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Thoughts on desktop operating systems
- beanjuiceII 2y ago[flagged]
- abhinavk 2y agoDon’t sell yourself short.
- ttyprintk 2y agoI’d recommend Debian Gnome to the author, based on their experience with snap.
- pmontra 2y agoDebian is where I went to get rid of snaps. My Debian 11 desktop is indistinguishable from my old Ubuntu 22.04 one and my machines feels a little faster. It didn't spin the fan much with Ubuntu, it spins it less often with Debian.
- osigurdson 2y agomac ui is nice but just thinking about the keyboard and mouse (iMac) give me carpal tunnel syndrome.
- wolrah 2y ago> mac ui is nice but just thinking about the keyboard and mouse (iMac) give me carpal tunnel syndrome. This seems like an odd complaint in the context of a desktop computer like an iMac where you have effectively infinite choice in input devices. I don't disagree that Apple's stock keyboard is bad and their mouse team seems actively hostile to the idea of making their product not stupid in some way, but it's a desktop computer so....just plug in any other USB keyboard and mouse you prefer, or pair up some Bluetooth ones, whichever way is your jam. I use a Macbook Air for work so when I'm mobile I'm stuck dealing with this thin squishy thing keyboard (IMO the trackpad is pretty good as they go), but when I'm at my desk I'm typing on a ZSA Moonlander full of Boba U4 switches and mousing with either a Logitech MX Vertical or a G700S, and it all "just works".
- smallstepforman 2y agoGaming on OSX is a disaster due to no official Vulkan support and OpenGL capped at 4.1. Its like a big “go away” sign. Even before that, performance and frame rates were lower. A luxury car. Ubuntu with its Unity design first, then Snap, put desktop Linux back a decade. What a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. A SUV. Win11 is stable and fast(ish), but we’d be crazy to depend on a commercial OS for privacy, security and long term stability (unless subscription model). A sedan. Haiku is amazing, but why are there so little users and devs? With Chromium based apps (eg. Falcon) the modern web is no longer a problem on Haiku. It’s actually got the most modern design of the batch I’m listing,the least bloat and performance is great. Batmobile. The ‘BSDs. Great performance, reliable systems, great license, they do need a simple GUI installer. Trucks.
- musicale 2y ago> Gaming on OSX is a disaster due to no official Vulkan support and OpenGL capped at 4.1 Game development on OSX is fantastic for thousands of iOS game developers. iPad games can often run out of the box.
- soulbadguy 2y agogaming != game devolvement though...
- pjmlp 2y agoIt is hard to get games without game development.
- soulbadguy 2y agoNot sure i am following the point here. OP mentioned that MacOS is still lagging a gaming OS. To which someone replied that MacOs is agreat game development platform. I was just pointing out that being a good Os to develop game is very different to being a good OS to play/run games...
- 2y ago
- tetrisgm 2y agoI have to say that besides a period of 10 years after the launch of the iPhone, I've been really impressed with Windows 11 lately. It's stable, gets out of the way, feels fast. I have all the tweaks I need, and it doesn't feel like I'm sacrificing UX. My only gripe is setting up Docker containers on Windows kind of sucks. But for web apps, games, and general productivity, it's been a perfect daily driver for several years for me.
- soulbadguy 2y agoWindows have really evolved and improved as an OS. WSL2 + vscode is almost replacing my need for a VM or a linux box for most of my needs. The oss is also much more stable, the update less annoying and the UI/design language pretty nice. Sadly MSFT being MSFT, after all of this progress, they are now regressing with ads and news inserted inside the desktop. Weird telemetry and loging requirements and now with AI everywhere. And if any one from the windows team is reading this... FIX DESKTOP SEARCH :)
- whartung 2y agoThis was, sheesh, 20 years ago, but my nit with Windows is how it always locks files. And using your example of Desktop Search, more than once I’ve had a build fail because it could not delete the files in the artifact directory because the desktop search was indexing one of the files. Not often, not always, just enough to be very annoying. I was always bumping heads with file locks one way or another.
- pjmlp 2y agoWhile the experience could be better, UNIX is the outlier on bad approaches to file locks, meaning having none at all. There is a reason why UNIX file locks are called advisory.
- akkad33 2y agoI still find windows slow. They recently launched tabs in file explorer but opening a tab is actually slower than opening a new window. And with the new AI stuff it was a good time for me to switch to Linux
- soulbadguy 2y agoFrom the article : > Linux is top-notch for software development, and quickly becoming a compelling choice for gaming thanks to Valve’s Proton and the SteamDeck. I keep telling myself I’m going to switch my PC from Windows to Linux but it hasn’t happened yet (I’m not counting dual-booting). > It’s slowly gaining adoption which is great to see. The Windows hegemony may never be toppled but I’m rooting for Linux. If anything i am seeing the reverse. I think windows is becoming a competent dev. OS much faster than linux is becoming a gaming/producitivity OS. Since WSL2 i am feeling less and less the pull to setup any kind of linux enviroment. And everytime i do, the linux "jank" always pops out in surprising way. For example, 120hz@4k + fractional scaling, or any kind of HDR breaks everything last time i tried ubuntu
- jayd16 2y agoThey are relying on each other more and more. Wine is great. WSL is great. They're making each other better. Who would have guessed?
- soulbadguy 2y agoThe dream would be MSFT to port windows GUI/UI layer the linux kernel... boom
- bombela 2y agoFor what is worth, 120Hz@4k + fractional scaling worked out of the box for me on a t14 AMD gen2 (KDE Wayland). HDR, though, forget about it. My gaming PC is still running MS Windows, for HDR, Nvidia GPU support, and DRMs (cannot get Netflix 4k HDR outside of windows and smart tv similar stuff).
- hiAndrewQuinn 2y agoFor me, i3wm / Sway WM are the killer apps that really keep me on BSD / Linux. I'm quite handy with the Windows tiling shortcuts, but I like how these systems enforce it. I just find the experience of navigating through them with my keyboard so much more inherently satisfying than anything else I've come across. I don't game, I just like doing weird things with code, so it's a natural fit for me.
- DEADMINCE 2y agoNothing beats AwesomeWM for me so far. Things like i3 and Sway have some nice features, but they don't have the freedom to customize your environment to the same extent. Nothing else really compares for me.
- k8sToGo 2y agoI tried Linux Desktop recently. Two different distros, both did not want to start up the graphical part due to some nouveau problem out of the box. Yes, I can set nomodeset, but the fiddling already starts before using it? And this was not some obscure Laptop or something. A self built Intel desktop with an nvidia GPU. Ended up switching to a MacBook Pro instead. I like macOS. With VMware Fusion having become free for personal use, I recreated WSL2 basically on my Mac.
- hgyjnbdet 2y agoNividia GPUs are notoriously bad for supporting Linux. But I appreciate that you thought it easier recreating WSL2 on a Mac than troubleshooting GPU issues.
- k8sToGo 2y agoWhy are you taking it personally if I don’t use Linux on a desktop? There is more to it why I got the MacBook. And setting up a Linux console VM is indeed much faster and easier than fiddling with Nouveau and NVIDIA drivers.
- dgan 2y agoAfter using a macbook at work for a little more than a year, and after running linux at home for 7 years, i am unfortunate enough to land on a MS-only-and-exclusively company. We don't even have WSL. The development experience is as windows-y as you could imagine: deployment is a copy paste on a shared drive. Some internal package installation is a copy paste from a shared drive. External program installation is hunting on the Web. The terminal is light years behind what Unix has to offer. Ah yes, and the laptop weights 5kg and holds the battery for 3h. The only reason to use this platform is when you re a hostage and have a gun on your head
- majkinetor 2y agoAll that has nothing to do with Windows. The fact that you don't use automation, package managers, modern terminals etc tells about company, not the OS.
- shiroiushi 2y agoIt's exactly the type of development that's been encouraged by Windows since it started. It's only more recently that it's been possible or normal to adopt more modern practices. His company obvious is stuck in 2000.
- haunter 2y ago> and the laptop weights 5kg and holds the battery for 3h. I don't follow how is it Window's fault that your company is incompetent? I get +10 hours on the Thinkpad X1 Carbon and it's a ~1.5kg laptop
- anta40 2y agoI'm happy enough with macOS. That's the "de facto" OS for mobile app devs (no Xcode for Linux... well you get the point). And installing most open source apps is super easy, thanks to Homebrew. Still miss Linux for thinkering, though.
- hulitu 2y ago> The visual design of Windows 11 is decent, Yep, decent like a porno movie. /s Who does not love gray on gray, dark blue on light blue, the absence of every delimitation of GUI elements ?
- senectus1 2y agoI love Fedora.. I've wiped my windows lic at home and live in fedora. I'm looking for ways to use it at the office... But one thing that drives me nuts is where you get software from. Some software is delivered from the "repo" \, some is from "flathub" and some is downloaded rpm's or whatever. But once you've installed it, there is no simple way to tell where you installed it from... I'd expect like a little logo overlaying the icon or something.
- juancn 2y agoThe issue with Linux for productive work (for me) is that I end up fiddling with it rather than getting stuff done. Windows is not much better (those hard to skip full screen ads after updates). MacOS for me is the one that has fewer distractions. I've been using the same image since 2006 (I upgraded OSes and migrated from one notebook to the next) with no issues, no reinstalls. That's 18 years having a really stable environment.
- dissent 2y ago> Windows has one major thing going for it: it’s best-in-class for gaming. > It might even be the greatest gaming platform of all time I keep hearing this. It's the worst gaming platform of all time. Windows was brute forced into being the only gaming platform on desktop computing due to the total dominance of the IBM PC and the Windows operating system. Neither of these were designed for games. Only cheap hardware and very powerful CPUs compared to the alternative made them viable at all. It should be viewed in terms of opportunity cost - what could gamers have had if it wasn't for Windows?
- red-iron-pine 2y agogaming on linux is pretty good these days. been using Fedora as a daily driver since ~2009 and with Nvidia and AMD cards. it's had some rough points, but both the nVidia proprietary, and AMD open source drivers are solid. CP2077 works just fine, ditto for the Halo collection. Proton is amazing and works out of the box.
- dissent 2y agoWhich they had to do by wrapping the entire proprietary win32 API, we had to wait decades, and it needed Valve behind it. All without Microsoft's cooperation. Their strategy was to make it the best gaming platform by making it the only gaming platform, and it was very successful.
- kkfx 2y agoPersonally: - desktops are now considered "endpoints" or "bootloader for a WebVM" (the monsters improperly named browsers for legacy reasons); - desktop are the CORE of computing, as long as they are classic networked desktops, meaning a single application, user programmable as a NORMAL usage, like modern Emacs or classic Smalltalk workstations; - modern desktop OS, both FLOSS and commercials are CRAP, simply because they are things designed with a bad idea in mind. Many from OSX to Gnome SHell (the second capital not a typo) tend to be narcissistic putting at the user sight center the least useful thing "the WM/DE/DS" or the element that should just be used to handle apps and files; - Windows recently in UI terms have copied some logic FLOSS design, being a bit more usable, things like a reasonable context menu and so on, but it's plagued by the commercial push of ads and nagware anywhere, OSX seems to be an essentially dead product the vendor keep just to have "a complete offer" but they do not want desktop computing, they want grown slaves/child able just to touch a colorful screen with their fingers, FLOSS plethora of WMs tend to be static, only something have happened to the tiling WM landscape, GNU/Linux DE/DS (since tied to systemd) like Kde or Gnome SHell have essentially no idea on how to evolve anymore; - in applications terms most apps remain in their legacy state or they tend to became DocUIs without being real DocUIs so mimicking WebUIs, becoming monsters to overcome the biggest modern desktop problem, the fact that for commercial reasons we do not have anymore a single application as an OS, meaning the lack of integration with the sole possible IPCs like cut&paste and drag&drop. Until FLOSS devs realize what we lost embracing modern commercial desktop there will be no chance to recover, the desktop future remain the sorry state of a crappy WebVM bootloader where the user can't even handle it's files much, can't even own information in files (with storage dedicated to specific apps instead of generic files usable with many different tools).
- pabs3 2y agoThere is Vulkan on Apple ARM hardware on Linux and I expect the same drivers could be adapted to work on macOS too. https://rosenzweig.io/blog/vk13-on-the-m1-in-1-month.html https://rosenzweig.io/blog/vk13-on-the-m1-in-1-month.html