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If every computer was sold with Linux/KDE and the entire ecosystem had spent the last 30 years developing and using that platform it was just be normal for ever

If every computer was sold with Linux/KDE and the entire ecosystem had spent the last 30 years developing and using that platform it was just be normal for everyone. If in that world I then created a new proprietary desktop that was Windows 10 I would be dismissed as a loser by the entire industry for making a terrible unusable piece of crap. There is nothing objectively wrong with the Linux desktop that it can't be used dby everyone.

mmplxx 5y ago
The first sentence is probably true. The third one is objectively false: 1. Poor quality drivers. The money is not there. Intel and AMD might throw a couple of engineers on it but the process is always catching-up: slow and incomplete. Think of video, audio, power management, etc. I recently bought an AMD laptop just to discover modern standby and my jack headset are not supported, that my internal mic and speakers occasionally stop working and otherwise are too low, etc. After two kernel releases all these problems persist, even if they were acknowledged by the developers that are working on it (very resource-constrained). "Linux-ready" laptops might be a safer option but in general they are not cheap and they share most of the shortcomings listed here, it's just a safer gamble and you pay the insurance premium. Of course, if Linux had been sold OEM for 30 years with hardware vendors providing state-of-the-art drivers even before releases, this would be a different story. 2. The state of the display server. Multiple HiDPI screens with different scaling factors are not properly supported. This is an all too common requirement nowadays: FHD laptop + FHD/UHD external screen. X+xrandr is slow and buggy with most video drivers. Even after ten years, Wayland adoption is slow both by compositors and by apps. And critical functionality is missing or in alpha-state, for example screen sharing (a must have in these WFH days), be it because of the design of Wayland itself or because it depends on technologies that are still more immature (PipeWire, portals, etc). 3. Fragmentation at all levels: distribution, package manager, desktop, toolkit. From the perspective of an app developer you get a tiny market share with no clear target platform and a propensity to break backwards compatibility every now and then. This of course enables a negative feedback loop wrt to my previous points. Must read/watch from kernel developers: Molnar: http://files.catwell.info/misc/mirror/ingo-molnar-what-ails-the-linux-desktop-2012-03-17.txt http://files.catwell.info/misc/mirror/ingo-molnar-what-ails-..., Torvalds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc. These problems are not unknown to Windows users (WinForms|WPF|UWP|WinUI and MSI|MSIX|exe, for example) but are way worse in Linux.

mmplxx 5y ago

The first sentence is probably true. The third one is objectively false: 1. Poor quality drivers. The money is not there. Intel and AMD might throw a couple of engineers on it but the process is always catching-up: slow and incomplete. Think of video, audio, power management, etc. I recently bought an AMD laptop just to discover modern standby and my jack headset are not supported, that my internal mic and speakers occasionally stop working and otherwise are too low, etc. After two kernel releases all these problems persist, even if they were acknowledged by the developers that are working on it (very resource-constrained). "Linux-ready" laptops might be a safer option but in general they are not cheap and they share most of the shortcomings listed here, it's just a safer gamble and you pay the insurance premium. Of course, if Linux had been sold OEM for 30 years with hardware vendors providing state-of-the-art drivers even before releases, this would be a different story. 2. The state of the display server. Multiple HiDPI screens with different scaling factors are not properly supported. This is an all too common requirement nowadays: FHD laptop + FHD/UHD external screen. X+xrandr is slow and buggy with most video drivers. Even after ten years, Wayland adoption is slow both by compositors and by apps. And critical functionality is missing or in alpha-state, for example screen sharing (a must have in these WFH days), be it because of the design of Wayland itself or because it depends on technologies that are still more immature (PipeWire, portals, etc). 3. Fragmentation at all levels: distribution, package manager, desktop, toolkit. From the perspective of an app developer you get a tiny market share with no clear target platform and a propensity to break backwards compatibility every now and then. This of course enables a negative feedback loop wrt to my previous points. Must read/watch from kernel developers: Molnar: http://files.catwell.info/misc/mirror/ingo-molnar-what-ails-the-linux-desktop-2012-03-17.txt http://files.catwell.info/misc/mirror/ingo-molnar-what-ails-..., Torvalds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc. These problems are not unknown to Windows users (WinForms|WPF|UWP|WinUI and MSI|MSIX|exe, for example) but are way worse in Linux.