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I sincerely hope that one day, Linux GUI land will receive similar amounts of work as the kernel. While it's great that we can boot it on pretty much every dev

I sincerely hope that one day, Linux GUI land will receive similar amounts of work as the kernel. While it's great that we can boot it on pretty much every device out there, I would much prefer if it was a viable Windows alternative on a few devices instead. Just yesterday, I plugged an external screen into my Ubuntu laptop. And then I had to duck-duck for like an hour to figure out how to make the fonts large enough to be readable again. And why doesn't the file browser reliably show me all the files in a folder? Sometimes, the first file in alphabetical order is just omitted. I sincerely want to like Linux for Desktop as much as I love it on servers. But the fact is, OSX and Windows just make you so much more productive, because things just work.

minhazm 6y ago
One of the issues is that most of the money comes from big corporate sponsors that are nearly exclusively going to be running Linux on a server with no GUI. These businesses have no interest in trying to develop a desktop UI when Mac OS and Windows work fine already and someone else is doing all the work for it already.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  It's not just corporate sponsors though. Many Linux developers and most hardcore Linux nerds have an irrational distain for GUIs. They think that Vim is the best thing since sliced bread and if you don't want to use the terminal to set up WiFi then you're a noob that belongs on Windows. Not everyone is like that but that's definitely the prevailing attitude. A good example is the regular hate that SystemD receives. Nobody wants a modern system that supports hotplugging and GUI configuration. They think you should edit init.rc files by hand and reboot your desktop (laptop? what's that?) whenever you plug something in.
  - minhazm 6y ago
    The reason people like Vim isn't because they hate GUI's. I use a Mac because I like the GUI, but I still do most of my development in Vim because I'm more productive in it. Most of these hardcore Vim (or Emacs) users stay that way because they've built up years of muscle memory and customizations that makes it the most productive editor for them. I also use VS Code and for some stuff I work faster in VS Code. But there's a good argument that a keyboard driven UX is faster than a mouse driven one since you can input things so much faster than with a mouse. I personally hate SystemD also, but that's more because it makes it such a pain to stuff like look at logs. I never remember the correct journalctl command. Just let me cat/tail a file like everything else. I don't know anyone who hates SystemD because it allows GUI configuration. It's just that SystemD made some other changes also that people don't like.
picardythird 6y ago
Hmm, I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I recently logged on to an (admittedly older) mac machine and it took roughly 3 minutes to fully log in. Then I spent some significant time fumbling around a clumsy gui like a pleab. After that, cd’ing around my minimal - yet blazing fast - thinkpad w/ void linux felt nearly exhilirating. Didn’t have to touch the mouse for many minutes at a time.
globular-toast 6y ago
There are lots of things you've learnt for Windows and Mac that make you productive. I can say this with certainty as someone who hasn't used Windows for almost 15 years and has never used MacOS. When I come into contact with those systems I have no idea what's going on. Windows has a million buttons all over the place and MacOS has really weird, unintuitive behaviour and "gestures" that you need to just know, somehow. The best way is just to take the plunge. Immerse yourself by removing other OSes from your own PC. In a few weeks you'll be flying.
yoz-y 6y ago
I think that elementaryos has had the best shot at this as of yet.
ginko 6y ago
Anecdotal I know, but I very recently got a macbook air after years of practically exclusively using Linux and the opinionated user interface drives me crazy. Here's a few pain points: - Scroll direction can only be set globally so either touchpad or mouse scrolling feels awkward for me - You need an extra click on another window before you can interact with it - No focus-follows-mouse (there used to be 3rd party plugins but those seem to be gone now) - While basic split screen tiling works and you can set up a global kb shortcut to move windows to left/right of the screen, Firefox seems to completely ignore those - If you're running multiple displays macos for some reason always picks the most awkward display to open new windows in - I really miss being able to grab and resize windows using a modifier key like in XFCE I'm sure I'd get used to many of those, but the lack of focus-follows-mouse and easy window manipulation are the big one for me and I don't think that'll change much. Actually I think those were already pain points when I last tried out Mac OS in the late PPC days. There's of course plenty of things that I like, especially the tight integration with my iphone and trackpad gestures (although I'm not sure how ergonomic using the trackpad all day is). I was hoping it could become my main driver at home, but now I ordered a Ryzen mini PC for that. edit: Oh, I completely forgot the biggest deal breaker for me at the moment. As of now the GUI version of Emacs (either downloaded through brew or from https://emacsformacosx.com/ https://emacsformacosx.com/) doesn't work. MacOS simply refuses to start the binary.
- astrange 6y ago
  macOS does have mouse-following interaction in some situations. If you move the mouse over a background window, you can scroll it with the trackpad/wheel. You can't click on things or type in it because that's dangerous and would make people afraid to accidentally touch the mouse in case they move it.
- jmkni 6y ago
  > - You need an extra click on another window before you can interact with it I don't have this issue, I can interact with a window just by hovering over it with the mouse pointer > - If you're running multiple displays macos for some reason always picks the most awkward display to open new windows in You can set the default display in the settings (under arrangement, drag the white bar to the display you want to make the default) Agree about the other issues though.
philwelch 6y ago
I sincerely hope that one day, MacOS or Windows can provide a GUI that provides as smooth an experience as the i3 tiling window manager.
Zardoz84 6y ago
Don't use Gnome and you have all these issues with the GUI fixed.
rkangel 6y ago
I really think we're getting there. Wayland is a much saner, more consistent experience than X11 ever was. I use Fedora and with Gnome and Mutter you get a solid experience. Not everyone likes Gnome but I find it to be generally pretty good and productive to work in. There are some gaps in Wayland - screen sharing being the obvious one. But these gaps are in the process of being closed (pipewire being part of the picture). Give it another year and I believe that Wayland will be a solid solution for all the major use cases (multi-monitor, high-dpi, screen sharing). My other issue with Linux as a workstation solution is OOM handling, and even that is being worked on!
- salamandersauce 6y ago
  Nvidia really needs to get on Wayland already. I tried a few months ago to run KDE on Wayland+Nvidia it was literally unusable. I could not put a panel down without bugs. I'm running mixed DPI with the Nvidia driver and it's just easiest to make seperate X screens despite all the downsides that brings :/. I'm going to be sad that a lot of little WMs are probably never going to make the jump. I'm not sure Wayland is ever going to get that many.
  - exciteabletom 6y ago
    nVidia works fine on Wayland on Gnome because Gnome implemented nVidia's EGLstreams as well as GBM
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tgv 6y ago
I've written this before, but it's not going to happen without a large amount of apps, that people actually want and can use. And that's not going to happen unless there's all the necessary tooling, especially for UI. mac/iOS and Windows have great support for building user-oriented applications. And then it still needs a centralized way to monetize the development work. And to get all that, you need a ton of paying users, not a bunch of freeloading tinkerers. It's simply not going to happen any time soon.
- taklamundak 6y ago
  So nice
- hobonate 6y ago
  There's already GTK and Qt. What more do you want? > And then it still needs a centralized way to monetize the development work. I disagree: once you put money into the equation, the quality of packages will go down as programmers try to shake as much money out of the users. Compare programs like MATLAB vs GNU Octave or Photoshop vs GIMP for example. > And to get all that, you need a ton of paying users, not a bunch of freeloading tinkerers. Do you really? I mean you are basically saying that the only way linux can compete is if it sacrifices most of what makes it good in the first place. I really doubt that users think "hmm today i'm going to pay for a bunch of crappy apps that each do some trivial thing for me while uploading my data to the cloud, then watch some ads, and then wade through a bunch of graphical menus to disable this one stupid feature I don't like, i love using iWinux this is so much better than other OS's".
  - hyakosm 6y ago
    > There's already GTK and Qt. What more do you want? There's GTK2, GTK3, vanilla Qt, KDE-Qt with additional tooling... The problem in Linux is the lack of integration between these tools. The fragmentation of the GNU/Linux ecosystem forbids the possibility of an unified API like HaikuOS kits. (https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/ https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/)
    - 6y ago

minhazm 6y ago

One of the issues is that most of the money comes from big corporate sponsors that are nearly exclusively going to be running Linux on a server with no GUI. These businesses have no interest in trying to develop a desktop UI when Mac OS and Windows work fine already and someone else is doing all the work for it already.

IshKebab 6y ago
It's not just corporate sponsors though. Many Linux developers and most hardcore Linux nerds have an irrational distain for GUIs. They think that Vim is the best thing since sliced bread and if you don't want to use the terminal to set up WiFi then you're a noob that belongs on Windows. Not everyone is like that but that's definitely the prevailing attitude. A good example is the regular hate that SystemD receives. Nobody wants a modern system that supports hotplugging and GUI configuration. They think you should edit init.rc files by hand and reboot your desktop (laptop? what's that?) whenever you plug something in.
- minhazm 6y ago
  The reason people like Vim isn't because they hate GUI's. I use a Mac because I like the GUI, but I still do most of my development in Vim because I'm more productive in it. Most of these hardcore Vim (or Emacs) users stay that way because they've built up years of muscle memory and customizations that makes it the most productive editor for them. I also use VS Code and for some stuff I work faster in VS Code. But there's a good argument that a keyboard driven UX is faster than a mouse driven one since you can input things so much faster than with a mouse. I personally hate SystemD also, but that's more because it makes it such a pain to stuff like look at logs. I never remember the correct journalctl command. Just let me cat/tail a file like everything else. I don't know anyone who hates SystemD because it allows GUI configuration. It's just that SystemD made some other changes also that people don't like.

picardythird 6y ago

Hmm, I’ve had the exact opposite experience. I recently logged on to an (admittedly older) mac machine and it took roughly 3 minutes to fully log in. Then I spent some significant time fumbling around a clumsy gui like a pleab. After that, cd’ing around my minimal - yet blazing fast - thinkpad w/ void linux felt nearly exhilirating. Didn’t have to touch the mouse for many minutes at a time.

globular-toast 6y ago

There are lots of things you've learnt for Windows and Mac that make you productive. I can say this with certainty as someone who hasn't used Windows for almost 15 years and has never used MacOS. When I come into contact with those systems I have no idea what's going on. Windows has a million buttons all over the place and MacOS has really weird, unintuitive behaviour and "gestures" that you need to just know, somehow. The best way is just to take the plunge. Immerse yourself by removing other OSes from your own PC. In a few weeks you'll be flying.

yoz-y 6y ago

I think that elementaryos has had the best shot at this as of yet.

ginko 6y ago

Anecdotal I know, but I very recently got a macbook air after years of practically exclusively using Linux and the opinionated user interface drives me crazy. Here's a few pain points: - Scroll direction can only be set globally so either touchpad or mouse scrolling feels awkward for me - You need an extra click on another window before you can interact with it - No focus-follows-mouse (there used to be 3rd party plugins but those seem to be gone now) - While basic split screen tiling works and you can set up a global kb shortcut to move windows to left/right of the screen, Firefox seems to completely ignore those - If you're running multiple displays macos for some reason always picks the most awkward display to open new windows in - I really miss being able to grab and resize windows using a modifier key like in XFCE I'm sure I'd get used to many of those, but the lack of focus-follows-mouse and easy window manipulation are the big one for me and I don't think that'll change much. Actually I think those were already pain points when I last tried out Mac OS in the late PPC days. There's of course plenty of things that I like, especially the tight integration with my iphone and trackpad gestures (although I'm not sure how ergonomic using the trackpad all day is). I was hoping it could become my main driver at home, but now I ordered a Ryzen mini PC for that. edit: Oh, I completely forgot the biggest deal breaker for me at the moment. As of now the GUI version of Emacs (either downloaded through brew or from https://emacsformacosx.com/ https://emacsformacosx.com/) doesn't work. MacOS simply refuses to start the binary.

astrange 6y ago
macOS does have mouse-following interaction in some situations. If you move the mouse over a background window, you can scroll it with the trackpad/wheel. You can't click on things or type in it because that's dangerous and would make people afraid to accidentally touch the mouse in case they move it.
jmkni 6y ago
> - You need an extra click on another window before you can interact with it I don't have this issue, I can interact with a window just by hovering over it with the mouse pointer > - If you're running multiple displays macos for some reason always picks the most awkward display to open new windows in You can set the default display in the settings (under arrangement, drag the white bar to the display you want to make the default) Agree about the other issues though.

philwelch 6y ago

I sincerely hope that one day, MacOS or Windows can provide a GUI that provides as smooth an experience as the i3 tiling window manager.

Zardoz84 6y ago

Don't use Gnome and you have all these issues with the GUI fixed.

rkangel 6y ago

I really think we're getting there. Wayland is a much saner, more consistent experience than X11 ever was. I use Fedora and with Gnome and Mutter you get a solid experience. Not everyone likes Gnome but I find it to be generally pretty good and productive to work in. There are some gaps in Wayland - screen sharing being the obvious one. But these gaps are in the process of being closed (pipewire being part of the picture). Give it another year and I believe that Wayland will be a solid solution for all the major use cases (multi-monitor, high-dpi, screen sharing). My other issue with Linux as a workstation solution is OOM handling, and even that is being worked on!

salamandersauce 6y ago
Nvidia really needs to get on Wayland already. I tried a few months ago to run KDE on Wayland+Nvidia it was literally unusable. I could not put a panel down without bugs. I'm running mixed DPI with the Nvidia driver and it's just easiest to make seperate X screens despite all the downsides that brings :/. I'm going to be sad that a lot of little WMs are probably never going to make the jump. I'm not sure Wayland is ever going to get that many.
- exciteabletom 6y ago
  nVidia works fine on Wayland on Gnome because Gnome implemented nVidia's EGLstreams as well as GBM

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tgv 6y ago

I've written this before, but it's not going to happen without a large amount of apps, that people actually want and can use. And that's not going to happen unless there's all the necessary tooling, especially for UI. mac/iOS and Windows have great support for building user-oriented applications. And then it still needs a centralized way to monetize the development work. And to get all that, you need a ton of paying users, not a bunch of freeloading tinkerers. It's simply not going to happen any time soon.

taklamundak 6y ago
So nice
hobonate 6y ago
There's already GTK and Qt. What more do you want? > And then it still needs a centralized way to monetize the development work. I disagree: once you put money into the equation, the quality of packages will go down as programmers try to shake as much money out of the users. Compare programs like MATLAB vs GNU Octave or Photoshop vs GIMP for example. > And to get all that, you need a ton of paying users, not a bunch of freeloading tinkerers. Do you really? I mean you are basically saying that the only way linux can compete is if it sacrifices most of what makes it good in the first place. I really doubt that users think "hmm today i'm going to pay for a bunch of crappy apps that each do some trivial thing for me while uploading my data to the cloud, then watch some ads, and then wade through a bunch of graphical menus to disable this one stupid feature I don't like, i love using iWinux this is so much better than other OS's".
- hyakosm 6y ago
  > There's already GTK and Qt. What more do you want? There's GTK2, GTK3, vanilla Qt, KDE-Qt with additional tooling... The problem in Linux is the lack of integration between these tools. The fragmentation of the GNU/Linux ecosystem forbids the possibility of an unified API like HaikuOS kits. (https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/ https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/api/)
  - 6y ago