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> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to

by _wdzx 10y ago

> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so. I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.). Have you tried something else than xfce or unity?

brulard 10y ago
I've never heard the opposite. I've switched to OsX 4 years ago after being completely unhappy and irritated with Windows for over 12 years. Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. Although I would be much more happy with something Open Source.
- rayiner 10y ago
  I used Linux on the desktop from 2001-2007 or so. Switched to OS X until then. It's no contest: OS X is smoother, more consistent, and lower maintenance. Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity.
  - idobai 10y ago
    > Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity. Gnome 2.x is a dead-end - it was buggy and ugly. Gnome 3.x is far better. Unity is just another canonical-outrage.
    - AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
      Would you mind explaining what you mean by outrage? For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far. And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system.
      - idobai 10y ago
        By "outrage" I've meant canonical has developed it because they didn't like gnome shell(they like the innovation-thing). > For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far. Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize. > And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system. But we should talk about it if we're here...
        AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
        > By "outrage" I've meant canonical has developed it because they didn't like gnome shell(they like the innovation-thing). After watching the "we're the only ones who know best, so shut up"-antics of the Gnome developers, I can understand that canonical got cold feet. > Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize. In my experience, setting up multiple monitors was much less of a hassle under Unity than under Gnome. I don't have any recent data on the resources use, but I wouldn't run either Unity or Gnome on a low memory setup. Firefox and Chrome dwarf any RAM use for compositing anyway. >But we should talk about it if we're here... Ok, gladly. In Gnome 3, a lot of functionality comes from extensions. Even changing the theme (from a black top panel) needs an extension. Installing extensions is done over the web using your browser (this works to a varying degree out of the box). I don't know of any recent changes, but about a year ago I had a look under the hood, because I wanted to make my own extensions, and was shocked by how they work. First of all, there seems to be pretty much no integrity checks, signing, hashing to prevent malicious extensions. That's pretty much a no-go if you want to use Gnome in any kind of industrial setting (you will have to maintain them offline and manually on the file system level, sidestepping the supported way). My second gripe is the stability of extensions. Since you're downloading from a website, the currently offered may not fully support your slightly outdated Gnome install. However, if you keep your Gnome up to date, expect random failures of your extensions. From http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ about the reasoning behind sidestepping distro packaging (emphasis mine): "The second reason is that extensions are not working with a stable API, so have very specific version requirements that don't really fit into the normal assumptions packaging systems make. If a packaged extension says it works with GNOME Shell 3.2 only and not with GNOME Shell 3.4, then that will likely break the user's attempt to upgrade to the next version of their distribution. We'd rather just disable the extension and let the user find a new version when it becomes available." So, you just updated your Gnome and your productivity extensions fail. Now you have to search replacements and, should you find them, configure them anew. Sometimes extensions just randomly fail. This was the main reason I finally gave up on using Gnome for work. And speaking of stable APIs: another shock was to see that extensions don't operate against a plugin API but are basically Javascript code smudged into the existing running code. This makes gauging the effects one extension has on another pretty much impossible. My final conclusion regarding Gnome 3 was that it is a wobbly work in progress, less configurable than Compiz (there just aren't that much extensions to choose from in the end), based on questionable design principles and taste. It's okay for hobby use, I guess. But I have yet to find a distro that provides an as polished DE setup with Gnome as Ubuntu does with Unity. Don't get me wrong, I want Gnome to be great, since many distros use it as default DE and I want an alternative if Canonical mucks up Unity with their Mir transition and their focus on smart phones. There's also Cinnamon wich I kind of like, but it has the same problems regarding extensions as Gnome. I will give KDE a closer look in the future.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - lisivka 10y ago
      I use Mate (Gnome 2.x fork) daily. Gnome 3.x is ugly and buggy.
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    9 years is an incredibly long time in tech. Aside from a lot of other very good wms, there's always mate if you really like GNOME 2. http://mate-desktop.com/ http://mate-desktop.com/ Even better, none of those wms will go away just because Apple decided to change things.
    - type0 10y ago
      MATE is better than OS X desktop, at least for me.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I tend to agree. My development workstation runs Linux (and it's fine, but on that machine I only need Sublime, a terminal, Chrome, and IntelliJ--anything creative or entertaining I do on my laptop or in Windows respectively) literally only because I'm not buying a Mac Pro. It works, sort of, after spending a nontrivial time figuring out kludging together decent replacements for common functionality (xsel garbage for pbcopy/pbpaste, etc.); it probably helps that I already install the GNU coreutils on my Macs because I know the GNU tools better. In retrospect, a Mac Pro would probably not be that much more expensive than the time I spent getting this fairly minimally demanding environment set up, though on the other hand I did re-learn a decent bit of stuff about Linux in the process. On the gripping hand, things related to X aren't particularly important to my life, so that's kind of a push.
  - Filligree 10y ago
    Then I'd encourage you to try KDE. 4, not 5; 5 is still being developed. I don't know what's going on with the Gnome guys, but KDE is flat-out the best desktop manager I've used, and I'm including Windows and OS X in the comparison. It's not without glitches, but the glitches are mostly of the "Google can't be bothered to make Chrome cooperate, and no-one has updated Emacs' DM support in the last ten years" sort.
    - kitsunesoba 10y ago
      As a long time Mac user I find KDE hard to enjoy. The UIs of KDE apps are almost universally overpacked, messy, or lopsided (one side of the window had its controls crammed while the other has awkward white space). It might sound like a silly gripe but it really bothers me. The design of apps from GTK+ desktop environments (GNOME, Cinnamon, Pantheon) generally feel much better, but they have their own problems.
  - wtbob 10y ago
    I agree that GNOME and Unity have jumped the shark — I think that I started to notice when GNOME got rid of xscreensaver and replaced it with a screen-blanker, with an unfulfilled promise of adding screensavers back someday, c.f. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/msg00340.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/...). Meanwhile everything went down the path of compositing and otherwise burning way too much CPU to do not a whole lot extra. I switched over to a tiling WM years ago, and have been extremely happy since. It does exactly what I want; I can connect to a running instance with my editor and reconfigure it, as well rewrite it while it's running. It's pretty great.
- fnord123 10y ago
  You can hear the opposite from me then. I have an OS X laptop and a desktop running Gnome (Fedora) and I find Gnome far better. Originally, I didn't like Gnome 3, but after I used it a lot, I got used to it; I added some extensions, and now I prefer it. In my opinion: * Finder is garbage (alt tab is broken and non configurable. I can't figure out how to convince it that the built in display is always the primary display. It seems to struggle with nfs mounts which Gnome doesn't at all. I've had just as many, or more issues with OS X and projectors as I have with Gnome). Where is the centralised location for Finder extensions to tweak it to my preferences? * The default command line tools that come with OS X are old and basic (reminds me of Sun's tools) and have a death of a thousand paper cuts (e.g. top defaults to sorting by pid, lol; they still ship bash 3.5.57, locales are all fucked up). * brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. But that's Open Source people trying to shore up OS X deficiencies so I won't call it "garbage". (F)OSS people put in a lot of effort to keep it running and they deserve praise. * The programs from Apple are all terrible. I literally don't use any except Safari sometimes since it allegedly doesn't use as much battery as Chrome or Firefox. I guess I sometimes copy paste stuff into Textedit and I sometimes use Calculator. It's all certainly usable but there is no consensus that OS X is the best. YMMV. My feeling is that each time there is an OS X release, it jumps ahead of Gnome; but Gnome usually trundles along and surpasses it and maintains a lead most of the time.
  - Razengan 10y ago
    > Finder is garbage Try PathFinder: http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ It can be used for free until you decide to buy it. > alt tab is broken and non configurable Cmd+Tab? What exactly do you find annoying? Try Missing Control (F3, or set a mouse hot corner in System Preferences -> Mission Control) to quickly see all windows (for all process, or Ctrl+F3 for current app, Cmd+F3 for desktop) and just raise the one you want. Also try TinkerTool: https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html > brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/ https://nixos.org/nix/ > The programs from Apple are all terrible. Which ones, and how, exactly?
    - fnord123 10y ago
- vetinari 10y ago
  I've got other experience: - random failures to mount network shares, - drag-and-droping files between Finder windows suddenly stops working, - the file rename edit widget appearing in random part of the screen that are bugs, that should not appear in the supposedly best desktop OS.
  - radicalbyte 10y ago
    I can recommend using Forklift. It has its own share of bugs, but you don't get the freezing and general crappy experience of Finder when accessing network shared :)
- wtbob 10y ago
  > Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. I recently set up Ubuntu and Mint computers for some folks, and can report that Mint is not bad, but Ubuntu is dreck (seriously, the change-user-password dialogue hangs: do Ubuntu users never change their passwords‽). I've been running Debian with stumpwm for years now, and am convinced that this is the way of the future: a tiling window manager, extensible in a real language, capable of performing literally any task I ask of it. Most of the time, my main window is full-screen — that's odd to someone used to a classic desktop interface (as I used to be), but it's actually very much like a modern tablet or phone.
thegeomaster 10y ago
I use KDE and can confirm, unfortunately, that (at least on my setup) I have encountered many bugs pertaining to graphics. I also often get PulseAudio issues like the sound skipping when the system is under heavier-than-usual momentary load. I can't run Chrome developer tools without it crashing inside the driver every few minutes. Mounting an NTFS partition works on second try every time. I've used GNOME previously, which was too memory-hungry and often too unresponsive to use. I love Linux as a developer platform and that's why I'm staying here. But if I could give up the shell, package management, understandable system architecture and the like, I'd move to Windows in a jiffy. Its desktop works flawlessly on my PC.
- idobai 10y ago
  > I've used GNOME previously, which was too memory-hungry and often too unresponsive to use. Maybe you should buy a dev computer instead. Gnome consumes far less memory than the average DE. I always try every DE at every release and as far as I've experienced gnome-shell and cinnamon are the best at customization/plugins/performance. Edit: > I'd move to Windows in a jiffy. Its desktop works flawlessly on my PC. I'm currently at work and I've a windows and an ubuntu on virtualbox - gnome-shell is pretty smooth while windows appends the "Not responding" text to every window's title, the search in the menu is much slower than it should be and the apps are often frozen - it is far from "flawless" for me.
- lisivka 10y ago
  I use Mate at Fedora. I see none of your bugs.
  - throwaway2048 10y ago
    I'm sure that's of great value to him.
    - lisivka 10y ago
      For me, it looks like a lie, because of no information about hardware, distro, kernel, etc. For example, pulseaudio works fine for me for at least 6 years on 6 notebooks and 2 workstations of various vendors (HP, Dell, Acer, Medion). But if it will work badly under heavy load, then obvious command will fix that: `sudo renice -n -10 $(pgrep pulseaudio)` .
redwall_hp 10y ago
ChuckMcM's criticisms seem to be of the X Window System, not of any particular desktop environment. Architecturally, it really doesn't fit with modern systems and has a lot of legacy baggage. It doesn't matter what DE you like, X still powers it, and it's the issue. Wayland is on the way, which may bring Linux graphics into the 21st century, but I haven't been following that very closely. Apple's way more on the ball about GUI stuff. While OS X lags behind in OpenGL support, which sucks for games, they nail everything their desktop environment needs to function. But notably, they don't use something like X. They have their own software stack.
- _wdzx 10y ago
  Enlighten me - what's the problem with the linux desktops?
  - aaron-lebo 10y ago
    Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Certainly right there with Windows or OSX or anything else. In a lot of cases you don't even need to be very selective, you just need to have a modern machine.
    - eropple 10y ago
      I run a Linux desktop for work (typing on it right now) as a dual-boot with my Windows setup. It is a "modern machine", at least if an i7-6700K and a 980Ti are modern, and I couldn't get X to start with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. And yet it did with Ubuntu 14.04, which is bizarre. My time is valuable enough that I didn't debug it further than that--if I wanted to light my time on fire I'd just go set up a Hackintosh and have a better desktop experience, so for now I'm getting by with 14.04. But that sucks profoundly; it was my first attempt at a Linux desktop in probably three years and I was pretty disheartened by how things have gotten worse for my use cases in that time. "If you select your hardware," you can definitely have a decent time. But I don't know many people for whom the operating system is more important than what you can do with it, and part of "what you can do with it" is "use your hardware."
lloeki 10y ago
> far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.). Have you tried something else than xfce or unity? You're missing the point, GP is talking about a level below the DEs, namely the graphics stack, which if unavailable or inefficient makes any discussion about the DEs moot since the GUI may very well be unusable at all in practice. In that regard the "Windows desktop" has plenty of favorable points and "macOS desktop" is just stellar because it has had a comparatively perfect track record of driver support including a compositor since forever. With a VESA/OPenGL/Quartz software render fallback many people on the Hackintosh crowd have been using OS X on unsupported cards via software fallback and not even notice they weren't getting the full Quartz QE/CI, which is nothing short of astonishing. This is the signature attitude that points to the point being missed, what good is conky or awesomewm or ratpoison or xmonad or openbox if I can't make tearing and rendering artifacts disappear nor get proper colour management or sane HiDPI support? (PS: Xinerama, I hate you) As for the DE experience on other platforms, Windows has had a kinda-tiling WM that regular people do use in the form of AeroSnap, while macOS is now getting tabs-in-the-window-manager, and Exposé+Spaces that evolved into Mission Control has been a positively brilliant experience for years. Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder).
- pimeys 10y ago
  > As for the DE experience on other platforms, Windows has had a kinda-tiling WM that regular people do use in the form of AeroSnap, while macOS is now getting tabs-in-the-window-manager, and Exposé+Spaces that evolved into Mission Control has been a positively brilliant experience for years. > Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder). And then again, after using almost 10 years xmonad at work and at home for everything, using Windows or OS X is definitely not a nice experience. I don't really care about GUI tricks or clutter on my desktop. I just want my terminal, my editor and my browser to appear when I press the key combinations and I want my desktop to manage the windows so that they're always in the right place. The other thing I don't miss from the Windows and OS X world are the updates. I don't want to spend one work day to update my system to the next version and possibly fixing things because something changed in the xcode and I need to reinstall it to get my toolchain to work, or something changed in the Windows Linux subsystem and again I'm spending time fixing stuff. I like things to be simple and a very basic Linux installation with a good wm which you know by heart is miles ahead of everything else. And it doesn't change so you can focus on your work.
hiram112 10y ago
Linux on the desktop is still full of issues that were solved by Windows and Mac a decade ago. Fonts still look like crap (Ubuntu is an exception), and even with patches there are still problems with Java, old GTK libs, etc. I could care less about games, MS Office, a d a lot of other things that are deal breakers for some, but I have tried Linux on the desktop and it is still lacking.
- idobai 10y ago
  > Fonts still look like crap (Ubuntu is an exception) You can change|install fonts on linux. > and even with patches there are still problems with Java, old GTK libs, etc What kind of problems? > but I have tried Linux on the desktop and it is still lacking. Can you tell us what do you miss?
  - hiram112 10y ago
    My latest foray involved Infinality patches on Fedora 23. Honestly, with the exception of Ubuntu, this is the best I've ever gotten with Linux. I think part of this is due to Google having released a lot of great fonts with open licenses (droid mono, e.g.). But still, they just aren't as good as Windows 7. And it's not because I'm just used to Windows. I rarely use Macs, but when I do, I'm more than happy with the fonts (they're probably better than Windows). In both, the display and sizes are consistent in all apps, but Linux has so many different toolkits that don't respect the default - Java, VLC, Chrome, etc. - basically like 50% of the apps I'm using most of the day. My latest try with running Fedora 23 on my laptop outside of the VM seemed okay... until a recent Kernel / X update turned it into a hot mess - fan constantly running, processor overheating warnings in the logs, etc. Maybe it was my NVidia card or something. The problem is that I have a Dell Precision which is one of THE few models (along with Thinkpads) that are well supported on Linux. But I just don't have time to deal with these things anymore. If Windows 10 doesn't clean up its act, I'll probably be moving to a MBP, even though I haven't had good luck with them in the past. Honestly, I'm at the point where I'd pay serious money to RedHat or some other company (maybe Dell or Lenovo) to put out a well supported laptop / Linux combo: nice fonts, supported discrete video, working ACPI, upgradable parts, and no spying or trying to monetize the OS user nor dumbing down the interface a la Apple and MS.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dang 10y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12034708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12034708 and marked it off-topic.

by _wdzx 10y ago

brulard 10y ago

I've never heard the opposite. I've switched to OsX 4 years ago after being completely unhappy and irritated with Windows for over 12 years. Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. Although I would be much more happy with something Open Source.

rayiner 10y ago
I used Linux on the desktop from 2001-2007 or so. Switched to OS X until then. It's no contest: OS X is smoother, more consistent, and lower maintenance. Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity.
- idobai 10y ago
  > Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity. Gnome 2.x is a dead-end - it was buggy and ugly. Gnome 3.x is far better. Unity is just another canonical-outrage.
  - AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
    Would you mind explaining what you mean by outrage? For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far. And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system.
    - idobai 10y ago
      By "outrage" I've meant canonical has developed it because they didn't like gnome shell(they like the innovation-thing). > For productivity, Unity beats any Gnome 3 setup I've tried so far. Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize. > And we're still not talking about the maintenance/security nightmare that is the Gnome 3 plugin system. But we should talk about it if we're here...
      - AnonymousPlanet 10y ago
        > By "outrage" I've meant canonical has developed it because they didn't like gnome shell(they like the innovation-thing). After watching the "we're the only ones who know best, so shut up"-antics of the Gnome developers, I can understand that canonical got cold feet. > Unity has problems with multiple monitors, consumes more RAM and CPU and is also hard to customize. In my experience, setting up multiple monitors was much less of a hassle under Unity than under Gnome. I don't have any recent data on the resources use, but I wouldn't run either Unity or Gnome on a low memory setup. Firefox and Chrome dwarf any RAM use for compositing anyway. >But we should talk about it if we're here... Ok, gladly. In Gnome 3, a lot of functionality comes from extensions. Even changing the theme (from a black top panel) needs an extension. Installing extensions is done over the web using your browser (this works to a varying degree out of the box). I don't know of any recent changes, but about a year ago I had a look under the hood, because I wanted to make my own extensions, and was shocked by how they work. First of all, there seems to be pretty much no integrity checks, signing, hashing to prevent malicious extensions. That's pretty much a no-go if you want to use Gnome in any kind of industrial setting (you will have to maintain them offline and manually on the file system level, sidestepping the supported way). My second gripe is the stability of extensions. Since you're downloading from a website, the currently offered may not fully support your slightly outdated Gnome install. However, if you keep your Gnome up to date, expect random failures of your extensions. From http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ http://lwn.net/Articles/460037/ about the reasoning behind sidestepping distro packaging (emphasis mine): "The second reason is that extensions are not working with a stable API, so have very specific version requirements that don't really fit into the normal assumptions packaging systems make. If a packaged extension says it works with GNOME Shell 3.2 only and not with GNOME Shell 3.4, then that will likely break the user's attempt to upgrade to the next version of their distribution. We'd rather just disable the extension and let the user find a new version when it becomes available." So, you just updated your Gnome and your productivity extensions fail. Now you have to search replacements and, should you find them, configure them anew. Sometimes extensions just randomly fail. This was the main reason I finally gave up on using Gnome for work. And speaking of stable APIs: another shock was to see that extensions don't operate against a plugin API but are basically Javascript code smudged into the existing running code. This makes gauging the effects one extension has on another pretty much impossible. My final conclusion regarding Gnome 3 was that it is a wobbly work in progress, less configurable than Compiz (there just aren't that much extensions to choose from in the end), based on questionable design principles and taste. It's okay for hobby use, I guess. But I have yet to find a distro that provides an as polished DE setup with Gnome as Ubuntu does with Unity. Don't get me wrong, I want Gnome to be great, since many distros use it as default DE and I want an alternative if Canonical mucks up Unity with their Mir transition and their focus on smart phones. There's also Cinnamon wich I kind of like, but it has the same problems regarding extensions as Gnome. I will give KDE a closer look in the future.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - lisivka 10y ago
    I use Mate (Gnome 2.x fork) daily. Gnome 3.x is ugly and buggy.
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  9 years is an incredibly long time in tech. Aside from a lot of other very good wms, there's always mate if you really like GNOME 2. http://mate-desktop.com/ http://mate-desktop.com/ Even better, none of those wms will go away just because Apple decided to change things.
  - type0 10y ago
    MATE is better than OS X desktop, at least for me.
- eropple 10y ago
  I tend to agree. My development workstation runs Linux (and it's fine, but on that machine I only need Sublime, a terminal, Chrome, and IntelliJ--anything creative or entertaining I do on my laptop or in Windows respectively) literally only because I'm not buying a Mac Pro. It works, sort of, after spending a nontrivial time figuring out kludging together decent replacements for common functionality (xsel garbage for pbcopy/pbpaste, etc.); it probably helps that I already install the GNU coreutils on my Macs because I know the GNU tools better. In retrospect, a Mac Pro would probably not be that much more expensive than the time I spent getting this fairly minimally demanding environment set up, though on the other hand I did re-learn a decent bit of stuff about Linux in the process. On the gripping hand, things related to X aren't particularly important to my life, so that's kind of a push.
- Filligree 10y ago
  Then I'd encourage you to try KDE. 4, not 5; 5 is still being developed. I don't know what's going on with the Gnome guys, but KDE is flat-out the best desktop manager I've used, and I'm including Windows and OS X in the comparison. It's not without glitches, but the glitches are mostly of the "Google can't be bothered to make Chrome cooperate, and no-one has updated Emacs' DM support in the last ten years" sort.
  - kitsunesoba 10y ago
    As a long time Mac user I find KDE hard to enjoy. The UIs of KDE apps are almost universally overpacked, messy, or lopsided (one side of the window had its controls crammed while the other has awkward white space). It might sound like a silly gripe but it really bothers me. The design of apps from GTK+ desktop environments (GNOME, Cinnamon, Pantheon) generally feel much better, but they have their own problems.
- wtbob 10y ago
  I agree that GNOME and Unity have jumped the shark — I think that I started to notice when GNOME got rid of xscreensaver and replaced it with a screen-blanker, with an unfulfilled promise of adding screensavers back someday, c.f. https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/msg00340.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-March/...). Meanwhile everything went down the path of compositing and otherwise burning way too much CPU to do not a whole lot extra. I switched over to a tiling WM years ago, and have been extremely happy since. It does exactly what I want; I can connect to a running instance with my editor and reconfigure it, as well rewrite it while it's running. It's pretty great.
fnord123 10y ago
You can hear the opposite from me then. I have an OS X laptop and a desktop running Gnome (Fedora) and I find Gnome far better. Originally, I didn't like Gnome 3, but after I used it a lot, I got used to it; I added some extensions, and now I prefer it. In my opinion: * Finder is garbage (alt tab is broken and non configurable. I can't figure out how to convince it that the built in display is always the primary display. It seems to struggle with nfs mounts which Gnome doesn't at all. I've had just as many, or more issues with OS X and projectors as I have with Gnome). Where is the centralised location for Finder extensions to tweak it to my preferences? * The default command line tools that come with OS X are old and basic (reminds me of Sun's tools) and have a death of a thousand paper cuts (e.g. top defaults to sorting by pid, lol; they still ship bash 3.5.57, locales are all fucked up). * brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. But that's Open Source people trying to shore up OS X deficiencies so I won't call it "garbage". (F)OSS people put in a lot of effort to keep it running and they deserve praise. * The programs from Apple are all terrible. I literally don't use any except Safari sometimes since it allegedly doesn't use as much battery as Chrome or Firefox. I guess I sometimes copy paste stuff into Textedit and I sometimes use Calculator. It's all certainly usable but there is no consensus that OS X is the best. YMMV. My feeling is that each time there is an OS X release, it jumps ahead of Gnome; but Gnome usually trundles along and surpasses it and maintains a lead most of the time.
- Razengan 10y ago
  > Finder is garbage Try PathFinder: http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ http://www.cocoatech.com/pathfinder/ It can be used for free until you decide to buy it. > alt tab is broken and non configurable Cmd+Tab? What exactly do you find annoying? Try Missing Control (F3, or set a mouse hot corner in System Preferences -> Mission Control) to quickly see all windows (for all process, or Ctrl+F3 for current app, Cmd+F3 for desktop) and just raise the one you want. Also try TinkerTool: https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html > brew, compared to dnf or apt, is not good. Try nix: https://nixos.org/nix/ https://nixos.org/nix/ > The programs from Apple are all terrible. Which ones, and how, exactly?
  - fnord123 10y ago
vetinari 10y ago
I've got other experience: - random failures to mount network shares, - drag-and-droping files between Finder windows suddenly stops working, - the file rename edit widget appearing in random part of the screen that are bugs, that should not appear in the supposedly best desktop OS.
- radicalbyte 10y ago
  I can recommend using Forklift. It has its own share of bugs, but you don't get the freezing and general crappy experience of Finder when accessing network shared :)
wtbob 10y ago
> Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. I recently set up Ubuntu and Mint computers for some folks, and can report that Mint is not bad, but Ubuntu is dreck (seriously, the change-user-password dialogue hangs: do Ubuntu users never change their passwords‽). I've been running Debian with stumpwm for years now, and am convinced that this is the way of the future: a tiling window manager, extensible in a real language, capable of performing literally any task I ask of it. Most of the time, my main window is full-screen — that's odd to someone used to a classic desktop interface (as I used to be), but it's actually very much like a modern tablet or phone.

thegeomaster 10y ago

I use KDE and can confirm, unfortunately, that (at least on my setup) I have encountered many bugs pertaining to graphics. I also often get PulseAudio issues like the sound skipping when the system is under heavier-than-usual momentary load. I can't run Chrome developer tools without it crashing inside the driver every few minutes. Mounting an NTFS partition works on second try every time. I've used GNOME previously, which was too memory-hungry and often too unresponsive to use. I love Linux as a developer platform and that's why I'm staying here. But if I could give up the shell, package management, understandable system architecture and the like, I'd move to Windows in a jiffy. Its desktop works flawlessly on my PC.

idobai 10y ago
> I've used GNOME previously, which was too memory-hungry and often too unresponsive to use. Maybe you should buy a dev computer instead. Gnome consumes far less memory than the average DE. I always try every DE at every release and as far as I've experienced gnome-shell and cinnamon are the best at customization/plugins/performance. Edit: > I'd move to Windows in a jiffy. Its desktop works flawlessly on my PC. I'm currently at work and I've a windows and an ubuntu on virtualbox - gnome-shell is pretty smooth while windows appends the "Not responding" text to every window's title, the search in the menu is much slower than it should be and the apps are often frozen - it is far from "flawless" for me.
lisivka 10y ago
I use Mate at Fedora. I see none of your bugs.
- throwaway2048 10y ago
  I'm sure that's of great value to him.
  - lisivka 10y ago
    For me, it looks like a lie, because of no information about hardware, distro, kernel, etc. For example, pulseaudio works fine for me for at least 6 years on 6 notebooks and 2 workstations of various vendors (HP, Dell, Acer, Medion). But if it will work badly under heavy load, then obvious command will fix that: `sudo renice -n -10 $(pgrep pulseaudio)` .

redwall_hp 10y ago

ChuckMcM's criticisms seem to be of the X Window System, not of any particular desktop environment. Architecturally, it really doesn't fit with modern systems and has a lot of legacy baggage. It doesn't matter what DE you like, X still powers it, and it's the issue. Wayland is on the way, which may bring Linux graphics into the 21st century, but I haven't been following that very closely. Apple's way more on the ball about GUI stuff. While OS X lags behind in OpenGL support, which sucks for games, they nail everything their desktop environment needs to function. But notably, they don't use something like X. They have their own software stack.

_wdzx 10y ago
Enlighten me - what's the problem with the linux desktops?
- aaron-lebo 10y ago
  Based on this thread, I'd say the problem is a lot of people haven't given them the time. If you select your hardware, they work pretty flawlessly. Certainly right there with Windows or OSX or anything else. In a lot of cases you don't even need to be very selective, you just need to have a modern machine.
  - eropple 10y ago
    I run a Linux desktop for work (typing on it right now) as a dual-boot with my Windows setup. It is a "modern machine", at least if an i7-6700K and a 980Ti are modern, and I couldn't get X to start with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. And yet it did with Ubuntu 14.04, which is bizarre. My time is valuable enough that I didn't debug it further than that--if I wanted to light my time on fire I'd just go set up a Hackintosh and have a better desktop experience, so for now I'm getting by with 14.04. But that sucks profoundly; it was my first attempt at a Linux desktop in probably three years and I was pretty disheartened by how things have gotten worse for my use cases in that time. "If you select your hardware," you can definitely have a decent time. But I don't know many people for whom the operating system is more important than what you can do with it, and part of "what you can do with it" is "use your hardware."

lloeki 10y ago

> far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.). Have you tried something else than xfce or unity? You're missing the point, GP is talking about a level below the DEs, namely the graphics stack, which if unavailable or inefficient makes any discussion about the DEs moot since the GUI may very well be unusable at all in practice. In that regard the "Windows desktop" has plenty of favorable points and "macOS desktop" is just stellar because it has had a comparatively perfect track record of driver support including a compositor since forever. With a VESA/OPenGL/Quartz software render fallback many people on the Hackintosh crowd have been using OS X on unsupported cards via software fallback and not even notice they weren't getting the full Quartz QE/CI, which is nothing short of astonishing. This is the signature attitude that points to the point being missed, what good is conky or awesomewm or ratpoison or xmonad or openbox if I can't make tearing and rendering artifacts disappear nor get proper colour management or sane HiDPI support? (PS: Xinerama, I hate you) As for the DE experience on other platforms, Windows has had a kinda-tiling WM that regular people do use in the form of AeroSnap, while macOS is now getting tabs-in-the-window-manager, and Exposé+Spaces that evolved into Mission Control has been a positively brilliant experience for years. Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder).

pimeys 10y ago
> As for the DE experience on other platforms, Windows has had a kinda-tiling WM that regular people do use in the form of AeroSnap, while macOS is now getting tabs-in-the-window-manager, and Exposé+Spaces that evolved into Mission Control has been a positively brilliant experience for years. > Meanwhile on Linux, the very fact that you have to massage it into something useful ever so slightly at every level is, to me, a telltale sign of its deficiencies. Things are getting better (wayland, drm2), but they're getting better on the other platforms too. The best part is that nobody's standing still and things are moving forward (hopefully, as from the outside it looks like Linux people are running in circles these days around, so I hope reinvented wheels are getting rounder). And then again, after using almost 10 years xmonad at work and at home for everything, using Windows or OS X is definitely not a nice experience. I don't really care about GUI tricks or clutter on my desktop. I just want my terminal, my editor and my browser to appear when I press the key combinations and I want my desktop to manage the windows so that they're always in the right place. The other thing I don't miss from the Windows and OS X world are the updates. I don't want to spend one work day to update my system to the next version and possibly fixing things because something changed in the xcode and I need to reinstall it to get my toolchain to work, or something changed in the Windows Linux subsystem and again I'm spending time fixing stuff. I like things to be simple and a very basic Linux installation with a good wm which you know by heart is miles ahead of everything else. And it doesn't change so you can focus on your work.

hiram112 10y ago

Linux on the desktop is still full of issues that were solved by Windows and Mac a decade ago. Fonts still look like crap (Ubuntu is an exception), and even with patches there are still problems with Java, old GTK libs, etc. I could care less about games, MS Office, a d a lot of other things that are deal breakers for some, but I have tried Linux on the desktop and it is still lacking.

idobai 10y ago
> Fonts still look like crap (Ubuntu is an exception) You can change|install fonts on linux. > and even with patches there are still problems with Java, old GTK libs, etc What kind of problems? > but I have tried Linux on the desktop and it is still lacking. Can you tell us what do you miss?
- hiram112 10y ago
  My latest foray involved Infinality patches on Fedora 23. Honestly, with the exception of Ubuntu, this is the best I've ever gotten with Linux. I think part of this is due to Google having released a lot of great fonts with open licenses (droid mono, e.g.). But still, they just aren't as good as Windows 7. And it's not because I'm just used to Windows. I rarely use Macs, but when I do, I'm more than happy with the fonts (they're probably better than Windows). In both, the display and sizes are consistent in all apps, but Linux has so many different toolkits that don't respect the default - Java, VLC, Chrome, etc. - basically like 50% of the apps I'm using most of the day. My latest try with running Fedora 23 on my laptop outside of the VM seemed okay... until a recent Kernel / X update turned it into a hot mess - fan constantly running, processor overheating warnings in the logs, etc. Maybe it was my NVidia card or something. The problem is that I have a Dell Precision which is one of THE few models (along with Thinkpads) that are well supported on Linux. But I just don't have time to deal with these things anymore. If Windows 10 doesn't clean up its act, I'll probably be moving to a MBP, even though I haven't had good luck with them in the past. Honestly, I'm at the point where I'd pay serious money to RedHat or some other company (maybe Dell or Lenovo) to put out a well supported laptop / Linux combo: nice fonts, supported discrete video, working ACPI, upgradable parts, and no spying or trying to monetize the OS user nor dumbing down the interface a la Apple and MS.

deleted 10y ago

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dang 10y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12034708 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12034708 and marked it off-topic.