I've been daily-driving KDE/Plasma for... around 7 years now? And I have a really low tolerance for daily technical nuisances. There have been some issues over that period, but honestly not more than I would have to deal with on other platforms.
I also introduced a partner to Elementary a few years back and she has absolutely fallen in love with it despite the shifting set of glitches it has on every update (she calls "personality"). She's clever but not especially technical and had no Linux experience beforehand.
As I see it, there are essentially three desktop platforms to choose from: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Windows is moving in an ad-supported direction that I want no part of and there's even more that I dislike about what Apple is doing (and this from someone who was one of those weird die-hard Apple enthusiasts in the 90s).
So I didn't switch to Linux because I'm fanatical about it, but because it was my option of last resort for having a desktop environment that I felt like I could largely control and use the way I wanted to use it. And, it has turned out that I'm really happy with it, most of the time.
That's probably not going to be a persuasive argument for the average casual computer user. On the other hand, tired tirades against "the year of the Linux desktop" completely miss the fact that Linux is a completely reasonable desktop experience today.
That's just not at all acceptable to the majority of people who want to know they can click a link in Firefox (or Chromium or whatever) and watch the damn video. Perhaps more important: it's a prime example of sidestepping the question that is so frequent in these communities where you don't get answers to your questions, you get told random things sort of related to your question that others have done.
I started this recent test drive after installing Arch on a secondary system intended to be a home server and, within an hour, I had Steam installed, a DualShock 4 controller connected via bluetooth, and I was playing a windows game (Final Fantasy 12 - The Zodiac Age) at 60FPS stable. I honestly couldn't believe how much "just worked."
and i tried using windows 10 shortly after it's release and just couldn't.
people like what they're used to. if you're used to windows, linux is a tough sell. but if you're used to linux, so is windows. linux people like to worry about how it is perceived by the average user, but the average user fails all the time on any operating system.
My next system is going to be a lightweight Linux host with a pile of VMs and something like https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary, with juicy enough hardware to make it feel like I'm only running one OS.
which is the same as my troubleshooting procedure on ubuntu.
I remember talking with a buddy of mine about Linux, and he said the same thing you did about any distro outside of Fedora or Ubuntu: That Linux is held together by a scrappy group of volunteers competing against millions of dollars of investment and armies full of full-time employees. That was 1998 and what do you know, Linux is doing just fine. Linux desktop is still innovating. GNOME might do stupid stuff (though they haven't "literally" hung anybody that I'm aware of) but they innovate. Marketshare hasn't changed much but the size of the market has grown massively. 3% now is a lot different from 3% in 2010, and there are tons of developers and sponsors helping to keep Linux alive on the desktop.
I was the only Linux desktop user in my office of 150 people for awhile. The absolute bullsh*t everybody had to eat from OSX (let alone windows) astounded me. And they just smile and gobble it up because they have a gui in front of their VPN. Let 'em I say. The Linux desktop will do fine without them.
The best example I know of this is GIMP; it has just a few (4 IIRC, could be 3 or 5 too, but thereabouts) people working on it in their spare time. That's it.
Folks complain that it's not as good as Photoshop, and that's true, but if you consider the team size it's actually pretty darn impressive! How many people work on Photoshop? I betcha it's a few more than a handful.
Not all of the Linux ecosystem is just volunteers though; most kernel contributions come from various companies; Ubuntu and RedHat work on a lot of different things (cue systemd discussion), etc.
Seeing these things as "products" where "users" have to choose from in a "free market" is already a flawed outlook. That's not what people are doing or how they're thinking.
Getting volunteer coders to work in the customer-service style that is required to make a desktop for non-technical people just doesn't seem to work. And turning a volunteer community into a profit seeking one usually seems to hit these roadblocks.
We should just accept that success for Linux on the desktop looks like what we have now. Which seems fine to me. Everyone who wants it has it. Unending lust for growth is a trait of megacoroprations and cancers, not great company to keep IMO.
This is patently and blatantly not true. I have installed Ubuntu to my mom and my wife's parents, and they are happily browsing internet ever after, without any malware or crapware. In the past few years I have spent ~0 hours on maintenance of these devices.
Previously, when they were using Windows, it was a never-ending nightmare.
You see, a well set up Ubuntu is perfect for people who need the computer to just work. They just can't break it!
My wife had an older laptop, which had a failing hdd and I used the opportunity to swap for a SSD and asked her to try Ubuntu.
Yeah, she had a lot of questions at first, but eventually she got used to it. She got a new laptop and had to go back to Windows due to her work, but whenever she is just browsing or videocalling anyone, she doesn't mind using the older laptop.
Also, guess which laptop always has issues with the printer?
In my experience any laptop on any system will have issues with the goddamn fucking printer :-)
I had an old dot-matrix printer connected to the parallel port for a very long time. Could "print" with just "cat file.txt >/dev/lpt0". It was great. Downside was I couldn't use it in the evening as it woke up the neighbours.
"More recently, Linux has also been used on the workstations used by animators for drawing and modeling their creations, as the leading producers of animation software have tailored their applications to run on Linux." [1]
[2] is a demo video of Pixar's use of linux for animation and rendering.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/18/business/technology-disne...
[2] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2016/09/pixar-film-production-...
[3] https://renderman.pixar.com/resources/RenderMan_20/installat...
Also Docks are terrible UI. They are annoying, take up too much space, and you can never really find a good place to move them so they are out of the way.
The Apple Dock was something designed to look cool and fresh in order to sell a bunch of G3 and G4 iMacs back in the day, but it's a step backwards from even Windows 95's taskbar.
Gnome devs staying away from that is one of the more laudable decisions they made in terms of design.
Using Ubuntu, Fedora or any other distro with either a large community or a clear funding path (like PopOS) is great. The “2 guys made a distro and have no funding or way to monetize their work” isn’t a Linux problem it’s a business model problem.
I've been using OSX at work and I absolutely hate it. I keep asking myself..why the fuck is my 16GB/512GB Core i7 Mac taking 3 seconds to open the settings UI? Why does the "finder" app suck so much? How come OSX has got some basic usability gaps like windows jumping out of my screen and not having an "auto raise windows on hover" option..? and the list continues. Windows seems better at some of these UX departments in my POV. Anyway, these proprietary Operating Systems are always a subject of corporate greed. They're never 100% in the user's control and can be remotely toyed with - The companies backing them can happily add/remove your software, send advertisements, spyware, bloatware down your throat and you'll just end up seeing your system resources being leeched away along this process. Apple could be better in this department but I cannot just stand the (subjectively) horrible UX of the entire system.
Anyway, linux can be what you want. I've run KDE Neon on my PC for years without having to deal with any problem whatsoever. It's been smooth and easy and KDE gave me way, way more features than Windows and Mac put together. I'm talking about KDE but on Linux you can get anything you want. All at the convenience of knowing that there is no commercial element behind these things. Since donations are how things usually get paid for in FOSS, you're welcome to donate to keep it lively and bustling. I do, from time to time.
The virtual desktops and full screen mode combined with separate program and window switching shortcuts were really easy to get used to and it feels a lot better to use than Windows. The M1 SoC is also a lot faster than anything I've used on Windows laptops in the last few years. On my old Windows laptop I had the same experience as you on macOS. The settings app sometimes taking ages to load and freeze randomly when installing updates.
If I am honest they all suck in different ways (or sometimes the same ways) and most people will be happy with any of them. Of course some people have software that require a certain OS but I guess that's the minority. The biggest advantages of Windows and macOS are Microsoft Office, Adobe Products and the bigger user base. But the first two matter way less because everything is a web app today.
Are you being hyperbolic here? I move between Linux, Windows 10, iOS, macOS, and Android and they are all mostly fine. I can’t say I love or hate any of them although there are things that each seems to be best at.
I think Linux’s hardware agnosticism is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, you can run it anywhere, but it doesn’t run great anywhere.
I think that could change though. IMHO, Asahi Linux is one of the most interesting things going on in the world of Linux right now. They don’t have to support a lot of different hardware configurations so I think they have a good chance of really getting things dialed in and creating a super polished product.
Since you work on the kernel, maybe you can answer this - does Linux have something similar to timer coalescing? IIRC, that’s one of thing in macOS that helps them with battery life.
Correct, and the drivers that get worked on are the ones that we kernel developers have access to. The situation has gotten better as more and more vendors have contributed drivers over the years and standards have allowed many devices to run on a single driver and we've become more focused on improving and adopting USB, PCI, etc. Plus kernel builds have become more automated as companies like Intel contribute lots of automated builds against tons of different hardware configurations. Still though, Linux is focused on the server and mobile market. That's what people like me get paid to work on, and so it's going to get the best support.
> Since you work on the kernel, maybe you can answer this - does Linux have something similar to timer coalescing?
Yes it does. Also Google has contributed tons, and tons, and tons of power management code (for Android of course). Power management on Linux has improved tremendously. There's still only so much that can be done, because we don't have as tight of an integration into the hardware stack on Desktop. We can't force vendors to implement certain features or make sure everyone implements certain low power state callbacks in drivers.
I don’t think you’re wrong, I think you’re missing the point. I can’t speak for the elementary developers but I don’t think you'd start a project like this hoping to take over the world. You start a project like elementary because you think something like elementary should exist.
Shrinking segment, absolutely. Especially for the casual home-user segment. But leading with exaggerated flamebait is not welcome here, as I'm sure you are aware.
You also have GNOME shipping on Fedora and Ubuntu which most new users are going to download, which can't even get their stuff together enough to put a freaking dock and activity indicator on the desktop without having to completely switch to a different activities screen. Asking for a dock will literally get you hung in the village square as people assert that normal users want to use keyboard shortcuts. Everything on the Linux desktop has to either be old fashion or eclectic and tailored to the tech enthusiasts already using it (one of the things that Elementary was actually solving). I tried getting my dad to use GNOME and he gave up after five minutes to go back to his Mac (I can't even launch an app?). It's a mess. Every other distro is basically being held together by a scrappy group of volunteers that are supposed to compete against millions of dollars of investment and armys of full time employees.
I feel bad for Elementary. They made a good product that was actually sane for people coming from MS/A, but they were never going to turn it into something super profitable or even sway companies like Adobe etc. to get their apps running natively on Linux.
This isn't doom and gloom about Linux. Linux owns computing. It's more about how Desktop is niche and not even worth getting into at this point, and how the author has much to gain by just walking away and moving on to other ventures.
Edit:
You can downvote all you want if it brings you catharsis, but you know I'm right. The year of the Linux desktop isn't right around the corner, just like it wasn't right around the corner last year, or the year before that. Linux desktops will always be for enthusiasts, students who want to learn Linux, or people who have to use outdated hardware, which is honestly the way it should be so that Linux keeps its identity and doesn't become yet another replaceable component in a proprietary stack like it is on Android (I'm looking at you Fuchsia).
And no, it doesn't matter that you're reading this right now on Sway using lynx and your mother and sister are using Ubuntu that you installed for them. You are on HN. You are not the segment that makes Linux desktops a lucrative business idea. A software engineer needs to know how to think about market segments and the normal user use cases and not be completely self absorbed into how the world works for them.