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I have used Linux as my primary desktop system for over ten years. Usability really sucks. I'm not talking about a new UX model, systemd vs sysv, or wayland vs

I have used Linux as my primary desktop system for over ten years. Usability really sucks. I'm not talking about a new UX model, systemd vs sysv, or wayland vs xorg. I'm talking about not needing to know about unix-isms to run a desktop operating system. Gnome and KDE are okay-ish now. Honestly the best desktop system for linux I've seen is Deepin https://www.deepin.org/en/ https://www.deepin.org/en/ , which is produced by a Chinese based group and marketed mainly at Chinese audiences. It installs updates on reboot, which removes many corner cases for desktop users. It has a nice dedicated admin panel that feels like a single interface rather than 20 different panels glued together. It focuses on efficient desktop use rather than some new hotness UI concept which Unity and Gnome3 both got infatuated with. The desktop interface is fast and gets out of your way, but providing useful quick tools to open, close, and switch apps. Why do I think governments haven't used more open source? Because we care more about systemd vs sysv then a single good consistent UI. Because we think writing desktop components in javascript and python will give good (enough) performance that won't feel sluggish; hint, they won't. Because coders (often) care more about how their code looks, using the slow interpreted language they know, or "getting the job done" (as they define it), then they do about concrete performance evaluation, benchmarking, and end user use cases and long term person off the street testing. Sorry, that was kinda a rant. But seriously, checkout the deepin desktop. New users can be really productive in it quickly and maintain it themselves.

michel-slm 9y ago
the Gnome desktop (at least on Fedora) also delays updates until shutdown/reboot time. but points taken on Javascript and Python. From what I'm seeing in Gnome Builder updates though, they're really interested in getting to a point where Rust can be used for writing Gnome apps.
- pmontra 9y ago
  Not on Ubuntu with Gnome flashback. I get an update popup at least any other day with the new versions of some packages or security updates. Reboots are for switching to new versions of the kernel. I confess I sometime postpone reboots for even a couple of months. I suspend my laptop and I have too many open applications (desktop or background) to be willing to close and restart all of them. If it's really like that, no Fedora for me.
  - cmurf 9y ago
    Most distros have this no bundled libraries rule, so either the stale version can still be used after an update, or if it's yanked out from under running processes, they can crash. Hence rebooting. macOS and Windows have mandatory reboots for anything system related too, so this is not out of the ordinary. Right now, if you use flatpak based applications on Fedora, they get updated without reboots. And that's the way forward, including for the desktop environment itself eventually.
AsyncAwait 9y ago
Personally, I prefer to install my updates manually, when I see fit and am glad that there are still systems that allow me to do so.
cmurf 9y ago
This is a chicken egg problem, where distros claim they want more users, but when they get users complaining about usability problems, users either get ignored, get ridiculed, or are told it works by design they should adapt. So until there are just enough of a certain kind of user who can adapt, but still complain and insist on software becoming more usable, things can change. And face it, both macOS and Windows have had persistent crappy UI/Ux of their own, it's just not as such a critical mass that people say f it, I'm going back to pencil and paper (which when it comes to proprietary voting systems, we should sooner be on pencil and paper).
- kardianos 9y ago
  You're missing the point. It isn't about "bad" UX, but consistent UX that omits implementation details. With the exception of Win8, both osx and windows have huge consistency points.
morsch 9y ago
I use OS X, Windows 10 and Gnome 3 pretty much every day. They're all okay. I like Gnome best, and Windows least. But they all do the job, and they're way more similar than they are different. In contrast, 10 to 15 years ago, the user experience was wildly different on each of them. But it's moot anyway. Browser apps will continue to displace desktop apps, and they don't really care which operating system you're running. European governments would be well served to somehow supply their administrations (as well as the general public) with a first-class alternative to Google Docs. Extra requirements: self-hostable, (even more) extensible.
- rossng 9y ago
  So, Collabora Online[1] [1] https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/
  - qznc 9y ago
    Also, Open Xchange https://www.open-xchange.com/ https://www.open-xchange.com/
- kardianos 9y ago
  This is true for me any my personal family. This is not true for many (most?) large governments. Again, my main point is that developers often miss what users actually need and care about.
  - morsch 9y ago
    Many people in administration don't need much more from their office suite than regular users. Many others do, though, I agree -- hence the extensible part. Either make the extensions by dedicated government IT staff or pay someone to do it; open-source either way, obviously, because it's absurd to use public funds to commission proprietary software.
zanny 9y ago
> Because we care more about systemd vs sysv then a single good consistent UI. I always thought the whole systemd thing was a clown car joke. Nobody actually cared, right? Anyone that mattered? It isn't fair to say that because KDE and Gnome exist that Linux is screwed forever. They are entirely two different stacks, and their competition breeds innovation and progress. You can't have "do whatever you want with the code" software and not see the emergence of competing ideas. Both projects also date back to the mid 90s, so they are so old with so many millions of LOC under them you don't throw that away. Especially when doing so basically tells hundreds of free software developers to - in many cases - use something they hate - either GObject C or Qt respectively. Both are not pleasant to work in, and while both have their own abstractions (GTK has its Python bindings and Javascript design thing and Qt has QML) you always end up dropping into the base toolkit for something. They exist because competing technologies exist, and you should evaluate them independently as much as you would evaluate Windows or OSX. > Because we think writing desktop components in javascript and python will give good (enough) performance that won't feel sluggish; hint, they won't. The vast majority of enterprise software is being written in one of the following nowadays: * Java. Ugly as fuck, can be slow when written poorly (and it will be written poorly). Huge clunky codebase, giant memory footprint. * React / Electron / Just a webapp. Super slow, super clunky, super painful to write because you break the browser metaphor in a dozen ways trying to make it work. It is putting plane wings on a VW Beetle and hoping you get somewhere in one piece. * Mobile apps, ignoring the desktop, and pissing everyone off in the process. Some businesses I know have tried putting their Android APK business app they use on ipads in the field in ARC on Chrome for the Desktop to get their office staff using it, its insane. None of these are good. It is all shit. All the native APIs are colossal shit. Cocoa is awful, Objective C is awful. C# is... ok. But its awful. UWP is horrifyingly bad with some mutant C++ dialect and the promise of eternal lock-in. Compared to everything else, GTK and Qt are the best development environments for user software by far. I personally might significantly prefer the modern QML style Qt programming over GTK3, but they are still leagues beyond the usability of any other platform, and that is without even considering that they are cross platform. That is about the worst criticism of the Linux desktop ecosystem, because that is also the best thing the ecosystem has produced, two really good toolkits. GTK not so much for stability, but just using it is much less painful than any first class alternative. If we can get something to Qt's standards and API coverage written in, say, Rust, that would be the golden miracle. But PyQT right now isn't that bad. It is pretty bad, having to put C++ metaphors in Python, but its only as bad as GObject metaphors in Python, and way better than anything on .net or the awful NDK on Android.
hutzlibu 9y ago
There are very complex websites programmed in javascript that are not sluggish. So why is it then impossible to use that on the desktop? I would say, this is actually the way to go. Because there are MANY good UI-Designers now, because of the web. And they know Web-technologys. If there will be a easy way, to integrate that into the desktop(native apps in general), then there will be better and more consistent UI's over time, that "newbs" can use. But deepin looks interesting. edit: and quite ironically, deepin is based on Webkit und HTML5 ... (or used to be until recently, don't know for sure yet, why does deepin does not even have a english Wiki page?) edit2: but the deeper I look into it, the more it looks flawed unfortunately https://www.quora.com/How-does-Deepin-compare-with-Elementary-OS/answers/9834001?srid=uBnq0 https://www.quora.com/How-does-Deepin-compare-with-Elementar...
- kardianos 9y ago
  That info is old. They rewtote it. Look at GitHub, not quora.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
The biggest issue with "desktop environments" is that they try to emulate windows. The problem with that is that there are not only a series of widgets, but also separate programs/libraries made to do what was designed to be done from a shell. For example, in the file manager, you can right-click a file, and decide what program it opens with. That might mean the file manager has emulated some sort of registry. Alternatively, to better integrate with the system, it might be using xdg-open. The goal should not be to make a closely integrated system, but a loosely coupled set of consistent, simple programs that let the user control specific aspects of the OS. KDE and GNOME have improved a lot in this respect, but they still seem to have the wrong goals.

michel-slm 9y ago

the Gnome desktop (at least on Fedora) also delays updates until shutdown/reboot time. but points taken on Javascript and Python. From what I'm seeing in Gnome Builder updates though, they're really interested in getting to a point where Rust can be used for writing Gnome apps.

pmontra 9y ago
Not on Ubuntu with Gnome flashback. I get an update popup at least any other day with the new versions of some packages or security updates. Reboots are for switching to new versions of the kernel. I confess I sometime postpone reboots for even a couple of months. I suspend my laptop and I have too many open applications (desktop or background) to be willing to close and restart all of them. If it's really like that, no Fedora for me.
- cmurf 9y ago
  Most distros have this no bundled libraries rule, so either the stale version can still be used after an update, or if it's yanked out from under running processes, they can crash. Hence rebooting. macOS and Windows have mandatory reboots for anything system related too, so this is not out of the ordinary. Right now, if you use flatpak based applications on Fedora, they get updated without reboots. And that's the way forward, including for the desktop environment itself eventually.

AsyncAwait 9y ago

Personally, I prefer to install my updates manually, when I see fit and am glad that there are still systems that allow me to do so.

cmurf 9y ago

This is a chicken egg problem, where distros claim they want more users, but when they get users complaining about usability problems, users either get ignored, get ridiculed, or are told it works by design they should adapt. So until there are just enough of a certain kind of user who can adapt, but still complain and insist on software becoming more usable, things can change. And face it, both macOS and Windows have had persistent crappy UI/Ux of their own, it's just not as such a critical mass that people say f it, I'm going back to pencil and paper (which when it comes to proprietary voting systems, we should sooner be on pencil and paper).

kardianos 9y ago
You're missing the point. It isn't about "bad" UX, but consistent UX that omits implementation details. With the exception of Win8, both osx and windows have huge consistency points.

morsch 9y ago

I use OS X, Windows 10 and Gnome 3 pretty much every day. They're all okay. I like Gnome best, and Windows least. But they all do the job, and they're way more similar than they are different. In contrast, 10 to 15 years ago, the user experience was wildly different on each of them. But it's moot anyway. Browser apps will continue to displace desktop apps, and they don't really care which operating system you're running. European governments would be well served to somehow supply their administrations (as well as the general public) with a first-class alternative to Google Docs. Extra requirements: self-hostable, (even more) extensible.

rossng 9y ago
So, Collabora Online[1] [1] https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/ https://www.collaboraoffice.com/code/
- qznc 9y ago
  Also, Open Xchange https://www.open-xchange.com/ https://www.open-xchange.com/
kardianos 9y ago
This is true for me any my personal family. This is not true for many (most?) large governments. Again, my main point is that developers often miss what users actually need and care about.
- morsch 9y ago
  Many people in administration don't need much more from their office suite than regular users. Many others do, though, I agree -- hence the extensible part. Either make the extensions by dedicated government IT staff or pay someone to do it; open-source either way, obviously, because it's absurd to use public funds to commission proprietary software.

zanny 9y ago

> Because we care more about systemd vs sysv then a single good consistent UI. I always thought the whole systemd thing was a clown car joke. Nobody actually cared, right? Anyone that mattered? It isn't fair to say that because KDE and Gnome exist that Linux is screwed forever. They are entirely two different stacks, and their competition breeds innovation and progress. You can't have "do whatever you want with the code" software and not see the emergence of competing ideas. Both projects also date back to the mid 90s, so they are so old with so many millions of LOC under them you don't throw that away. Especially when doing so basically tells hundreds of free software developers to - in many cases - use something they hate - either GObject C or Qt respectively. Both are not pleasant to work in, and while both have their own abstractions (GTK has its Python bindings and Javascript design thing and Qt has QML) you always end up dropping into the base toolkit for something. They exist because competing technologies exist, and you should evaluate them independently as much as you would evaluate Windows or OSX. > Because we think writing desktop components in javascript and python will give good (enough) performance that won't feel sluggish; hint, they won't. The vast majority of enterprise software is being written in one of the following nowadays: * Java. Ugly as fuck, can be slow when written poorly (and it will be written poorly). Huge clunky codebase, giant memory footprint. * React / Electron / Just a webapp. Super slow, super clunky, super painful to write because you break the browser metaphor in a dozen ways trying to make it work. It is putting plane wings on a VW Beetle and hoping you get somewhere in one piece. * Mobile apps, ignoring the desktop, and pissing everyone off in the process. Some businesses I know have tried putting their Android APK business app they use on ipads in the field in ARC on Chrome for the Desktop to get their office staff using it, its insane. None of these are good. It is all shit. All the native APIs are colossal shit. Cocoa is awful, Objective C is awful. C# is... ok. But its awful. UWP is horrifyingly bad with some mutant C++ dialect and the promise of eternal lock-in. Compared to everything else, GTK and Qt are the best development environments for user software by far. I personally might significantly prefer the modern QML style Qt programming over GTK3, but they are still leagues beyond the usability of any other platform, and that is without even considering that they are cross platform. That is about the worst criticism of the Linux desktop ecosystem, because that is also the best thing the ecosystem has produced, two really good toolkits. GTK not so much for stability, but just using it is much less painful than any first class alternative. If we can get something to Qt's standards and API coverage written in, say, Rust, that would be the golden miracle. But PyQT right now isn't that bad. It is pretty bad, having to put C++ metaphors in Python, but its only as bad as GObject metaphors in Python, and way better than anything on .net or the awful NDK on Android.

hutzlibu 9y ago

There are very complex websites programmed in javascript that are not sluggish. So why is it then impossible to use that on the desktop? I would say, this is actually the way to go. Because there are MANY good UI-Designers now, because of the web. And they know Web-technologys. If there will be a easy way, to integrate that into the desktop(native apps in general), then there will be better and more consistent UI's over time, that "newbs" can use. But deepin looks interesting. edit: and quite ironically, deepin is based on Webkit und HTML5 ... (or used to be until recently, don't know for sure yet, why does deepin does not even have a english Wiki page?) edit2: but the deeper I look into it, the more it looks flawed unfortunately https://www.quora.com/How-does-Deepin-compare-with-Elementary-OS/answers/9834001?srid=uBnq0 https://www.quora.com/How-does-Deepin-compare-with-Elementar...

kardianos 9y ago
That info is old. They rewtote it. Look at GitHub, not quora.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

The biggest issue with "desktop environments" is that they try to emulate windows. The problem with that is that there are not only a series of widgets, but also separate programs/libraries made to do what was designed to be done from a shell. For example, in the file manager, you can right-click a file, and decide what program it opens with. That might mean the file manager has emulated some sort of registry. Alternatively, to better integrate with the system, it might be using xdg-open. The goal should not be to make a closely integrated system, but a loosely coupled set of consistent, simple programs that let the user control specific aspects of the OS. KDE and GNOME have improved a lot in this respect, but they still seem to have the wrong goals.