23 ms·

Linux, amazingly, has some of my favourite UIs right now. It used to be different. I used to hate the Linux UIs, and preferred Windows 7 or OS X. Now that Win 1

Linux, amazingly, has some of my favourite UIs right now. It used to be different. I used to hate the Linux UIs, and preferred Windows 7 or OS X. Now that Win 10 is dominant, and I can't justify a new MBP (though I still love my 2015 MBP), I've jumped to Linux Mint. The UI is clean, easy to use, uncluttered, has obvious affordances. It isn't quite as polished as Win 7 was, but it's better than this new crap.

pampa 6y ago
There are UIs on Linux (& *BSDs) that you cant get anywhere else - tiling window managers. I'd argue that a tiling WM is the greatest UI for a poweruser/programmer/devops. There is a learing curve, but once you memorize a few hotkeys you wont be able to go back to a floating windows mess.
- wilsonnb3 6y ago
  There are tiling window managers for macOS and Windows.
  - pampa 6y ago
    I tried several, dont remember the names. They were mostly closed source and pretty much sucked, compared to i3, xmonad or awesome.
- streb-lo 6y ago
  Why a tiling wm instead of tmux? The only thing I want to tile is my terminal anyways -- tiled GUIs generally don't work well and alt-tabbing through them is a better UX.
  - rimunroe 6y ago
    You probably answered your own question there. They might want to tile things other than a terminal. I used to use Ion3 on a tiny Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D to divide the screen into quadrants containing things like a terminal (mostly used for IRC), Pidgin, a browser, and whatever videos I might be watching.
    - streb-lo 6y ago
      As soon as you are tiling mouse-driven GUIs your having to do more work to traverse your screen with the mouse vs a stacking wm where your stacked GUIs can be flipped through with keyboard shortcuts. I guess it makes sense if you have a bunch of apps you're predominantly reading from instead of interacting with but in my experience those are predominantly terminal UIs anyways.
    - akho 6y ago
      Quadrants with the same stuff are easy to do in Windows (with Win+arrows). The tricky part is in various autolayouts &c. But that is also where usefulness diminishes for non-terminal stuff. GUI apps usually expect stacking.
  - larntz 6y ago
    Why not? I use a tiling wm and I love it. I'm able to make my desktop act exactly the way I want it to act. I don't appreciate my windows being rambunctious. If I'm on a machine without a tiling wm I generally using everything maximized and alt-tab like you say. But that's still usually an extra click after opening an application. I also love tmux, but I have a coworker that doesn't see the point. So, having options is nice. I want to be able to work the way I want. I also want you and my coworker to be able to work your way.
  - pxc 6y ago
    I do pretty much everything in tmux and Emacs and sometimes ask myself ‘why not a tiling WM instead of tmux’? I've never really given it a fair shot.
    - streb-lo 6y ago
      I guess it depends on your setup but being able to attach to an existing tmux session from another machine is something a tiling wm won't be able to offer.
- lower 6y ago
  > (& *BSDs) You must be a C++ programmer [1]. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25224958/dereference-a-pointer-and-then-take-the-address-of-dereference https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25224958/dereference-a-p...
madjam002 6y ago
I’m using Gnome in dark mode and I agree for the most part, although I find LibreOffice looks absolutely dreadful in recent versions. I’m not sure whether it’s a regression or something wrong with my setup.
nayaketo 6y ago
I too am a big fan of the UI that comes with Cinnamon DE(the one that comes with Linux mint). I sometimes install other UIs just to see how they've evolved over the years but keep on coming back to Cinnamon for daily use.
rvz 6y ago
> Linux, amazingly, has some of my favourite UIs right now. Of which as a desktop app developer it is harder and more complicated to test. I have to test if my GUI app works properly before someone on whatever Linux distro complains that it doesn't work on either of their GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, LXDE or Mate setup or worse yet, if the problem is found deeper in the distro stack which could be the user's incompatible configuration or if it is the distro itself. Windows and macOS have a default desktop environment and windowing manager that I can test against which is very predictable and stable unlike the complexity of the Linux desktop stack and its distros.
- vetinari 6y ago
  If you have a problem that manifests itself under one DE but not under another, you are doing something very wrong - unless you are doing something very deeply integrated with specific DE. Seriously, for a normal, user-facing app, all you should care about is at the level of the framework you used.
  - rvz 6y ago
    > If you have a problem that manifests itself under one DE but not under another, you are doing something very wrong - unless you are doing something very deeply integrated with specific DE. I see. So you're saying it's the "app developers" fault when a Linux user changes any system component of the Linux desktop stack i.e. display manager or desktop environment and the app fails to start or crashes because it only runs on GNOME, KDE or its X11 or Wayland-specific. It is actually an entire distro problem. When someone decides to make the switch to full blown Wayland or some other configuration, all bets and guarantees are off on stability and they start finding alternatives for other apps because the apps they tried don't work on their setup. [0] There's a reason why they say "UNSUPPORTED". For example, Firefox couldn't start on SwayWM and the number of issues and combinations of people not running it on their distro setup was mounting. [1]. Such issues are easy to test on Windows and macOS but very difficult in Linux distros, resorting to trail through the whole desktop stack to find the issue as demonstrated in this ticket [2]. Such issues like this still exist in many Linux apps not just Firefox. > Seriously, for a normal, user-facing app, all you should care about is at the level of the framework you used. Like I said, no guarantees are made if the user ends up changing system components or old frameworks and the app crashes on their setup when it is specifically made to work on a default install of XYZ distro. The point is that the freedom to mix and match subsystem components makes it complicated to test your app or trace a bug which could at worst be a regression in one part of a Linux subsystem component, which is why some see it as a blessing and a curse here. [0] https://www.swalladge.net/archives/2019/10/14/are-we-wayland-yet/ https://www.swalladge.net/archives/2019/10/14/are-we-wayland... [1] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3115 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3115 [2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397834#c1 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397834#c1
linguae 6y ago
I'm a long-time Mac user who is planning a gradual transition to Linux and FreeBSD. However, I have used various desktop environments over the years in the context of installing Linux and FreeBSD on older hardware and in development VMs, and so I'm familiar with the Linux desktop ecosystem even if Macs are my daily drivers. One of the things I appreciate about the Unix ecosystem is the wide amount of choice of window managers and the broad support for themability. This means that users are less affected in Linux by current design fads. For example, the reason we have MATE and Cinnamon is because some people didn't like the changes made in GNOME 3. Now there are at least four well-supported GTK-based desktops: GNOME, XFCE, MATE, and Cinnamon. If Apple or Microsoft makes a UI change and I don't like it, I generally have to grin and bear it unless I switch platforms. If KDE, GNOME, Windowmaker, or another desktop environment/window manager makes a UI change that I don't like, then there are a lot of options I have to change things to my liking. That's the power of the Unix desktop ecosystem.
ceronman 6y ago
I recently installed Fedora 32 and I am extremely happy with it. I was not a big fan of Gnome 3 for a long time, but now it seems that the project is mature enough. All the Gnome apps look gorgeous and very clean. The whole interface is responsive and quick. I tried Windows 10 with WSL 2 for a few months, but the experience is far from being good. WSL is slow and the new Windows terminal needs a lot of polish. Windows 10 it self is a subpar experience. The UI in general is a mess, all from explorer to control panel and settings. You often find windows and text that look awful on high dpi displays. And I'm not talking about third party apps, I'm talking about Windows itself and some MS apps like Skype. Windows also is not as responsive as I would like. Hitting the windows key to quickly open an app, which is the most repeated action by me, is sluggish. The only reason I was using Windows was because my Thinkpad had issues with the microphone and speakers on Linux, but now that Fedora 32 is out with a new kernel, hardware works like a charm, so good byE Windows!
- sixothree 6y ago
  Is the dock still always hidden in Gnome 3?
  - ceronman 6y ago
    Yes, but this doesn't bother me at all. Getting used to the super key to switch windows is good enough.
  - Leherenn 6y ago
    There's an option to show it all the time (though I have only managed to have it "full screen", not reduced).
- sixothree 6y ago
  Also, just curious. Are you using Desktop Skype or the Windows Store version of Skype?
  - ceronman 6y ago
    Downloaded from Skype website, so I assume desktop Skype
badsectoracula 6y ago
The main issue with UI on Linux is that toolkits have a higher churn than in Windows - this is because there isn't really "Gtk", "Qt" or whatever, but "Gtk2", "Gtk3", "Gtk4", "Qt4", "Qt5", etc (and i'm sure that if i mentioned "Qt3" i'm sure someone would point out that nobody uses that anymore :-P). Writing something in Win32 will ensure it will run in 10 years from now and chances are it'll also run 20 years from now. As a user you have a very high chance of finding applications that work regardless of when they were made. As a developer you can focus on your tasks without wasting time to "upgrade" to the latest fad (Microsoft does release new toolkits, but the old stuff keep working and Win32 is the stablest of them all). And your knowledge will still be perfectly valid, no need to waste time learning how to do the exact same stuff in a different way. Writing something in Gtk3 (the current stable one) will ensure... well, once Gtk4 is stable, Gtk3 will be deprecated and the one to avoid. Qt can't even remain stable in the long term if they wanted (though they do not seem to want to - after all Qt is middleware targeted to application developers, not a platform component regardless if KDE pretends that it is) because of C++. As a user you are limited in the applications you can find and have to keep around all sorts of different toolkits - which wouldn't be that great of an issue (hard disk space is cheap) if those toolkits were still supported and compiled. Except the only distribution i'm aware that provides -say- Gtk1 is Slackware and Qt4 is already on its way out by most distributions. Gtk2 will soon follow (and perhaps some distributions will already have it dropped). As a developer you have to chase after the brokenness that Gtk and Qt developers introduce (though TBF Qt seems a bit better here, probably because they are getting paid by selling Qt licenses and they cant annoy the developers using Qt too much) and waste time "keeping up" just so that your existing application will keep working. Above X there aren't any stable UI APIs (unless you count Athena but that hasn't received any updates since the 80s - even the updates 3rd parties made during the 90s to improve its look a bit never became part of the "official" distribution). And people want to get rid of X's stability too with Wayland.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > Qt can't even remain stable in the long term if they wanted (though they do not seem to want to - after all Qt is middleware targeted to application developers, not a platform component regardless if KDE pretends that it is) because of C++ https://www.qt.io/blog/2018/05/24/porting-from-qt-1-0 https://www.qt.io/blog/2018/05/24/porting-from-qt-1-0 > So, what did we learn? It did not take that much effort to port tutorial 14 from Qt 1.0 to Qt 5.11. It probably took me longer to write this blog post. Qt 1 was released in 1995, Qt 5 has been released in 2012 (and did not break ABI / API since then). I think it's not unreasonable to spend a few days every 7 years to update your app to the new Qt major version... especially when the hardware evolves and you have to update to follow that anyways (touch screens, hidpi, permission requesting).

pampa 6y ago

There are UIs on Linux (& *BSDs) that you cant get anywhere else - tiling window managers. I'd argue that a tiling WM is the greatest UI for a poweruser/programmer/devops. There is a learing curve, but once you memorize a few hotkeys you wont be able to go back to a floating windows mess.

wilsonnb3 6y ago
There are tiling window managers for macOS and Windows.
- pampa 6y ago
  I tried several, dont remember the names. They were mostly closed source and pretty much sucked, compared to i3, xmonad or awesome.
streb-lo 6y ago
Why a tiling wm instead of tmux? The only thing I want to tile is my terminal anyways -- tiled GUIs generally don't work well and alt-tabbing through them is a better UX.
- rimunroe 6y ago
  You probably answered your own question there. They might want to tile things other than a terminal. I used to use Ion3 on a tiny Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D to divide the screen into quadrants containing things like a terminal (mostly used for IRC), Pidgin, a browser, and whatever videos I might be watching.
  - streb-lo 6y ago
    As soon as you are tiling mouse-driven GUIs your having to do more work to traverse your screen with the mouse vs a stacking wm where your stacked GUIs can be flipped through with keyboard shortcuts. I guess it makes sense if you have a bunch of apps you're predominantly reading from instead of interacting with but in my experience those are predominantly terminal UIs anyways.
  - akho 6y ago
    Quadrants with the same stuff are easy to do in Windows (with Win+arrows). The tricky part is in various autolayouts &c. But that is also where usefulness diminishes for non-terminal stuff. GUI apps usually expect stacking.
- larntz 6y ago
  Why not? I use a tiling wm and I love it. I'm able to make my desktop act exactly the way I want it to act. I don't appreciate my windows being rambunctious. If I'm on a machine without a tiling wm I generally using everything maximized and alt-tab like you say. But that's still usually an extra click after opening an application. I also love tmux, but I have a coworker that doesn't see the point. So, having options is nice. I want to be able to work the way I want. I also want you and my coworker to be able to work your way.
- pxc 6y ago
  I do pretty much everything in tmux and Emacs and sometimes ask myself ‘why not a tiling WM instead of tmux’? I've never really given it a fair shot.
  - streb-lo 6y ago
    I guess it depends on your setup but being able to attach to an existing tmux session from another machine is something a tiling wm won't be able to offer.
lower 6y ago
> (& *BSDs) You must be a C++ programmer [1]. [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25224958/dereference-a-pointer-and-then-take-the-address-of-dereference https://stackoverflow.com/questions/25224958/dereference-a-p...

madjam002 6y ago

I’m using Gnome in dark mode and I agree for the most part, although I find LibreOffice looks absolutely dreadful in recent versions. I’m not sure whether it’s a regression or something wrong with my setup.

nayaketo 6y ago

I too am a big fan of the UI that comes with Cinnamon DE(the one that comes with Linux mint). I sometimes install other UIs just to see how they've evolved over the years but keep on coming back to Cinnamon for daily use.

rvz 6y ago

> Linux, amazingly, has some of my favourite UIs right now. Of which as a desktop app developer it is harder and more complicated to test. I have to test if my GUI app works properly before someone on whatever Linux distro complains that it doesn't work on either of their GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, LXDE or Mate setup or worse yet, if the problem is found deeper in the distro stack which could be the user's incompatible configuration or if it is the distro itself. Windows and macOS have a default desktop environment and windowing manager that I can test against which is very predictable and stable unlike the complexity of the Linux desktop stack and its distros.

vetinari 6y ago
If you have a problem that manifests itself under one DE but not under another, you are doing something very wrong - unless you are doing something very deeply integrated with specific DE. Seriously, for a normal, user-facing app, all you should care about is at the level of the framework you used.
- rvz 6y ago
  > If you have a problem that manifests itself under one DE but not under another, you are doing something very wrong - unless you are doing something very deeply integrated with specific DE. I see. So you're saying it's the "app developers" fault when a Linux user changes any system component of the Linux desktop stack i.e. display manager or desktop environment and the app fails to start or crashes because it only runs on GNOME, KDE or its X11 or Wayland-specific. It is actually an entire distro problem. When someone decides to make the switch to full blown Wayland or some other configuration, all bets and guarantees are off on stability and they start finding alternatives for other apps because the apps they tried don't work on their setup. [0] There's a reason why they say "UNSUPPORTED". For example, Firefox couldn't start on SwayWM and the number of issues and combinations of people not running it on their distro setup was mounting. [1]. Such issues are easy to test on Windows and macOS but very difficult in Linux distros, resorting to trail through the whole desktop stack to find the issue as demonstrated in this ticket [2]. Such issues like this still exist in many Linux apps not just Firefox. > Seriously, for a normal, user-facing app, all you should care about is at the level of the framework you used. Like I said, no guarantees are made if the user ends up changing system components or old frameworks and the app crashes on their setup when it is specifically made to work on a default install of XYZ distro. The point is that the freedom to mix and match subsystem components makes it complicated to test your app or trace a bug which could at worst be a regression in one part of a Linux subsystem component, which is why some see it as a blessing and a curse here. [0] https://www.swalladge.net/archives/2019/10/14/are-we-wayland-yet/ https://www.swalladge.net/archives/2019/10/14/are-we-wayland... [1] https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3115 https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/3115 [2] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397834#c1 https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=397834#c1

linguae 6y ago

I'm a long-time Mac user who is planning a gradual transition to Linux and FreeBSD. However, I have used various desktop environments over the years in the context of installing Linux and FreeBSD on older hardware and in development VMs, and so I'm familiar with the Linux desktop ecosystem even if Macs are my daily drivers. One of the things I appreciate about the Unix ecosystem is the wide amount of choice of window managers and the broad support for themability. This means that users are less affected in Linux by current design fads. For example, the reason we have MATE and Cinnamon is because some people didn't like the changes made in GNOME 3. Now there are at least four well-supported GTK-based desktops: GNOME, XFCE, MATE, and Cinnamon. If Apple or Microsoft makes a UI change and I don't like it, I generally have to grin and bear it unless I switch platforms. If KDE, GNOME, Windowmaker, or another desktop environment/window manager makes a UI change that I don't like, then there are a lot of options I have to change things to my liking. That's the power of the Unix desktop ecosystem.

ceronman 6y ago

I recently installed Fedora 32 and I am extremely happy with it. I was not a big fan of Gnome 3 for a long time, but now it seems that the project is mature enough. All the Gnome apps look gorgeous and very clean. The whole interface is responsive and quick. I tried Windows 10 with WSL 2 for a few months, but the experience is far from being good. WSL is slow and the new Windows terminal needs a lot of polish. Windows 10 it self is a subpar experience. The UI in general is a mess, all from explorer to control panel and settings. You often find windows and text that look awful on high dpi displays. And I'm not talking about third party apps, I'm talking about Windows itself and some MS apps like Skype. Windows also is not as responsive as I would like. Hitting the windows key to quickly open an app, which is the most repeated action by me, is sluggish. The only reason I was using Windows was because my Thinkpad had issues with the microphone and speakers on Linux, but now that Fedora 32 is out with a new kernel, hardware works like a charm, so good byE Windows!

sixothree 6y ago
Is the dock still always hidden in Gnome 3?
- ceronman 6y ago
  Yes, but this doesn't bother me at all. Getting used to the super key to switch windows is good enough.
- Leherenn 6y ago
  There's an option to show it all the time (though I have only managed to have it "full screen", not reduced).
sixothree 6y ago
Also, just curious. Are you using Desktop Skype or the Windows Store version of Skype?
- ceronman 6y ago
  Downloaded from Skype website, so I assume desktop Skype

badsectoracula 6y ago

The main issue with UI on Linux is that toolkits have a higher churn than in Windows - this is because there isn't really "Gtk", "Qt" or whatever, but "Gtk2", "Gtk3", "Gtk4", "Qt4", "Qt5", etc (and i'm sure that if i mentioned "Qt3" i'm sure someone would point out that nobody uses that anymore :-P). Writing something in Win32 will ensure it will run in 10 years from now and chances are it'll also run 20 years from now. As a user you have a very high chance of finding applications that work regardless of when they were made. As a developer you can focus on your tasks without wasting time to "upgrade" to the latest fad (Microsoft does release new toolkits, but the old stuff keep working and Win32 is the stablest of them all). And your knowledge will still be perfectly valid, no need to waste time learning how to do the exact same stuff in a different way. Writing something in Gtk3 (the current stable one) will ensure... well, once Gtk4 is stable, Gtk3 will be deprecated and the one to avoid. Qt can't even remain stable in the long term if they wanted (though they do not seem to want to - after all Qt is middleware targeted to application developers, not a platform component regardless if KDE pretends that it is) because of C++. As a user you are limited in the applications you can find and have to keep around all sorts of different toolkits - which wouldn't be that great of an issue (hard disk space is cheap) if those toolkits were still supported and compiled. Except the only distribution i'm aware that provides -say- Gtk1 is Slackware and Qt4 is already on its way out by most distributions. Gtk2 will soon follow (and perhaps some distributions will already have it dropped). As a developer you have to chase after the brokenness that Gtk and Qt developers introduce (though TBF Qt seems a bit better here, probably because they are getting paid by selling Qt licenses and they cant annoy the developers using Qt too much) and waste time "keeping up" just so that your existing application will keep working. Above X there aren't any stable UI APIs (unless you count Athena but that hasn't received any updates since the 80s - even the updates 3rd parties made during the 90s to improve its look a bit never became part of the "official" distribution). And people want to get rid of X's stability too with Wayland.

jcelerier 6y ago
> Qt can't even remain stable in the long term if they wanted (though they do not seem to want to - after all Qt is middleware targeted to application developers, not a platform component regardless if KDE pretends that it is) because of C++ https://www.qt.io/blog/2018/05/24/porting-from-qt-1-0 https://www.qt.io/blog/2018/05/24/porting-from-qt-1-0 > So, what did we learn? It did not take that much effort to port tutorial 14 from Qt 1.0 to Qt 5.11. It probably took me longer to write this blog post. Qt 1 was released in 1995, Qt 5 has been released in 2012 (and did not break ABI / API since then). I think it's not unreasonable to spend a few days every 7 years to update your app to the new Qt major version... especially when the hardware evolves and you have to update to follow that anyways (touch screens, hidpi, permission requesting).