10 ms·

As part of the FLOSS rooting crowd, I'd really like that to happen. But we have to face reality: on the desktop, after decades we're still fighting for 2% of th

As part of the FLOSS rooting crowd, I'd really like that to happen. But we have to face reality: on the desktop, after decades we're still fighting for 2% of the marketshare. Not that progress hasn't happened. Quite on the contrary. Linux on the desktop experience nowadays is VASTLY superior to even 5 years ago. Of course, users from other camps will complain of features that have been lacking for many years (thumbnails in the file picker!) but alternatives aren't without their problems either: get a seasoned linux to try MacOS or Windows and you'll recognize weaknesses on the other approaches too. For me, linux on the desktop has been ready for a long time. I don't care if the market share is still in the single digits if it is good enough for me. Since I like the freedom, privacy, security and (yes) ease of use of desktop linux and do not depend on non-multiplatform software and services, there's just no better OS for me. Not everybody has this choice though. So, linux on the desktop not being popular is not a problem. If it continues popular enough not to be ignored by hardware vendors and service providers, everything else will continue to improve over time.

fsflover 5y ago
> there's just no better OS for me Try Qubes OS.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  What benefit will he have?
  - fsflover 5y ago
    https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      If you can't pitch it yourself, I don't see the point, the first link is just about paranoia. Were you ever curious but afraid: – to click on that link in the email, – to open that email attachment, – to go to that shady-looking website, – to install and run that suspicious program or even a virus, – to insert that USB stick from someone untrusted? Wth Qubes you do it all securely in a disposable VM and your personal files are safe. The worst thing which might happen is that the disposable VM breaks. If the pitch is to make people paranoid to run a new OS they need to learn isolation on, there are way easier ways like running a normal VM, which most people are still not going to understand very well or do.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - fsflover 5y ago
        > If you can't pitch it yourself, I don't see the point I linked my own text. Security is one benefit, and I agree that it's not so important for everyone. There are other benefits, as described. A normal VM is much less secure, because the host OS will have the Internet access and you will not benefit from hardware virtualization. It's also less convenient in my opinion. The UX of Qubes is really good.
        GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Most of those pitches are not important. >Were you ever been concerned about opening your personal email (controlling numerous online accounts) in the same browser where you go to random websites? Actually, even when the browsers are different it can be a problem on a monolithic OS! Mozilla has containers that people also barely use. >On Qubes OS, you open those things in separate VMs, isolated with hardware, not software. It’s often better 2 than physical (air-gap) isolation. Recommended by Snowden. It runs VM, this is not isolated with hardware. https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2019/03/05/qsb-048/ https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2019/03/05/qsb-048/ >Are you tired of remembering tens of complicated passwords, or using a password manager? On Qubes OS, you can save all your passwords as plain text (in a dedicated offline VM) and copy them into the necessary fields (in other VMs) whenever needed. Password managers are fine, why would someone tire of them? I don't think you are pitching it correctly, if you want to succeed at selling Qubes, remember most people use laptops, the amount of ram required to run Qubes and the battery drain is not worth it for the performance hit. It would be much better to sell it as an OS on a remote computer that uses Xen, there are huge problems like audio quality, slow loading, and I would never recommend it as a mobile device OS. Most of the benefits are done with less resource intense methods, and learning a new OS for most of these features and mainly drawbacks is not a good pitch. I think it would be great on a remote device with your computer as a thin client, but it has very little day to day practical use.
        fsflover 5y ago
GhettoComputers 5y ago
I agree completely I don’t care if it’s not mainstream. Desktops are usually gaming computers from what I see in my groups no reason to have Linux on there. Linux is on all the servers, most mobile devices, and I mentioned even Sony cameras run Android. I don’t see any benefit to Linux on desktop being mainstream. I like that it keeps away a lot of users since making things too easy since they’re unwilling to compile from GitHub is a feature, not a bug. It’s a mostly a programmer OS for programmers.
- RussianCow 5y ago
  I find this attitude completely elitist and counter productive. Why shouldn’t Linux be for everybody, usable on every type of device? Why should we need to rely on proprietary software for our day-to-day tasks? Don’t you think there is benefit to this?
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    >Why shouldn't Linux be for everybody, usable on every type of device? It is, but you often have the effort to put into it. Windows isn't usable for everyone, but that doesn't make me elitist, OSX is hard for others, but I don't see that being a problem. Some people can't do everything you do, and there are differences in our abilities. If you expect everything to be easy, and people not willing to put in work to have a functional OS, you should not expect them to use linux, it offers no benefits to most users, its made by hackers to hack on, Android is linux for everyone, and even then they find it hard. Don't expect people to run when they can't crawl. >Why should we need to rely on proprietary software for our day-to-day tasks? Because the free stuff sucks, GIMP still sucks. They stuck to having 3 windows open forever, GNOME doesn't like being configured, GTK always breaks stuff, and I just want stuff that "just works". When FOSS does it well like KDE being better than Windows's UI, or Firefox being better than IE6 I will choose it. I don't pick based on their principals, I just want good software, and like most people I am willing to pay for quality. I refuse to use a pinephone out of principal, I refuse to make my life hell.
    - pjerem 5y ago
dTal 5y ago
>thumbnails in the file picker! Use a decent desktop environment, like Plasma :) Gnome's file picker is notoriously, offensively bad - to the point that it makes me completely lose trust that any thought has been put into the human factors of the rest of the system. Plasma, on the other hand, continues to surprise with its thoughtful and accommodating design choices. Life is too short, and brainpower too limited, to justify wasting either on frustrating software.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I love KDE too. It's so configurable and just plain powerful. And looks great as well. I really felt so empowered when I left macOS for FreeBSD with KDE and I still do. I found I really hate opinionated software because usually I don't have the same opinions :)
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    Its like better windows! Sometimes pretty glitchy, but worth it for about 80%-90% problem free.
  - fatboy93 5y ago
    How's FreeBsd on your hardware? I've been itching to try it on my ThinkPad, but with an infant and work, I'm not able to find the time to do so!
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      It's great for me. It runs for months as a daily driver without any issues. No crashes. In HiDPI also. However I run it on a desktop NUC with wired everything. I don't use WiFi, Bluetooth or Suspending. I'm not sure if the more laptop-related usescases will be ok. For example I had to turn off my bluetooth controller because it hangs the boot process. I think this is just a peculiarity of my particular controller though. Also I have one weird key repeat thing I still have to investigate :) But I think my Apple keyboard is just a bit funny.
- belltaco 5y ago
artursapek 5y ago
> after decades we're still fighting for 2% of the marketshare I was using desktop linux for several years and recently switched back to a Mac because of the massive hardware improvements Apple made with its M1 chip. As much as I loved Linux, it's no longer just a software UX thing. The battery life and speed of the new Macs beats any Linux machine I could have bought for a comparable price.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  This is only a temporary thing though. Linux will be made to work on M1 hardware (getting pretty close already) and Intel is already heading in the same direction.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    Not trying to take away anything from the amazing Asahi Linux project, but as far as I know it doesn’t include the embedded GPU as of yet — so pretty close may unfortunately be a little bit further away still.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
>get a seasoned linux to try MacOS or Windows and you'll recognize weaknesses on the other approaches too. The tricky part of identifying “weaknesses” coming from and going to any two OSes or desktop environments is figuring out exactly what qualifies as a weakness and what is simply unfamiliar. Like for example, a lifelong Windows user is probably going to think that anything that’s not the spitting image of a Win9X style desktop is chock full of “weaknesses”, and a diehard tiling WM veteran Linux user is going to see anything not built around tiling as “weak”, when neither is fully true in an objective sense. This is a bit of a frustration for me as someone who primarily uses macOS but dabbles in Linux: most people haven’t used macOS extensively, and so Mac-style desktops tend to be seen by the individuals who develop DEs as full of “weaknesses”, and as a result there are no Linux DEs that are mac-like beyond the surface. There’s no shortage of Winlike DEs though.
- follower 5y ago
  FWIW I've (mostly) moved from Mac to Linux for around a year now & decided on elementary OS which has Mac as a primary influence: https://elementary.io https://elementary.io I don't like everything about it but it has been the most usable/value-aligned Linux distro I've encountered so far.
  - jorvi 5y ago
    Sometimes I wish everyone in Linux just came together and worked together in one big kumbaya. Arch it’s rolling release base, with Nix for configuring it, Elementary its UI and UX and pop_OS’s willingness to put users ahead of principle. Top it off with Red Hat backing and Ubuntu popularity and oh baby. I know I know, strength in diversity. But a man can dream..
- btdmaster 5y ago
  Not exactly Linux, but would helloSystem[1] be suitable? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
baq 5y ago
graphics drivers alone are in the tens of millions of lines of code (counting both kernel and user mode). there's no way open source community can do that amount of work for free every couple years as long as new hardware is being developed. this may become the case once hardware is good for 20 years. we aren't there yet, though we're closer than a decade ago. (typing this on an aging 8 year old desktop, which is really due for an upgrade).
- commoner 5y ago
  The FOSS community depends on contributions from GPU vendors to have their products supported on Linux in a reasonable timeframe. As long as the contributions are released under a FOSS license, the vendors are part of the FOSS community. Intel provides excellent Linux support for its GPUs through open source drivers,[1] and is about to launch a line of dedicated GPUs in early 2022 with the same level of support. AMD has provided good support for essential GPU features through its open source Linux driver since 2015,[2] but compute features such as full OpenCL support (for most AMD models) are still locked in its proprietary drivers.[3] Nvidia's open source Linux driver contributions are minimal, and they've earned a bad reputation for that. The reverse-engineered open source Nouveau driver is an incredible effort, but falls behind Nvidia's proprietary driver in performance and feature support.[4] This is what happens when the hardware vendor doesn't cooperate with the FOSS community. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU [3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU_PRO https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU_PRO [4] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nouveau https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nouveau
  - schmorptron 5y ago
    So does Intel also include their compute features in the mainline drivers, unlike AMD? That'd be something to push me towards them when GPUs become available and somewhat reasonably priced again
    - commoner 5y ago
Bolkan 5y ago
It will rise up to 5% if they just fixed their god damn installers. I've installed Linux tens of times and the gui installers have NEVER left the system in a bootable state, not even when I choose the 'wipe everything' option.
- urthor 5y ago
  Absolutely. Initiatives like PopOS and other ecosystem improvements will eventually impact this metric.
  - Bolkan 5y ago
    Popos installer didn't work for me either. It ended with a message saying 'something went wrong, try installing again', lol.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      Looks like a hardware problem to me.
      - Bolkan 5y ago
        I'm pretty sure it wasn't. The installer failed to setup bootloader. Installing it manually fixed the problem.
kaba0 5y ago
> security Just a note that linux is ridiculously unsecure in the default daily user mode. You have no sandboxing, everything runs as the same user with the same privileges, etc. Just a rogue app writing a single line of code (with no permission problem at all) to bashrc can basically do whatever it wants on your computer, including screensharing, key logging, encrypting your whole home folder, sending ssh folders to somewhere. The only thing it can’t do is install a goddamn video driver (as per the relevant xkcd comic) — but with keylogging it will see the sudo password sooner or later. Fortunately, Fedora does have SELinux, which makes it a bit better but a proper sandboxing solution is way overdue (firejail and flatpak are not necessary the best solution, it should be automatic). Like, at least copy what android does on the exact same OS.

fsflover 5y ago

> there's just no better OS for me Try Qubes OS.

GhettoComputers 5y ago
What benefit will he have?
- fsflover 5y ago
  https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15 https://forum.qubes-os.org/t/how-to-pitch-qubes-os/4499/15
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    If you can't pitch it yourself, I don't see the point, the first link is just about paranoia. Were you ever curious but afraid: – to click on that link in the email, – to open that email attachment, – to go to that shady-looking website, – to install and run that suspicious program or even a virus, – to insert that USB stick from someone untrusted? Wth Qubes you do it all securely in a disposable VM and your personal files are safe. The worst thing which might happen is that the disposable VM breaks. If the pitch is to make people paranoid to run a new OS they need to learn isolation on, there are way easier ways like running a normal VM, which most people are still not going to understand very well or do.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - fsflover 5y ago
      > If you can't pitch it yourself, I don't see the point I linked my own text. Security is one benefit, and I agree that it's not so important for everyone. There are other benefits, as described. A normal VM is much less secure, because the host OS will have the Internet access and you will not benefit from hardware virtualization. It's also less convenient in my opinion. The UX of Qubes is really good.
      - GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Most of those pitches are not important. >Were you ever been concerned about opening your personal email (controlling numerous online accounts) in the same browser where you go to random websites? Actually, even when the browsers are different it can be a problem on a monolithic OS! Mozilla has containers that people also barely use. >On Qubes OS, you open those things in separate VMs, isolated with hardware, not software. It’s often better 2 than physical (air-gap) isolation. Recommended by Snowden. It runs VM, this is not isolated with hardware. https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2019/03/05/qsb-048/ https://www.qubes-os.org/news/2019/03/05/qsb-048/ >Are you tired of remembering tens of complicated passwords, or using a password manager? On Qubes OS, you can save all your passwords as plain text (in a dedicated offline VM) and copy them into the necessary fields (in other VMs) whenever needed. Password managers are fine, why would someone tire of them? I don't think you are pitching it correctly, if you want to succeed at selling Qubes, remember most people use laptops, the amount of ram required to run Qubes and the battery drain is not worth it for the performance hit. It would be much better to sell it as an OS on a remote computer that uses Xen, there are huge problems like audio quality, slow loading, and I would never recommend it as a mobile device OS. Most of the benefits are done with less resource intense methods, and learning a new OS for most of these features and mainly drawbacks is not a good pitch. I think it would be great on a remote device with your computer as a thin client, but it has very little day to day practical use.
        fsflover 5y ago

GhettoComputers 5y ago

I agree completely I don’t care if it’s not mainstream. Desktops are usually gaming computers from what I see in my groups no reason to have Linux on there. Linux is on all the servers, most mobile devices, and I mentioned even Sony cameras run Android. I don’t see any benefit to Linux on desktop being mainstream. I like that it keeps away a lot of users since making things too easy since they’re unwilling to compile from GitHub is a feature, not a bug. It’s a mostly a programmer OS for programmers.

RussianCow 5y ago
I find this attitude completely elitist and counter productive. Why shouldn’t Linux be for everybody, usable on every type of device? Why should we need to rely on proprietary software for our day-to-day tasks? Don’t you think there is benefit to this?
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  >Why shouldn't Linux be for everybody, usable on every type of device? It is, but you often have the effort to put into it. Windows isn't usable for everyone, but that doesn't make me elitist, OSX is hard for others, but I don't see that being a problem. Some people can't do everything you do, and there are differences in our abilities. If you expect everything to be easy, and people not willing to put in work to have a functional OS, you should not expect them to use linux, it offers no benefits to most users, its made by hackers to hack on, Android is linux for everyone, and even then they find it hard. Don't expect people to run when they can't crawl. >Why should we need to rely on proprietary software for our day-to-day tasks? Because the free stuff sucks, GIMP still sucks. They stuck to having 3 windows open forever, GNOME doesn't like being configured, GTK always breaks stuff, and I just want stuff that "just works". When FOSS does it well like KDE being better than Windows's UI, or Firefox being better than IE6 I will choose it. I don't pick based on their principals, I just want good software, and like most people I am willing to pay for quality. I refuse to use a pinephone out of principal, I refuse to make my life hell.
  - pjerem 5y ago

dTal 5y ago

>thumbnails in the file picker! Use a decent desktop environment, like Plasma :) Gnome's file picker is notoriously, offensively bad - to the point that it makes me completely lose trust that any thought has been put into the human factors of the rest of the system. Plasma, on the other hand, continues to surprise with its thoughtful and accommodating design choices. Life is too short, and brainpower too limited, to justify wasting either on frustrating software.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
I love KDE too. It's so configurable and just plain powerful. And looks great as well. I really felt so empowered when I left macOS for FreeBSD with KDE and I still do. I found I really hate opinionated software because usually I don't have the same opinions :)
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  Its like better windows! Sometimes pretty glitchy, but worth it for about 80%-90% problem free.
- fatboy93 5y ago
  How's FreeBsd on your hardware? I've been itching to try it on my ThinkPad, but with an infant and work, I'm not able to find the time to do so!
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    It's great for me. It runs for months as a daily driver without any issues. No crashes. In HiDPI also. However I run it on a desktop NUC with wired everything. I don't use WiFi, Bluetooth or Suspending. I'm not sure if the more laptop-related usescases will be ok. For example I had to turn off my bluetooth controller because it hangs the boot process. I think this is just a peculiarity of my particular controller though. Also I have one weird key repeat thing I still have to investigate :) But I think my Apple keyboard is just a bit funny.
belltaco 5y ago

artursapek 5y ago

> after decades we're still fighting for 2% of the marketshare I was using desktop linux for several years and recently switched back to a Mac because of the massive hardware improvements Apple made with its M1 chip. As much as I loved Linux, it's no longer just a software UX thing. The battery life and speed of the new Macs beats any Linux machine I could have bought for a comparable price.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
This is only a temporary thing though. Linux will be made to work on M1 hardware (getting pretty close already) and Intel is already heading in the same direction.
- kaba0 5y ago
  Not trying to take away anything from the amazing Asahi Linux project, but as far as I know it doesn’t include the embedded GPU as of yet — so pretty close may unfortunately be a little bit further away still.

kitsunesoba 5y ago

>get a seasoned linux to try MacOS or Windows and you'll recognize weaknesses on the other approaches too. The tricky part of identifying “weaknesses” coming from and going to any two OSes or desktop environments is figuring out exactly what qualifies as a weakness and what is simply unfamiliar. Like for example, a lifelong Windows user is probably going to think that anything that’s not the spitting image of a Win9X style desktop is chock full of “weaknesses”, and a diehard tiling WM veteran Linux user is going to see anything not built around tiling as “weak”, when neither is fully true in an objective sense. This is a bit of a frustration for me as someone who primarily uses macOS but dabbles in Linux: most people haven’t used macOS extensively, and so Mac-style desktops tend to be seen by the individuals who develop DEs as full of “weaknesses”, and as a result there are no Linux DEs that are mac-like beyond the surface. There’s no shortage of Winlike DEs though.

follower 5y ago
FWIW I've (mostly) moved from Mac to Linux for around a year now & decided on elementary OS which has Mac as a primary influence: https://elementary.io https://elementary.io I don't like everything about it but it has been the most usable/value-aligned Linux distro I've encountered so far.
- jorvi 5y ago
  Sometimes I wish everyone in Linux just came together and worked together in one big kumbaya. Arch it’s rolling release base, with Nix for configuring it, Elementary its UI and UX and pop_OS’s willingness to put users ahead of principle. Top it off with Red Hat backing and Ubuntu popularity and oh baby. I know I know, strength in diversity. But a man can dream..
btdmaster 5y ago
Not exactly Linux, but would helloSystem[1] be suitable? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26092040
- kitsunesoba 5y ago

baq 5y ago

graphics drivers alone are in the tens of millions of lines of code (counting both kernel and user mode). there's no way open source community can do that amount of work for free every couple years as long as new hardware is being developed. this may become the case once hardware is good for 20 years. we aren't there yet, though we're closer than a decade ago. (typing this on an aging 8 year old desktop, which is really due for an upgrade).

commoner 5y ago
The FOSS community depends on contributions from GPU vendors to have their products supported on Linux in a reasonable timeframe. As long as the contributions are released under a FOSS license, the vendors are part of the FOSS community. Intel provides excellent Linux support for its GPUs through open source drivers,[1] and is about to launch a line of dedicated GPUs in early 2022 with the same level of support. AMD has provided good support for essential GPU features through its open source Linux driver since 2015,[2] but compute features such as full OpenCL support (for most AMD models) are still locked in its proprietary drivers.[3] Nvidia's open source Linux driver contributions are minimal, and they've earned a bad reputation for that. The reverse-engineered open source Nouveau driver is an incredible effort, but falls behind Nvidia's proprietary driver in performance and feature support.[4] This is what happens when the hardware vendor doesn't cooperate with the FOSS community. [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Intel_graphics [2] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU [3] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU_PRO https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/AMDGPU_PRO [4] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nouveau https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nouveau
- schmorptron 5y ago
  So does Intel also include their compute features in the mainline drivers, unlike AMD? That'd be something to push me towards them when GPUs become available and somewhat reasonably priced again
  - commoner 5y ago

Bolkan 5y ago

It will rise up to 5% if they just fixed their god damn installers. I've installed Linux tens of times and the gui installers have NEVER left the system in a bootable state, not even when I choose the 'wipe everything' option.

urthor 5y ago
Absolutely. Initiatives like PopOS and other ecosystem improvements will eventually impact this metric.
- Bolkan 5y ago
  Popos installer didn't work for me either. It ended with a message saying 'something went wrong, try installing again', lol.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    Looks like a hardware problem to me.
    - Bolkan 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure it wasn't. The installer failed to setup bootloader. Installing it manually fixed the problem.

kaba0 5y ago

> security Just a note that linux is ridiculously unsecure in the default daily user mode. You have no sandboxing, everything runs as the same user with the same privileges, etc. Just a rogue app writing a single line of code (with no permission problem at all) to bashrc can basically do whatever it wants on your computer, including screensharing, key logging, encrypting your whole home folder, sending ssh folders to somewhere. The only thing it can’t do is install a goddamn video driver (as per the relevant xkcd comic) — but with keylogging it will see the sudo password sooner or later. Fortunately, Fedora does have SELinux, which makes it a bit better but a proper sandboxing solution is way overdue (firejail and flatpak are not necessary the best solution, it should be automatic). Like, at least copy what android does on the exact same OS.