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End-user Linux has definitely improved in the last few years. It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic. That

End-user Linux has definitely improved in the last few years. It offers a lot of attractive features for what I imagine to be the typical HN demographic. That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc... Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and compile with a legacy glibc version..." crew comes in with a thousand and one rebuttals. Problems like that are still a suboptimal user experience, no matter how you slice it. I'd definitely consider a Linux daily driver for some of my work, but there are things that are just going to be less painful on Apple.

larrik 8y ago
I would also say that Apple has plenty of rough spots that Linux doesn't as well. Font rendering the Apple way is a style choice at best. What does "display/compositor fragmentation" mean to end-user?
- akiselev 8y ago
  > What does "display/compositor fragmentation" mean to end-user? My 1Password FireFox extension (ubuntu 18.04 LTS) doesn't work on X unless I log in through the website but it works just fine on Wayland.
  - vetinari 8y ago
    What is your X session? Gnome/KDE or plain window manager? It might be, that your wm is not launching some service that wayland session is and 1password needs.
    - pdpi 8y ago
      The fact that you're asking this question and suggesting that root cause is itself a significant part of the problem the OP was talking about.
      - vetinari 8y ago
        Unfortunately, the openness allows for so much flexibility, that many people end up breaking it up. Invariably, they will blame the system and not their changes. If they used the defaults, like they do in other systems, it would not happen.
        joombaga 8y ago
        In this case though LastPass is broken in Firefox on Ubuntu by default. Edit: akiselev said 1Password, not LastPass. My mistake. Interesting that I experienced this same issue with LastPass.
        vetinari 8y ago
        It turns out to be ubuntu bug: https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/90011/p1 https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/90011/p1
    - akiselev 8y ago
      This was a clean install so Gnome shell - worked just fine on Ubuntu 17.10 and 18.10 with X and Wayland. After I login through the 1password website, the extension window opens just fine so it might be some input security service, but how would a Firefox extension even have access to a system service like that except through Firefox's built in APIs?
      - vetinari 8y ago
        I don't know how 1password works; I'm using keepassxc. With keepassxc you have native application and extension, that communicate together via socket. The native application can use whatever native APIs it wants. However, back to you. What's more weird, if it is pure Firefox Webextension, that Firefox (still by default) launches as X11 application under Wayland, so the extension should have no way to know the difference.
  - Tehchops 8y ago
    ^^ Things exactly like this. The practical implications of what it means to the end user is that companies/entities that write any GUI-enabled software for Linux are forced to make decisions about what(if any) OS they'll support. And just like that, we've waded into "cracking open the window manager" just to figure out what's going on.
  - beyer 8y ago
    > My 1Password FireFox extension (ubuntu 18.04 LTS) doesn't work on X unless I log in through the website but it works just fine on Wayland. Hey there! Beyer from 1Password here. It sounds like your issue might be related to my post here: https://goo.gl/cdhFbz https://goo.gl/cdhFbz The good news is the underlying bug that was "breaking password fields in Firefox" was recently resolved. You can read about it here: https://goo.gl/uFv5rL https://goo.gl/uFv5rL If you are still having an issue using 1Password X after updating gnome-shell, please reach out to us at support+x@1password.com, and we'd be happy to help! Thanks for using 1Password!
- dictum 8y ago
  > Font rendering the Apple way is a style choice at best. Given how much of a hacker's usage of a computer is working with text (reading pages, writing code and documentation, taking notes) it's a style choice that actually has a significant impact. (By the way, macOS Mojave deprecates subpixel antialiasing — a poor decision when there are many non-hidpi displays still being used)
  - sbov 8y ago
    I've used both macbooks and linux and have never noticed a difference, so I have no clue what sort of impact I'm supposed to be noticing.
    - qznc 8y ago
      I remember a decade ago when there was more discussion about it the rought situation was: OS X fonts were "blurry" because the font rendering was optimized for stay true to the font shape. Microsoft was "crisp but kerning broken" because the font rendering optimized for pixel alignment, so less grey pixels but shapes moved slightly to fit pixel borders. Linux was somewhere in between however you configured it. That was the time of sub-100dpi screens though. With 300dpi (Retina) screens these days it does not matter much anymore.
  - jamie_ca 8y ago
    Yeah. I've got a 1440p 27" monitor that I connect via HDMI (USB-C adapter dock thingy) and the difference when I upgraded to Mojave was very stark. I actually prefer Windows rendering now to Mac.
jasondclinton 8y ago
That's true: some things are easier on Mac. In particular, I'd say that using software that hasn't been packaged for your distribution is much easier on Mac. However, your example of fonts is definitely not one of those areas, anymore. Font rendering on Linux is as advanced and capable as any other OS including in the areas of kerning and hinting. It should just work without any user intervention and look great. I agree with you that compositing/window manager fragmentation is a problem. And this article is a perfect example of that. The author may think that they're happy using i3 with Firefox and st at the moment, but the desktop computing environment has gotten so complex and the expectations of users who interact with desktop applications so rich, that a small hobby project DE/WM cannot fully satisfy all of those use cases over the long term. The only two desktop environment projects that have enough resources to meet the needs of users behind them are KDE and GNOME. And we shouldn't be telling new Linux users to try anything but those two. FWIW, I've worked at Google for 7 years where we use Linux on our workstations. Many engineers fiddle with various "hacker" window managers like i3, Sway, Awesome, or fvwm. They almost universally give up and switch to GNOME(/Cinnamon) or KDE: it's just too fiddly/not complete and they'd rather use their brain power for solving real problems. The authors example of messing around with dmenu because "unix philosophy" is an example of this kind of waste of time that people eventually get tired of because they have better things to spend their time on.
- Hello71 8y ago
  > Font rendering on Linux is as advanced and capable as any other OS including in the areas of kerning and hinting. It should just work without any user intervention and look great. This isn't entirely true. AIUI, Apple enables LCD filtering and subpixel rendering by default, because it knows that you're using an LCD and what the subpixel order is. However, these are usually toggleable via the GUI, and even without them it usually still looks fine.
  - jasondclinton 8y ago
    People forget that subpixel rendering was a thing on CRT's before LCD's were around. Subpixel order is pretty universally standardized. Is there an EDID data element for pixel order?
zozbot123 8y ago
If anything, font rendering in Linux is much better than in OSX. It does way more advanced auto-hinting and LCD-subpixel rendering, supports the newest font standards for things like advanced layouts, colored fonts and emojis, etc. etc. There's also very little display fragmentation other than the choice between Xorg and Wayland, which are largely complementary so far. But you can already be on Wayland-only in many cases.
jancsika 8y ago
> Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc... So take a user from Windows 10 or OSX whatever, and sit them in front of your favorite stable Linux distro running a terminal emulator and a browser of your choice. Are the fonts going to be rendered in a way that is unobtrusive for those users, or will things look ugly and difficult to read? Because I'm running a chroot of Debian Buster on my Chromebook and boy, that terminal sure does look blurry. (And is this a bug that will be fixed when Buster stabilizes, or am I expected to go read some font wiki on a different machine to "guess-and-check" it back to sanity?) I don't want to switch to OSX. But I also understand why someone wouldn't trust the UX of a system that ships in "headache-mode" by default. Edit: clarification
stcredzero 8y ago
That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Someone really needs to make Linux distros just work when hooking a laptop up to a projector. The fact that there's so much trouble that's so public and faced with so much concentrated embarrassment is a serious ongoing PR impediment to Linux. Linux distros got printing licked across the board, so it can happen. How about a Linux version of Airdrop?
- jasondclinton 8y ago
  This hasn't been an area where Linux has had problems for more than 5 years.
  - cmurf 8y ago
    I think dual headed (integrated and discrete GPU) laptops using Wayland is still a problem for some people. I don't know why. I gave up on dual headed laptops a while ago and haven't had a problem with multiple displays using i915 graphics and Wayland.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    This hasn't been an area where Linux has had problems for more than 5 years. Really? Because I definitely got the impression it was a widespread joke in that circle of devs. Also, when I saw it happen to the last poor sap, it happened on Bionic Beaver. Is this more of the Thermocline of Truth?
- jandrese 8y ago
  Last time I hooked up my Linux laptop to a projector it fired up the screen just fine. I didn't even have to hit some magic key combo to turn it on.
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    Time before last when I went to a Golang meetup, the presenter's Linux laptop embarrassed him for a few minutes, and lots of devs with Macbooks made some linux jokes at his expense. This was the story with printing in Linux as well, back in the day. It would work fine for some, and be a nightmare for others.
pjmlp 8y ago
Pretty much this, as UI focused developer I abandoned my Linux zealotry back to Windows. Yes Hollywood is pretty much sold on Maya and Houdini on Linux, but they use their own in-house distributions and have no issues dealing with binary blobs for performance. Meanwhile my Asus netbook sold with Linux still can't do video decoding on hardware nor OpenGL 4 support, in spite of DirectX 11 class hardware, because AMD decided to reboot their driver development.
- jandrese 8y ago
  I see lots of advice online to just use the kernel driver for AMD cards these days, but in my experience it is slow. On some of my machines it benchmarks slower than the Intel graphics. In other cases it is faster, but only by about 50% or so. It is disappointing. I still tend to prefer nVidia graphics when I'm building my own systems because even if the driver is a big binary blob it does work.
  - flukus 8y ago
    I don't care much about performance because I mostly play strategy games, my issue with the kernel driver is it's instability, many games will hard crash my system.
eli_gottlieb 8y ago
>Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and compile with a legacy glibc version..." crew comes in with a thousand and one rebuttals. Problems like that are still a suboptimal user experience, no matter how you slice it. No, my experience is much more along the lines of, "I download and install Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and then it works without further issues."
- H1Supreme 8y ago
  I put Ubuntu Mate on an old 2009 Macbook because it couldn't function with MacOs anymore. A wifi driver was the only thing it needed. Which, ended up being trivial to install. Everything else worked out of the box. Two finger gestures on the trackpad, audio, everything. My current Dell Inspiron 7000 didn't need a single driver installed manually (with Ubuntu). Pretty impressive.
PopsiclePete 8y ago
Linux is just consistent. When it works, it works. When it doesn't - god help you. There's no rhyme or reason. Sometimes, my wifi is broken. On a different distro, it's not. Right now, under Ubuntu 18.10, my suspend from resume is broken - it wasn't on 18.04. I have the official Linux laptop, basically - a Dell XPS 9350, all 100% Intel hardware, no binary blobs.
- kingosticks 8y ago
  I've also found that on my XPS 13 with 18.10. Was fine previously on 16.04. Now I have to open and shut the lid a few times to get it to stop flickering. It's annoying and would otherwise be perfect.
  - PopsiclePete 8y ago
    Ah yes that. That’s an (old) bug about how logind interacts with gdm. A quick workaround is ctrl-alt-fn-F1 to force the screen to lock itself. Makes the flicker go away.
    - kingosticks 8y ago
      That trick worked perfectly. Thanks very much.
- klardotsh 8y ago
  The 9370 is an even more fun can of worms - resuming from suspend will almost always work (I remember the 9350 having massive problems with this, it's not just you - I ended up selling that rig to a friend), but there's a decent chance I'll kernel panic upon plugging in my Type-C dock after said resume. The Killer Wi-Fi card has none of the connectivity problems I read about almost everywhere for this model.... but has all the throughput problems, running at about 15% of the throughput/bandwidth of my Chromebook (an Intel AC card) sitting right next to it as of the last time I tested. I'd definitely not call Linux consistent, but it's better than it was when I started using it back in 2006-2007ish, and I wouldn't trade it for any other setup (and it's not for a lack of trying: my primary work machine for 2.5ish of the last 6 years was a Macbook Pro of some sort for one reason or another)
davidy123 8y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but font rendering seems fine on Ubuntu without any after install steps. I've been using Ubuntu exclusively for well over a decade for everyday work, only occasionally going into a Windows VM, and it's really been perfectly fine, great even, as a developer. I bought a X1 Yoga the month after it was released and Ubuntu installed perfectly on it, the only thing that didn't work out of the box is the fingerprint reader. Until a year ago, battery life wasn't as good as Windows/Mac, but it's very good with the latest versions. Proprietary software that some people need to run, now that's another issue, but for most development tasks it's fantastically manageable and accessible, a real pushback against closed systems.
- neuronic 8y ago
  > and it's really been perfectly fine, great even, as a developer Here is the point. It absolutely is fine as a developer. But my parents would never be able to get accustomed to Ubuntu or any other distro. It was hard enough to make them use email. The truth is that the vast majority of people just want things to work. Like turning on a TV without any setup. Hell, people pay electronics stores 100€ to plugin a cable and run the "find channels" function. OECD studies have shown that more people than one thinks are incapable of using search in email [1]. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
  - davidy123 8y ago
    But, I wasn't talking about your parents.
- makewavesnotwar 8y ago
  I was using Ubuntu exclusively for around a decade too. It's a great development environment. But about a year ago I needed a new laptop and with the one I purchased, some things didn't only require extra steps to get working, some of them were no fix issues until some indeterminate date in the future. You mention the fingerprint reader not working out of the box - with my laptop, Fingerprint GUI was basically waiting on one of its dependencies to somehow figure out how to integrate my fingerprint scanner. Things like my active-stylus capable touchscreen weren't supported, and there were no applications to really utilize it even if it was. I switched to Windows as my primary OS when I realized Windows PowerShell had basically become on par with Linux in almost every degree and that VS Code was as cushy as I could hope for in a development environment. The only thing I've found that isn't supported out of the box is Redis, but I downloaded a ridiculously lightweight version of Ubuntu from the Microsoft store (we're talking <1 MB memory footprint) with one click and was then good to go. The other thing that really impressed me was all the easy to use tuning software. With ThrottleStop I was able to easily under-volt my processor to completely eliminate things like thermal throttling and improve performance all while greatly improving my battery life. Nvidia support is also way better so I can turn off my graphics card for anything but games - and then there's MSI Afterburner to under-volt my GPU when I am using it. And yeah, not only do my fingerprint scanner and stylus work on Windows, but Windows has Windows Ink built in so I can easily take screenshots of whatever I'm doing with Snip & Sketch and annotate them with a pen in an instant, and I can use Sketchpad like an on the fly whiteboard when I need to do some math. Plus, it has art programs like Krita that basically turn my laptop into an iPad Pro when I feel like getting artistic. And with programs like Enpass, I can use my fingerprint with Windows Hello in place of my master password for stuff like logins and credit card information, which is a lot more secure for someone like me that does a lot of my work from coffee shops. I still love Ubuntu, but all the offerings of Windows 10 has kind of made me a Windows fanboy and even makes MacOS seem like a decisive downgrade.
abrowne 8y ago
Font rendering is a funny one. Some distros were limited by patent issues, but Ubuntu has looked great for a while. Now Apple removed subpixel anti-aliasing in 10.14. This may look better on hidpi, but lots of us still have non-retina Macs
jsight 8y ago
I honestly feel like I've seen this same comment on every Linux workstation post for years now. And you know what? Its mostly true[1], but its also true for me in reverse. Mac OS has definitely improved in the last few years... that being said, it's still got rough spots that Fedora 29 doesn't. For me, this would be just as true of a statement. [1] Maybe not the part about "had to download[...]" which felt a bit biased.
black-tea 8y ago
> It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Yeah that good for MacOS and virtually every other piece of technology.
bwat49 8y ago
Ubuntu and it's derivatives have pretty good out of the box font rendering IMO
trumped 8y ago
For me, Linux has improved a lot because Windows has gotten a lot worst, but the Linux distributions I've used have not improved that much (mainly Fedora and Ubuntu). I've been using Linux exclusively for many years and will probably continue to do so though...
- cr0sh 8y ago
  I fell "in love" with the Budgie desktop experience, which is a project of Solus Linux. However, I didn't like the Solus Linux package system; I wanted the Debian plethora of packages. So I "found" Budgie Ubuntu. Best of both worlds, IMHO. It's the closest I've gotten to a Mac on Linux. It still has some rough edges, but nothing that really sticks out for day-to-day work and play.
hacknat 8y ago
I agreed with everything you said except this: > but there are still things that just going to be less painful on Apple. Of course OSX is more user friendly now, but Linux desktop has improved by leaps and bounds. 4 years ago you needed to be a developer or extremely savvy to run the average desktop distro, now I would say you just need to be tech sdavvy. I would argue that for the ho hum business cases (not extreme use case profiles like design and video production) that Ubuntu won’t cause any unnavigable issues. I think in a few years you will see the Linux diaries continue in popularity, especially among developers. Laptops have become commodity items. There just isn’t that much that differentiates (for me at least) a MacBook from a good ThinkPad.
- toyg 8y ago
  People have been saying that ever since, uhm, the first Mandrake release? It’s so much easier now, soon it will all be so smooth! except every year there is something else to rewrite/rejig. As soon as auto-configuring XFree was kinda figured out, out goes XFree and in comes x.org. Xorg getting to the point where having 3d animations doesn’t require kernel-module-config expertise? Out goes Xorg, in comes Wayland. Gnome 2 worked out the kinks? Time for Unity! Kde 4 finally getting snappy? time to break it up! Init systems figured out? Systemd! ALSA getting adoption? Pulseaudio! Pulseaudio finally working? Let’s rip it out! And so on and so forth, in an endless churn. Now, this sort of churn also happens in commercial alternatives; but stuff gets shipped when it’s 99.9% working, left running for years (or decades, if from Microsoft), then maybe gets rewritten with something that must be better (no regressions) or it won’t even ship. In the Linux world, it’s all just thrown over the wall; maybe you’ll be lucky and it will work on your machine, and maybe it won’t. By the time it gets fixed, it will be time to replace it. And so the experience is a perennial struggle against half-finished, unpolished software.
  - rip_netrunner 8y ago
    The reality is, people get paid more to develop for the Mac world and put more effort in consequentially, whereas Linux is still mainly volunteer-driven.
  - bigger_cheese 8y ago
INTPenis 8y ago
>Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc... Everyone has their own view of rough spots but those aren't mine. The rough spots I'm experiencing with Linux are very specific. Namely lack of support for some proprietary VPN solutions like Junos Pulse for example. Also lack of native clients for software like Webex Teams, forcing you to use their web apps which use up so much resources that I'm convinced they've caused my laptop to stall a couple of times. And of course, perhaps related to the issue above, anything relating to graphics does need work. The major positive thing I can say about using Linux daily in work and personal life is that it works so well that when it fails you get very annoyed. That's a good sign. It means that it's rare enough to annoy me. If it was too common I wouldn't be surprised when it fails. I also switched back from Mac to Linux, 2 years ago. But I use vanilla Gnome 3 on Fedora. Before Mac I used tiling window managers but now I don't see the point. It's just so much configuration to handle which Gnome does without a single line of config or shell code.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
Ubuntu and openSUSE are my main installs, and they usually feel fine, my only issue is always drivers, whether it's Wi-Fi or Graphics (worse one, since at least Wi-Fi I have ways to circumvent - buy a compatible wireless usb tiny adapter for example, or connect a router to the network and connect my device over LAN). If somebody could either make a properly open GPU or get AMD or Nvidia to release proper drivers that don't break between versions, I'd be happy. Nvidias drivers used to work on my one laptop, now they've broken something in the latest incarnation of the driver, that or it's just not compatible with Ubuntu's new X.org alternative, whatever the case, it seems too easily fragile. If I can't install it due to GPU issues, I move on if I can't find a compatible distro usually. As for the font thing, maybe I'm not a fontphile or something, but they're usually fine for me.

larrik 8y ago

I would also say that Apple has plenty of rough spots that Linux doesn't as well. Font rendering the Apple way is a style choice at best. What does "display/compositor fragmentation" mean to end-user?

akiselev 8y ago
> What does "display/compositor fragmentation" mean to end-user? My 1Password FireFox extension (ubuntu 18.04 LTS) doesn't work on X unless I log in through the website but it works just fine on Wayland.
- vetinari 8y ago
  What is your X session? Gnome/KDE or plain window manager? It might be, that your wm is not launching some service that wayland session is and 1password needs.
  - pdpi 8y ago
    The fact that you're asking this question and suggesting that root cause is itself a significant part of the problem the OP was talking about.
    - vetinari 8y ago
      Unfortunately, the openness allows for so much flexibility, that many people end up breaking it up. Invariably, they will blame the system and not their changes. If they used the defaults, like they do in other systems, it would not happen.
      - joombaga 8y ago
        In this case though LastPass is broken in Firefox on Ubuntu by default. Edit: akiselev said 1Password, not LastPass. My mistake. Interesting that I experienced this same issue with LastPass.
        vetinari 8y ago
        It turns out to be ubuntu bug: https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/90011/p1 https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/90011/p1
  - akiselev 8y ago
    This was a clean install so Gnome shell - worked just fine on Ubuntu 17.10 and 18.10 with X and Wayland. After I login through the 1password website, the extension window opens just fine so it might be some input security service, but how would a Firefox extension even have access to a system service like that except through Firefox's built in APIs?
    - vetinari 8y ago
      I don't know how 1password works; I'm using keepassxc. With keepassxc you have native application and extension, that communicate together via socket. The native application can use whatever native APIs it wants. However, back to you. What's more weird, if it is pure Firefox Webextension, that Firefox (still by default) launches as X11 application under Wayland, so the extension should have no way to know the difference.
- Tehchops 8y ago
  ^^ Things exactly like this. The practical implications of what it means to the end user is that companies/entities that write any GUI-enabled software for Linux are forced to make decisions about what(if any) OS they'll support. And just like that, we've waded into "cracking open the window manager" just to figure out what's going on.
- beyer 8y ago
  > My 1Password FireFox extension (ubuntu 18.04 LTS) doesn't work on X unless I log in through the website but it works just fine on Wayland. Hey there! Beyer from 1Password here. It sounds like your issue might be related to my post here: https://goo.gl/cdhFbz https://goo.gl/cdhFbz The good news is the underlying bug that was "breaking password fields in Firefox" was recently resolved. You can read about it here: https://goo.gl/uFv5rL https://goo.gl/uFv5rL If you are still having an issue using 1Password X after updating gnome-shell, please reach out to us at support+x@1password.com, and we'd be happy to help! Thanks for using 1Password!
dictum 8y ago
> Font rendering the Apple way is a style choice at best. Given how much of a hacker's usage of a computer is working with text (reading pages, writing code and documentation, taking notes) it's a style choice that actually has a significant impact. (By the way, macOS Mojave deprecates subpixel antialiasing — a poor decision when there are many non-hidpi displays still being used)
- sbov 8y ago
  I've used both macbooks and linux and have never noticed a difference, so I have no clue what sort of impact I'm supposed to be noticing.
  - qznc 8y ago
    I remember a decade ago when there was more discussion about it the rought situation was: OS X fonts were "blurry" because the font rendering was optimized for stay true to the font shape. Microsoft was "crisp but kerning broken" because the font rendering optimized for pixel alignment, so less grey pixels but shapes moved slightly to fit pixel borders. Linux was somewhere in between however you configured it. That was the time of sub-100dpi screens though. With 300dpi (Retina) screens these days it does not matter much anymore.
- jamie_ca 8y ago
  Yeah. I've got a 1440p 27" monitor that I connect via HDMI (USB-C adapter dock thingy) and the difference when I upgraded to Mojave was very stark. I actually prefer Windows rendering now to Mac.

jasondclinton 8y ago

That's true: some things are easier on Mac. In particular, I'd say that using software that hasn't been packaged for your distribution is much easier on Mac. However, your example of fonts is definitely not one of those areas, anymore. Font rendering on Linux is as advanced and capable as any other OS including in the areas of kerning and hinting. It should just work without any user intervention and look great. I agree with you that compositing/window manager fragmentation is a problem. And this article is a perfect example of that. The author may think that they're happy using i3 with Firefox and st at the moment, but the desktop computing environment has gotten so complex and the expectations of users who interact with desktop applications so rich, that a small hobby project DE/WM cannot fully satisfy all of those use cases over the long term. The only two desktop environment projects that have enough resources to meet the needs of users behind them are KDE and GNOME. And we shouldn't be telling new Linux users to try anything but those two. FWIW, I've worked at Google for 7 years where we use Linux on our workstations. Many engineers fiddle with various "hacker" window managers like i3, Sway, Awesome, or fvwm. They almost universally give up and switch to GNOME(/Cinnamon) or KDE: it's just too fiddly/not complete and they'd rather use their brain power for solving real problems. The authors example of messing around with dmenu because "unix philosophy" is an example of this kind of waste of time that people eventually get tired of because they have better things to spend their time on.

Hello71 8y ago
> Font rendering on Linux is as advanced and capable as any other OS including in the areas of kerning and hinting. It should just work without any user intervention and look great. This isn't entirely true. AIUI, Apple enables LCD filtering and subpixel rendering by default, because it knows that you're using an LCD and what the subpixel order is. However, these are usually toggleable via the GUI, and even without them it usually still looks fine.
- jasondclinton 8y ago
  People forget that subpixel rendering was a thing on CRT's before LCD's were around. Subpixel order is pretty universally standardized. Is there an EDID data element for pixel order?

zozbot123 8y ago

If anything, font rendering in Linux is much better than in OSX. It does way more advanced auto-hinting and LCD-subpixel rendering, supports the newest font standards for things like advanced layouts, colored fonts and emojis, etc. etc. There's also very little display fragmentation other than the choice between Xorg and Wayland, which are largely complementary so far. But you can already be on Wayland-only in many cases.

jancsika 8y ago

> Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc... So take a user from Windows 10 or OSX whatever, and sit them in front of your favorite stable Linux distro running a terminal emulator and a browser of your choice. Are the fonts going to be rendered in a way that is unobtrusive for those users, or will things look ugly and difficult to read? Because I'm running a chroot of Debian Buster on my Chromebook and boy, that terminal sure does look blurry. (And is this a bug that will be fixed when Buster stabilizes, or am I expected to go read some font wiki on a different machine to "guess-and-check" it back to sanity?) I don't want to switch to OSX. But I also understand why someone wouldn't trust the UX of a system that ships in "headache-mode" by default. Edit: clarification

stcredzero 8y ago

That being said, it's still got rough spots that OSX doesn't. It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Someone really needs to make Linux distros just work when hooking a laptop up to a projector. The fact that there's so much trouble that's so public and faced with so much concentrated embarrassment is a serious ongoing PR impediment to Linux. Linux distros got printing licked across the board, so it can happen. How about a Linux version of Airdrop?

jasondclinton 8y ago
This hasn't been an area where Linux has had problems for more than 5 years.
- cmurf 8y ago
  I think dual headed (integrated and discrete GPU) laptops using Wayland is still a problem for some people. I don't know why. I gave up on dual headed laptops a while ago and haven't had a problem with multiple displays using i915 graphics and Wayland.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  This hasn't been an area where Linux has had problems for more than 5 years. Really? Because I definitely got the impression it was a widespread joke in that circle of devs. Also, when I saw it happen to the last poor sap, it happened on Bionic Beaver. Is this more of the Thermocline of Truth?
jandrese 8y ago
Last time I hooked up my Linux laptop to a projector it fired up the screen just fine. I didn't even have to hit some magic key combo to turn it on.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  Time before last when I went to a Golang meetup, the presenter's Linux laptop embarrassed him for a few minutes, and lots of devs with Macbooks made some linux jokes at his expense. This was the story with printing in Linux as well, back in the day. It would work fine for some, and be a nightmare for others.

pjmlp 8y ago

Pretty much this, as UI focused developer I abandoned my Linux zealotry back to Windows. Yes Hollywood is pretty much sold on Maya and Houdini on Linux, but they use their own in-house distributions and have no issues dealing with binary blobs for performance. Meanwhile my Asus netbook sold with Linux still can't do video decoding on hardware nor OpenGL 4 support, in spite of DirectX 11 class hardware, because AMD decided to reboot their driver development.

jandrese 8y ago
I see lots of advice online to just use the kernel driver for AMD cards these days, but in my experience it is slow. On some of my machines it benchmarks slower than the Intel graphics. In other cases it is faster, but only by about 50% or so. It is disappointing. I still tend to prefer nVidia graphics when I'm building my own systems because even if the driver is a big binary blob it does work.
- flukus 8y ago
  I don't care much about performance because I mostly play strategy games, my issue with the kernel driver is it's instability, many games will hard crash my system.

eli_gottlieb 8y ago

>Inb4 the anecdotal "well it works for me I just had to download the xf86 font library and compile with a legacy glibc version..." crew comes in with a thousand and one rebuttals. Problems like that are still a suboptimal user experience, no matter how you slice it. No, my experience is much more along the lines of, "I download and install Ubuntu or Linux Mint, and then it works without further issues."

H1Supreme 8y ago
I put Ubuntu Mate on an old 2009 Macbook because it couldn't function with MacOs anymore. A wifi driver was the only thing it needed. Which, ended up being trivial to install. Everything else worked out of the box. Two finger gestures on the trackpad, audio, everything. My current Dell Inspiron 7000 didn't need a single driver installed manually (with Ubuntu). Pretty impressive.

PopsiclePete 8y ago

Linux is just consistent. When it works, it works. When it doesn't - god help you. There's no rhyme or reason. Sometimes, my wifi is broken. On a different distro, it's not. Right now, under Ubuntu 18.10, my suspend from resume is broken - it wasn't on 18.04. I have the official Linux laptop, basically - a Dell XPS 9350, all 100% Intel hardware, no binary blobs.

kingosticks 8y ago
I've also found that on my XPS 13 with 18.10. Was fine previously on 16.04. Now I have to open and shut the lid a few times to get it to stop flickering. It's annoying and would otherwise be perfect.
- PopsiclePete 8y ago
  Ah yes that. That’s an (old) bug about how logind interacts with gdm. A quick workaround is ctrl-alt-fn-F1 to force the screen to lock itself. Makes the flicker go away.
  - kingosticks 8y ago
    That trick worked perfectly. Thanks very much.
klardotsh 8y ago
The 9370 is an even more fun can of worms - resuming from suspend will almost always work (I remember the 9350 having massive problems with this, it's not just you - I ended up selling that rig to a friend), but there's a decent chance I'll kernel panic upon plugging in my Type-C dock after said resume. The Killer Wi-Fi card has none of the connectivity problems I read about almost everywhere for this model.... but has all the throughput problems, running at about 15% of the throughput/bandwidth of my Chromebook (an Intel AC card) sitting right next to it as of the last time I tested. I'd definitely not call Linux consistent, but it's better than it was when I started using it back in 2006-2007ish, and I wouldn't trade it for any other setup (and it's not for a lack of trying: my primary work machine for 2.5ish of the last 6 years was a Macbook Pro of some sort for one reason or another)

davidy123 8y ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but font rendering seems fine on Ubuntu without any after install steps. I've been using Ubuntu exclusively for well over a decade for everyday work, only occasionally going into a Windows VM, and it's really been perfectly fine, great even, as a developer. I bought a X1 Yoga the month after it was released and Ubuntu installed perfectly on it, the only thing that didn't work out of the box is the fingerprint reader. Until a year ago, battery life wasn't as good as Windows/Mac, but it's very good with the latest versions. Proprietary software that some people need to run, now that's another issue, but for most development tasks it's fantastically manageable and accessible, a real pushback against closed systems.

neuronic 8y ago
> and it's really been perfectly fine, great even, as a developer Here is the point. It absolutely is fine as a developer. But my parents would never be able to get accustomed to Ubuntu or any other distro. It was hard enough to make them use email. The truth is that the vast majority of people just want things to work. Like turning on a TV without any setup. Hell, people pay electronics stores 100€ to plugin a cable and run the "find channels" function. OECD studies have shown that more people than one thinks are incapable of using search in email [1]. [1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
- davidy123 8y ago
  But, I wasn't talking about your parents.
makewavesnotwar 8y ago
I was using Ubuntu exclusively for around a decade too. It's a great development environment. But about a year ago I needed a new laptop and with the one I purchased, some things didn't only require extra steps to get working, some of them were no fix issues until some indeterminate date in the future. You mention the fingerprint reader not working out of the box - with my laptop, Fingerprint GUI was basically waiting on one of its dependencies to somehow figure out how to integrate my fingerprint scanner. Things like my active-stylus capable touchscreen weren't supported, and there were no applications to really utilize it even if it was. I switched to Windows as my primary OS when I realized Windows PowerShell had basically become on par with Linux in almost every degree and that VS Code was as cushy as I could hope for in a development environment. The only thing I've found that isn't supported out of the box is Redis, but I downloaded a ridiculously lightweight version of Ubuntu from the Microsoft store (we're talking <1 MB memory footprint) with one click and was then good to go. The other thing that really impressed me was all the easy to use tuning software. With ThrottleStop I was able to easily under-volt my processor to completely eliminate things like thermal throttling and improve performance all while greatly improving my battery life. Nvidia support is also way better so I can turn off my graphics card for anything but games - and then there's MSI Afterburner to under-volt my GPU when I am using it. And yeah, not only do my fingerprint scanner and stylus work on Windows, but Windows has Windows Ink built in so I can easily take screenshots of whatever I'm doing with Snip & Sketch and annotate them with a pen in an instant, and I can use Sketchpad like an on the fly whiteboard when I need to do some math. Plus, it has art programs like Krita that basically turn my laptop into an iPad Pro when I feel like getting artistic. And with programs like Enpass, I can use my fingerprint with Windows Hello in place of my master password for stuff like logins and credit card information, which is a lot more secure for someone like me that does a lot of my work from coffee shops. I still love Ubuntu, but all the offerings of Windows 10 has kind of made me a Windows fanboy and even makes MacOS seem like a decisive downgrade.

abrowne 8y ago

Font rendering is a funny one. Some distros were limited by patent issues, but Ubuntu has looked great for a while. Now Apple removed subpixel anti-aliasing in 10.14. This may look better on hidpi, but lots of us still have non-retina Macs

jsight 8y ago

I honestly feel like I've seen this same comment on every Linux workstation post for years now. And you know what? Its mostly true[1], but its also true for me in reverse. Mac OS has definitely improved in the last few years... that being said, it's still got rough spots that Fedora 29 doesn't. For me, this would be just as true of a statement. [1] Maybe not the part about "had to download[...]" which felt a bit biased.

black-tea 8y ago

> It works great when it works, but when it doesn't.... Yeah that good for MacOS and virtually every other piece of technology.

bwat49 8y ago

Ubuntu and it's derivatives have pretty good out of the box font rendering IMO

trumped 8y ago

For me, Linux has improved a lot because Windows has gotten a lot worst, but the Linux distributions I've used have not improved that much (mainly Fedora and Ubuntu). I've been using Linux exclusively for many years and will probably continue to do so though...

cr0sh 8y ago
I fell "in love" with the Budgie desktop experience, which is a project of Solus Linux. However, I didn't like the Solus Linux package system; I wanted the Debian plethora of packages. So I "found" Budgie Ubuntu. Best of both worlds, IMHO. It's the closest I've gotten to a Mac on Linux. It still has some rough edges, but nothing that really sticks out for day-to-day work and play.

hacknat 8y ago

I agreed with everything you said except this: > but there are still things that just going to be less painful on Apple. Of course OSX is more user friendly now, but Linux desktop has improved by leaps and bounds. 4 years ago you needed to be a developer or extremely savvy to run the average desktop distro, now I would say you just need to be tech sdavvy. I would argue that for the ho hum business cases (not extreme use case profiles like design and video production) that Ubuntu won’t cause any unnavigable issues. I think in a few years you will see the Linux diaries continue in popularity, especially among developers. Laptops have become commodity items. There just isn’t that much that differentiates (for me at least) a MacBook from a good ThinkPad.

toyg 8y ago
People have been saying that ever since, uhm, the first Mandrake release? It’s so much easier now, soon it will all be so smooth! except every year there is something else to rewrite/rejig. As soon as auto-configuring XFree was kinda figured out, out goes XFree and in comes x.org. Xorg getting to the point where having 3d animations doesn’t require kernel-module-config expertise? Out goes Xorg, in comes Wayland. Gnome 2 worked out the kinks? Time for Unity! Kde 4 finally getting snappy? time to break it up! Init systems figured out? Systemd! ALSA getting adoption? Pulseaudio! Pulseaudio finally working? Let’s rip it out! And so on and so forth, in an endless churn. Now, this sort of churn also happens in commercial alternatives; but stuff gets shipped when it’s 99.9% working, left running for years (or decades, if from Microsoft), then maybe gets rewritten with something that must be better (no regressions) or it won’t even ship. In the Linux world, it’s all just thrown over the wall; maybe you’ll be lucky and it will work on your machine, and maybe it won’t. By the time it gets fixed, it will be time to replace it. And so the experience is a perennial struggle against half-finished, unpolished software.
- rip_netrunner 8y ago
  The reality is, people get paid more to develop for the Mac world and put more effort in consequentially, whereas Linux is still mainly volunteer-driven.
- bigger_cheese 8y ago

INTPenis 8y ago

>Font rendering, display/compositor fragmentation etc... Everyone has their own view of rough spots but those aren't mine. The rough spots I'm experiencing with Linux are very specific. Namely lack of support for some proprietary VPN solutions like Junos Pulse for example. Also lack of native clients for software like Webex Teams, forcing you to use their web apps which use up so much resources that I'm convinced they've caused my laptop to stall a couple of times. And of course, perhaps related to the issue above, anything relating to graphics does need work. The major positive thing I can say about using Linux daily in work and personal life is that it works so well that when it fails you get very annoyed. That's a good sign. It means that it's rare enough to annoy me. If it was too common I wouldn't be surprised when it fails. I also switched back from Mac to Linux, 2 years ago. But I use vanilla Gnome 3 on Fedora. Before Mac I used tiling window managers but now I don't see the point. It's just so much configuration to handle which Gnome does without a single line of config or shell code.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

Ubuntu and openSUSE are my main installs, and they usually feel fine, my only issue is always drivers, whether it's Wi-Fi or Graphics (worse one, since at least Wi-Fi I have ways to circumvent - buy a compatible wireless usb tiny adapter for example, or connect a router to the network and connect my device over LAN). If somebody could either make a properly open GPU or get AMD or Nvidia to release proper drivers that don't break between versions, I'd be happy. Nvidias drivers used to work on my one laptop, now they've broken something in the latest incarnation of the driver, that or it's just not compatible with Ubuntu's new X.org alternative, whatever the case, it seems too easily fragile. If I can't install it due to GPU issues, I move on if I can't find a compatible distro usually. As for the font thing, maybe I'm not a fontphile or something, but they're usually fine for me.