6 ms·

Neither one is ready as a desktop operating system. This is a particular bugbear of mine. If Linux isn't ready as a desktop system, how is it that I have been

Neither one is ready as a desktop operating system. This is a particular bugbear of mine. If Linux isn't ready as a desktop system, how is it that I have been using it as such for 15 years? I get that it isn't all things to all people, but it has long fulfilled my needs; I've always been able to find a good quality tool for any task I want to do. Generally speaking, I'm happier with Linux than Windows or Mac OS, though I'm sure familiarity is part of the equation.

petepete 7y ago
It comes down to the hardware you choose. I'm using a 7th Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon. When I got it everything worked out of the box with Fedora. Without coming pre-installed, I don't see how it can be readier. Of course if you buy a machine with exotic hardware (cough Broadcom) then it'll be a pain.
- RMPR 7y ago
  > I'm using a 7th Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon. When I got it everything worked out of the box with Fedora Even the fingerprint sensor? Using a X1 Yoga here, had trouble with it.
  - petepete 7y ago
    Sorry I only just saw this response. The fingerprint reader worked with the latest firmware, installed automatically via fwupdmgr. https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/com.synaptics.prometheus.firmware https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/com.synaptics.prometheus.firm...
- GordonS 7y ago
  You say "exotic hardware", but Broadcom hardware (e.g. NICs) are very common.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Well, my travel netbook came with Ubuntu pre-installed, then I was left without wlan during 2 months until all bugs fixes on the open source driver that replaced the "bad" working proprietary blob were sorted out. And to this day, the OpenGL and video hardware decoding capabilities are castrated by the open source version of the AMD driver, that did not considered worthwhile to support Brazos APUs to the same level that fxglr had. So much for coming pre-installed.
klibertp 7y ago
Same here, I ditched Windows, which was becoming increasingly bloated and harder to develop on, in 2004 I think, then I had a few years of FreeBSD (yes, as my main OS and on a laptop at that!), then switched back to Linux (drivers, mostly). Since ~2009, I've been working on Fedora, with a year of (forced) MacOS experience around '17 - I was delighted when the project I needed a Mac for ended, and I could get back to Fedora. Availability of drivers improved tremendously during the 2010s (although NVidia's became... hard to deal with), so much so that I could buy an off the shelf laptop and have Fedora up and running in a matter of minutes. With video codecs, web browsers, messaging apps, office suite - basically all the things you get on other OSes. Even the games I was interested in worked, thanks to Steam (and LD_PRELOAD in one case). To summarize: Linux was a decent desktop ten years ago, and it didn't get any worse, at the very least, since then.
arexxbifs 7y ago
With Linux, no matter the distribution you pick, you have to be more interested in computers than merely viewing them as an applicane for word processing, video chatting and online shopping. - Some software defaults to installation as sandboxed packages. Try explaining that to someone who is used to dragging and dropping files from the desktop into their programs to open them. - Want to watch a movie? Sure, but you won't get vsynced video without opening up a text editor as root to configure your graphics driver. - Ohh, your laptop has THAT particular Wifi/Bluetooth/PCI bridge/whatever chip? Sorry... - No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc". While Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Apple) has gotten a lot of flak over shoddy updates lately, things are, by and large, much more prone to breaking on Linux. And when they break, even just a little, you need to know your way around a terminal to fix them. I recently had to downgrade my kernel because of the bugs in i915. To do so, I had to first identify the problem by following the syslog and then do some heavy lifting in GRUB to lock my boot process to an older kernel version. The prerequisite knowledge to be able to perform what we might consider a simple task, has been built up during decades of me being a computer nerd. For someone without a keen interest in computers, Linux on the desktop isn't all that great. The thing is, I like it that way. I want the freedom of choice. I want the level of control it gives me. When (or if) it becomes ready for the desktop, it's probably ready to be abandoned for something else.
- GordonS 7y ago
  > No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc" I'm veering a bit OT here, but is anyone aware of the justification for having a case-sensitive file system? It's something that's always annoyed me about Linux and *BSD, but I wonder if there is any real benefit I've just never grasped?
  - arexxbifs 7y ago
    Don’t know if it’s the real reason, but it’s bound to save a few cycles when doing string comparisons. I guess that would’ve made a difference in a multi-user system on a PDP-11.
  - 7y ago
magicalhippo 7y ago
> If Linux isn't ready as a desktop system, how is it that I have been using it as such for 15 years? Obviously the bar for "ready as a desktop system" is subjective and thus will change wildly from person to person. For me, it's not ready primarily because it lacks any remote desktop solution comparable to RDP. Yes I've tried VNC, X2Go, NoMachines and some others I can't recall (though not ogon yet). I find it's also a lot more fiddly than Windows, but I could have lived with that.
- wikibot 7y ago
  I was 17 years old and had no technical experience when I began using Linux 15 years ago. I honestly don't trust comments about Linux online. I know it's not good to be so cynical, but the degree of criticism that the Linux desktop receives just does not match with my experience.
Koshkin 7y ago
I had Slackware on a Dell laptop in 2003, everything worked like a charm - wifi, graphics, everything. (An attempt to switch to Linux ver. 2.6 broke things, but that's another story.)
agapon 7y ago
Using FreeBSD + KDE as my desktop (on a PC, not laptop) since early 2000-s as well.

petepete 7y ago

It comes down to the hardware you choose. I'm using a 7th Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon. When I got it everything worked out of the box with Fedora. Without coming pre-installed, I don't see how it can be readier. Of course if you buy a machine with exotic hardware (cough Broadcom) then it'll be a pain.

RMPR 7y ago
> I'm using a 7th Gen Lenovo X1 Carbon. When I got it everything worked out of the box with Fedora Even the fingerprint sensor? Using a X1 Yoga here, had trouble with it.
- petepete 7y ago
  Sorry I only just saw this response. The fingerprint reader worked with the latest firmware, installed automatically via fwupdmgr. https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/com.synaptics.prometheus.firmware https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/com.synaptics.prometheus.firm...
GordonS 7y ago
You say "exotic hardware", but Broadcom hardware (e.g. NICs) are very common.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
pjmlp 7y ago
Well, my travel netbook came with Ubuntu pre-installed, then I was left without wlan during 2 months until all bugs fixes on the open source driver that replaced the "bad" working proprietary blob were sorted out. And to this day, the OpenGL and video hardware decoding capabilities are castrated by the open source version of the AMD driver, that did not considered worthwhile to support Brazos APUs to the same level that fxglr had. So much for coming pre-installed.

klibertp 7y ago

Same here, I ditched Windows, which was becoming increasingly bloated and harder to develop on, in 2004 I think, then I had a few years of FreeBSD (yes, as my main OS and on a laptop at that!), then switched back to Linux (drivers, mostly). Since ~2009, I've been working on Fedora, with a year of (forced) MacOS experience around '17 - I was delighted when the project I needed a Mac for ended, and I could get back to Fedora. Availability of drivers improved tremendously during the 2010s (although NVidia's became... hard to deal with), so much so that I could buy an off the shelf laptop and have Fedora up and running in a matter of minutes. With video codecs, web browsers, messaging apps, office suite - basically all the things you get on other OSes. Even the games I was interested in worked, thanks to Steam (and LD_PRELOAD in one case). To summarize: Linux was a decent desktop ten years ago, and it didn't get any worse, at the very least, since then.

arexxbifs 7y ago

With Linux, no matter the distribution you pick, you have to be more interested in computers than merely viewing them as an applicane for word processing, video chatting and online shopping. - Some software defaults to installation as sandboxed packages. Try explaining that to someone who is used to dragging and dropping files from the desktop into their programs to open them. - Want to watch a movie? Sure, but you won't get vsynced video without opening up a text editor as root to configure your graphics driver. - Ohh, your laptop has THAT particular Wifi/Bluetooth/PCI bridge/whatever chip? Sorry... - No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc". While Microsoft (and to a lesser extent, Apple) has gotten a lot of flak over shoddy updates lately, things are, by and large, much more prone to breaking on Linux. And when they break, even just a little, you need to know your way around a terminal to fix them. I recently had to downgrade my kernel because of the bugs in i915. To do so, I had to first identify the problem by following the syslog and then do some heavy lifting in GRUB to lock my boot process to an older kernel version. The prerequisite knowledge to be able to perform what we might consider a simple task, has been built up during decades of me being a computer nerd. For someone without a keen interest in computers, Linux on the desktop isn't all that great. The thing is, I like it that way. I want the freedom of choice. I want the level of control it gives me. When (or if) it becomes ready for the desktop, it's probably ready to be abandoned for something else.

GordonS 7y ago
> No, don't open "Christmas Wishlist.doc", that's from last year. The new one is called "Christmas wishlist.doc" I'm veering a bit OT here, but is anyone aware of the justification for having a case-sensitive file system? It's something that's always annoyed me about Linux and *BSD, but I wonder if there is any real benefit I've just never grasped?
- arexxbifs 7y ago
  Don’t know if it’s the real reason, but it’s bound to save a few cycles when doing string comparisons. I guess that would’ve made a difference in a multi-user system on a PDP-11.
- 7y ago

magicalhippo 7y ago

> If Linux isn't ready as a desktop system, how is it that I have been using it as such for 15 years? Obviously the bar for "ready as a desktop system" is subjective and thus will change wildly from person to person. For me, it's not ready primarily because it lacks any remote desktop solution comparable to RDP. Yes I've tried VNC, X2Go, NoMachines and some others I can't recall (though not ogon yet). I find it's also a lot more fiddly than Windows, but I could have lived with that.

wikibot 7y ago
I was 17 years old and had no technical experience when I began using Linux 15 years ago. I honestly don't trust comments about Linux online. I know it's not good to be so cynical, but the degree of criticism that the Linux desktop receives just does not match with my experience.

Koshkin 7y ago

I had Slackware on a Dell laptop in 2003, everything worked like a charm - wifi, graphics, everything. (An attempt to switch to Linux ver. 2.6 broke things, but that's another story.)

agapon 7y ago

Using FreeBSD + KDE as my desktop (on a PC, not laptop) since early 2000-s as well.