I have the idea that most people use browser-based email clients anyway?

Why? Then you have to open your browser.

I use Evolution.

I don't think I am saying something controversial when I say that the majority of people have a browser open at almost all times...

Considering changes in communication, where mail is less relevant compared to discord, slack, WhatsApp, ... I guess many people can meanwhile live quite some time without looking at a mail app at all. While browser is needed regularly.

Indeed, browsers are open a lot. It's nice to consolidate your needs to just tabs in there. I use Slack and plenty of other things that way too.

I will say, however, a proper email client is nice for archival purposes.

(note: not the person you're replying to, just a random passerby)

> Why? Then you have to open your browser.

To me, the question isn't "why use my browser", it's "why use something else when I already have a browser and it's always open"?

For me, the answer is "because native mail clients are so much snappier and responsive".

As well as being able to choose my client based on the interface I prefer, rather than whatever UI the webmail provider decides to give me. And my mail client is also always open. And it uses less memory than a typical browser tab.

The reality I think is, the average user probably doesn't care about snappyness as long as it is not too bothersome. The path of least resistance is opening the webmail (no setup required).

Fair. I just don't always have a browser open. I don't need it when I'm coding and such. If I need to look something up I'll make a note and come back to it. Breaks my flow to just stop and look something up when I can just stub something out and fix it proper later.

Many folks, including myself, live (nearly) entirely within the browser. Pinned tabs, multiple windows, as big improvements in JS / wasm make this pretty smooth.

New Outlook is a browser based email client strangely. It runs roughly the same code on the desktop as on outlook.com. It's Edge underneath.

Which sucks, because the new Outlook is less performant than the native one.

> I have the idea that most people use browser-based email clients anyway?

Indeed, but it's not an option if you have more than one email account on the same service.

firefox containers can help there

Just switch to Linux already. It's really there. Some compromises required, sure, but they are already far and between.

Keep it for gaming if you need. But give Proton a try first.

My almost 75yo dad switched recently. I swear I'm telling the truth: his main complaint was, after buying a new printer, he couldn't find the matching drivers. I told him just to print, and that was that.

I only use Windows on my gaming desktop and would go Linux first next time I upgrade. Only a few games I play still need Windows and I could still use dual boot for them.

  > Just switch to Linux already. 

I did this. Again. After running Linux as my main desktop OS from about 1992 - 1999, and some years since then.

  > It's really there. Some compromises required, sure, but they are already far and between.

I'm not sure about that, and borderline disagree.

There are a lot of compromises:

- The Linux desktop is far flakier and far less elegant than Windows and especially macOS. KDE's a little less flakey than GNOME, I suppose.

- A lot of the apps you love don't exist on Linux.

- The Linux replacements for the apps you love are way less functional.

- Keyboard shortcuts are chaotic unless you spend a lot of time deep diving on how to configure them coherently across applications.

- Odd behaviors with snap/flatpak apps, but those will get worked out with time.

Pluses:

- The underlying Linux OS is rock stable with compatible hardware.

- You can customize your desktop pretty much infinitely, if that's your thing.

- Everything is free.

- Logging is, compared to macOS and Windows, excellent.

- If you're a developer, everything is more compatible on Linux.

Anyways, after a year, I went crawling back to my Mac. I still have a Linux desktop SSD in the PC, ready to go, but I rarely pop in anymore.

That said, if you live the terminals plus browser lifestyle, you won't miss much switching to Linux desktop.

Edit: for context, I used UNIX and Linux way before I ever used Windows or DOS. I have, in the past, done deep dives on Windows, Windows kernel, Windows and .net programming, etc. I just prefer *NIX.

It's just what you're used to. I wouldn't be able to get through my day on a windows box, I'd be so frustrated.

A lot of the apps that I love don't exist on windows. Unix vs windows is like a very large and well stocked toolbox versus a set of nail clippers and a bent hairpin.

I agree. I did hold out for a year on modern Linux desktop, but I think the relative elegance of macOS has ruined me, I think.

At some point in the next year or two, I plan to re-dogfood Linux desktop with i3 or Sway, as I effectively work in a tiled arrangement and it's far more stable than GNOME.

I don't really use Windows, but when I do, I'm pretty much in a web browser or WSL. I don't have much interest in the rest of it anymore, especially with the ruination Microsoft is committing.

While I've done a lot of Windows programming and PowerShell and whatnot, I'm a UNIX native, I'm old, and I'm sticking with some variant of it until EOL.

> A lot of the apps you love don't exist on Linux.

About this point, I switched to Ubuntu in 2009 after I realized that all the apps I was using in Windows XP were open source and available on Linux too. Some of them were actually Linux native and were much faster there, example: Gimp.

Let's just agree to disagree. I grew up with Windows, learnt programming on it, was C++ proficient, COM, COM+, switched to C#, .NET, WinForms, WPF ... and that was when it got too much. If you know Windows, you probably can at least feel why. I earned quite a lot of money with Windows.

I had tons of apps on Windows, and all alternatives on Linux are better to me (IntelliJ vs. Visual Studio, VS Code the same, CodeLion). I had a MacOS stint in the middle of the transition, so maybe that's a difference.

But still: I'm not you, you are not me, and that's okay. I'm just proof that it is probably subjective, and not objective, what you describe.

And regarding the desktop OS experience: couldn't disagree more. But, as already said, probably taste :)

My hope is to find a viable enough setup to return to Linux, preferably on a modular component, unified memory ARM64 architecture of some sort, but I'm flexible.

If Adobe or Serif announced Linux support, I’d switch in a heartbeat. I was about to add DaVinci Resolve to that list, but they actually released official Linux support, so I can cross some video editing off my list. And one presumes all web-based tools such as Figma also work well on Linux these days, so… the list of tools that aren’t Linux compatible might be vanishingly small now. But not zero, sadly.

Figma works perfectly on Linux¹. If you don't believe me, let's privately talk.

E-Mail me at [email protected], if you like.

¹ our (sub-orga-wide) UX crew uses MacOS, almost all Devs use Linux, and both of them use Figma

Too many dev commenters will hand-wave away complaints about graphics work on Linux. Bitmap and vector graphics are terrible, and I have tried the options. RAW photo editing is mediocre. Font rendering and color management has always been behind.

When I switched to a Mac, it wasn't that MacOS got vastly better. It was that Windows has been getting dramatically worse.

I that being said, Resolve and Blender on Linux can nicely serve subsets of the creative community. We just need more.

> it's really there

Battery life, display scaling, sleep & wake up issues, trackpad gestures, sound output, GPU-accelerated video playback... Just to name a couple of problems I hope not to encounter every time I decide to give Linux another chance, but I still do.

To fix them, you need to run some arcane commands, edit some config files, compile your own kernel, ... I don't know. I'll have something that "just works". I'll keep using Linux headless on a server, where it really shines.

On bleeding edge hardware: possibly. On anything that is a couple of years old Linux runs out of the box, usually is rock solid. It's a bit less flashy and in your face though, but I personally prefer that.

> On anything that is a couple of years old Linux runs out of the box

YMMV. Just yesterday, I discovered that the Debian installer doesn't include support for UFS drives, which have been available in laptops for 3+ years now.

(Explaining to my wife why I was returning the laptop I'd just bought wouldn't have been a great endorsement for "Linux runs out of the box".)

Coincidental bug report from mail list last week: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]...

Interesting, UFS probably means something different to me than it means to you, for me it spells Unix File System, the bug report lists it as some hardware variation that I'd never even heard of today.

Did you see the follow up comments by the way? Compared to trying to get support from a commercial vendor the FOSS world never ceases to amaze me with the degree of effort people are willing to make to get other people on the way again.

So, let's strike 'a couple of years old' and add 'anything mainstream that is a couple of years old'. We're going to end up with a very long definition if we have to add all of the possible exceptions but I suspect there are more devices capable of running Linux by now than there are of running Windows!

Well UFS isn't entirely esoteric, it's the successor to eMMC and the storage medium on most Android phones. (iPhones use NVMe) I think it's mostly that the UFS/Debian intersection is a bit of an edge case where users aren't typically trying to install Debian on low-end laptops, but it threw me for a bit of a loop when I ran the installer and it showed no available drives to install to. (The Ubuntu installer, for instance, does seem to include UFS support.)

And yes, the support was good! I expect the installer will be fixed within a few months, or whenever the next Debian release happens, given how easy the fix looks to be.

> To fix them, you need to run some arcane commands

At least you can fix them.

Also, sorry can't help the cheap shot: how is typing "arcane commands" any different than clicking on "gnostic glyphs"? Anything can sound complex if you want it to :)

I'm not disputing your experiences but it's so surprising to me. I exclusively use Linux on the desktop on numerous devices, some of which seem like prime candidates for the types of issues you mention, but I've not had any major problems in literal years, especially since switching to the zen kernel.

It's always a shame when people don't like the things you do I guess.

Well, a major difference is that you can discover a GUI and find solutions organically, while the shell is pretty useless without prior knowledge. Even as an experienced user, you need to know to put research into those issues.

I usually struggle with GUIs and I find the concept of discoverability awful. Having to randomly click through tons of menus until you discover the right place is frustrating. I use MS Word maybe twice a month, and every time I go through that ritual of clicking through several tabs just to be able to discover how to save a file. If I used it more often I certainly would remember, but then it's no longer about discovering.

Oh and if you're lucky you have the option to hover for a second to find what the icons mean through a tooltip. Having to do that with every icon until you find the right one is not pleasant.

I just find typing "help" or "man" a lot more intuitive than the random clicking on icons.

I'm sure that I'm a rare specimen and most people would prefer clicking to reading, but personally I find discoverability a bad user experience.

There's nothing wrong with the concept of discoverability. Having the capability of discovering how to do thing X without referring to documentation is fine. The problem is when users are forced to rely on it because the documentation is trash or nonexistent. That does seem to be a trend and I share your frustration with it, but discoverability and good documentation can (and should) coexist.

Yes, you are right that discoverability isn't detrimental unless it becomes an expectation that this is how one must engage with software. I assume that it is also the preferred way to engage with software for some people .

Good user interface/software design is good regardless of whether it is graphical or not though.

Having a row of icons with vague meanings, or endlessly nested/badly categories menus isn't intuitive or easy.

Conversely, there are a plethora of terminal-based programs with absolutely excellent UX.

Anyone can edit a well-documented template/example config file, and a good CLI program is almost like an interactive conversation, which again is an extremely intuitive experience. It's not the fault of whether the interface is graphical or not in most cases, it's just mediocre/bad software.

Oh god no. This is just not the solution for most people unless you want to own their computing infrastructure until they drop dead and have to micromanage their differences galore.

And for myself, I'd rather pay for O365 than use Linux on the desktop. It is just so so so broken. High DPI is a mess, half the apps are only 60% complete, weird ass bugs (LibreOffice won't open spreadsheets it created half the time for example) and on top of that things break all the time on routine upgrades from power management to GPU drivers.

I say this as someone who actually spends most of the day SSH'ed into Linux boxes.

I've been trying for 25 years to get it on my desktop and it's nowhere near any commercial product in any way.

You seem to really have bad luck. High DPI works without a glitch¹ on all of our developer machines², most of them using two 4k monitors in parallel.

¹ both on Wayland and X11, so maybe we're really being lucky.

² mostly Dell Laptops, but also Lenovo

Can you do 150% fractional scaling on a 27" 4K monitor in any Gnome based desktop?

Dell? I have a cupboard full of ones I've murdered and a limping one. No thanks.

If only there existed a viable Remote Desktop alternative for Linux.

I use Remote Desktop to log into my home PC when I'm at work or away. No need to have a powerful laptop and no need to worry about laptop getting stolen.

Tried all the Linux alternatives (latest round was last year). Yes there are functional remote desktop solutions, where functional means it actually works. But they're not really usable on a day-to-day basis and none of them are anywhere near the RDP experience.

I see some developments on the horizon which make me a bit hopeful though.

What about TeamViewer.

Performance is passable, though again not as great as RDP. Though I really don't like the idea of having my private machine open to a corporation.

> Just switch to Linux already. It's really there.

Is it though? A friend of mine bought AMD RX 7800. He went with AMD specifically to make sure Linux compatibility is top notch given that AMD drivers are included in the kernel and developed by AMD developers. The result is that he cannot boot his Arch machine with it until he disconnects his monitor. Seriously. It just hangs forever [0]. Everything is up to date. Tried with NixOS and got same result. That's on top of other performance related problems he's encountered (mostly in Blender). Tried Windows to make sure the card is not at fault and voilà everything works correctly with no issues.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/t6mXPm5.jpg