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The existence of this survey is evidence that Linux on the desktop is flawed. There should be one answer. Instead, Linux desktop users are using Linux on the

by jmpman 7y ago

The existence of this survey is evidence that Linux on the desktop is flawed. There should be one answer. Instead, Linux desktop users are using Linux on the desktop because they can’t be satisfied by Windows or OSX. So then they try Linux on the desktop, and aren’t satisfied with GNOME, so they then need to fork and create another desktop manager. This new desktop manager doesn’t suit someone, so instead of working to improve it, they work on another desktop manager. Linux on the desktop is a sign of someone who doesn’t recognize that a solution is good enough and accept it. It’s a pathology and says more about the people who are using it than the actual technology.

bediger4000 7y ago
That seems a bit... arrogant. I mean, I'm Windows all the way, but surely there's a wide variety of people in the world. We don't have just two or three kinds of auto, for example.
- jmpman 7y ago
  Have you worked with people who willingly (not forced by their employer) use Linux on the desktop as their primary desktop?
  - abjKT26nO8 7y ago
    I have. And I have friends I made while studying mathematics that wouldn't go near Windows and Mac, but are just fine with Linux.
  - detaro 7y ago
    Sure. Why wouldn't they? In my experience, all three desktop OSes get usage if you let techy people pick freely and there isn't requirements forcing otherwise (e.g. for a job requiring Adobe software using Linux is probably not a good idea)
jraph 7y ago
I mainly use GNU/Linux by principle. It just so happens to be the best operating system too, but that is mostly a nice coincidence ;-) My point is, you cannot draw any conclusion on Linux users because they use it for different reasons and I certainly didn't start using it because I was not satisfied with Windows: I was mostly curious I guess, and liked the little games that came with Mandrake 9 (I was a child). Most Linux users don't make their own desktop anyway. And you cannot blame people who write their own desktop manager for fun and let express their creativity in their free time, or to implement their vision, or to fit their need. They possibly wouldn't have contributed to any existing solution anyway. What's more, you don't seem to have done much research before this heavy, misguided critic. Speaking for the two big desktops, first we had KDE. But the FSF was disatisfied with the fact that Qt was non-free. They started three projects: - a free reimplementation of Qt. - lobbying for Qt to be freed. - an alternative, free desktop: GNOME. The second and third projects succeeded so the first was dropped. But by the time the second project succeded, the third was already well advanced. That is why we have Gnome besides KDE. For ideological reasons, not because someone was not satisfied by KDE and decided to create GNOME instead of contributing to KDE. The reality is more complicated than what you say. I am sorry that you were annoyed by colleagues using Linux but your perception of them is not an accurate representation of the world. And I can see that KDE (or Gnome indeed) is a good solution, thank you very much.
- jmpman 7y ago
  I get the free software principle issue. But that’s like people who won’t use Uber/Lyft and still use Taxis because Taxis have the legal right to sell transportation and Uber/Lyft are/were operating against the law (if not the letter, at least the spirit). I applaud those people, but it’s a sign of their inflexibility. I also get the people who can’t afford a legal software lic for Windows and instead of pirating, they use Linux. Also, upstanding humans who I applaud, but they’re inflexible in their ethics. Good? Bad? Certainly different. I’m just pointing out that using Linux on the desktop is impractical, driven by reasons that aren’t objectively “better”, and the people attracted to it are doing it for reasons which reflect more on their personality (inflexible) than the underlying technology, and the reason for the fracture in Linux desktop managers is due to the users personality traits. And for the record, I’m right on the borderline of using Linux on the desktop, but each time I start down that path, I question - why am I really doing this?
rvz 7y ago
This is spot on. The problematic nature of the Linux desktop is due to the inability to have a standardised and integrated desktop experience but instead its community goes for an ecosystem of having alternatives of alternative subsystems competing with themselves rather than improving upon each other. I don't want to spend hours googling and customising different settings all for it to suddenly break and then reseting the whole OS to fix it. There is only one version of macOS and Windows to test against but thousands of Linux distros that behave differently with many DEs, Window Managers, audio subsystems, packaging formats and the list goes on. As a software developer I can imagine that it is harder to test a GUI app on several Linux distros than it is on macOS and Windows since tracking down the fault of the issue may involve switch/upgrading either GNOME, KDE, GTK, Wayland, X11, libDRM or even Linux itself. This is just too much work. > There should be one answer. The closest answer to having a 'consistent Linux desktop' is ChromeOS.
- Yaa101 7y ago
  You mean one that spies on you? Don't you think that defies what Linux et al. is all about? Besides, The main function of the Linux world is developing computational solutions, not bring people desktops for money. Linux is used to make money much different than that, ask the users of supercomputers, or people that develop communication systems.
zzzcpan 7y ago
> instead of working to improve it, they work on another desktop manager If only it was that simple. Turns out nobody wants your improvements and can't even understand and be convinced they are improvements, unless you follow their vision and policies and try to change your use cases to adopt to that and work on their idea of improvements. And then there are corporations, like Red Hat, that want to control linux desktop and are spreading this bullshit how linux desktop is bad because there is choice and not a single desktop environment they control. > Linux on the desktop is a sign of someone who doesn’t recognize that a solution is good enough and accept it. It's the other way around. You really have to be able to recognize and accept good enough to switch to linux desktop, because this is what you will always be after when using it.
lazylizard 7y ago
I find linux much more user friendly than Windows n slightly moreso than osx. >90% of the computers i interact with are linux so i use a linux desktop. I also use a imac. And i have a nanopi n a Windows pc at home(DirectX!). I really dont care what desktop.
rkeene2 7y ago
I use the desktop environment I use for reasons that predate macOS/Mac OS X and are largely divorced from Microsoft Windows. I used to use the standard UNIX desktop environment, but then when I switched to Linux (since most UNIX software is closed) I had to find something similar. I tried fvwm/fvwm2+themes at first then found XFCE3 which had really similar goals to the standard UNIX desktop environment at the time. So I stuck with it as it became XFCE4. So, there is an explanation about why Linux desktop users use different desktop environments that is completely unaccounted for by your macOS/Windows-centric theory. It also helps explain why there might always be more than one option. Also, for what it's worth, the Common Desktop Environment was never that popular with Linux users but did become open source relatively recently.
likeclockwork 7y ago
Maybe we value choice? On Windows and MacOS you have no choice on desktop environment. Where choice is available sometimes people want radically different things from each other.

by jmpman 7y ago

bediger4000 7y ago

That seems a bit... arrogant. I mean, I'm Windows all the way, but surely there's a wide variety of people in the world. We don't have just two or three kinds of auto, for example.

jmpman 7y ago
Have you worked with people who willingly (not forced by their employer) use Linux on the desktop as their primary desktop?
- abjKT26nO8 7y ago
  I have. And I have friends I made while studying mathematics that wouldn't go near Windows and Mac, but are just fine with Linux.
- detaro 7y ago
  Sure. Why wouldn't they? In my experience, all three desktop OSes get usage if you let techy people pick freely and there isn't requirements forcing otherwise (e.g. for a job requiring Adobe software using Linux is probably not a good idea)

jraph 7y ago

I mainly use GNU/Linux by principle. It just so happens to be the best operating system too, but that is mostly a nice coincidence ;-) My point is, you cannot draw any conclusion on Linux users because they use it for different reasons and I certainly didn't start using it because I was not satisfied with Windows: I was mostly curious I guess, and liked the little games that came with Mandrake 9 (I was a child). Most Linux users don't make their own desktop anyway. And you cannot blame people who write their own desktop manager for fun and let express their creativity in their free time, or to implement their vision, or to fit their need. They possibly wouldn't have contributed to any existing solution anyway. What's more, you don't seem to have done much research before this heavy, misguided critic. Speaking for the two big desktops, first we had KDE. But the FSF was disatisfied with the fact that Qt was non-free. They started three projects: - a free reimplementation of Qt. - lobbying for Qt to be freed. - an alternative, free desktop: GNOME. The second and third projects succeeded so the first was dropped. But by the time the second project succeded, the third was already well advanced. That is why we have Gnome besides KDE. For ideological reasons, not because someone was not satisfied by KDE and decided to create GNOME instead of contributing to KDE. The reality is more complicated than what you say. I am sorry that you were annoyed by colleagues using Linux but your perception of them is not an accurate representation of the world. And I can see that KDE (or Gnome indeed) is a good solution, thank you very much.

jmpman 7y ago
I get the free software principle issue. But that’s like people who won’t use Uber/Lyft and still use Taxis because Taxis have the legal right to sell transportation and Uber/Lyft are/were operating against the law (if not the letter, at least the spirit). I applaud those people, but it’s a sign of their inflexibility. I also get the people who can’t afford a legal software lic for Windows and instead of pirating, they use Linux. Also, upstanding humans who I applaud, but they’re inflexible in their ethics. Good? Bad? Certainly different. I’m just pointing out that using Linux on the desktop is impractical, driven by reasons that aren’t objectively “better”, and the people attracted to it are doing it for reasons which reflect more on their personality (inflexible) than the underlying technology, and the reason for the fracture in Linux desktop managers is due to the users personality traits. And for the record, I’m right on the borderline of using Linux on the desktop, but each time I start down that path, I question - why am I really doing this?

rvz 7y ago

This is spot on. The problematic nature of the Linux desktop is due to the inability to have a standardised and integrated desktop experience but instead its community goes for an ecosystem of having alternatives of alternative subsystems competing with themselves rather than improving upon each other. I don't want to spend hours googling and customising different settings all for it to suddenly break and then reseting the whole OS to fix it. There is only one version of macOS and Windows to test against but thousands of Linux distros that behave differently with many DEs, Window Managers, audio subsystems, packaging formats and the list goes on. As a software developer I can imagine that it is harder to test a GUI app on several Linux distros than it is on macOS and Windows since tracking down the fault of the issue may involve switch/upgrading either GNOME, KDE, GTK, Wayland, X11, libDRM or even Linux itself. This is just too much work. > There should be one answer. The closest answer to having a 'consistent Linux desktop' is ChromeOS.

Yaa101 7y ago
You mean one that spies on you? Don't you think that defies what Linux et al. is all about? Besides, The main function of the Linux world is developing computational solutions, not bring people desktops for money. Linux is used to make money much different than that, ask the users of supercomputers, or people that develop communication systems.

zzzcpan 7y ago

> instead of working to improve it, they work on another desktop manager If only it was that simple. Turns out nobody wants your improvements and can't even understand and be convinced they are improvements, unless you follow their vision and policies and try to change your use cases to adopt to that and work on their idea of improvements. And then there are corporations, like Red Hat, that want to control linux desktop and are spreading this bullshit how linux desktop is bad because there is choice and not a single desktop environment they control. > Linux on the desktop is a sign of someone who doesn’t recognize that a solution is good enough and accept it. It's the other way around. You really have to be able to recognize and accept good enough to switch to linux desktop, because this is what you will always be after when using it.

lazylizard 7y ago

I find linux much more user friendly than Windows n slightly moreso than osx. >90% of the computers i interact with are linux so i use a linux desktop. I also use a imac. And i have a nanopi n a Windows pc at home(DirectX!). I really dont care what desktop.

rkeene2 7y ago

I use the desktop environment I use for reasons that predate macOS/Mac OS X and are largely divorced from Microsoft Windows. I used to use the standard UNIX desktop environment, but then when I switched to Linux (since most UNIX software is closed) I had to find something similar. I tried fvwm/fvwm2+themes at first then found XFCE3 which had really similar goals to the standard UNIX desktop environment at the time. So I stuck with it as it became XFCE4. So, there is an explanation about why Linux desktop users use different desktop environments that is completely unaccounted for by your macOS/Windows-centric theory. It also helps explain why there might always be more than one option. Also, for what it's worth, the Common Desktop Environment was never that popular with Linux users but did become open source relatively recently.

likeclockwork 7y ago

Maybe we value choice? On Windows and MacOS you have no choice on desktop environment. Where choice is available sometimes people want radically different things from each other.