8 ms·

There’s one power tool remaining, Linux

minkles 2y ago
If it had a working, competent desktop environment, yes. But it's not there. Everything else, 100%. But the whole desktop environment thing is a mess with extremely poor quality control. It's much more fun to change the universe 50 times than it is to actually fix all the bugs and problems with it. And that's why for the last 25 years I ended up flipping back and forward between Windows and Mac and Linux lasting a maximum of a day or two.
- yonatan8070 2y ago
  I use KDE Plasma both at home and at work (software dev), it's stable and works well. I have a colleague who does the same with Ubuntu's GNOME. What about the Linux desktops do you find incompetent?
  - minkles 2y ago
    Things that suck: fractional scaling doesn't work anywhere properly, most of the desktop apps have terrible user experiences, absolutely show stopping bugs, suspend/resume on the whole platform is Russian roulette, inconsistencies everywhere, vast differences on rendering between toolkits, sound over BT is terrible and everything is half finished. It feels like an artist's attic rather than a competent platform. If you spend most of your time in a terminal or IDE you don't see the pain. I want it to work. I want to use it. But it's just bad quality. In context, by the time I've worked around the issues, I earn enough to just buy a Mac and use that. And everything works fine there!
    - talldayo 2y ago
      It's funny, I'm the same way for Macs. Why would I buy a computer that launches Apple Music by default when I plug in my headphones? Why does my taskbar ship with services I'll never use pinned to the bottom? Why does Safari send me little reminder notifications that it's still installed? It all feels so gaudy and anti-productive that I end up spending more time setting up Macs then I do setting up Linux. When I have to go use a Mac it's like getting assigned to a Siberian labor camp. Nowadays desktop Linux is pretty good, to the point that Valve uses it as the backbone for their gaming handheld. Fractional scaling is upstreamed in Qt and GTK, Pipewire is the default for Bluetooth now alongside 320kbps codecs (including AAC), and GNOME and KDE are both now stable enough on Wayland to daily-drive. I think your complaints would have been valid 10 years ago, but the hodge-podge x11 desktops are in the rearview mirror for most users.
      - phoronixrly 2y ago
        Why the hell would I need a mac laptop for work for which I would need to spend not sure how many hours setting up a development environment while the OS actively fights me? With literally a retrofitted (pun intended) homebrew packaging system that slings binaries compiled by randos on the internet... Oh Apple software and hardware is so secure... Bruh, your entire dev env unless you're developing in xcode is literally a supply chain attack waiting to happen. And at the same time it is hard to make work and breaks randomly with OS updates or bottle updates or just after a restart with no apparent reason. Please... Fractional scaling is (allegedly) not working... Big deal, even if it was true (it's not https://i.imgur.com/wm84JxU.png https://i.imgur.com/wm84JxU.png)...
      - nopeNopeNooope 2y ago
        None of your comebacks are things that are show stoppers. Apple music loads when you plug in headphones? Is that the same as your laptop doesn't suspend and resume at all? The taskbar has things you don't like in it? Is that the same as "the UI for most apps are show stopper broken"? If I fix the icons in my dock, they stay fixed. If I fix something in Linux, someone is going to come along and break it next time I patch something. See the difference? I like the mac as an access device for power tools BECAUSE the kind of folks who like messing with computers aren't messing with mine. And most of what you mention in the last paragraph needs to be prefaced with "if you don't mind burning 4x more battery on doing it without acceleration", and "if you don't mind it looking like a small child chose your fonts". It's not enough for it to be kinda usable if you squint, it needs to use the hardware I paid for, it needs to suspend and resume and boot securely, it needs to look good, display in the colors I want on the display hardware I choose, and let me remap the keyboard without using 10 apps to cover all the weird edge cases. That's table stakes.
        hatsix 2y ago
        How about "I can't control the volume through the Mac if my audio goes to a digital output, like HDMI". My monitor has audio out, which I plug into speakers... both have their own volume, but I'd rather use keyboard controls, but I can't, OSX disables volume control completely. Also, you can't have a window span monitors. It only appears on the monitor that has >50%. Links opened from non browsers open in the window physically closest to the opening app (ish). If you run chrome with multiple profiles, you can't just expect the most recently used window to open the link, you must position the window with the profile you want to use overlapping the other browser, often requiring me to drag a window fully to the other monitor (because windows can't span monitors). OSX is the worst window manager ever created. There are states you can get into with your mouse that you can't reverse without a obscure key combo. Window snapping took how long, and it's still the worst. you can't make a window be as big as it can be without making it full screen. It's just the worst. I've been told I can fix all of these things... if I buy 10 different $10 apps.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      > fractional scaling doesn't work anywhere properly Sure it does. Some apps require a workaround (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI) but most of the time you can set it in the DE and forget about it. If you're in Wayland you get the same output rescaling option as MacOS. (Which still requires some workarounds for apps - you'll see a few problems on a 1080p screen regardless of the system) > suspend/resume on the whole platform is Russian roulette It's better than windows these days and you can actually disable periodic auto resume unlike on MacOS. > sound over BT is terrible This has been solved since pipewire. Linux effectively has the best, most customisable and lowest latency audio system today. It's definitely better than MacOS which will force you into mono low quality if any app queries the microphone. > And everything works fine there! It's ok if you prefer it, but the list of issues on a MacOS is long and often ignored upstream. It's not even close to "everything". (I've got a trivially reproducible system crash bug report open for over a year now)
      - jitl 2y ago
        I use Linux Bluetooth most days of the week, and I regularly get an issue where after resuming from sleep, all the audio has a stutter and crackle. I can’t give Linux a pass on audio until I can use a stock system from some well known distribution without needing to debug the audio and/or Bluetooth subsystems. Maybe pipewire does finally solve this. I don’t know if my distro uses it or not by default.
      - deafpolygon 2y ago
        I wonder how much of this is Stockholm Syndrome.
        viraptor 2y ago
        Of this comment? None, I'm using all 3 main OSes and have lots of complaints all around.
      - latchkey 2y ago
        I had to purchase and install an extension [0] that requires a lot of security lockdown navigation [1], just to get a proper EQ and be able to adjust where the sound goes. [0] https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/ https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/ [1] https://rogueamoeba.com/support/knowledgebase/?showArticle=ACE-StepByStep&product=Airfoil+for+Mac https://rogueamoeba.com/support/knowledgebase/?showArticle=A...
  - LastMuel 2y ago
    Agreed. I’ve been using Kubuntu and have loved it.
- blisterexe 2y ago
  Well, how long ago was the last time you've tried it? Major desktop environments have cleaned up their act quite a bit recently.
  - minkles 2y ago
    Literally last month.
    - blisterexe 2y ago
      Given your other reply, it seems that most of your problems are due to you having not well compatible hardware, you wouldnt blame macos for not running well on a hackintosh.
      - minkles 2y ago
        Oh here we go again. Someone blaming the hardware. Every damn time. A hackintosh isn't even comparable. I tried it on a stock Lenovo T14 gen 3 and a new Intel 14500 crate with both integrated graphics and a 4060 and a Lenovo T495s. The issues were persistent across all three machines. Can you imagine a typical dumb end user hitting one of these problems and you telling them: "buy a new computer". Hell no. The damn software should work properly.
        phoronixrly 2y ago
        All I got for this is that mac is for dumb users?
        minkles 2y ago
        That can be turned the other way around. Who would rationally waste their time arguing with something to get it working when something that works is already available?
        phoronixrly 2y ago
- rewgs 2y ago
  I switch between daily driving my M1 Mac and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon running Hyprland on Arch. The latter is easily the most fluid, efficient desktop experience I’ve ever found. I’ll always keep around a Mac just in case something breaks, but more and more I’m living on the Thinkpad. I’m really not a fan of the “usual subjects” in the Linux desktop world (e.g. Gnome, KDE Plasma, etc…XFCE is decent), but step beyond that into the tiling Window Manager world and the user/developer experience is IMO leaps and bounds beyond any other desktop.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- 7e 2y ago
  Totally agreed, desktop Linux is a Potemkin village of suck. It's slow, font rendering is still terrible, keyboard shortcuts are all over the map, gesture support for trackpads is just the pits, mouse acceleration is weird, laptop power features never work, half the time I boot into some weird EFI setup, then have to continue... but most of all, the software isn't as numerous or as high quality or polished as what you can get on a Mac. It's night and day. Most people who like desktop Linux seem to only want to do some narrow thing with their computer, like use Emacs for everything.
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  I think you are right, but I don't use a desktop environment (none is installed on my computer), and instead use the command shell, with xterm, to do most stuff. Other people also don't use a desktop environment because they don't like it but Linux can still be used without a desktop environment. Alternatively, try to make a better desktop environment if you know how to do.
- kkfx 2y ago
  IMVHO ALL modern desktops are crap, because of a flawed concept underneath them, not because of something else. Icons? How absurd can be putting things that get covered by any window? How absurd is floating windows model? My desktop is EXWM (Emacs) witch offer at login an org-mode live dashboards of anything I frequently need, a "desktop" in my own hand able to collect any kind of information I want. Keybindings are my control and quick launchers of various functionalities not apps, meaning a quick key to open a new mail compose buffer, no need to fire up some app up-front, another to search&narrow between my notes, the most flexible taxonomy who contain anything, files and executable links (elisp: sexps). Long story short a free tiling desktop I can bend to my needs. Modern desktops are the aftermath of widget-based GUIs, limited and limiting tools who can't be flexible so try to be generic and users have to adapt to them instead of the contrary. No matter how well you do the modern design, it's still users who adapt to it instead of the desktop designed by any users according do his/her own needs and desire. The overall OS it's the same, in a classic desktop, let's say a LispM, anything is a function you can combine and use everywhere, if you have maxima (CAS) installed you can solve an ode inside a mail compose buffer, simply because your fully-integrated environment have that functionality, you can type and preview LaTeX etc. Modern GUIs have tried to mimic that and blatantly fail. Microsoft OLE are probably the biggest integration effort, still a fail due to the lack of substantial integration and widgets based design. Apple have tried the absurd of "integrating GUIs in the desktop" with top menu and Finder, another fail. Now most tend to WebUIs, witch are DocUIs but still not in user hands to be simply integrated and bent. So again another failure with "composed" WebApps that keep failing and still not enough flexibility. That's why after 50+ years we "tech savvy users" keep learning the Unix CLI, Emacs, LaTeX and so on, because essentially no modern tool could work better or with less effort.
  - minkles 2y ago
    I’m not sure there aren’t better solutions to the unix CLI which is basically formed of a bunch of shit parsers written by idiots wired together, an operating system pretending to be an editor and a text processing package with a footprint the size of windows. YMMV but these are also poor solutions to the problem that no one has the time, money, motivation or competence to do better. LaTeX is a daily one for me. It would be beneficial for society that someone writes a word processor from scratch that does better. I used TechWriter back in the 90s it it was better than both LaTeX and word.
hagbard_c 2y ago
Yes, there is. Someone made the comparison to power tools before Gruber used it, it also includes a mentioning of his favourite fruit-flavoured toy line as well as Microsoft's products. I am, of course, talking about Neal Stephenson's essay on Unix - The Hole Hawg [1]. Replace 'Unix' with 'Linux' and the comparison still holds: Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously. Linux is a Hole Hawg, it might be rough on the edges but it can do the work where its more polished brethern-in-Posix give up. [1] http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > Linux is a Hole Hawg, it might be rough on the edges but it can do the work... Oh yup it does. If Linux powers 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputer and if it powers billions of small devices, it certainly can be used as powertool on my main desktop PC.

If it had a working, competent desktop environment, yes. But it's not there. Everything else, 100%. But the whole desktop environment thing is a mess with extremely poor quality control. It's much more fun to change the universe 50 times than it is to actually fix all the bugs and problems with it. And that's why for the last 25 years I ended up flipping back and forward between Windows and Mac and Linux lasting a maximum of a day or two.

yonatan8070 2y ago
I use KDE Plasma both at home and at work (software dev), it's stable and works well. I have a colleague who does the same with Ubuntu's GNOME. What about the Linux desktops do you find incompetent?
- minkles 2y ago
  Things that suck: fractional scaling doesn't work anywhere properly, most of the desktop apps have terrible user experiences, absolutely show stopping bugs, suspend/resume on the whole platform is Russian roulette, inconsistencies everywhere, vast differences on rendering between toolkits, sound over BT is terrible and everything is half finished. It feels like an artist's attic rather than a competent platform. If you spend most of your time in a terminal or IDE you don't see the pain. I want it to work. I want to use it. But it's just bad quality. In context, by the time I've worked around the issues, I earn enough to just buy a Mac and use that. And everything works fine there!
  - talldayo 2y ago
    It's funny, I'm the same way for Macs. Why would I buy a computer that launches Apple Music by default when I plug in my headphones? Why does my taskbar ship with services I'll never use pinned to the bottom? Why does Safari send me little reminder notifications that it's still installed? It all feels so gaudy and anti-productive that I end up spending more time setting up Macs then I do setting up Linux. When I have to go use a Mac it's like getting assigned to a Siberian labor camp. Nowadays desktop Linux is pretty good, to the point that Valve uses it as the backbone for their gaming handheld. Fractional scaling is upstreamed in Qt and GTK, Pipewire is the default for Bluetooth now alongside 320kbps codecs (including AAC), and GNOME and KDE are both now stable enough on Wayland to daily-drive. I think your complaints would have been valid 10 years ago, but the hodge-podge x11 desktops are in the rearview mirror for most users.
    - phoronixrly 2y ago
      Why the hell would I need a mac laptop for work for which I would need to spend not sure how many hours setting up a development environment while the OS actively fights me? With literally a retrofitted (pun intended) homebrew packaging system that slings binaries compiled by randos on the internet... Oh Apple software and hardware is so secure... Bruh, your entire dev env unless you're developing in xcode is literally a supply chain attack waiting to happen. And at the same time it is hard to make work and breaks randomly with OS updates or bottle updates or just after a restart with no apparent reason. Please... Fractional scaling is (allegedly) not working... Big deal, even if it was true (it's not https://i.imgur.com/wm84JxU.png https://i.imgur.com/wm84JxU.png)...
    - nopeNopeNooope 2y ago
      None of your comebacks are things that are show stoppers. Apple music loads when you plug in headphones? Is that the same as your laptop doesn't suspend and resume at all? The taskbar has things you don't like in it? Is that the same as "the UI for most apps are show stopper broken"? If I fix the icons in my dock, they stay fixed. If I fix something in Linux, someone is going to come along and break it next time I patch something. See the difference? I like the mac as an access device for power tools BECAUSE the kind of folks who like messing with computers aren't messing with mine. And most of what you mention in the last paragraph needs to be prefaced with "if you don't mind burning 4x more battery on doing it without acceleration", and "if you don't mind it looking like a small child chose your fonts". It's not enough for it to be kinda usable if you squint, it needs to use the hardware I paid for, it needs to suspend and resume and boot securely, it needs to look good, display in the colors I want on the display hardware I choose, and let me remap the keyboard without using 10 apps to cover all the weird edge cases. That's table stakes.
      - hatsix 2y ago
        How about "I can't control the volume through the Mac if my audio goes to a digital output, like HDMI". My monitor has audio out, which I plug into speakers... both have their own volume, but I'd rather use keyboard controls, but I can't, OSX disables volume control completely. Also, you can't have a window span monitors. It only appears on the monitor that has >50%. Links opened from non browsers open in the window physically closest to the opening app (ish). If you run chrome with multiple profiles, you can't just expect the most recently used window to open the link, you must position the window with the profile you want to use overlapping the other browser, often requiring me to drag a window fully to the other monitor (because windows can't span monitors). OSX is the worst window manager ever created. There are states you can get into with your mouse that you can't reverse without a obscure key combo. Window snapping took how long, and it's still the worst. you can't make a window be as big as it can be without making it full screen. It's just the worst. I've been told I can fix all of these things... if I buy 10 different $10 apps.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    > fractional scaling doesn't work anywhere properly Sure it does. Some apps require a workaround (https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI) but most of the time you can set it in the DE and forget about it. If you're in Wayland you get the same output rescaling option as MacOS. (Which still requires some workarounds for apps - you'll see a few problems on a 1080p screen regardless of the system) > suspend/resume on the whole platform is Russian roulette It's better than windows these days and you can actually disable periodic auto resume unlike on MacOS. > sound over BT is terrible This has been solved since pipewire. Linux effectively has the best, most customisable and lowest latency audio system today. It's definitely better than MacOS which will force you into mono low quality if any app queries the microphone. > And everything works fine there! It's ok if you prefer it, but the list of issues on a MacOS is long and often ignored upstream. It's not even close to "everything". (I've got a trivially reproducible system crash bug report open for over a year now)
    - jitl 2y ago
      I use Linux Bluetooth most days of the week, and I regularly get an issue where after resuming from sleep, all the audio has a stutter and crackle. I can’t give Linux a pass on audio until I can use a stock system from some well known distribution without needing to debug the audio and/or Bluetooth subsystems. Maybe pipewire does finally solve this. I don’t know if my distro uses it or not by default.
    - deafpolygon 2y ago
      I wonder how much of this is Stockholm Syndrome.
      - viraptor 2y ago
        Of this comment? None, I'm using all 3 main OSes and have lots of complaints all around.
    - latchkey 2y ago
      I had to purchase and install an extension [0] that requires a lot of security lockdown navigation [1], just to get a proper EQ and be able to adjust where the sound goes. [0] https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/ https://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/ [1] https://rogueamoeba.com/support/knowledgebase/?showArticle=ACE-StepByStep&product=Airfoil+for+Mac https://rogueamoeba.com/support/knowledgebase/?showArticle=A...
- LastMuel 2y ago
  Agreed. I’ve been using Kubuntu and have loved it.
blisterexe 2y ago
Well, how long ago was the last time you've tried it? Major desktop environments have cleaned up their act quite a bit recently.
- minkles 2y ago
  Literally last month.
  - blisterexe 2y ago
    Given your other reply, it seems that most of your problems are due to you having not well compatible hardware, you wouldnt blame macos for not running well on a hackintosh.
    - minkles 2y ago
      Oh here we go again. Someone blaming the hardware. Every damn time. A hackintosh isn't even comparable. I tried it on a stock Lenovo T14 gen 3 and a new Intel 14500 crate with both integrated graphics and a 4060 and a Lenovo T495s. The issues were persistent across all three machines. Can you imagine a typical dumb end user hitting one of these problems and you telling them: "buy a new computer". Hell no. The damn software should work properly.
      - phoronixrly 2y ago
        All I got for this is that mac is for dumb users?
        minkles 2y ago
        That can be turned the other way around. Who would rationally waste their time arguing with something to get it working when something that works is already available?
        phoronixrly 2y ago
rewgs 2y ago
I switch between daily driving my M1 Mac and a Thinkpad X1 Carbon running Hyprland on Arch. The latter is easily the most fluid, efficient desktop experience I’ve ever found. I’ll always keep around a Mac just in case something breaks, but more and more I’m living on the Thinkpad. I’m really not a fan of the “usual subjects” in the Linux desktop world (e.g. Gnome, KDE Plasma, etc…XFCE is decent), but step beyond that into the tiling Window Manager world and the user/developer experience is IMO leaps and bounds beyond any other desktop.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
7e 2y ago
Totally agreed, desktop Linux is a Potemkin village of suck. It's slow, font rendering is still terrible, keyboard shortcuts are all over the map, gesture support for trackpads is just the pits, mouse acceleration is weird, laptop power features never work, half the time I boot into some weird EFI setup, then have to continue... but most of all, the software isn't as numerous or as high quality or polished as what you can get on a Mac. It's night and day. Most people who like desktop Linux seem to only want to do some narrow thing with their computer, like use Emacs for everything.
zzo38computer 2y ago
I think you are right, but I don't use a desktop environment (none is installed on my computer), and instead use the command shell, with xterm, to do most stuff. Other people also don't use a desktop environment because they don't like it but Linux can still be used without a desktop environment. Alternatively, try to make a better desktop environment if you know how to do.
kkfx 2y ago
IMVHO ALL modern desktops are crap, because of a flawed concept underneath them, not because of something else. Icons? How absurd can be putting things that get covered by any window? How absurd is floating windows model? My desktop is EXWM (Emacs) witch offer at login an org-mode live dashboards of anything I frequently need, a "desktop" in my own hand able to collect any kind of information I want. Keybindings are my control and quick launchers of various functionalities not apps, meaning a quick key to open a new mail compose buffer, no need to fire up some app up-front, another to search&narrow between my notes, the most flexible taxonomy who contain anything, files and executable links (elisp: sexps). Long story short a free tiling desktop I can bend to my needs. Modern desktops are the aftermath of widget-based GUIs, limited and limiting tools who can't be flexible so try to be generic and users have to adapt to them instead of the contrary. No matter how well you do the modern design, it's still users who adapt to it instead of the desktop designed by any users according do his/her own needs and desire. The overall OS it's the same, in a classic desktop, let's say a LispM, anything is a function you can combine and use everywhere, if you have maxima (CAS) installed you can solve an ode inside a mail compose buffer, simply because your fully-integrated environment have that functionality, you can type and preview LaTeX etc. Modern GUIs have tried to mimic that and blatantly fail. Microsoft OLE are probably the biggest integration effort, still a fail due to the lack of substantial integration and widgets based design. Apple have tried the absurd of "integrating GUIs in the desktop" with top menu and Finder, another fail. Now most tend to WebUIs, witch are DocUIs but still not in user hands to be simply integrated and bent. So again another failure with "composed" WebApps that keep failing and still not enough flexibility. That's why after 50+ years we "tech savvy users" keep learning the Unix CLI, Emacs, LaTeX and so on, because essentially no modern tool could work better or with less effort.
- minkles 2y ago
  I’m not sure there aren’t better solutions to the unix CLI which is basically formed of a bunch of shit parsers written by idiots wired together, an operating system pretending to be an editor and a text processing package with a footprint the size of windows. YMMV but these are also poor solutions to the problem that no one has the time, money, motivation or competence to do better. LaTeX is a daily one for me. It would be beneficial for society that someone writes a word processor from scratch that does better. I used TechWriter back in the 90s it it was better than both LaTeX and word.

hagbard_c 2y ago

Yes, there is. Someone made the comparison to power tools before Gruber used it, it also includes a mentioning of his favourite fruit-flavoured toy line as well as Microsoft's products. I am, of course, talking about Neal Stephenson's essay on Unix - The Hole Hawg [1]. Replace 'Unix' with 'Linux' and the comparison still holds: Unix is the Hole Hawg of operating systems, and Unix hackers, like Doug Barnes and the guy in the Dilbert cartoon and many of the other people who populate Silicon Valley, are like contractor's sons who grew up using only Hole Hawgs. They might use Apple/Microsoft OSes to write letters, play video games, or balance their checkbooks, but they cannot really bring themselves to take these operating systems seriously. Linux is a Hole Hawg, it might be rough on the edges but it can do the work where its more polished brethern-in-Posix give up. [1] http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html

TacticalCoder 2y ago
> Linux is a Hole Hawg, it might be rough on the edges but it can do the work... Oh yup it does. If Linux powers 500 of the world's top 500 supercomputer and if it powers billions of small devices, it certainly can be used as powertool on my main desktop PC.