[qwerty456127]

Can you name any end user desktop issues for Linux? I don't know any except lack of native Adobe Photoshop, limited selection of games and inefficient marketing. It already is easy and pleasurable for any reasonably young non-gamer non-geek with Windows7&Mac background to use Ubuntu or Manjaro, just install it, install and pin all the apps they need and no questions emerge.

[rifung]

> Can you name any end user desktop issues for Linux?

I've installed Linux on like 5 of my desktops/laptops. The best way to describe my issues with it are "death by a thousand cuts". Namely that random stuff just doesn't work, either at all or the way I expect or want.

Installing Nvidia drivers is hit or miss. Wifi often doesn't work out of the box. The touchpad experience is far inferior. Also all of the desktop environments I've used have been really ugly (GNOME, KDE, Unity).

Even when installing Linux there are so many options for partitioning (what format you want, swap space size, etc) which are likely overwhelming for non technical users.

[ThenAsNow]

> Also all of the desktop environments I've used have been really ugly (GNOME, KDE, Unity).

This is very much in the eye of the beholder. Linux with KDE has been my daily driver since at least as far back as 2009 (with the KDE 3.5 series), possibly earlier.

In no way would I say it's any uglier than windows, especially now with all the effort to make key GTK applications fit with Qt ones via theming. Windows 10's hodgepodge of old and new styles for things like settings is more offensive to me than anything a Linux graphical desktop does.

Agree the driver situation lagging on Linux vs. Windows is sub-optimal, but when the driver support is there, I don't find Linux to work any more poorly than Windows.

The reality is that every major desktop system has issues, but at least with Linux, if you learn enough about the plumbing, you can go in and try to fix or work around issues that arise. Until we move into a new world of robust, correct-by-construction, non-worse-is-better software, I'll take the lumps I get with Linux over the others whenever I have the choice.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> The reality is that every major desktop system has issues, but at least with Linux, if you learn enough about the plumbing, you can go in and try to fix or work around issues that arise.

Have you ever tried that? You'll find that the plumbing consists of 20 different standards of pipe cobbled together over the past 30 years by dozens of different plumbers, each with their own conception of how plumbing should work but too lazy to tear out the whole thing and replace it so they just patch in their change with duct tape and rubber bands.

And worse, that's the culture the community seems to prefer. Case in point: the one guy who's shown a willingness to unify that plumbing, Lennart Pottering, is loathed for being successful at it.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> Have you ever tried that? You'll find that the plumbing consists of 20 different standards of pipe cobbled together over the past 30 years by dozens of different plumbers, each with their own conception of how plumbing should work but too lazy to tear out the whole thing and replace it so they just patch in their change with duct tape and rubber bands.

This is actually true:), but I defy you to find a desktop OS of which the same isn't true. Did MS ever fix the fact that they have 2 completely different control panels with partially-overlapping functionality? And I know Windows Explorer still can't open certain paths because DOS had a ... poor implementation of device files.

> Pottering, is loathed for being successful at it.

Pottering unified the plumbing by taking a demolition crew to the house and replacing the plumbing and electrical systems while people were living in it, informed us that objects being automatically thrown in the trash if they were on the floor when you left the room was a feature[0], and demanded that all faucet manufacturers adopt a new pipe size that only his plumbing uses[1].

[0] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/commit/97e5530cf20

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11797075 https://github.com/tmux/tmux/issues/428

[uryga]

> Did MS ever fix the fact that they have 2 completely different control panels with partially-overlapping functionality?

if you're referring to the split that came with Windows 8 , there's been (slow) progress in Windows 10. There's still a handful of settings left in the old Control Panel, but most of them have been moved to the new Settings app.

[ThenAsNow]

> Have you ever tried that?

I have. I have been able to find offending runaway Flash sessions and kill them without taking out all my Firefox windows. I have been able to force wifi associations when some software flaw is preventing an automatic join to those networks. In similar situations Windows will simply not enumerate the network and recourse is limited. The examples go on for situations where things don't work.

Look, I agree with you and the criticisms of the CADT development model. I'm not claiming the Linux experience is objectively great, end-of-story. I'm claiming that if the hardware is supported by a mature enough driver (which is true of a lot of hardware!), I don't find the Linux experience to be more frustrating than Windows/Mac, subject to the caveats I made about commercial software in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18444723 . And it's great to not to have to go out of my way to keep the OS vendor from gathering data from my system without my express permission.

Another nice thing about Linux is that it makes a good host for VMs, so for those times when Windows is needed (assuming not for games), it can be kept in a VM with some measure of control.

We are a long way from desktop software utopia, but real breakthroughs probably depend more on rigorously-architected and implemented environments vs. working on the edges of decades-old architectures whose fundamental shortcomings are legion and are implemented in unsafe languages. Windows, MacOS, and Linux (or name your choice of free Unix-alike) all suck in this regard.

> And worse, that's the culture the community seems to prefer. Case in point: the one guy who's shown a willingness to unify that plumbing, Lennart Pottering, is loathed for being successful at it.

I don't know that that's a fair characterization. With some of the people raging, you'll pry their current way of doing business out of their cold dead hands. Others welcome better and more sound ways of doing things <raises hand>. But there are plenty of problems with the ad-hoc, NIH, and questionable software quality approach that the systemd implementers use. There was a front-page HN submission just a day or two ago on readiness protocols (written by J. de Boyne Pollard) covering systemd shortcomings, not to mention udev screwups, dhcp issues (does systemd really need its own dhcp client??), etc. All in all, MHO is that systemd is a significant step forward but suffers mightily from its ad-hoc development approach.

[JdeBP]

So there was!

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18416854

Just for clarification: the punctuation in that sentence should not be mis-read as my FGA on readiness protocols covering udev and DHCP, which it does not. (-:

[qwerty456127]

> Installing Nvidia drivers is hit or miss.

That's why I've specified it as for non-gamers. I have an old built-in Intel graphics controller (the same as on the old MacBook Air model that still has F-keys) and have no problems. Nevertheless I have indeed always been highlighting graphics drivers quality as a permanent problem, nobody ever writes really good ones, even Windows drivers are quirky and Linux drivers are always full of problems in every single version (yet it rarely is too hard to set up a configuration working nicely and forget about that if 3D graphics is not among your primary computer usage tasks).

> Wifi often doesn't work out of the box.

On MacBook only. According to my experience it has always been working out of the box on non-Apple PCs for about 7 years already.

> The touchpad experience is far inferior.

According to my experience exactly the opposite. But I haven't used PCs with multitouch touchpads so it's probable you're right.

> Also all of the desktop environments I've used have been really ugly (GNOME, KDE, Unity).

As for me and whom I've shown it Unity and today KDE5 (as shipped with Manjaro) look great (old KDEs looked ugly, I agree). And the look can be customized to whatever you may desire.

> Even when installing Linux there are so many options for partitioning (what format you want, swap space size, etc) which are likely overwhelming for non technical users.

It's exactly the same as with Windows: either use default partitioning or whatever partitioning you want, the only difference is Linux installers usually allow you to define more complex partitioning without having to use 3-rd party tools like PartitionMagic/Acronis if you want. Anyway, it is always a great idea for a non-geek user to ask a geek friend of theirs to install an OS for them rather than to do it themselves, regardless to what OS they would like to install.

[weberc2]

Lack of a good financial alternative to Quicken keeps my dad off of Linux, but the chasm between Linux desktops and Mac is huge (I wish it weren't so, as I'm very fond of the idea of a high-quality Linux desktop experience). It's not just the availability of apps, but the general quality of the offerings and overall user experience. A lot of this comes down to the fact that GTK and Qt are absolutely terrible compared to native Mac toolkits.

Another huge problem for Linux desktops is the lack of support for high-quality hardware--for example, I haven't found any Linux laptops with trackpads that are in the same ballpark as Macs' (and installing Linux on Macs and configuring/calibrating it to behave sanely is a huge pain).

[ThenAsNow]

This is a very fair point about Linux being an uncompelling target for commercial software. Sadly, even many engineering tools such as CAD systems have stopped supporting Linux.

There is a lot of value to having some organization have both end-to-end responsibility and authority for the functioning of end-user software stacks such as desktop environments. Even the Red Hat model is not enough to keep all the myriad independently-developed and maintained pieces of FOSS synchronized and moving in the right direction collectively to make an appealing target for commercial desktop development. I don't know if there is a viable solution to this problem building on the FOSS ecosystem as it exists.

And of course, irrespective of what RMS would wish, it seems the only people willing to work on a lot of the hard and unsexy problems are in fact commercial developers that need to make money from the sale of the software, not just support.

[dorianm]

Last time I used Ubuntu it didn't have support for horizontal scrolling for instance and all the answers online were outdated dconf-editor paths

[binomialxenon]

I've been on Debian for two years and I've never not had horizontal scrolling.

[StreamBright]

Yeah like you know UX.