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by lj3 3620 days ago
There are no good options these days. I know that's been the song of developers since the beginning of software, but it does seem we've hit a bit of a valley in terms of desktop OS's. Linux still can't quite get its foot in the door. OS X peaked with 10.6.4. Windows peaked with 7. Everything since has been the long, slow decline of trying to mimic mobile's success and failing.
1 comments

Wholeheartedly agree.

I want Windows 10s graphics performance, Linux' kernel/CLI tools/open source mindset and OS X' graphical applications/UI design/integration with my my other devices.

Currently using OS X, but the hardware situation is frustrating (has always been, but currently at it's worst since ~10 years), the software quality is declining and Apple's ongoing direction towards iOS doesn't fit me.

Using Linux on my PC is frustrating, the graphics situation is terrible. All I want is 60 fps vsync'd performance, fluid scrolling, no choppiness when moving or resizing windows. Also, there is still a lack of many important applications (Adobe, MS Office). The whole Gtk vs. Qt situation also aggravates this.

Windows, for me, as a developer, is a total disaster, not only does it differ totally from my usual UNIX environment with it's completely different way of handling files and directories, but I also dislike the software: font rendering is terrible (in my eyes), the switch to UWP is terrible, as is the platform (UWP) itself, to me, the lack of choice is even worse than on OS X. But Windows seems to be the only OS at the moment to run without major problems on hardware of my choice with good graphics performance.

I really wished Linux would get it's graphics stack straight. I know it's not the individual developer's fault (and most certainly, the NVIDIA/AMD didn't help much in the past), but the current situation is still somewhat subpar. Still, the choices at the moment all frustrate me, so I stick to what I have.

What GPU do you have, and which driver stack do you use?
The machine on which I installed Linux had a Core i7 4770, so it came with an Intel HD 4600. This chip did well, but of course the performance is not enough, so I installed my GTX 770. The proprietary driver made many problems, reported wrong refresh rates (Compiz never got above 30 fps, unless I manually told it the refresh rate, which breaks my multi monitor setup). I tried mutter (Gnome 3), Compton and Compiz, but none of them could easily deliver sane, smooth 60 fps using vsync.

Kwin from KDE actually managed that, but the performance was very bad, whenever I started playing a YouTube video for example, scrolling got choppy and to a maximum of 30 fps.