4 ms·

Microsoft is the reason the Linux desktop is still not a thing in 2022. At every step of the way for many years Microsoft has always done some psychotic ill-int

• twblalock 4y ago
  The Linux desktop is its own worst enemy. The fragmentation, the inconsistency, the need to drop into a terminal to debug certain things, and the difficulty of dealing with driver problems for inexperienced users all do more damage than anything Microsoft attempted to do.
  • 29athrowaway 4y ago
    • smoldesu 4y ago
      Windows is perfectly usable, unfortunately. Microsoft's packaging isn't terrible, and web browsers support it just fine, which makes it good enough for the majority of users. While I haven't used Windows in quite some time, I totally get why people still use it. It really does "just work" on most hardware. The parent comment was on the right track, I think. The Linux desktop constantly sabotages itself, and things like the x11/Wayland rift, the Snap/Flatpak vs Native Packaging battle, and all of the new abstractions do not lend themselves well to usability. Pretty much every open source project has made this mistake at some point, but I think the most consistent party that works against it's community is GNOME. Not only do they ignore the feedback from their users (a problem so pathological it's a meme by now), but they don't ask for help when they make new changes. Inevitably, this leads to worse UI (like the GNOME 40+ dock, the worse GTK widgets, the ugliness that is Adwaita, etc.), which leads to Linux being seen as neckbeard software again. If you enjoy Linux, I encourage you to use it; I use it too, and it's great for a lot of stuff. Everyone responsible for marketing Linux to a wider audience has failed though, and the effort to replace Windows with OSS is looking increasingly Sisyphean.
      • liotier 4y ago
        > things like the x11/Wayland rift, the Snap/Flatpak vs Native Packaging battle, and all of the new abstractions do not lend themselves well to usability Which is why opiniated distributions exist, so that users get a coherent environment from people who made the choices for them.
      • 29athrowaway 4y ago
        You can have Snap, Flatpaks and native packaging running side by side so... and Ubuntu has a unified interface for all of them (the "Software" application). So yeah, another non-problem for the end user. The end user doesn't have to know what X11 and Wayland are. You don't need to know this to use most software. Just use what your distro provides. Most of the complexity you mention is hidden from the end user.
• epolanski 4y ago
  No one forces gamedevs to ditch opengl.
  • 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Read the information in the link about how DirectX became the de-facto standard (sections 2 and 3).
    • forgotpwd16 4y ago
      The link seems full of MS distrust rather an objective review. DirectX overtook OpenGL thanks to the mess started by GPU manufacturers that introduced their own proprietary extensions and ARB sleeping. https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/88055 https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/a/88055
    • bitwize 4y ago
      DirectX was simply a better API. Game dev is hard enough without dealing with OpenGL's jank-ass state machine, which adapted to vertex and pixel shaders about as well as the Unix process model adapted to threading. One of the great tragedies in 3D graphics is that Project Fahrenheit never got off the ground. Under Fahrenheit, OpenGL would be put out to pasture, DirectX would become the new low-level standard, and a higher level scene graph API would be built on top of DirectX.
      • 29athrowaway 4y ago
        True, but that was not the reason it was abandoned initially. Back then multi-core CPUs were not much of a thing yet. The reason it was abandoned is because people were told OpenGL on Windows Vista was going to be implemented through a compatibility layer that was going to be slow.
        • bitwize 4y ago
          By the time Vista came around, virtually no one except Carmack was seriously targeting OpenGL.
• cogman10 4y ago
  Disagree Linux desktop hasn't been a thing because running anything other than FOSS on linux is an absolute nightmare. If SOMEONE hasn't compiled your gui for your specific linux flavor, you're in for a bad time. Heck, if you are looking to distribute a binary, it is often EASIER to target windows and use WINE instead of trying to get binaries working for the 5 million platforms on linux. There's a reason 30 different containerization package distribution systems (flatpak, snap, et all) have cropped up. In addition to all that, there's simply the fact that the Linux GFX backend is a complicated mess. XFree86? X11? Xorg? Wayland? Y11? All of those + the fact that windows management is a DIFFERENT problem from the actual rendering so now you have concepts like "Window" strewn across 20 different systems. The Linux desktop is a lovable freakshow. The reason it hasn't caught on is because it's far too common to need to grab the man pages, pull up vim, and tweak 30 config files to get it just right for your specific set of hardware. That isn't to say that OSes like Ubuntu, Redhat, or Debian haven't made herculean efforts to make things appear simple. However, it's far from "Well, microsoft bad therefore this didn't happen."
  • hulitu 4y ago
    > Heck, if you are looking to distribute a binary, it is often EASIER to target windows and use WINE instead of trying to get binaries working for the 5 million platforms on linux. Slackware was never a "supported platform" yet i had no problem running binaries (java, Mentor Graphics) on it.
  • xorcist 4y ago
    > it's far too common to need to grab the man pages, pull up vim, and tweak 30 config files Well, sure, but the desktop itself is pretty solid. I've had all my relatives on bog standard Linux desktops for the past decade or so, and the half-yearly questions about it are limited to things like "what does disk full mean?" and "should I press this button that says 'Upgrade'?" (yes, you should). That's when all your applications are web based anyway. If you have special local software needs you should of course use whatever they support.
• AreYouSirius 4y ago
• NavinF 4y ago
  OpenGL is such a pain in the ass. You'd know if you tried it. I'll just repost my desktop linux rant from last year since nothing's changed: --- 1. Update glibc and everything breaks 2. Update Nvidia drivers and everything breaks 3. 99% of laptops have at least one device with missing or broken drivers. 802.11ac is very old in 2021, but the most popular ac chips still need an out-of-tree driver which will break when you update your kernel. Have fun copying kernel patches from random forums 4. Even the smallest of changes (ex: set display scaling to something that's not a multiple of 100%) require dicking around with config files. Windows 10's neutered control panel is still leagues ahead of Ubuntu's settings app. (Why are the default settings so bad? High DPI 4K monitors have been out for a decade now. Maybe they've fixed this since I've last checked. Or maybe all the devs use 10 year old Thinkpads) 5. Every config file is its own special snowflake with its own syntax, keywords, and escape characters 6. Every distro is its own special snowflake so it takes forever to help someone unfuck their computer if you're not familiar with their distro. Releasing software on Linux is painful for a related reason: The kennel has a stable ABI, but distros don't. You have to ship half the distro with every app if you want it to work out of the box. Using Docker for GUI apps is insane, but sometimes that's that you gotta do. 7. The desktop Linux community seems to only care about performance on old crappy hardware. 8. Audio input and output latency is really high out of the box. That's one of many things that require tweaking just to get acceptable performance.
  • 29athrowaway 4y ago
    This rant sounds like an informercial full of fake problems nobody has. I have used Linux for decades and have never experienced any of this. 1. Use the software packaged for your distro. Want to update? then update. It just works. 2. Use the packaged nvidia drivers for your distro. Want to update? then update. It just works. 3. Prefer a laptop that is compatible with Linux, if that's not possible, use a laptop-friendly distro. 4. 99.99999% of people will never ever try to do that probably that's why. 5. Most of them are key/value based despite the syntax. 6. Yet most distros inherit from a major base distro like Redhat, Debian or others. If you want to use Slackware or Gentoo then that's your own choice. 7. There are many distros but, many of them are Debian or Redhat based, the ones that aren't are used by a tiny percentage of users. 8. And Pipewire solves this, and is the default sound server on recent distros.
• aklemm 4y ago
  .doc and .xls stopped literally every single business I ever worked in from dabbling with Linux desktop for staff.
  • akagusu 4y ago
    Same here. Lots of money wasted on Windows licenses.
• phendrenad2 4y ago
  This is just confirmation bias. Let me present an alternate view: Microsoft is a corporation that wants to make $$$. 1. Making OpenGL a compatibility layer on top of DirectX simplifies the stack, and helps Microsoft save $$$. (Apple doesn't support OpenGL 4.4+, is that "psychotic ill-intentioned"?) 2. Giving things away for free costs $$$. (If the EU demanded that IBM provide an open interface to its mainframes, do you think they would comply eagerly? Would it be "psychotic ill-intentioned" if they didn't?) 3. Standards are almost never followed by the company with a dominant position. Standards benefit companies that are not dominant in the market. Adhering to standards as the dominant player in the market = wasted $$$. 4. Trusted computing puts PCs on the same footing as Playstation/Xbox and allows content to be streamed without risk of piracy. That's the simplest explanation. A lot of people would like to stream 4k netflix on their PCs, but they can't because piracy is too great a concern. More popular features = more $$$. 5. This has nothing to do with Windows vs Linux. Regardless, plagiarizing your competitor makes you more $$$. 6. It should come as a surprise to no one, owning property makes you more $$$. (If Nintendo buys a game studio, is that also "psychotic"?!)
  • rustqt6 4y ago
    Even the king of open and darling of oss dudes-- Google, doesn't support caldav and cardav natively in Android. So I cannot host radicale and expect to get my contacts in Android without 3rd party app.
• tzs 4y ago
  Microsoft's OOXML spec was so much larger than ODF for at least 3 reasons. 1. OOXML is an XML-ization of a descendent of earlier binary office formats. You can do things in binary formats that don't map efficiently to XML. That resulted in OOXML having uglier and more verbose XML. If I recall correctly this was only a small part of the size difference. 2. OOXML was way more complete. This was a big part of the size difference. The first approved standard for ODF for example gave no details on how formulas worked in spreadsheets. All you could get from the standard was that you should support formulas. The OOXML spec on the other hand described in detail the format of formulas and gave detailed specs for a large number of functions. There were often 2 or 3 pages for a single function. 3. When IBM and Sun were touting that 6000 page number for the draft OOXML spec, they were using a printing that has something like half as many lines per page as the printing of ODF they were comparing with.
  • Nursie 4y ago
    The other side to that is that MS appeared to "stuff" ISO committees in various places to force it through, and didn't provide enough detail in their huge spec for true interop. Perhaps neither was perfect, but it certainly seemed like MS played dirty.
    • oaiey 4y ago
      Well, they were/are the dominant player who could not adopt another standard and had zero incentive except regulatory and public opinion. It is a proprietary standard full of History. Nothing else than horrible in standard and process is to be expected.
• hulitu 4y ago
  Microsoft phylosophy is the reason. KDE and GNOME at the beginning (1.x) were quiet good. If developers would have fixed the bugs linux would have been better. But fixing bugs sucks, do they release every couple of years a new version, incompatible with the old one and the circle is closed. The sane users had given up a long time ago. My 15 years old fvwm config still works today.
  • 29athrowaway 4y ago
    Like Windows 95 that had blue screens of death every 5 seconds? And would die if you send it a ping?
• trasz 4y ago
  Funny how nobody remembers how OpenGL thing was SGI’s proprietary API designed to replace the standard, cross platform PHIGS.