4 ms·

In my opinion, that's complete bollocks. Windows is awful as a desktop platform, especially for a developer. The dev tooling sucks compared to Unix tools. The p

In my opinion, that's complete bollocks. Windows is awful as a desktop platform, especially for a developer. The dev tooling sucks compared to Unix tools. The package manager is brand new, has very few packages, works poorly, and 99% of the time you install something it won't use it. You can't dig into the tools to fix any issues you find. The terminal emulator - and the shells - suck. As a user, it depends on what you're looking for. I bet most end users would have no problems on a Linux desktop, especially one like Cinnamon or KDE Plasma. I have no idea what you're talking about, Linux on the desktop is great.

gorkonsine 9y ago
I've used Linux on the desktop since about 1999. It's not "great"; it has a lot of problems. But it is indeed better (IMO) than the alternatives, which are MacOSX (proprietary, tied to limited and expensive hardware), and Windows (a complete horror show, esp. now with Win10--spyware, ads, a ridiculously horrible UI when you click "start", and of course the total lack of decent utilities and shell and the horrifically bad-to-nonexistent package management you mention). The main problems with desktop Linux as I see it are 1) crappy DEs (namely Gnome3, the most popular and pushed hard by Red Hat) and fragmentation in the DE space, video driver problems, and power-management problems (particularly on laptops, esp. with suspend/resume). My laptop also has a lot of trouble going from docked (w/ dual monitors) to undocked and back. This stuff actually works pretty well on Windows, but on Linux it's a real PITA and frequently requires reboots IME, and that's on a not-new Dell business laptop that's generally well-supported.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  So... Linux is the worst desktop, except all others. I agree with most of your gripes, but fragmentation is more an more just becoming a reality. UIs won't look the same anymore, it just doesn't make sense to. So people will experiment with different things and try to find something better, the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have. Fragmentation, can be restated as "Community diversity" and it ain't going away because its a huge strength. Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it.
  - gorkonsine 9y ago
    UIs don't need to look the same, and there's no reason they should. Choice is a good thing. The problem, however, is a lack of interoperability: Gtk apps look like shit in KDE and vice-versa. There's no good reason for this; it's possible to make it so apps with different toolkits blend in seamlessly, but the Gnome devs are infamous for being completely unhelpful here and having a "our way or the highway" approach to everything. >Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it. Not true; if Canonical had their way, everyone would be using Unity. Honestly, I don't begrudge them making Unity; it's good to have some diversity, but I do begrudge them switching to Gnome3 recently and abandoning Unity altogether. A lot of people liked Unity and its concepts. Instead of throwing in the towel and becoming yet another me-too Gnome3 distro, they could have adopted KDE, and then created a custom KDE theme or version of Plasma which looks and works like Unity and allows them to continue to explore those concepts which leveraging the existing KDE underpinnings and the superior Qt toolkit. The real problem IMO is the horrible Gtk toolkit: it's in C but bolts on a hacky OOP concept, it's undocumented, and it's constantly changing. I know of at least one commercial project which had to abandon it and switch to Qt because of the constant API deprecation, and there's at least one FOSS DE (Lxde I think) which also switched from Gtk to Qt for the same reasons, and got a performance boost in the process IIRC. >the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have. I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs. Lots of people were perfectly happy with Gnome2, but then it was deprecated and they were pushed to Gnome3 and it was terrible and they hated it. As a result, not 1 but 2 new DEs were created, just to satisfy people who wanted something more stable: Cinnamon and MATE. It's a complete mess. A lot of people were similarly pissed when KDE4.0 was released and they couldn't use KDE3 any more because the distros all deprecated it, and the new version was filled with huge bugs and didn't work. At some point, you need to aim for product maturity instead of constant churn. I've been using ssh for many, many years and I don't see that being deprecated any time soon and having to switch to some other standard, but somehow we're supposed to accept this as normal for DEs?
    - sqeaky 9y ago
      > everyone would be using Unity 3 months ago I would have agreed but they have announced that for their next LTS 18.04 they are dropping unity in favor of Gnome3. I agree that improved interop would be good, but I am grateful for how well it does work. Copy/paste and other common shortcuts and features work. But, I use KDE and it sucks when I click something and it tries to open nautilus and clobbers my wallpaper. A "killall nautilus" later and everything is fine, but its annoying and a non-power user couldn't do this. The new the changed right click menu on the desktop would be really weird for the uninitiated too. > I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs It's not just Linux UIs Every UI is advancing; my friends and family are constantly asking me for help with win10 or whatever crazy mac/iOS/android shit they dig up. I explain I never used it, but I can form better google searches than them so I can figure out how to do what they need (I also don't mind this because I like learning this stuff too). The root of this is how does a UI designer improve the UI while keeping it familiar enough for previous users? How do you keep power users and people on the cutting edge happy without losing the technophobic grandparents and those slow to learn?
- shmerl 9y ago
  Windows and MacOS aren't even close to something like KDE.
PopsiclePete 9y ago
Anything up until Windows 10 - I'd have agreed with you. But Windows 10 is a whole different ball game. PowerShell is finally where it needs to be, native Docker, they have an official Ubuntu sub-system with various tools. Honestly, this whole "WinDoze is lame" attitude is so 2008. Windows 10 is a great platform. And I say this as an Arch Linux user who just wasted 2 hours dicking around with DBus and NetworkManager because there are still 3-year-old unfixed bugs regarding Cisco VPN connections.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  I will not use any OS that serves me ads and I have to pay for it. I will not use an OS that spies on me. I will not use any OS that is not open source so I can see what it is today should I need/want to (and I will gladly investigate it for others if you can convince me... $). I really don't know why people like windows beyond having their applications (That really is enough). It is limited, the tools they make are clearly more for checking off boxed on some marketing list somewhere because they rarely work right and often limited in their core performance. Even their tools like their expensive compiler and database does work as well for my worklaods as their free and open source counterparts. It wasn't that long ago we saw the remotely exploitable flaw in Windows Defender that allowed arbitrary execution of code in a security product! Or more innocuous but no less annoying, the guy with the umpteen core ryzen getting blocked by some random mutex deep inside windows so his build was being throttled and he couldn't use his own CPU the way he wanted. It buggy, its lower quality, but they succeeded in having many make their software for it exclusively so it is Then we can start talking about the ethical issues with it, like giving money to a monopoly that has tried to bribe standardization bodies and has been convicted several times of anticompetitive practices.

gorkonsine 9y ago

I've used Linux on the desktop since about 1999. It's not "great"; it has a lot of problems. But it is indeed better (IMO) than the alternatives, which are MacOSX (proprietary, tied to limited and expensive hardware), and Windows (a complete horror show, esp. now with Win10--spyware, ads, a ridiculously horrible UI when you click "start", and of course the total lack of decent utilities and shell and the horrifically bad-to-nonexistent package management you mention). The main problems with desktop Linux as I see it are 1) crappy DEs (namely Gnome3, the most popular and pushed hard by Red Hat) and fragmentation in the DE space, video driver problems, and power-management problems (particularly on laptops, esp. with suspend/resume). My laptop also has a lot of trouble going from docked (w/ dual monitors) to undocked and back. This stuff actually works pretty well on Windows, but on Linux it's a real PITA and frequently requires reboots IME, and that's on a not-new Dell business laptop that's generally well-supported.

sqeaky 9y ago
So... Linux is the worst desktop, except all others. I agree with most of your gripes, but fragmentation is more an more just becoming a reality. UIs won't look the same anymore, it just doesn't make sense to. So people will experiment with different things and try to find something better, the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have. Fragmentation, can be restated as "Community diversity" and it ain't going away because its a huge strength. Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it.
- gorkonsine 9y ago
  UIs don't need to look the same, and there's no reason they should. Choice is a good thing. The problem, however, is a lack of interoperability: Gtk apps look like shit in KDE and vice-versa. There's no good reason for this; it's possible to make it so apps with different toolkits blend in seamlessly, but the Gnome devs are infamous for being completely unhelpful here and having a "our way or the highway" approach to everything. >Because while you think gnome3 sucks if Canonical had their way everyone would be using it. Not true; if Canonical had their way, everyone would be using Unity. Honestly, I don't begrudge them making Unity; it's good to have some diversity, but I do begrudge them switching to Gnome3 recently and abandoning Unity altogether. A lot of people liked Unity and its concepts. Instead of throwing in the towel and becoming yet another me-too Gnome3 distro, they could have adopted KDE, and then created a custom KDE theme or version of Plasma which looks and works like Unity and allows them to continue to explore those concepts which leveraging the existing KDE underpinnings and the superior Qt toolkit. The real problem IMO is the horrible Gtk toolkit: it's in C but bolts on a hacky OOP concept, it's undocumented, and it's constantly changing. I know of at least one commercial project which had to abandon it and switch to Qt because of the constant API deprecation, and there's at least one FOSS DE (Lxde I think) which also switched from Gtk to Qt for the same reasons, and got a performance boost in the process IIRC. >the alternative is to stagnate with accepting what we have. I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs. Lots of people were perfectly happy with Gnome2, but then it was deprecated and they were pushed to Gnome3 and it was terrible and they hated it. As a result, not 1 but 2 new DEs were created, just to satisfy people who wanted something more stable: Cinnamon and MATE. It's a complete mess. A lot of people were similarly pissed when KDE4.0 was released and they couldn't use KDE3 any more because the distros all deprecated it, and the new version was filled with huge bugs and didn't work. At some point, you need to aim for product maturity instead of constant churn. I've been using ssh for many, many years and I don't see that being deprecated any time soon and having to switch to some other standard, but somehow we're supposed to accept this as normal for DEs?
  - sqeaky 9y ago
    > everyone would be using Unity 3 months ago I would have agreed but they have announced that for their next LTS 18.04 they are dropping unity in favor of Gnome3. I agree that improved interop would be good, but I am grateful for how well it does work. Copy/paste and other common shortcuts and features work. But, I use KDE and it sucks when I click something and it tries to open nautilus and clobbers my wallpaper. A "killall nautilus" later and everything is fine, but its annoying and a non-power user couldn't do this. The new the changed right click menu on the desktop would be really weird for the uninitiated too. > I can't even count the number of comments I've read from people who are sick and tired of the constant change and churn in Linux UIs It's not just Linux UIs Every UI is advancing; my friends and family are constantly asking me for help with win10 or whatever crazy mac/iOS/android shit they dig up. I explain I never used it, but I can form better google searches than them so I can figure out how to do what they need (I also don't mind this because I like learning this stuff too). The root of this is how does a UI designer improve the UI while keeping it familiar enough for previous users? How do you keep power users and people on the cutting edge happy without losing the technophobic grandparents and those slow to learn?
shmerl 9y ago
Windows and MacOS aren't even close to something like KDE.

PopsiclePete 9y ago

Anything up until Windows 10 - I'd have agreed with you. But Windows 10 is a whole different ball game. PowerShell is finally where it needs to be, native Docker, they have an official Ubuntu sub-system with various tools. Honestly, this whole "WinDoze is lame" attitude is so 2008. Windows 10 is a great platform. And I say this as an Arch Linux user who just wasted 2 hours dicking around with DBus and NetworkManager because there are still 3-year-old unfixed bugs regarding Cisco VPN connections.

sqeaky 9y ago
I will not use any OS that serves me ads and I have to pay for it. I will not use an OS that spies on me. I will not use any OS that is not open source so I can see what it is today should I need/want to (and I will gladly investigate it for others if you can convince me... $). I really don't know why people like windows beyond having their applications (That really is enough). It is limited, the tools they make are clearly more for checking off boxed on some marketing list somewhere because they rarely work right and often limited in their core performance. Even their tools like their expensive compiler and database does work as well for my worklaods as their free and open source counterparts. It wasn't that long ago we saw the remotely exploitable flaw in Windows Defender that allowed arbitrary execution of code in a security product! Or more innocuous but no less annoying, the guy with the umpteen core ryzen getting blocked by some random mutex deep inside windows so his build was being throttled and he couldn't use his own CPU the way he wanted. It buggy, its lower quality, but they succeeded in having many make their software for it exclusively so it is Then we can start talking about the ethical issues with it, like giving money to a monopoly that has tried to bribe standardization bodies and has been convicted several times of anticompetitive practices.