11 ms·

Just give a Linux desktop which is a smooth as macOS.

by secfirstmd 10y ago

holydude 10y ago
....for free. But seriously it's hard to create quality software especially if you are not as rich as Apple or MS
- Longhanks 10y ago
  Apple was not rich when Mac OS X launched.
  - holydude 10y ago
    When OSX launched people had different expectations.
  - boomboomsubban 10y ago
    Rich enough to spend half a billion on NeXT, which they turned into OS X.
- rbanffy 10y ago
  Judging by how much money Microsoft has, I wouldn't say money solves that problem.
vvangemert 10y ago
Like https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/ ?
- Brakenshire 10y ago
  Unfortunately I'm just about to give up on elementary because of its bugginess. In my experience, running on well-supported hardware, it has frequent long pauses booting up, serious problems with suspend, failures to install with the new appcenter, and a few other small issues. I support the theory of elementary (UI/designer led, unified HIGs, encouraging payment for development of the OS and the general ecosystem, and the emphasis on polished, hassle-free computing) but in practice it's just not there. They need to sort out bugs before taking on new features/designs. I'm actually just considering what distribution to recommend to an inexperienced user. I would recommend elementary in a heartbeat if serious bugs were fixed within weeks, instead they go on for years.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    A while since I have tried latest elementary now (I'm on KDE Neon now) but it used to be really good. Has it become worse over the two last years?
Asooka 10y ago
Oh god please no. I would really prefer that we stop the experimentation and just go back to implementing the standard desktop. Linux got its success by being a Unix clone, down to copying the syscall numbers. We should mimic that on desktop by just copying Windows, rather than chasing unproven weird ideas. OSX succeeds not because it's quirky, but because it is backed by a company with massive resources. And even OSX is much closer to Windows than Gnome is. Please stop innovation for innovation's sake and just make Windows 98 again.
- towndrunk 10y ago
  I wouldn't mind Windows 10 UI on Linux.
- dleslie 10y ago
  Hell, I'm happy with MATE; Unity, Gnome3, KDE, et al just fail to meet that combination of usable features, low footprint, and staying out of the way.
- criddell 10y ago
  > OSX succeeds not because it's quirky, but because it is backed by a company with massive resources. If deep pockets was all it took to make an OS succeed, Windows Phone wouldn't be dead. On the desktop, OSX, Windows, and most Linux variants are all good enough. What matters is application support. For my job, 50% of the applications I use run on Linux, 75% run on OSX (natively), and 100% work on Windows. Can you guess which OS I use at work? Thanks to Valve, Linux has a real shot at picking up some steam in the gaming space. Without Adobe and Microsoft, it probably won't go anywhere on corporate or consumer desktops.
  - MegaDeKay 10y ago
    "Thanks to Valve, Linux has a real shot at picking up some steam..." Nicely done :-)
  - zamalek 10y ago
    > 100% work on Windows Make that 110% if you include Visual Studio. The degree of polish that Visual Studio has just isn't available anywhere else. At some point early this year I was considering Linux+VSCode. VS2017, with F5-to-Docker debug, launched and everything else looks like a giant pain in the ass once again. The Azure integration is anticompetitive but, wow, is it also so much better than the alternative. XCode is a hilarious joke that Apple is playing on developers. Linux IDEs, while much better than XCode, would have been competitive in 2003 (unless you use Java/IntelliJ exclusively). It's no wonder that Windows is the only platform where developers shy away from text editors - it's the only platform where the alternatives to text editors don't absolutely suck. It's really not that text editors are better than IDEs - an good IDE and a good text editor are complementary, not competitive. Where I'm going with this is that a good IDE begets a quality application. That 100% doesn't arise from the ether. Alongside your game argument comes another indicator of this: Windows has a very mature graphical debugger[1] (having been growing it since DX9) where, so far as I have read, both competing operating systems lack this functionality entirely. Balmer might have looked like a fool with his "developers, developers, developers" dance. The thing is that he was completely correct - instead of mocking his monkey dancing, Apple and Linux should have been paying attention to the people that he was praising. If Ubuntu want to compete in this space the developer experience must be fixed. [1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh315751.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh315751.aspx
rbanffy 10y ago
Like Gnome?
kbart 10y ago
It's portability vs usability. Linux runs on pretty much anything: from the smallest chips to the super computers. You can't make something that suits every use case perfectly, so in order to support such variety, compromises must be made. iOS/macOS runs only on a handful devices that were designed and build by a single company, it's not fair to compare the two.
- FreakyT 10y ago
  So the funny thing is how well macOS works even when it doesn't have the right drivers. At one point I tried and failed to set up a Hackintosh on unsupported hardware, but I was shocked to find how good it looked even with the default VESA video driver! While Linux's VESA driver got tons of screen tearing issues and generally poor drawing speeds, Mac OS (this was 10.4) was sitting there drawing a fully composited desktop with no slowdowns whatsoever. At that same time, Linux required special graphics hardware with beta drivers to even get any form of desktop compositing working.
- massysett 10y ago
  You are talking about the Linux kernel. Desktops (e.g. KDE, GNOME, Unity, etc) run practically exclusively on AMD64 systems that take the laptop or desktop form factor. What we've seen are ill-fated attempts to make those desktops work well on touch devices. That's what Unity was all about. On the other hand Apple has refused to make macOS run on touch screens.
  - whatusername 10y ago
    Refused to release. I'm sure they have prototypes that "run" on touch screens.
- tapoxi 10y ago
  All I really want are graphics drivers that don't need to be recompiled every time I update my kernel. Why is this such a hard problem?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
DCKing 10y ago
GNOME on Wayland with AMD or Intel graphics (can't tell you about Nvidia) is at least as smooth as Windows 10 or macOS. That's just graphical performance I'm talking about though. Unfortunately, that alone isn't quite the same 'smooth' experience as Windows and macOS because: - the only somewhat noob friendly out of the box experience that has this setup is the latest Fedora (at the moment) - you need to be concerned about whether your graphics card is compatible - many Linux apps aren't built using modern GTK3 or Qt which will result in some jarring/inconsistent experience when doing actual work in your desktop environment - there are just fewer quality applications to work with on Linux, and cross-platform applications often are less graphically pleasing than their Windows and especially macOS equivalents - there's no equivalent of Macbook or Microsoft Precision trackpads on Linux, which to me are part of the subjective 'smooth' experience on Macbooks or recent properly equipped Windows laptops Wayland in my experience really solves the performance/smoothness problems the Linux desktop has. But there's still a long way to go even after Wayland becomes the default on the Linux desktop.
reitanqild 10y ago
Juat remember that a lot of us actually really don't like using MacOSX. I respect that others like it, -would even vote argue for coworkers to get a Mac even if it is slightly more expensive than my machine if thats what they are used to and like, - but passing it around as a benchmark for a good desktop gets a bit tiring.
- herbst 10y ago
  I've got introduced to it in late 2015. I was running Gnome Shell with Arch for the most time and got a 2015 MBP at work. I always found the design to look dated and the intuitively of the UI beeing stuck in history other than going with time. From my POV i never understood how OSX is praised as design standard, but i didnt switch from Vista to OSX years ago.

Just give a Linux desktop which is a smooth as macOS.

holydude 10y ago

....for free. But seriously it's hard to create quality software especially if you are not as rich as Apple or MS

Longhanks 10y ago
Apple was not rich when Mac OS X launched.
- holydude 10y ago
  When OSX launched people had different expectations.
- boomboomsubban 10y ago
  Rich enough to spend half a billion on NeXT, which they turned into OS X.
rbanffy 10y ago
Judging by how much money Microsoft has, I wouldn't say money solves that problem.

vvangemert 10y ago

Like https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/ ?

Brakenshire 10y ago
Unfortunately I'm just about to give up on elementary because of its bugginess. In my experience, running on well-supported hardware, it has frequent long pauses booting up, serious problems with suspend, failures to install with the new appcenter, and a few other small issues. I support the theory of elementary (UI/designer led, unified HIGs, encouraging payment for development of the OS and the general ecosystem, and the emphasis on polished, hassle-free computing) but in practice it's just not there. They need to sort out bugs before taking on new features/designs. I'm actually just considering what distribution to recommend to an inexperienced user. I would recommend elementary in a heartbeat if serious bugs were fixed within weeks, instead they go on for years.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  A while since I have tried latest elementary now (I'm on KDE Neon now) but it used to be really good. Has it become worse over the two last years?

Asooka 10y ago

Oh god please no. I would really prefer that we stop the experimentation and just go back to implementing the standard desktop. Linux got its success by being a Unix clone, down to copying the syscall numbers. We should mimic that on desktop by just copying Windows, rather than chasing unproven weird ideas. OSX succeeds not because it's quirky, but because it is backed by a company with massive resources. And even OSX is much closer to Windows than Gnome is. Please stop innovation for innovation's sake and just make Windows 98 again.

towndrunk 10y ago
I wouldn't mind Windows 10 UI on Linux.
dleslie 10y ago
Hell, I'm happy with MATE; Unity, Gnome3, KDE, et al just fail to meet that combination of usable features, low footprint, and staying out of the way.
criddell 10y ago
> OSX succeeds not because it's quirky, but because it is backed by a company with massive resources. If deep pockets was all it took to make an OS succeed, Windows Phone wouldn't be dead. On the desktop, OSX, Windows, and most Linux variants are all good enough. What matters is application support. For my job, 50% of the applications I use run on Linux, 75% run on OSX (natively), and 100% work on Windows. Can you guess which OS I use at work? Thanks to Valve, Linux has a real shot at picking up some steam in the gaming space. Without Adobe and Microsoft, it probably won't go anywhere on corporate or consumer desktops.
- MegaDeKay 10y ago
  "Thanks to Valve, Linux has a real shot at picking up some steam..." Nicely done :-)
- zamalek 10y ago
  > 100% work on Windows Make that 110% if you include Visual Studio. The degree of polish that Visual Studio has just isn't available anywhere else. At some point early this year I was considering Linux+VSCode. VS2017, with F5-to-Docker debug, launched and everything else looks like a giant pain in the ass once again. The Azure integration is anticompetitive but, wow, is it also so much better than the alternative. XCode is a hilarious joke that Apple is playing on developers. Linux IDEs, while much better than XCode, would have been competitive in 2003 (unless you use Java/IntelliJ exclusively). It's no wonder that Windows is the only platform where developers shy away from text editors - it's the only platform where the alternatives to text editors don't absolutely suck. It's really not that text editors are better than IDEs - an good IDE and a good text editor are complementary, not competitive. Where I'm going with this is that a good IDE begets a quality application. That 100% doesn't arise from the ether. Alongside your game argument comes another indicator of this: Windows has a very mature graphical debugger[1] (having been growing it since DX9) where, so far as I have read, both competing operating systems lack this functionality entirely. Balmer might have looked like a fool with his "developers, developers, developers" dance. The thing is that he was completely correct - instead of mocking his monkey dancing, Apple and Linux should have been paying attention to the people that he was praising. If Ubuntu want to compete in this space the developer experience must be fixed. [1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh315751.aspx https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh315751.aspx

rbanffy 10y ago

Like Gnome?

kbart 10y ago

It's portability vs usability. Linux runs on pretty much anything: from the smallest chips to the super computers. You can't make something that suits every use case perfectly, so in order to support such variety, compromises must be made. iOS/macOS runs only on a handful devices that were designed and build by a single company, it's not fair to compare the two.

FreakyT 10y ago
So the funny thing is how well macOS works even when it doesn't have the right drivers. At one point I tried and failed to set up a Hackintosh on unsupported hardware, but I was shocked to find how good it looked even with the default VESA video driver! While Linux's VESA driver got tons of screen tearing issues and generally poor drawing speeds, Mac OS (this was 10.4) was sitting there drawing a fully composited desktop with no slowdowns whatsoever. At that same time, Linux required special graphics hardware with beta drivers to even get any form of desktop compositing working.
massysett 10y ago
You are talking about the Linux kernel. Desktops (e.g. KDE, GNOME, Unity, etc) run practically exclusively on AMD64 systems that take the laptop or desktop form factor. What we've seen are ill-fated attempts to make those desktops work well on touch devices. That's what Unity was all about. On the other hand Apple has refused to make macOS run on touch screens.
- whatusername 10y ago
  Refused to release. I'm sure they have prototypes that "run" on touch screens.
tapoxi 10y ago
All I really want are graphics drivers that don't need to be recompiled every time I update my kernel. Why is this such a hard problem?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

DCKing 10y ago

GNOME on Wayland with AMD or Intel graphics (can't tell you about Nvidia) is at least as smooth as Windows 10 or macOS. That's just graphical performance I'm talking about though. Unfortunately, that alone isn't quite the same 'smooth' experience as Windows and macOS because: - the only somewhat noob friendly out of the box experience that has this setup is the latest Fedora (at the moment) - you need to be concerned about whether your graphics card is compatible - many Linux apps aren't built using modern GTK3 or Qt which will result in some jarring/inconsistent experience when doing actual work in your desktop environment - there are just fewer quality applications to work with on Linux, and cross-platform applications often are less graphically pleasing than their Windows and especially macOS equivalents - there's no equivalent of Macbook or Microsoft Precision trackpads on Linux, which to me are part of the subjective 'smooth' experience on Macbooks or recent properly equipped Windows laptops Wayland in my experience really solves the performance/smoothness problems the Linux desktop has. But there's still a long way to go even after Wayland becomes the default on the Linux desktop.

reitanqild 10y ago

Juat remember that a lot of us actually really don't like using MacOSX. I respect that others like it, -would even vote argue for coworkers to get a Mac even if it is slightly more expensive than my machine if thats what they are used to and like, - but passing it around as a benchmark for a good desktop gets a bit tiring.

herbst 10y ago
I've got introduced to it in late 2015. I was running Gnome Shell with Arch for the most time and got a 2015 MBP at work. I always found the design to look dated and the intuitively of the UI beeing stuck in history other than going with time. From my POV i never understood how OSX is praised as design standard, but i didnt switch from Vista to OSX years ago.