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I find it amusing that there’s this constant assetion on this forum that the Linux desktop sucks Yet many of us have been quite happy with it for decades, and

by chgs 2y ago

I find it amusing that there’s this constant assetion on this forum that the Linux desktop sucks Yet many of us have been quite happy with it for decades, and the major problems tend to be with new stuff that seems to be added just to do something different.

jchw 2y ago
I have been using Linux as my primary operating system for two decades, and I think the Linux desktop sucks. I strongly disagree that my problems with it are largely the result of "new stuff that seems to be added just to do something different". When I first started using Linux, there was no kernel modesetting and XFree86 ran as root. I had to manually configure my graphics and display settings by editing the Xorg.conf in nano, or sometimes I could get YaST to do it. Multi-head output was not well-supported, and you often had to restart to reconfigure your outputs. Installing the NVIDIA driver was a straight up pain in the ass. (Some things never change.) X.Org eventually improved and added hotplugging. The Linux desktop stack went through a lot of "new stuff" like new versions of DRM/DRI, the addition of hotplugging, the introduction of KMS and libinput. Dynamic input configuration was added with the `xinput` command. The XInput2 extension was developed to greatly improve touch and pen tablet support. XRandr made it possible to dynamically arrange displays, replacing Xinerama. UI toolkits needed to be rewritten to support scalable rendering so that we could have high DPI support. Most recently, a lot of work and many new protocols across multiple parts of the desktop stack had to be re-hauled from kernel to userland to support explicit synchronization for graphics tasks and buffers. All of this required major shifts, and that broke user's workflows at some points. Plenty of people were broken by the gradual transition to using libinput, from graphics tablets to Synaptics touchpads, a lot of work had to be redone in order to re-haul the input system. Only recently are there Linux laptops where the out-of-the-box touchpad experience is good enough to rival a MacBook, and it's certainly not all of them. Don't get me wrong, I loved KDE 3. And despite all of it's flaws, I still prefer Linux greatly over the other options available. But would I go back to using Linux 2.6 and KDE 3 and etc. today? Fuck no, we've improved so many things since then. And yes, no question that at times things have felt like they've been moving backwards in some regards, but it really isn't for nothing. The fact that modern desktop Linux trivially hotplugs displays with different DPIs and refresh rates (and potentially variable refresh rates) is genuinely something that took a herculean effort. All of that work required massive rewrites. It required kernel changes, graphics driver changes, it required major UI toolkit changes, it required redesigning apps and rewriting components. And yes, I admit I am not the biggest contributor to open source or anything, my patches are mostly unimportant. But, when I hit something that sucks in the Linux desktop, I do try my best to see if I can't do something about it. I have contributed random little bits here and there to various projects I care about. Most recently, I've been doing work to improve some situations where thumbnails in KDE are suboptimal. There's easily thousands of these little small issues that make Linux worse to use on desktop, we've got plenty of work to do. And I make it work. Except for work-owned computers, all of my machines run Linux, and I have a fair number of them. I do not have a single box I own personally that boots any other kernel or any other desktop. I know my way around Wine, even enough to make occasional, if small, code contributions. (For example, I made a quick patch when graphics tablets were not working in Wine under XWayland.) So I'm not suggesting that it's unusable, but I can't recommend the Linux desktop to random people. It's been getting closer, but a lot of the reason it's getting closer is because of some of the efforts that I assume you'd complain about.
andrewprock 2y ago
Decades? Really? The UX was so bad in 1998 I just went back to windows for another decade.
- chgs 2y ago
  25 years ago I was quite happy with enlightenment but moved to blackbox/fluxbox. Went to xfce around 2010ish though. Only issues I can think of that have every affected me were pulseaudio related.
- smallerfish 2y ago
  Windows was so bad in 1999 that I switched to Linux and have been happy with it since.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
That's not a contradiction; Linux distros have problems, they just suck differently and probably less than Darwin or NT.
anvuong 2y ago
Coming from Windows and Mac, the multiple monitors experience on Linux is terrible, especially when the monitors have different refresh rates or different resolutions. It's getting a bit better with Ubuntu 24.10 but still not close to the smooth experience I have on Windows and Mac. Recently I needed to switch to Wayland due to my monitors setup. Then I also needed to write a small program that capture application screen, which is a stupidly simple thing to do on Windows, Mac, or even on Xorg. For Wayland I had to jump through bunch of stupid hoops just to get it kinda working ...
- viraptor 2y ago
  Having to deal with windows on Windows regularly being placed on a monitor which didn't exist and windows on MacOS restoring to weird places... None of them are great. You get to choose your preferred set of problems.
LooseMarmoset 2y ago
The Linux desktop is pretty great, for the most part. I would say that in addition to a usable desktop, Linux distributions generally also provide a more stable Windows environment than Windows itself does. I have quite a suite of games in Steam and GoG, and I find that many older games that simply cannot be coaxed into running on Windows can be made to run happily on one version of Wine/Proton or another. There are still some weak areas in desktop Linux if you're running a desktop that isn't Gnome or Plasma - wifi configuration comes to mind immediately, as does sound configuration. Bluetooth can be picky if you don't know to get all the non-free firmware. But really, we're living in a dream era of Linux desktops, if you happen to have lived through the early days of `startx` and XFree86. Hands up if you ever smoked a monitor coil with a bad X config file...
wojciii 2y ago
I use Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for work. I used the previous version until a few days ago. I had no resistance from my corporate overlords over this. I get my work done and I'm more effective as a developer. The corporate MS apps all work in a browser. I don't use any of the office apps for anything serious. The Linux desktop is here already and is accepted. Also KDE is quite nice and snappy most of the time.

by chgs 2y ago

jchw 2y ago

I have been using Linux as my primary operating system for two decades, and I think the Linux desktop sucks. I strongly disagree that my problems with it are largely the result of "new stuff that seems to be added just to do something different". When I first started using Linux, there was no kernel modesetting and XFree86 ran as root. I had to manually configure my graphics and display settings by editing the Xorg.conf in nano, or sometimes I could get YaST to do it. Multi-head output was not well-supported, and you often had to restart to reconfigure your outputs. Installing the NVIDIA driver was a straight up pain in the ass. (Some things never change.) X.Org eventually improved and added hotplugging. The Linux desktop stack went through a lot of "new stuff" like new versions of DRM/DRI, the addition of hotplugging, the introduction of KMS and libinput. Dynamic input configuration was added with the `xinput` command. The XInput2 extension was developed to greatly improve touch and pen tablet support. XRandr made it possible to dynamically arrange displays, replacing Xinerama. UI toolkits needed to be rewritten to support scalable rendering so that we could have high DPI support. Most recently, a lot of work and many new protocols across multiple parts of the desktop stack had to be re-hauled from kernel to userland to support explicit synchronization for graphics tasks and buffers. All of this required major shifts, and that broke user's workflows at some points. Plenty of people were broken by the gradual transition to using libinput, from graphics tablets to Synaptics touchpads, a lot of work had to be redone in order to re-haul the input system. Only recently are there Linux laptops where the out-of-the-box touchpad experience is good enough to rival a MacBook, and it's certainly not all of them. Don't get me wrong, I loved KDE 3. And despite all of it's flaws, I still prefer Linux greatly over the other options available. But would I go back to using Linux 2.6 and KDE 3 and etc. today? Fuck no, we've improved so many things since then. And yes, no question that at times things have felt like they've been moving backwards in some regards, but it really isn't for nothing. The fact that modern desktop Linux trivially hotplugs displays with different DPIs and refresh rates (and potentially variable refresh rates) is genuinely something that took a herculean effort. All of that work required massive rewrites. It required kernel changes, graphics driver changes, it required major UI toolkit changes, it required redesigning apps and rewriting components. And yes, I admit I am not the biggest contributor to open source or anything, my patches are mostly unimportant. But, when I hit something that sucks in the Linux desktop, I do try my best to see if I can't do something about it. I have contributed random little bits here and there to various projects I care about. Most recently, I've been doing work to improve some situations where thumbnails in KDE are suboptimal. There's easily thousands of these little small issues that make Linux worse to use on desktop, we've got plenty of work to do. And I make it work. Except for work-owned computers, all of my machines run Linux, and I have a fair number of them. I do not have a single box I own personally that boots any other kernel or any other desktop. I know my way around Wine, even enough to make occasional, if small, code contributions. (For example, I made a quick patch when graphics tablets were not working in Wine under XWayland.) So I'm not suggesting that it's unusable, but I can't recommend the Linux desktop to random people. It's been getting closer, but a lot of the reason it's getting closer is because of some of the efforts that I assume you'd complain about.

andrewprock 2y ago

Decades? Really? The UX was so bad in 1998 I just went back to windows for another decade.

chgs 2y ago
25 years ago I was quite happy with enlightenment but moved to blackbox/fluxbox. Went to xfce around 2010ish though. Only issues I can think of that have every affected me were pulseaudio related.
smallerfish 2y ago
Windows was so bad in 1999 that I switched to Linux and have been happy with it since.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

That's not a contradiction; Linux distros have problems, they just suck differently and probably less than Darwin or NT.

anvuong 2y ago

Coming from Windows and Mac, the multiple monitors experience on Linux is terrible, especially when the monitors have different refresh rates or different resolutions. It's getting a bit better with Ubuntu 24.10 but still not close to the smooth experience I have on Windows and Mac. Recently I needed to switch to Wayland due to my monitors setup. Then I also needed to write a small program that capture application screen, which is a stupidly simple thing to do on Windows, Mac, or even on Xorg. For Wayland I had to jump through bunch of stupid hoops just to get it kinda working ...

viraptor 2y ago
Having to deal with windows on Windows regularly being placed on a monitor which didn't exist and windows on MacOS restoring to weird places... None of them are great. You get to choose your preferred set of problems.

LooseMarmoset 2y ago

The Linux desktop is pretty great, for the most part. I would say that in addition to a usable desktop, Linux distributions generally also provide a more stable Windows environment than Windows itself does. I have quite a suite of games in Steam and GoG, and I find that many older games that simply cannot be coaxed into running on Windows can be made to run happily on one version of Wine/Proton or another. There are still some weak areas in desktop Linux if you're running a desktop that isn't Gnome or Plasma - wifi configuration comes to mind immediately, as does sound configuration. Bluetooth can be picky if you don't know to get all the non-free firmware. But really, we're living in a dream era of Linux desktops, if you happen to have lived through the early days of `startx` and XFree86. Hands up if you ever smoked a monitor coil with a bad X config file...

wojciii 2y ago

I use Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for work. I used the previous version until a few days ago. I had no resistance from my corporate overlords over this. I get my work done and I'm more effective as a developer. The corporate MS apps all work in a browser. I don't use any of the office apps for anything serious. The Linux desktop is here already and is accepted. Also KDE is quite nice and snappy most of the time.