4 ms·

Year of Linux on desktop, it's coming home boys! I'm joking but secretly hoping it happens.

by bserge 5y ago

kiawe_fire 5y ago
Perhaps I’ve just become “one of those people”, but I honestly think if not for the buzz around the M1 from Apple, we would be seeing a lot more activity on the Linux side. “The year of the Linux desktop” always feels like just a couple of bad big tech decisions (and an absence of good decisions) away.
- gentleman11 5y ago
  Linux needs killer app equivalents. Many of the foss versions of windows programs have pretty painful UX or are missing key features (eg, smart select in gimp is really frustrating to use vs photoshop or affinity). Foss really needs to start tempting designers to participate more
  - willtim 5y ago
    It's worse than that. The desktop efforts are heavily fragmented and arguably the leader, RedHat's "Gnome", while quite polished, is actually quite user hostile (e.g. works very differently to anything else, perhaps to dodge patents; and constantly changes/removes popular features). Linux needs to have a standardised "platform" with stable APIs.
    - techrat 5y ago
      Good luck getting anyone to agree on anything. It's why everything is so fragmented to begin with. "Oh, I don't like what X is doing, so I'll fork it and make Y." If I were in a position where I managed several distros... I could say we could just suck it up and universally use XFCE, but then there's always someone who won't like that and they'll respin a distro to have some other DE instead. It seems with every decision we end up with another fork.
      - michaelmrose 5y ago
        XFCE is honestly a mediocre middle ground between the actual minimalism of a window manager or the better functionality of say kde. Most fragmentation is actually entirely different software with the same end goal as opposed to actual forks and it's not really clear that the developer of foo would have joined forces with the developer of bar had he not started his own project.
        techrat 5y ago
        Like I said, good luck getting anyone to agree on anything.
    - gentleman11 5y ago
      It’s not user hostile, I love gnome. It might slow down if you don’t reboot (could be a hibernation or suspend issue?) but the Ux is great. Windows is a nuisance after using gnome. You do need to install some addons that should be built in
      - willtim 5y ago
        I could not find any add-on (that still works) to give me back my tray icons. Not even Apple would take this feature away.
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
I'm over in Mac-land so a bit unclear on the state of things, but it seems like the problem must be marketing by now, right? I can't think of any use cases for mainstream users where Windows is a requirement. Graphic designers, digital art types, and musicians are all fringe and mostly on Mac anyway. PC gamers are a fringe crowd. Practically all productivity software has migrated to the cloud. Desktop Linux usability seemed to meet the standard of Windows XP and Windows 7 years ago. Is the problem really that you still have to grapple with graphics drivers on the CLI? Or is it just that Best Buy and CostCo still don't have motivation to put shiny Linux machines on the shelves? and yeah I know all about the various shady Gates/Ballmer-era OEM deals… I just can't believe that not one OEM has snapped by now.
- chopin 5y ago
  When I buy a computer, Windows 10 is installed as default. You have to go out of your way to get a computer which hasn't. I think it's as easy as that. I've setup Linux on all machines I own or maintain, for all users including my wife. The frequency of hickups is not higher than it was with Windows and It's easy to roll back to a known good configuration, much easier than with Windows. I never looked back. Edited to add: The last machine I bought was a Purism laptop. The first machine which did not have Windows pre-installed.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  Linux simply has too many rough edges still exposed to appeal to a lot of less technical users. Even in the best case scenario (super standard desktop with hardware well supported by FOSS drivers), there’s always some odd thing that requires one to pull out the terminal, usually because UI functionality was insufficient or failed to work as expected. That does not bother me or probably most of us on HN much, but for most people it’s like periodically needing to muck around under the hood of their car. It’s too much, they just want to drive and take the vehicle in to get oil and brake changes every once in a fairly long while. Anything more is tedious overhead. The situation with proprietary drivers still kinda stinks too. The distros I’ve seen handle it best are Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers control panel and pop!_OS which just sidesteps the issue altogether for Nvidia hardware by shipping an ISO with non-free Nvidia drivers included, but the rest just leave you with a package manager, terminal, and whatever you can scrounge up on the internet. Yeah it’s technically the responsibility of Nvidia, etc to fix that, but it’s negatively impacting adoption nonetheless.
techrat 5y ago
The 'desktop' is an outmoded concept anyhow. More is being done on Mobile to the exclusion of the desktop. Who needs a big machine with a monitor when you can do just about everything on a Chromebook or iPad? As far as Linux on ________, Let's look at where we're at now. Supercomputer. Linux runs the entire Top 500. https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/ https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/ Severs/Websites. 75% are Linux or variants. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system Mobile. 72% is Android alone, which counts for Linux IMNSHO. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide ChromeOS now exceeds MacOS market share. Apple had already been making (painful) attempts to move away from the Desktop. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-worlds-second-most-popular-desktop-operating-system-isnt-macos-anymore/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-worlds-second-mo... And, of course, there's the Linux Subsystem for Windows. Linux won. It's over. Windows might be holding onto a majority if you only count desktops, but given even Microsoft has moved towards supporting Linux directly on their own OS... and moving towards Cloud As a Service and hosting, yep, Linux on Azure... Even Microsoft knows that Windows has found itself facing the once unthinkable: support Linux or find yourself increasingly irrelevant. Windows on ARM failed. Twice. Windows Mobile in all of its variants are dead now. Microsoft released an Android device. So given everything that we use today, something that ISN'T running a *ix type kernel is, in fact, the minority. Microsoft is grasping harder with Windows 11... and in their shortsightedness, they ended up excluding huge chunks of systems that were still being sold even as recently as 3 years ago. It's quite unthinkable to me because the one and ONLY one major killing feature of Windows in general was that you could install it on decade-old hardware. Win10 ran pretty decently on my Phenom II x4 desktop which had 16GB Ram. Why shouldn't it? And now Win11 is looking to exclude first gen Ryzen. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/324157-windows-11-may-not-run-on-early-ryzen-threadripper-skylake-x-or-any-intel-systems-2016 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/324157-windows-11-may-... The tighter the grip, the more that will slip in between their fingers... At this point, it's becoming easier and easier to support Linux... thanks to Proton on Steam, more native binaries (BlackMagic, for example, with DaVinci Resolve), more apps becoming webapps and only needing a web browser. At this point, I think what we're waiting for is for legacy companies like Adobe to shit the bed and render themselves irrelevant. (And boy have they gotten close.) Yeah. The year of Linux on the Desktop is a meme... but should it actually happen... the concept of 'desktop' won't matter anymore, IMHO.

Year of Linux on desktop, it's coming home boys! I'm joking but secretly hoping it happens.

by bserge 5y ago

Year of Linux on desktop, it's coming home boys! I'm joking but secretly hoping it happens.

Perhaps I’ve just become “one of those people”, but I honestly think if not for the buzz around the M1 from Apple, we would be seeing a lot more activity on the Linux side. “The year of the Linux desktop” always feels like just a couple of bad big tech decisions (and an absence of good decisions) away.

gentleman11 5y ago
Linux needs killer app equivalents. Many of the foss versions of windows programs have pretty painful UX or are missing key features (eg, smart select in gimp is really frustrating to use vs photoshop or affinity). Foss really needs to start tempting designers to participate more
- willtim 5y ago
  It's worse than that. The desktop efforts are heavily fragmented and arguably the leader, RedHat's "Gnome", while quite polished, is actually quite user hostile (e.g. works very differently to anything else, perhaps to dodge patents; and constantly changes/removes popular features). Linux needs to have a standardised "platform" with stable APIs.
  - techrat 5y ago
    Good luck getting anyone to agree on anything. It's why everything is so fragmented to begin with. "Oh, I don't like what X is doing, so I'll fork it and make Y." If I were in a position where I managed several distros... I could say we could just suck it up and universally use XFCE, but then there's always someone who won't like that and they'll respin a distro to have some other DE instead. It seems with every decision we end up with another fork.
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      XFCE is honestly a mediocre middle ground between the actual minimalism of a window manager or the better functionality of say kde. Most fragmentation is actually entirely different software with the same end goal as opposed to actual forks and it's not really clear that the developer of foo would have joined forces with the developer of bar had he not started his own project.
      - techrat 5y ago
        Like I said, good luck getting anyone to agree on anything.
  - gentleman11 5y ago
    It’s not user hostile, I love gnome. It might slow down if you don’t reboot (could be a hibernation or suspend issue?) but the Ux is great. Windows is a nuisance after using gnome. You do need to install some addons that should be built in
    - willtim 5y ago
      I could not find any add-on (that still works) to give me back my tray icons. Not even Apple would take this feature away.

Eric_WVGG 5y ago

I'm over in Mac-land so a bit unclear on the state of things, but it seems like the problem must be marketing by now, right? I can't think of any use cases for mainstream users where Windows is a requirement. Graphic designers, digital art types, and musicians are all fringe and mostly on Mac anyway. PC gamers are a fringe crowd. Practically all productivity software has migrated to the cloud. Desktop Linux usability seemed to meet the standard of Windows XP and Windows 7 years ago. Is the problem really that you still have to grapple with graphics drivers on the CLI? Or is it just that Best Buy and CostCo still don't have motivation to put shiny Linux machines on the shelves? and yeah I know all about the various shady Gates/Ballmer-era OEM deals… I just can't believe that not one OEM has snapped by now.

chopin 5y ago
When I buy a computer, Windows 10 is installed as default. You have to go out of your way to get a computer which hasn't. I think it's as easy as that. I've setup Linux on all machines I own or maintain, for all users including my wife. The frequency of hickups is not higher than it was with Windows and It's easy to roll back to a known good configuration, much easier than with Windows. I never looked back. Edited to add: The last machine I bought was a Purism laptop. The first machine which did not have Windows pre-installed.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
Linux simply has too many rough edges still exposed to appeal to a lot of less technical users. Even in the best case scenario (super standard desktop with hardware well supported by FOSS drivers), there’s always some odd thing that requires one to pull out the terminal, usually because UI functionality was insufficient or failed to work as expected. That does not bother me or probably most of us on HN much, but for most people it’s like periodically needing to muck around under the hood of their car. It’s too much, they just want to drive and take the vehicle in to get oil and brake changes every once in a fairly long while. Anything more is tedious overhead. The situation with proprietary drivers still kinda stinks too. The distros I’ve seen handle it best are Ubuntu with the proprietary drivers control panel and pop!_OS which just sidesteps the issue altogether for Nvidia hardware by shipping an ISO with non-free Nvidia drivers included, but the rest just leave you with a package manager, terminal, and whatever you can scrounge up on the internet. Yeah it’s technically the responsibility of Nvidia, etc to fix that, but it’s negatively impacting adoption nonetheless.

techrat 5y ago

The 'desktop' is an outmoded concept anyhow. More is being done on Mobile to the exclusion of the desktop. Who needs a big machine with a monitor when you can do just about everything on a Chromebook or iPad? As far as Linux on ________, Let's look at where we're at now. Supercomputer. Linux runs the entire Top 500. https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/ https://itsfoss.com/linux-runs-top-supercomputers/ Severs/Websites. 75% are Linux or variants. https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/operating_system Mobile. 72% is Android alone, which counts for Linux IMNSHO. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/worldwide ChromeOS now exceeds MacOS market share. Apple had already been making (painful) attempts to move away from the Desktop. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-worlds-second-most-popular-desktop-operating-system-isnt-macos-anymore/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/the-worlds-second-mo... And, of course, there's the Linux Subsystem for Windows. Linux won. It's over. Windows might be holding onto a majority if you only count desktops, but given even Microsoft has moved towards supporting Linux directly on their own OS... and moving towards Cloud As a Service and hosting, yep, Linux on Azure... Even Microsoft knows that Windows has found itself facing the once unthinkable: support Linux or find yourself increasingly irrelevant. Windows on ARM failed. Twice. Windows Mobile in all of its variants are dead now. Microsoft released an Android device. So given everything that we use today, something that ISN'T running a *ix type kernel is, in fact, the minority. Microsoft is grasping harder with Windows 11... and in their shortsightedness, they ended up excluding huge chunks of systems that were still being sold even as recently as 3 years ago. It's quite unthinkable to me because the one and ONLY one major killing feature of Windows in general was that you could install it on decade-old hardware. Win10 ran pretty decently on my Phenom II x4 desktop which had 16GB Ram. Why shouldn't it? And now Win11 is looking to exclude first gen Ryzen. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/324157-windows-11-may-not-run-on-early-ryzen-threadripper-skylake-x-or-any-intel-systems-2016 https://www.extremetech.com/computing/324157-windows-11-may-... The tighter the grip, the more that will slip in between their fingers... At this point, it's becoming easier and easier to support Linux... thanks to Proton on Steam, more native binaries (BlackMagic, for example, with DaVinci Resolve), more apps becoming webapps and only needing a web browser. At this point, I think what we're waiting for is for legacy companies like Adobe to shit the bed and render themselves irrelevant. (And boy have they gotten close.) Yeah. The year of Linux on the Desktop is a meme... but should it actually happen... the concept of 'desktop' won't matter anymore, IMHO.