4 ms·

End of an Era: No Linux Desktop at Home (after 17 years)

17 points by gherlein 16y ago

pohl 16y ago
Was the database instance on that box?
hexis 16y ago
cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fblog.herlein.com%2F2011%2F01%2Fend-of-an-era-no-linux-desktop-at-home%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=...
zdw 16y ago
Same here... all Mac and Solaris here for the last few years, with VM's for the rest. Linux boot/utility disks are still really nice to have around though, and my routers and other embedded devices run Linux.
mithaler 16y ago
As an Ubuntu user running the exact same hardware he describes (Dell XPS M1530), I don't understand his frustration, since literally everything in Ubuntu Just Works for me on it. I haven't had a single bit of trouble on that hardware in all the time I've run Ubuntu. But then, Ubuntu has made tremendous strides in recent years on that front, and I wouldn't be surprised if other distros haven't kept up (though he doesn't say what distro he'd been using).
beej71 16y ago
For me, it's continuation of an era: Still Linux Desktop at Home (for 17 years--thanks Slackware 2.0!) The good news, for me, is that Linux apparently doesn't seem to care if its popular on the desktop or not. If my choices were Windows and OS X, my life would not be nearly as easy. At least that's my takeaway from this article. When the author wrote "Error establishing database connection", I'm pretty sure that's what he was talking about.
- beej71 16y ago
  Edit: after reading the cached article, I guess he's more like me than I'd anticipated. (Except I use a Mac to do iPhone dev, and I can't even begin to imagine giving up my Linux desktop for that. I do as much work on the Linux machine as I possibly can. But that's just me.) Edit: reply/edit... man, I need more coffee.
cosgroveb 16y ago
Interestingly enough, for me 2010 was the first time in 10 years that I actually stuck with Linux on the desktop. Ubuntu really does Just Work for me, on every machine I own. You can't beat Apple's industrial design or the quality of parts they use but I have never felt at home in their UI. I probably never will. That's too bad because I'd rather be seen with a Macbook than pretty much any PC. But that's just vanity :)
- austinshea 16y ago
  A macbook can run Linux. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook
  - cosgroveb 16y ago
    Thanks for that!
  - nailer 16y ago
    Dual booting here. The Mac constantly has the red optical light turned on under Linux. Temperature control can be a little off too. It works, but not seamlessly.
    - threedaymonk 16y ago
      You can turn the red light off with alsamixer (find the SPDIF column and hit M to mute, as I recall). There must also be a way to automate this on boot, though I don't know it off the top of my head.
      - xiongchiamiov 16y ago
        Alsa settings can be saved using `sudo alsactl store`; most distros have their startup scripts configured to load up the generated config file when they start.
- larrik 16y ago
  Me too. I've installed Linux about every year for the past 6-7 years, trying Suse, Debian, and others. The last few years were Ubuntu, but I just could never make linux my full time machine. Then I put a clean install of 9.10 on my new machine last Thanksgiving, and never went back. I feel that Ubuntu is simply the best operating system out there right now. I use OS X for iPhone development, and Ubuntu makes it feel a bit clunky and very rigid. I also have Windows 7 for gaming, and I'd rather spend days trying to get games to run well under wine instead (and those that don't, get rarely played).
burgerbrain 16y ago
Short version: Individual posts a story about how he personally doesn't use linux as a desktop anymore, then the inclusive title is copied from a personal blog to a news aggregator in a way that constitutes flamebait.
bryanlarsen 16y ago
I find this to be strange timing. For the most part stuff just works on Linux these days. I've had more trouble trying to get old printers working on Windows machines than I have had on Linux boxes. I've also had more trouble with buggy graphics drivers on Windows in the last 3 years than I've had on Linux. (Civ 5 still doesn't display right after 4 driver updates). Linux also seems to be the only place where innovation is happening on the desktop. We get small refreshes every 6 months, whereas the last time Mac users got a significant desktop refresh was for 10.5 in 2007, and Windows users get updates even less frequently. We've had KDE4 in the meantime, and Gnome3 is coming soon. His real complaint seems to be that OpenOffice doesn't interact well Microsoft Office. There are several different good ways of running Microsoft Office on Linux (I recommend CrossOver).
- sudont 16y ago
  While I agree with you in that CUPS is solid, and his printer issues are elsewhere--Guess what's used for mac printing?--the "no innovation elsewhere" is a bit misleading. The interface on a Mac is settling down because it really doesn't need any tweaking. Most of the extra stuff now is just churn (the hideous widget placement on the App Store for one). Instead, the work is going into simplifying workflows: the twitterization of everything. Time-Machine for one-click backups, AirTunes for OTA plug-and-play. Hell, even the TZ selector now integrates skyhook so it's generally correct, NAT withstanding. That type of ideology carries over to dealing with Word files. Is it really necessary to dick around with CrossOver or WINE's bottling, when the end goal he stated is not to? Some is infinitely more than none to a pedant.
  - bryanlarsen 16y ago
    "The interface on a Mac is settling down because it really doesn't need any tweaking" And yet there are others in this thread whose primary reason to stay away from OS X is that window management on Linux is so much superior. It's not my primary reason, but it is certainly a factor. "dick around with CrossOver's bottling". Umm, CrossOver is a pretty much a click to install and forget-about-it operation. That's why you pay for CrossOver rather than dicking around with wine. Me I really appreciate the fact that every crappy Windows application I install is completely sandboxed away from each other.
ramidarigaz 16y ago
I dunno. I agree with some of the other posters here. I've been using Ubuntu pretty much exclusively for 2.5 years, and it's been great. I just research the hardware I buy to ensure that everything works out of the box. There are a few glitches, but nothing that really gets in my way. I keep Windows around for the games that don't work well with Wine, but other than that, Ubuntu works great.
charlesju 16y ago
The big bottleneck for mass Linux adoption is that most of the mavens (tech nerds and early adopters) are Mac users. And since Mac is BSD-based, a lot of the draw of Linux (customizations, scripts, programming, etc.) is gone. I find almost no reason to switch from a Mac to Linux. It's actually a lot easier to use Mac to develop for work (Rails) because I know every Mac has the same standard configurations and I do not need to make a configuration script to give to all the new kids.
pgroves 16y ago
IMO, the reason desktop linux never took off is that you need to draw developers to the platform, and developing desktop linux apps completely sucks. I recently wrote my first large gtk app and was appalled at how painful it was. Gtk has been around for like 15 years and half of it's widgets are unuseable and the api is clunky. I don't understand why kde/qt lost so decisively to gnome in terms of support by the distributions, although I will admit gtk apps tend to look better. Things may have been better if QT had gotten more community support, or at least more designers working on pretty themes. There can't be many experienced linux desktop developers who would voluntarily do their next project on that platform. As Steve Ballmer famously bellowed in his drunken rant, "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!"
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mahmoudimus 16y ago
I have a 15" MacBook Pro at home, and I tried very hard to use it as my primary Python/C++ development environment, but, it just felt completely awkward and kludgy. Ubuntu is the distro I use and it mostly Just Works. 1. Window management for Linux is much more mature than MacOSX's -- XMonad, dwm, Compiz' grid plugin, etc. 2. emacs keybindings for everything in Linux actually works. kill-yank rings work as expected. I've had serious setbacks when using MacOS's emacs keybindings. 3. apt for Debian based distros. (just phenomenal) Sure, my sound may not work 1/2 of the time, flash applications may use all 4 cores of my crappy laptop, and wireless N is initially disabled by default, but, I'm willing to put up with all of this so the operating system doesn't get in my way when I am coding. MacOS is there, but it's just not quite there, yet. Linux is making great strides as well, so we'll see how it plays out.
- beoba 16y ago
  I LOVE GRID
DjDarkman 16y ago
There is a problem with Macintosh-es too, you know, it's too damn expensive in Europe, for no apparent reason, that's why I'm still using Linux. The price difference is so huge that you might as well fly over to the US and buy one there. I will buy one later on, though. But back to the critism: - I doubt that OS X has better driver support than Linux, for your setup maybe(good for you), but generally most stuff simply just work with Linux, I plug in my mouse, and it loads even faster than on Windows 7 - You still(to my knowledge) can't tweak a Mac. Desktop the way you can tweak KDE, GNOME and many others. In the end my advice is load up an Ubuntu CD and be amazed that Linux is not what you described.
- xiongchiamiov 16y ago
  I doubt that OS X has better driver support than Linux Apple knows exactly what hardware you're using if you buy a Mac, and thus are able to accomodate you quite nicely. This of course doesn't count peripherals, but it's still quite significant.
  - DjDarkman 16y ago
    You shouldn't compare the OS-es that way, otherwise Mac OS X is a clear loser, because it only supports Apple hardware. If we are comparing the two OS-es the only fair comparison we can make is the peripherals, where again, I doubt that OS X would win, sure it has great support from a lot of descent vendors, but again Linux support is huge, not because of the companies interest but because the developer community does a great job in writing drivers at an insane pace, heck they even managed to make broadcom cards work using binary blobs created originally for windows.
foljs 16y ago
Unavoidable comment from people who don't understand statistics and generalization: "But I use Linux at Home just fine, and so does my Aunt Tilly after I set it up for her".

17 points by gherlein 16y ago

pohl 16y ago

Was the database instance on that box?

hexis 16y ago

cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fblog.herlein.com%2F2011%2F01%2Fend-of-an-era-no-linux-desktop-at-home%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=...

zdw 16y ago

Same here... all Mac and Solaris here for the last few years, with VM's for the rest. Linux boot/utility disks are still really nice to have around though, and my routers and other embedded devices run Linux.

mithaler 16y ago

As an Ubuntu user running the exact same hardware he describes (Dell XPS M1530), I don't understand his frustration, since literally everything in Ubuntu Just Works for me on it. I haven't had a single bit of trouble on that hardware in all the time I've run Ubuntu. But then, Ubuntu has made tremendous strides in recent years on that front, and I wouldn't be surprised if other distros haven't kept up (though he doesn't say what distro he'd been using).

beej71 16y ago

For me, it's continuation of an era: Still Linux Desktop at Home (for 17 years--thanks Slackware 2.0!) The good news, for me, is that Linux apparently doesn't seem to care if its popular on the desktop or not. If my choices were Windows and OS X, my life would not be nearly as easy. At least that's my takeaway from this article. When the author wrote "Error establishing database connection", I'm pretty sure that's what he was talking about.

beej71 16y ago
Edit: after reading the cached article, I guess he's more like me than I'd anticipated. (Except I use a Mac to do iPhone dev, and I can't even begin to imagine giving up my Linux desktop for that. I do as much work on the Linux machine as I possibly can. But that's just me.) Edit: reply/edit... man, I need more coffee.

cosgroveb 16y ago

Interestingly enough, for me 2010 was the first time in 10 years that I actually stuck with Linux on the desktop. Ubuntu really does Just Work for me, on every machine I own. You can't beat Apple's industrial design or the quality of parts they use but I have never felt at home in their UI. I probably never will. That's too bad because I'd rather be seen with a Macbook than pretty much any PC. But that's just vanity :)

austinshea 16y ago
A macbook can run Linux. https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook
- cosgroveb 16y ago
  Thanks for that!
- nailer 16y ago
  Dual booting here. The Mac constantly has the red optical light turned on under Linux. Temperature control can be a little off too. It works, but not seamlessly.
  - threedaymonk 16y ago
    You can turn the red light off with alsamixer (find the SPDIF column and hit M to mute, as I recall). There must also be a way to automate this on boot, though I don't know it off the top of my head.
    - xiongchiamiov 16y ago
      Alsa settings can be saved using `sudo alsactl store`; most distros have their startup scripts configured to load up the generated config file when they start.
larrik 16y ago
Me too. I've installed Linux about every year for the past 6-7 years, trying Suse, Debian, and others. The last few years were Ubuntu, but I just could never make linux my full time machine. Then I put a clean install of 9.10 on my new machine last Thanksgiving, and never went back. I feel that Ubuntu is simply the best operating system out there right now. I use OS X for iPhone development, and Ubuntu makes it feel a bit clunky and very rigid. I also have Windows 7 for gaming, and I'd rather spend days trying to get games to run well under wine instead (and those that don't, get rarely played).

burgerbrain 16y ago

Short version: Individual posts a story about how he personally doesn't use linux as a desktop anymore, then the inclusive title is copied from a personal blog to a news aggregator in a way that constitutes flamebait.

bryanlarsen 16y ago

I find this to be strange timing. For the most part stuff just works on Linux these days. I've had more trouble trying to get old printers working on Windows machines than I have had on Linux boxes. I've also had more trouble with buggy graphics drivers on Windows in the last 3 years than I've had on Linux. (Civ 5 still doesn't display right after 4 driver updates). Linux also seems to be the only place where innovation is happening on the desktop. We get small refreshes every 6 months, whereas the last time Mac users got a significant desktop refresh was for 10.5 in 2007, and Windows users get updates even less frequently. We've had KDE4 in the meantime, and Gnome3 is coming soon. His real complaint seems to be that OpenOffice doesn't interact well Microsoft Office. There are several different good ways of running Microsoft Office on Linux (I recommend CrossOver).

sudont 16y ago
While I agree with you in that CUPS is solid, and his printer issues are elsewhere--Guess what's used for mac printing?--the "no innovation elsewhere" is a bit misleading. The interface on a Mac is settling down because it really doesn't need any tweaking. Most of the extra stuff now is just churn (the hideous widget placement on the App Store for one). Instead, the work is going into simplifying workflows: the twitterization of everything. Time-Machine for one-click backups, AirTunes for OTA plug-and-play. Hell, even the TZ selector now integrates skyhook so it's generally correct, NAT withstanding. That type of ideology carries over to dealing with Word files. Is it really necessary to dick around with CrossOver or WINE's bottling, when the end goal he stated is not to? Some is infinitely more than none to a pedant.
- bryanlarsen 16y ago
  "The interface on a Mac is settling down because it really doesn't need any tweaking" And yet there are others in this thread whose primary reason to stay away from OS X is that window management on Linux is so much superior. It's not my primary reason, but it is certainly a factor. "dick around with CrossOver's bottling". Umm, CrossOver is a pretty much a click to install and forget-about-it operation. That's why you pay for CrossOver rather than dicking around with wine. Me I really appreciate the fact that every crappy Windows application I install is completely sandboxed away from each other.

ramidarigaz 16y ago

I dunno. I agree with some of the other posters here. I've been using Ubuntu pretty much exclusively for 2.5 years, and it's been great. I just research the hardware I buy to ensure that everything works out of the box. There are a few glitches, but nothing that really gets in my way. I keep Windows around for the games that don't work well with Wine, but other than that, Ubuntu works great.

charlesju 16y ago

The big bottleneck for mass Linux adoption is that most of the mavens (tech nerds and early adopters) are Mac users. And since Mac is BSD-based, a lot of the draw of Linux (customizations, scripts, programming, etc.) is gone. I find almost no reason to switch from a Mac to Linux. It's actually a lot easier to use Mac to develop for work (Rails) because I know every Mac has the same standard configurations and I do not need to make a configuration script to give to all the new kids.

pgroves 16y ago

IMO, the reason desktop linux never took off is that you need to draw developers to the platform, and developing desktop linux apps completely sucks. I recently wrote my first large gtk app and was appalled at how painful it was. Gtk has been around for like 15 years and half of it's widgets are unuseable and the api is clunky. I don't understand why kde/qt lost so decisively to gnome in terms of support by the distributions, although I will admit gtk apps tend to look better. Things may have been better if QT had gotten more community support, or at least more designers working on pretty themes. There can't be many experienced linux desktop developers who would voluntarily do their next project on that platform. As Steve Ballmer famously bellowed in his drunken rant, "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!"

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mahmoudimus 16y ago

I have a 15" MacBook Pro at home, and I tried very hard to use it as my primary Python/C++ development environment, but, it just felt completely awkward and kludgy. Ubuntu is the distro I use and it mostly Just Works. 1. Window management for Linux is much more mature than MacOSX's -- XMonad, dwm, Compiz' grid plugin, etc. 2. emacs keybindings for everything in Linux actually works. kill-yank rings work as expected. I've had serious setbacks when using MacOS's emacs keybindings. 3. apt for Debian based distros. (just phenomenal) Sure, my sound may not work 1/2 of the time, flash applications may use all 4 cores of my crappy laptop, and wireless N is initially disabled by default, but, I'm willing to put up with all of this so the operating system doesn't get in my way when I am coding. MacOS is there, but it's just not quite there, yet. Linux is making great strides as well, so we'll see how it plays out.

beoba 16y ago
I LOVE GRID

DjDarkman 16y ago

There is a problem with Macintosh-es too, you know, it's too damn expensive in Europe, for no apparent reason, that's why I'm still using Linux. The price difference is so huge that you might as well fly over to the US and buy one there. I will buy one later on, though. But back to the critism: - I doubt that OS X has better driver support than Linux, for your setup maybe(good for you), but generally most stuff simply just work with Linux, I plug in my mouse, and it loads even faster than on Windows 7 - You still(to my knowledge) can't tweak a Mac. Desktop the way you can tweak KDE, GNOME and many others. In the end my advice is load up an Ubuntu CD and be amazed that Linux is not what you described.

xiongchiamiov 16y ago
I doubt that OS X has better driver support than Linux Apple knows exactly what hardware you're using if you buy a Mac, and thus are able to accomodate you quite nicely. This of course doesn't count peripherals, but it's still quite significant.
- DjDarkman 16y ago
  You shouldn't compare the OS-es that way, otherwise Mac OS X is a clear loser, because it only supports Apple hardware. If we are comparing the two OS-es the only fair comparison we can make is the peripherals, where again, I doubt that OS X would win, sure it has great support from a lot of descent vendors, but again Linux support is huge, not because of the companies interest but because the developer community does a great job in writing drivers at an insane pace, heck they even managed to make broadcom cards work using binary blobs created originally for windows.

foljs 16y ago

Unavoidable comment from people who don't understand statistics and generalization: "But I use Linux at Home just fine, and so does my Aunt Tilly after I set it up for her".