't have to bother Fiddling with drivers on DOS" would've been more commonplace.

From the 80s to the 2000s, video games became a multi-billion dollar industry that inspired two half-generations of kids to pursue careers in technology, but the world of FOSS was so focused on different use cases that the middle ground of "computer curious" kids probably wasn't as big of a revolution as it could've been.

Hopefully, the work Valve is putting into Proton/WINE + Steam Deck will give us a piece of that alternate history.

I think it just comes down to how you uses a computer. I mainly program, web browse, and listen to music. I don't game, watch movies, nor use or want to use 'business' apps. Abiword is about the most business app I use with any regularity. If I -have- to do something else, usually GDocs can handle it.

Re: 5) It might depend on the person. I've only ever used Gimp, and while it has redone the UI multiple times, and some things remain nonintuitive, I find myself around it well enough. When PhotoPea launched with its PS style UI, I wanted to give it a try to see what I was missing. I find myself lost, probably how a PS user feels going into Gimp.

A lot of the items that GP and you are discussing are, from my perspective, complaints about Linux circa 2005, maybe 2010 in a few cases.

I do all the above things and problems are rare. To the point where I ditched my Windows install for gaming. Steam's work on Proton means games seem to just work with the exception of specific Anti-Cheat software in certain games (and even in those games it's usually just MP that doesn't work).

KDE Plasma gives me basically the Windows 7 desktop interface with whatever window dressing I want and virtual desktop support out of the box. Plus, I can do everything that Linux can without any Windows overhead.

Maybe I'm really lucky re: productivity stuff but honestly I don't have a ton of complaints about it.

Thanks to Valve's Proton, now most Windows games work flawlessly on Linux. When you install them from Steam, you don't even have to know they're Windows binaries, they just work.

> There were too many projects with none focusing on really making a better gui than mac/windows.

Many of us have preferred Linux desktops for a decade or two.

Calling a desktop gui better when it lacks the basics like multiple virtual desktops is quite a stretch IMO. Same goes for not being able to update your kernel without getting a brand new desktop environment either you want it or not. Same goes for not being able to customize CMD-tab on Mac.

> A lack of bread and butter 1st class "business" apps

so far so good until this:

> OpenOffice is fine, IF you are ok with the janky ui and no one knowing how it works.

In fact for many years OpenOffice, now Libre Office has been less alien to large segments of the user base.

For a number of things it has also been significantly better at times: I remember very well having to import a certain report patched together by four others to use an actually working styling system.

> lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc server and outlook-like client)

This was a good point for a long time. I can work around it by using my iPad for this these days.

> Until recently, installing on laptops was an absolute crap shoot.

Having Linux work better on laptops than Windows is the default state for most laptops and have been for a decase. Last big issue was a screen resolution problem solved by installing the 915 driver using synapse on nc6230 or something back in 2006.

Getting a Windows machine to stop lagging unpredictably though, that is job best left for a specialist. Some come working out of the box, but those are the exception.

(Although it should be noted that I hate lagging as much as designers hate misalignment.)

I see at least 25 Windows tickets for every Linux desktop ticket.

Sure I am paid more than an equivalent Windows admin but the ongoing cost of support is far less. Stuff just doesn't randomly stop working like in Windows. It's really nice.

I know I have plenty of small problems with my Linux desktop, same as I have with my old Windows desktops, but I generally know how to fix/learn to fix those without going to a support line. That would be true even if you gave me a Windows computer.

Essentially, if you gave the people filing all the Windows support tickets a Linux machine instead, would that fix the problem? Or is it that those people are more likely to need support help AND also happen to prefer/need Windows.

It's not your average office I'll admit that, but we do have non-technical people on Linux that work help desk and RMA (think $100k networking gear).

Windows Rant Incoming:

Windows Update sucks. It just sucks. I fucking hate it. It fails for no reason, it fails for every reason. With how important updates are for Windows updating should JUST WORK.

I was trying to curate updates via WSUS and then moved to W4B SAC but recently said eff it and just let them update however they want. Just let the updates fail, they'll work eventually. I really don't care anymore or have the energy to.

It's vile and a pain in the ass to deal with.

Linux/Ubuntu? "Oh, I should update. Okay, Alt+T, sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade"

Done.

It does it when I tell it to and only then.

Good luck getting multiple different sized monitors to work well out of the box (e.g. laptop + external) on Linux, sometimes even with tinkering you are left with subpar scaling on one. Mac on the other hand just handles whatever combo of monitors and resolutions you throw at it with nothing that you have to do on your side and has done so for a decade now.

Things are much more likely to eventually break if you use an installation too long - I rarely have issues with 5+ year old Windows but most distros don't even support that, and even if they do good luck getting through all the upgrades without having to tinker. Hell, I have to manually mess with PPAs at least once a year just to apply updates.

There's also just too much choice with so many of the options having drawbacks that are hard to distinguish between, especially for non-power users.

There's a ton of other stuff like that that we Linux users are used to so it's not too bad for us but that cause so many people who get a linux machine from a friend to eventually just pay for a Windows install on it since they can't deal with it..

Just Works™ actually. Using a laptop/external simultaneous combo at different resolutions right now, and it's literally perfect. It even gets the scaling right. Not a second of configuration.

- 5k

- Built in webcam

- Built in speakers

- Built in mic

All work on Fedora. Thinking about it now, I realize that I may be overselling it in that I did have to tinker to get brightness adjusting to work. I installed this [0] tool, and mapped +/- to Super +, and Super - so that I can quickly adjust brightness.

So, it's definitely not as seamless a setup as the Mac, but it was honestly not bad at all and is a great setup.

[0] https://github.com/chrisdavies/lg

It sounds like you might still be using Xorg?

These are all solved problems in Wayland (that is, as long as the applications are native Wayland clients, and not running through XWayland) but some people are still reluctant or unable (see NVidia EGLStream debacle) to migrate yet.

I think this is the biggest issue in the Linux user Space. This is simply a wrong assumption for at least a few years now.

Ubuntu, for some reason, tends more break way more dramatic than other distros (usually something with complex deps)

as for apps, I dont know, Linux is superior in many ways for non GUI work. If you need photoshop then yeah this is not the right OS for you. But I would not want to touch anything Adobe with their dirty subscription models. its not true of all categories though. Krita for digital painting is amazing. Blender for 3d work too. The real answer is... it depends.

The second thing (and which you mention) is the laptop install situation, I was never sure if running Linux on whatever laptop would work, and if yes if it would work 100%, meaning no wifi/sound/battery drain issues. That was one of the main reasons that has kept me away from Linux since then. Granted, if Apple goes on its current way of trying to restrict access to its machines I may make the switch back sometime in the near future.

Most wifi cards on Laptops now are either Intel or Killer. So most distros will ship with these common ones. They also usually ship with universal drivers for things like trackpads and monitors so that at least everything "works" out of the box on a fresh install. However you still are best hunting down specific drivers for your equipment to get the best experience or performance.

My personal experience is that if you use a Dell or Lenovo laptop, that you won't need to worry about compatibility. These two companies in particular seem to have the best linux support so their equipment generally just works. I have found HP to "mostly" work. Good luck with Asus or Gigabyte. I wouldn't even try a lesser brand than those.

Battery life on Linux is a mixed bag. There are tools you can install that can give you incredible control over your battery and drag a battery's life out much longer than you would get from the same laptop on Windows. But you will need to constantly manage it and be aware of it. For example I need to go into the terminal and manually change a profile every time I connect and disconnect from the charger. As opposed to Mac and Windows that mostly manage themselves to get the best performance/battery life ratio. I found that if you don't do anything with Linux and just run it on battery that you will get substantially lower battery life than the same device would give you on Windows.

Let's be real you won't buy the cheapest Fujitsu or whatever anyway. You are going to get a proper ThinkPad or something and than Linux is the faster and better working system either way.

That was 5 years ago and I never looked back. I think that adapter is the secret key. Once you have that it doesn't make sense why you wouldn't use KDE Plasma.

I literally only know LS MKDIR and then conda commands. I don't know what any folder does outside of /home. I don't care about these things. Everything has always just worked and if something breaks I can reinstall in about 10 minutes.

The experience people describe on here is what I remember in 1999 when I spent a week trying to get my soundcard to work and gave up.

Asus EEE 1005HA

Asus U36G

HP EliteBook 8470p

HP ProBook 430 G6

ThinkPad x220

Acer that I don't remember by model number (I have installed it for others)

Yes, the wifi issue is solved since like 2013. You usually only need to install firmware, which is a standard package from your distribution's repository (some user-friendly distribution even do this for you).

Having recently reentered the world of the full MS and Office stack, janky shit is the standard. Word - the app, online and teams. None of them work right. The meme where someone thinks they’ll just move an image is accurate. Headers and footers, formatting and most other parts are actually broken or have unpredictable behaviour across apps that are presumably supposed to be the same?

I feel like an old man shouting into a void, but it isn’t right how crappy the industry standard has become.

You open up OpenOffice for the first time, it looks like software from 10 years ago.

I hate teams with a searing passion, but the thing is though it does break, it looks pretty good doing it.

About your #1, well a few tried and for some people they succeeded, but for most people KDE got about equally good some time ago, and both Windows and MacOS kept getting worse and worse. The result is that KDE is much better than those now.

About #2, with the new Office365, Windows is also lacking a reasonably good outlook-like client. The exchange OWA is a much better alternative now, and you can access it from Linux just as easily as from Windows.

I use gimp and inkscape sometimes.

Gnome 3 is perfect for 99% of what I need it to do.

I still own an iPhone, it compliments my Linux laptop well where I do my serious work, the phone is a toy.

They use a Web browser, email, calendar, word processor, spreadsheet, an image editor, and a dozen smaller proprietary apps that are absolutely essential to their job.

I think it may be the last of those... all the various industry specific apps that are hindering Linux as much as the obvious big players like Microsoft. I think word processing on Linux is fine; but your company's eight year old customized CRM tool will never, ever, be available on anything but Windows. Or specialized document scanner. Or sales commission tracker.

When people say that "X has no alternative for Excel", that X includes Windows as well. As a good rule of thumb: If there actually is an alternative on Windows, then there is also one on linux.

Microsoft appears to have taken a step back from their long-held focus of not breaking things on upgrades.

Granted, these clients should not be using Win9x apps still and hoping for compatibility.

Considering picking up and older Mac now that the hardware is finally affordable prices as more of it hits the used market. Not sure if I'll leave MacOS on it or install windows or Linux.

Sadly, it still is. I have a System76 Oryx running the manufacturers distro and I still have issues with hybrid graphics, Wifi breaking randomly, Bluetooth devices not connecting, and the the fans spinning up like crazy and the UI freezing for seconds at a time. On a laptop built for Linux! I still like it but I can't tell anyone it "just works"

I mean, my laptop is a MSI GS65 and :

- fans spin up like crazy randomly

- if I plug an ethernet cable, I have to disable & reenable the adapter on windows

- sometimes on reboot the mousepad won't work and I have to power off and wait and power back on

- sometimes on reboot the HDMI won't work and I have to power off and wait and power back on

and all this on Windows, Linux also have the two last problems (though much less since some recent kernels) but not the two first.

Laptops just suck.

I've been using Lenovo Thinkpad's with no problems at all. I just ordered a Frame.Work laptop that I'm stoked for. Hopefully it goes well.

Eventually, competitive pressure forced Microsoft to develop ("heavily borrow") a GUI. All sarcasms aside, mWindows has become usable. But this GUI is a heavy cost.

GNU-Linux is a success. For the generations of people who were sold "a GUI", Linux is often seen as too hard. But for people who found easy access to compilers and other tools through GNU-Linux, there is nothing better.

There is room for all these operating systems, obviously. As for which one is best, there is no contest in my mind. The one that does not lock me in and lets me build what I need is an easy winner.

Not really true. Windows has copied loads of stuff from Linux GUIs over the years. I began to notice this around Windows Vista.

> A lack of bread and butter 1st class "business" apps - you know, office. OpenOffice is fine, IF you are ok with the janky ui and no one knowing how it works

This is valid. Shouldn't be so bad today with web apps being a thing.

> lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc server and outlook-like client). Holy fudge, I tried to get this going and people just crapped on me for suggesting it.

Yeah, because MS locks other mail clients out. Thunderbird is an excellent email client. Outlook is some proprietary business messaging thing that also happens to support email (badly).

I think the situation is less bad now, but my point was the boat had mostly sailed.

--

Thunderbird is fine (i use it daily), but nothing touches the functionality of outlook (on windows - not the limited versions that exist on the web and elsewhere). And I was as anti MS as anyone back then, but once I had to actually implement exchange servers as part of my job vs using sendmail and a bunch of random crap - there was just no contest. I always knew it was important, but it really is the killer business app.

And now that you dont need to hire 1.5 people minimum to manage it, and pay for servers and infrastructure etc to get the benefits, it is now more a killer app than ever, to those who need it. (really, I hope to never manage on-location exchange ever again)

--

I don't think the target is "better than mac/windows", but I'd argue KDE focuses a lot on making a good UI. Read [1] a bit, you'll see that a lot of work is done on fixing usability bugs and bringing small improvements to an already great desktop environment.

By the way, I've entered in a store that sells computers and noticed the Windows laptops. I was shocked to see myself think "Wait, are they selling computers on Plasma now?". If think it was Windows 11, it's amazing to see that it really resembles Plasma with a white theme.

[1] https://pointieststick.com/

You can use photoshop cc on linux

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jl3Pa8udFQQ

I've found PhotoGIMP makes GIMP UI more like Photoshop, which helps me a lot: https://github.com/Diolinux/PhotoGIMP/releases

On a Mac I switched from Photoshop to Pixelmator no problem. Hoping PhotoGimp can help me do the same.

I flirted with Linux but never used it full time until about 2017 when the C710 Chromebook came out. What I really wanted was a basic laptop that was cheap enough to toss into a bag. So I nuked ChromeOS and started using ChrUbuntu.

Windows 10 had been out for about 2 years by that point and it became an increasing source of frustration, but I also knew I couldn't stay on Windows 7 forever.

What surprised me was that I came to prefer using my ChrUbuntu laptop despite having a much, much, MUCH more powerful desktop.

Windows 10 broke me. Why? How?

Inconsistency in the UI. Still finding old shit buried under several layers of new shit. It was still all shit in the end.

Ads in the Start Menu.

Haphazard driver support.

Forced updates and starts. Kind of a problem when you're trying to do a 17 hour overnight render job, y'know...

The problems I had in Windows just didn't seem to exist in Linux. The things people said "Oh, you have to go to the command line to fix everything" didn't seem to ring true at all. The memes, stereotypes, the disclaimers and talking points, all of it, were badly out of date. With Ubuntu, I could install from LiveUSB, entirely graphical, go through less steps during the installation process compared to Windows and still install software like Steam, vendor specific drivers and other stuff without ever touching the command line. AND Ubuntu doesn't piss me off by forcing me to restart when I don't want to.

After that, I continued to have BSOD's in Windows 10 with hardware that ran flawlessly under Ubuntu.

Networking, filesystem management was slower in Windows 10. I didn't have any issue getting Samba working in Linux to use with the NAS drives during video editing and transfer.

Google Drive was more than good enough when it came to office file compatibility. In the production house I worked out of, it came to be the preferred method. Gone was the Office shackles... and rightly so, after decades of email attachments being the viral vector for Windows systems, it's safer to just share a Drive link.

It was also because of the overhead of management that the house ended up switching from Outlook/Exchange to GoogleApps completely.

The more we did online, the less it mattered what type of system we were using.

The last, and still current, issue we still had? Adobe. After Apple's Final Cut fiasco, Adobe's failure to provide themselves as an alternative on Linux based setups was a major disappointment.

So, at this point... I have a separate airgapped Windows 7 box that runs my offline Adobe CS apps. They don't get updated and they don't need to be. (Why Win 7? Windows 10 BSODs on that box, too.)

Recently did an upgrade on my main system as well. Had a Ryzen 7 2700X setup that ran great for 3 years. Decided to make that my Windows 10 sidebox for apps that still don't quite work under Wine (though Proton is really helping to reduce that number of apps) and... yep. Have gotten hard freezes and BSODs for the first time when all I did was format the SSD to put Windows 10 on it.

Windows is decades of crap compressed into an OS. Despite having started with MSDos5.0 and Windows 3.0, using WinNT4 through to Win7 as my primary and only OS... I find Windows cumbersome, clunky, kludgy and badly implemented compared to where Ubuntu is today.

Year of the Linux desktop? Fuck off. People repeat that like it's some great joke, but the honest truth is... I use Linux now despite never having had a Linux background because it is less annoying to use than Windows.

I switched to sshfs as soon as I migrated my home infrastructure to Linux. It's much faster compared to Samba at least if you have low performance hardware on the NAS side. I wanted authentication and you don't have to fiddle with Kerberos.

mWindows 11 will be the greatest Windows yet, said Redmond marketing.

Linux is the only reason why I ever discovered a love for programming and computing.

Of course, Gimp will never be close to Photoshop because it never aimed to be

Question of taste. Really. If you like an os inspired by sonic the hedgehog, Mac and windows is for you.

2) A lack of bread and butter 1st class

What are you lacking? OpenOffice not good enough? Use softmaker. Does windows actually have an SSH by now?

3) lack of open source exchange type mail/cal/etc

Evolution, Thunderbird and a few proprietary ones

4) Until recently, installing on laptops was an absolute crap shoot.

I had not had a problem in 20 years

5) Just, apps, in general. Gimp is fine, but it has

Fair point. I have used Photoshop with wine for some specific color maps

2) here is where peoples blind spots can be, but they really reallllly don't understand that MS made some apps that basically need to be aped feature for feature to allow for migration to linux as a desktop. Again touching on familiarity (as in with the gui) but also feature set. People who make money writing certain things can't use certain apps because the features needed by those users don't exist because the software (at the time it needed to be) wasn't mature enough.

3) Thunderbird and evolution are not replacements for outlook. Exchange/outlook had database backed mail and calendaring. No one to this day is even remotely close. Not google, not anyone. This is the biggest app in business for better or worse. Not only did you have database backed calendaring and email, but you also had ridiculously fine-grained group policy management, and way better tools for retention (and this is actually a bfd) If an oss replacement had been made 15-20 years ago the computing landscape would be hugely different.

Only windows gets the full feature set to this day - ios/mac/android/web all don't get the full thing (because no/limited GPOs)

There WAS a project called zimbra or something, and I think they knew replacing exchange was a holy grail (and wanted to benefit monetarily), but iirc it was a paid thing, and never took off in any meaningful way.

4) remember, you, we, are not 99.99% of computer users. I have had hmm, 4 linux laptops over the years, and while fine, it was never problem free. Driver support mostly came down to age and brand, most of them were Dells.

...and some very expensive (6-figure prices - per year) IC design software is Linux-only. Look at Cadence Virtuoso, for example. Not available on Windows nor Mac.

I'm surprised the photoshop doesn't have the same feature. it would makes things so much easier for online tutorials just to name the tool or setting instead of having to list out the full location in the file menu (which is something that might be subject to change in future versions)

It still is. I mean it will sort of work, but power management, battery management, and even obvious things like swap drives may just not work right after install.

I don't denigrate your approach with Windows but please don't tell me I can't do x because I literally can on Linux.

My Linux devices are often domain joined - I log into an AD (used to be eDirectory but wth) I don't care. AD is quite a decent LDAP directory - not as good as eDir though but I doubt many here are capable of discussing that little number. I make huge use of Kerberos - all my browsers can connect to my Apaches etc with SSO if I so wish. Let's Encrypt and putting AD and vCentre CA certs into the various places like /usr/local/share/whatever and running the maint script keeps the browsers from getting upset.

I used to have email via GroupWise but we moved to Exchange back in the day (2011 from memory) I've used Evolution EWS since then. Provided you get your endpoints and DNS in line then you can use Kerberos, otherwise it's NTLM ... lol. You can put Exchange behind HA Proxy. That gets you loads of extra goodies like being able to hide squidgy bits and upping the SSL/TLS to the point where you can make say Exchange 2013 PCI/DSS compliant.

I have no idea why you fixate on GIMP, there are so many graphics apps available it is quite embarrassing. Have a look at say Krita.

Ditch OpenOffice. LibreOffice is capable and where the development is happening. Back in the day I was a MS Office trainer (and a few other things). I know what leading and kerning actually means and dealing with hanging indents, n and m dashes and all the rest. Upper case used to be stored in the upper row of cases in a printer's workshop, leading was shims of lead to move letters up and down. I taught Lotus 1-2-3 macros to company execs as well as Super Calc and even Excel. I can write macros in more languages badly than I care to recall. I wrote a Finite Capacity Scheduler (yes: finite) in Excel VBA for a pie factory near Plymouth. I'm quite happy with LO. It's quite capable in my opinion.

I've got loads of CAD options - I'm a fan of 3D printing. LibreCAD and OpenSCAD are absolutely belting and getting better every month. Blender is quite capable I'm told. I have not even started on that little number but I gather it is absolutely the dog's nadgers. Apparently film studios use it.

I have so many high quality options available to me using Linux. I'm 50 years old. I've used computers from ZX80 and I still have a Commodore 64 (with a USB interface now). My first real PC was a 8086. I managed to get a cracked copy of AutoCAD to work on my 80286 with a 80287 co-processor that my parents bought me for my birthday at something like £120 back in 1987ish.

I'm a sysadmin so not too fussed about IDEs but there are an absolute shitload of them available. Bear in mind the real difference between a Linux distro and Windows and Apples: We've always had an appstore and it is part of the system and not a bolt on.

When I type:

  # emerge -Uve --deep --newuse @world
  # yay -Syu
  # apt update && apt upgrade

I've seen Windows updates last for days at worst. At best it takes at least 15 minutes. On average you'll need around 30 mins except for Defender updates.

So:

1) Take your pick - for me KDE 2) LO for Office apps. There are so many first class apps it's hard to create a starting point 3) Evo + EWS. OK I'll accept that there is only one app here. You do get all functionality including calendar. You also have more options for notifications 4) Really? 5) You have access to a ridiculous amount of software from a central source

I think that open source has already surpassed closed source stuff by quite a long way. I own my own company and live and die by my choices. I've been doing IT for about 30 years and for about the last 15 of those I have not used MS software on my personal gear.

I wrote this a while back but I do keep it up to date: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Intranet - might be handy for someone integrating Linux in a Windows world.

Nothing to feel bad about saying. As a mass-market option it absolutely did. There was no flood of new users coming along back then, and there wont be this time around either.

But for me as a developer, I still think a Linux-desktop is the best desktop I can get. So that's what I'm going to use.

And that's all I care about. That the wider masses run Windows or MacOS doesn't really bother me at all. After all, why should it?

Foss projects do need to attract more ux designers though. I was telling a friend the other day about how amazing blender is… but had to admit it was so unintuitive/un-discoverable that you can’t really use the program without going through fairly specific tutorials for what you are trying to do

What the Linux desktops lacked is powerful leadership, period.

I would only recommend Ubuntu to people I dislike.

Exactly. Except I am quite pleased how OpenOffice is right now, but I digress back to agreeing with you.

I use Linux everywhere, just rarely on bare metal. All the linux I use is in memory somewhere. My bare metal machine recreational and general use machine is Mac. It runs Windows but it hasn't in two years.

The OS isn't the hill I'm here to die on. Its just the fact of life.

Gimp. I shudder at the thought. Honestly at this point, I feel the same about Gimp as I do about people clinging onto to pre-subscription Photoshop. Its like these arbitrary and clueless bragging points they now both have to rationalize life choices - whether it is an attempt to stick it to the man because they became the get of my lawn people resistant to change without realizing it, or because they actually can't afford it and this is also a byproduct of their life decisions. In either scenario, there seems to be a lack of observation that the commercial products are lightyears ahead now and there is no point in intentionally inconveniencing yourself for a cause nobody else cares about.

But that depends on the type of users: for devs & office workers, I think Google suite can replace MS Office and many Internet apps can help with many other types of everyday app that's available on Mac or Window.

On one hand telling a random MacOS/Winows-person to switch to Linux is most probably NOK. Image&video editing & office apps and probably other stuff (doubts about audio apps - I loved Linux+"Jack"+filters when playing guitar as an amateur) are not as good as on those OSs.

On the other hand telling the same to a techy guy/girl >might< be OK. E.g. a huge amount of programming languages can be installed & handled very easily, many different filesystems (with their pros&cons) are available, same for networking stuff (e.g. Wireguard, nfs with multiple connections since kernel ~5.3, bundle multiple separate TCP/IP connections together, etc...), same for virtualization technologies(Xen, KVM, multiple container flavours), etc... is available to be installed&configured&used quite easily, a lot of stuff can be read/dealt through "/sys" and "/proc" (makes it easy e.g. when reversing-engineering a controller), etc... . It's literally "dreamland" if 1) you wish for something like that (or maybe you aren't even aware that something like that can be done easily on this SW-level) and 2) you're able&willing to invest time in it.

E.g. in my case, on the desktop, I'm super happy with Linux+Gentoo; I guess because I'm a pure techy guy + picky hehe:

I don't have a strong need for any "office" app (Libreoffice is more or less ok for the basic stuff that I need, graphics editing is more or less ok with the available apps), at the same time I want some things (e.g. placement of some windows when I start them, remapping of keyboard keys, ...) to be set up "just as I want them to be" which cannot work with Windows (and I'm excluding OSx by default as being too protective - e.g. bought many years ago an iPod nano 6th gen, could not copy to it files from Linux as the iPod storage was encrypted therefore I threw it away) => yes, Linux & the distro is not easy to handle, but that in turn made me learn a lot of stuff, which in turn made me able to handle a lot of extra stuff (e.g. recently to install ~20 different DBs to do tests & in some cases proof-of-concepts, to understand better networking & tunnels to then work around limitations at work, a lot more stuff...), which in turn made me able to handle as well servers.

I don't know but I've always interacted in terminal, making the fact that I use macOS not significant.

Only if you’re not in 99.9% of the computer user base.

Of course, that assumes a desktop environment. On a server, if a process starts using up a lot of memory, it's probably vitally important to keeping the (database|webserver) up, and should not be constrained in any way.

Which probably explains the situation that we're in.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/EnableSystemdOomd

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20620545

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/8/4/15

Suddenly seeing a black screen with an Apple while I'm in the middle of something important is irritating at best, especially when it happens repeatedly and I haven't pinned down the RC.

I was so angry I went and upgraded to 64GB of RAM and now it's stable. I found out that I don't use any more tabs than I have in the past, with gobs of RAM available. So I believe it's just the web getting more bloated over time along with Chrome getting more bloated. One day I suspect I'll be running the same number of tabs and 64GB won't even save me.

Lately I've been running with "swappiness" turned way down, but not with completely disabled swap. Eh, I've got 32 GiB of RAM now, my system can handle a few programs in memory -- even a couple of Electron ones.

(edit) if it is not installed by the distro allready (eg dietpi). It creates a swappartition per thread inside ram, unused pages get compressed and stored there. Increases SSD lifetime by reducing writes to swappartition/file on disk.

(2) Wrong. Just by you saying "Open Office" means that you are out of touch. You are stuck back in 2010. There is no pathos here. If you have not gotten the memo that Open Office is dead and the project that took over and continued improving is called Libre Office, then it is a sign you are out of touch. Libre Office is not janky, and hundreds of thousands of users beg to differ.

(3) There are several. Thunderbird and Evolution. However you always have your outlook.com for work email.

(4) Wrong. Recently? Define recently. The last 10 years has been a joyride.

(5) Wrong. Krita for photoshop workloads is amazing. Applications are thriving.