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Both major consumer OS vendors seem hell-bent on bringing the OS layer under their complete control. As a power user, it's very frustrating. Meanwhile "desktop"

Both major consumer OS vendors seem hell-bent on bringing the OS layer under their complete control. As a power user, it's very frustrating. Meanwhile "desktop" Linux still kind of sucks, just like it did 10 years ago. I don't have much hope of seeing a compelling, unified UX out of Linux in my lifetime.

hexis 6y ago
Maybe desktop Linux needs more people like you and me to help make it better?
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm not a UX designer or expert. And the problem is not that Linux doesn't have enough UI developers, it's that many of them are working on re-inventing the wheel in different, competing ways. Linux needs a dictatorial BDFL for UI - a Linus Torvalds for the desktop - an idea somewhat antithetical to the distributed nature of open source development. It doesn't help that organizations that could be leading the charge keep changing direction. Ubuntu went Gnome -> Unity -> Gnome in the span of 15 years or so. And now they're going in hard on Snaps, which introduces breaks in UI uniformity again (Gnome Themes, for example[1]). [1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/10/automatic-theme-installation-for-snap-apps-is-shaping-up-nicely-video https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/10/automatic-theme-installa...
  - ebiester 6y ago
    Two groups tried that. Unity tried that, and GNOME is trying that. Many of us really hate GNOME's decisions. I'm not sure I really like the BDFL here.
- baq 6y ago
  It needs more people willing to pay software developers, UX designers and testers to improve the Linux desktop, starting with the kernel, graphics drivers, ending in consistent set of apps. This is a (ten) billion dollar endeavor.
pshirshov 6y ago
Desktop linux still kind of sucks because there aren't enough people writing desktop linux software which does not suck and not enough people paying for that. Also there are enough people in linux community who still hate/disapprove all the integration efforts (e.g. systemd). And the thing linux sucks the most is integration.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  > Also there are enough people in linux community who still hate/disapprove all the integration efforts (e.g. systemd). This is a fair point, and I'm guilty of complaining about systemd myself. Having said that, I haven't seen any improvements in the Linux UI experience that could be explained by "systemd fixed that". Maybe network management??
  - Spivak 6y ago
    The biggest thing is probably systemd user services and session management with logind. Having your entire user session under a process supervisor that can anything can hook into is good for stability since your "desktop" now has a much more control of what's actually running. They days of logout just failing because your compositor can't kill all the things are pretty much gone. Logind is far far from perfect but it's a breath of fresh air compared to ConsoleKit and it unifies the concept of a session so that GUI/VNC/SSH are all the same kind of thing.
  - pshirshov 6y ago
    There are A LOT of improvements (e.g. session management, dynamically spawned services, networking, bluetooth, thunderbolt) which were made possible by systemd, udev and dbus. I'm not saying that UI/UX is good. It sucks. It does not improve that much over time. Also Canonical made things worse by rolling out snapd which is unreliable and hard to setup non-ubuntu distros (e.g. it tends to drop its state on Gentoo)
nomel 6y ago
> bringing the OS layer under their complete control To me, it seems the purpose is almost always to protect the average user from malware. What do you think their reasoning is?
- cecja 6y ago
  But what if facebook or twitter started censoring users... ups wrong discussion or is it?
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  So what if that is their reasoning? Freedom also means the freedom to make mistakes. We don't set a standard of "absolute safety" in many other (arguably more important) areas of our lives, so why do it here?
  - nomel 6y ago
    Because a computer is an appliance for most people, with it working, and it being secure, being an absolutely critical feature. I believe still have the option to disable SIP and make as many mistakes as you want. [1] 1. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-big-sur-11-beta-release-notes/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note... > Workaround: During development, you can temporarily disable System Integrity Protection to allow these deprecated kernel extensions to load.
    - AlexandrB 6y ago
      The fact that you can still disable SIP is a good point and I hope that's always possible. The direction Apple is going thought suggests that an iPad-like experience is the eventual goal.
      - nomel 6y ago
        The requirement of a developer account, or some entitlement, to get full access would really be unfortunate.
dylan604 6y ago
What is it about Adobe software that makes it only work on Windows or macOS? Both of their graphics engines are totally different, so what makes it so difficult for Linux compatibility? It's the only software package that keeps me beholden to Apple (I'll never run Windows of my own decision).
- jasonv 6y ago
  I have an aging MacBook Air (works great for 99% of the things I want to do), an aging iPad Pro, and an iPhone XR. I probably am in the market to replace them in that order. I just bought my son a Lenovo laptop because he needed Windows. I'm dismayed at where Apple is going, so I'm considering a Dell Linux laptop as my daily driver. I need to do some video editing, so for a while I'll use my son's laptop, and possibly get a Mac Mini if I really need to keep up with video editing. My thinking is I'll buy the minimum I need to keep up with my video editing but make more aligned choices for my daily drivers. Sitting on those thoughts more has left me entirely cold to the iPhone 12 announcements last week.
  - mcyukon 6y ago
    I'm in the same boat, just more from a Photography standpoint. Oldest Mac I own is a 2012 MBP and I really do not see any appeal in any of the newer machines. I built myself fairly high end Mini ITX Windows machine for a fraction of what a comparable Mac would cost. Only downside is having a somewhat bigger PC on my desk. For video editing I was very surprised at how quickly I picked up / understood the Free version of Davinci Resolve after looking for a Final Cut replacement for my gaming PC.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      The one thing the newer machines have are better discrete GPUs. Everything now will use the GPU from web browsing to full on video/photo editing and color correction. Your 2012 GPU might as well be hanging out with Moses its so old in GPU years. The speed difference you'll see in a photo edit standpoint will justify your upgrade. If you are even halfway serious about using Resolve, you cannot put enough GPU power in a box. (I've built Resolve desktop systems with 3 GPUs in a Mac PCIe external chasis. PCs/Linux Resolve systems can have even more GPUs.)
pmarreck 6y ago
I'm kind of glad Linux doesn't have a "unified UX". I mean, the MacOS of 15+ years ago iron-fisted it, and it was right most of the time, but glaringly not in a few cases (simple examples, the ability to reshape a window by any corner or edge was conspicuously absent on Mac for a long time, as was the right mouse button). Best to let a bunch of free ideas duke it out. Currently using Ubuntu 20.10 beta (releases in 2 days!) on ZFS on root, and got all my dev and games working, so I'm pretty happy with it thus far. The ability to roll back to any point at which an apt install was made or attempted via zsys' integration with ZFS snapshots is nice. And ZFS is just... as glorious as an enterprise-class filesystem, basically. And all "for free".
- millstone 6y ago
  Consistent UI compounds. If every app picked its own keyboard shortcuts and "duked it out", we would lose the thing that makes keyboard shortcuts useful.
miguelmota 6y ago
Curious, what sort of things make desktop Linux suck in your opinion? I’ve been on Linux for years as my primary machine and haven’t encountered anything that made me switch back.
- dylan604 6y ago
  Can you select a file in the whatever is the Linux desktop equivalent of Finder and hit the spacebar to get a quick look at the file native to the OS? Can I run the software I need to be able to make a living? Can I run multiple HiDPI displays that I can connect/disconnect as needed without causing issues? I honestly don't know if these are or are not available features. The first question is a muscle memory thing for me and makes me thing Windows Explorer is broken. I know the second question is not possible, so after that it's full stop. Question 3 is something I anecdotally know that has been an issue in the past, but would be problem for me if it is not possible.
  - miguelmota 6y ago
    > Can you select a file in the whatever is the Linux desktop equivalent of Finder and hit the spacebar to get a quick look at the file native to the OS? Yes, I use pcmanfm on Linux and the spacebar will open the file in the default program. > Can I run the software I need to be able to make a living? Depends on what you do. If it's mostly design work and you require Adobe products then Linux is not a good choice. For software development then Linux is great. > Can I run multiple HiDPI displays that I can connect/disconnect as needed without causing issues? I never encountered problems connecting external monitors but also haven't tried connecting to an Apple monitor and makes me think drivers are probably non-existing for that.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      >Yes, I use pcmanfm on Linux and the spacebar will open the file in the default program. That's not what QuickLook does. It allows the user to get a "quick look" at a file without launching a default application. Also, in macOS you get access to QuickLook from inside any application's Open dialog. That's a huge time saver when you have similar files and just need to see which one before doing a full open. Think large image files that you want to place in a layout.

hexis 6y ago

Maybe desktop Linux needs more people like you and me to help make it better?

AlexandrB 6y ago
I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm not a UX designer or expert. And the problem is not that Linux doesn't have enough UI developers, it's that many of them are working on re-inventing the wheel in different, competing ways. Linux needs a dictatorial BDFL for UI - a Linus Torvalds for the desktop - an idea somewhat antithetical to the distributed nature of open source development. It doesn't help that organizations that could be leading the charge keep changing direction. Ubuntu went Gnome -> Unity -> Gnome in the span of 15 years or so. And now they're going in hard on Snaps, which introduces breaks in UI uniformity again (Gnome Themes, for example[1]). [1] https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/10/automatic-theme-installation-for-snap-apps-is-shaping-up-nicely-video https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/10/automatic-theme-installa...
- ebiester 6y ago
  Two groups tried that. Unity tried that, and GNOME is trying that. Many of us really hate GNOME's decisions. I'm not sure I really like the BDFL here.
baq 6y ago
It needs more people willing to pay software developers, UX designers and testers to improve the Linux desktop, starting with the kernel, graphics drivers, ending in consistent set of apps. This is a (ten) billion dollar endeavor.

pshirshov 6y ago

Desktop linux still kind of sucks because there aren't enough people writing desktop linux software which does not suck and not enough people paying for that. Also there are enough people in linux community who still hate/disapprove all the integration efforts (e.g. systemd). And the thing linux sucks the most is integration.

AlexandrB 6y ago
> Also there are enough people in linux community who still hate/disapprove all the integration efforts (e.g. systemd). This is a fair point, and I'm guilty of complaining about systemd myself. Having said that, I haven't seen any improvements in the Linux UI experience that could be explained by "systemd fixed that". Maybe network management??
- Spivak 6y ago
  The biggest thing is probably systemd user services and session management with logind. Having your entire user session under a process supervisor that can anything can hook into is good for stability since your "desktop" now has a much more control of what's actually running. They days of logout just failing because your compositor can't kill all the things are pretty much gone. Logind is far far from perfect but it's a breath of fresh air compared to ConsoleKit and it unifies the concept of a session so that GUI/VNC/SSH are all the same kind of thing.
- pshirshov 6y ago
  There are A LOT of improvements (e.g. session management, dynamically spawned services, networking, bluetooth, thunderbolt) which were made possible by systemd, udev and dbus. I'm not saying that UI/UX is good. It sucks. It does not improve that much over time. Also Canonical made things worse by rolling out snapd which is unreliable and hard to setup non-ubuntu distros (e.g. it tends to drop its state on Gentoo)

nomel 6y ago

> bringing the OS layer under their complete control To me, it seems the purpose is almost always to protect the average user from malware. What do you think their reasoning is?

cecja 6y ago
But what if facebook or twitter started censoring users... ups wrong discussion or is it?
AlexandrB 6y ago
So what if that is their reasoning? Freedom also means the freedom to make mistakes. We don't set a standard of "absolute safety" in many other (arguably more important) areas of our lives, so why do it here?
- nomel 6y ago
  Because a computer is an appliance for most people, with it working, and it being secure, being an absolutely critical feature. I believe still have the option to disable SIP and make as many mistakes as you want. [1] 1. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-notes/macos-big-sur-11-beta-release-notes/ https://developer.apple.com/documentation/macos-release-note... > Workaround: During development, you can temporarily disable System Integrity Protection to allow these deprecated kernel extensions to load.
  - AlexandrB 6y ago
    The fact that you can still disable SIP is a good point and I hope that's always possible. The direction Apple is going thought suggests that an iPad-like experience is the eventual goal.
    - nomel 6y ago
      The requirement of a developer account, or some entitlement, to get full access would really be unfortunate.

dylan604 6y ago

What is it about Adobe software that makes it only work on Windows or macOS? Both of their graphics engines are totally different, so what makes it so difficult for Linux compatibility? It's the only software package that keeps me beholden to Apple (I'll never run Windows of my own decision).

jasonv 6y ago
I have an aging MacBook Air (works great for 99% of the things I want to do), an aging iPad Pro, and an iPhone XR. I probably am in the market to replace them in that order. I just bought my son a Lenovo laptop because he needed Windows. I'm dismayed at where Apple is going, so I'm considering a Dell Linux laptop as my daily driver. I need to do some video editing, so for a while I'll use my son's laptop, and possibly get a Mac Mini if I really need to keep up with video editing. My thinking is I'll buy the minimum I need to keep up with my video editing but make more aligned choices for my daily drivers. Sitting on those thoughts more has left me entirely cold to the iPhone 12 announcements last week.
- mcyukon 6y ago
  I'm in the same boat, just more from a Photography standpoint. Oldest Mac I own is a 2012 MBP and I really do not see any appeal in any of the newer machines. I built myself fairly high end Mini ITX Windows machine for a fraction of what a comparable Mac would cost. Only downside is having a somewhat bigger PC on my desk. For video editing I was very surprised at how quickly I picked up / understood the Free version of Davinci Resolve after looking for a Final Cut replacement for my gaming PC.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    The one thing the newer machines have are better discrete GPUs. Everything now will use the GPU from web browsing to full on video/photo editing and color correction. Your 2012 GPU might as well be hanging out with Moses its so old in GPU years. The speed difference you'll see in a photo edit standpoint will justify your upgrade. If you are even halfway serious about using Resolve, you cannot put enough GPU power in a box. (I've built Resolve desktop systems with 3 GPUs in a Mac PCIe external chasis. PCs/Linux Resolve systems can have even more GPUs.)

pmarreck 6y ago

I'm kind of glad Linux doesn't have a "unified UX". I mean, the MacOS of 15+ years ago iron-fisted it, and it was right most of the time, but glaringly not in a few cases (simple examples, the ability to reshape a window by any corner or edge was conspicuously absent on Mac for a long time, as was the right mouse button). Best to let a bunch of free ideas duke it out. Currently using Ubuntu 20.10 beta (releases in 2 days!) on ZFS on root, and got all my dev and games working, so I'm pretty happy with it thus far. The ability to roll back to any point at which an apt install was made or attempted via zsys' integration with ZFS snapshots is nice. And ZFS is just... as glorious as an enterprise-class filesystem, basically. And all "for free".

millstone 6y ago
Consistent UI compounds. If every app picked its own keyboard shortcuts and "duked it out", we would lose the thing that makes keyboard shortcuts useful.

miguelmota 6y ago

Curious, what sort of things make desktop Linux suck in your opinion? I’ve been on Linux for years as my primary machine and haven’t encountered anything that made me switch back.

dylan604 6y ago
Can you select a file in the whatever is the Linux desktop equivalent of Finder and hit the spacebar to get a quick look at the file native to the OS? Can I run the software I need to be able to make a living? Can I run multiple HiDPI displays that I can connect/disconnect as needed without causing issues? I honestly don't know if these are or are not available features. The first question is a muscle memory thing for me and makes me thing Windows Explorer is broken. I know the second question is not possible, so after that it's full stop. Question 3 is something I anecdotally know that has been an issue in the past, but would be problem for me if it is not possible.
- miguelmota 6y ago
  > Can you select a file in the whatever is the Linux desktop equivalent of Finder and hit the spacebar to get a quick look at the file native to the OS? Yes, I use pcmanfm on Linux and the spacebar will open the file in the default program. > Can I run the software I need to be able to make a living? Depends on what you do. If it's mostly design work and you require Adobe products then Linux is not a good choice. For software development then Linux is great. > Can I run multiple HiDPI displays that I can connect/disconnect as needed without causing issues? I never encountered problems connecting external monitors but also haven't tried connecting to an Apple monitor and makes me think drivers are probably non-existing for that.
  - dylan604 6y ago
    >Yes, I use pcmanfm on Linux and the spacebar will open the file in the default program. That's not what QuickLook does. It allows the user to get a "quick look" at a file without launching a default application. Also, in macOS you get access to QuickLook from inside any application's Open dialog. That's a huge time saver when you have similar files and just need to see which one before doing a full open. Think large image files that you want to place in a layout.