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What year is this? Linux desktop experience is fantastic in 2020. It has been for several years. That's bordering FUD you're spreading.

coreblocks 2137 days ago

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, I've had it on my machines in many different flavors, ever since 2010. However for at least the past 3 desktops I've had, there were always some issues during installation or fiddling to do after installation to get things running smoothly.

For example, my current home PC has a Intel i9-9900ks on a nice gigabyte motherboard and a NVIDIA 2070 Super. When I try to boot into Ubuntu 20.04, the display driver always fails (black screen / a mess of pixels). I had to boot with some grub flags in order to get to a stage where I could install the proprietary drivers. This is because of the open source drivers for NVIDIA GPUs being terrible, it's not the fault of Linux but that's not the point, it's a bad user experience for at least half of the users with a fairly modern discrete GPU.

A few months ago my girlfriend (who has a degree in computer science and is currently getting her Phd in mathematics) tried to install Ubuntu on her Razer Blade 15 (2018). Initially the she had some trouble with getting the NVME drive to show up (it was an issue with UEFI settings), we eventually fixed that but after installation, the wifi didn't work. At that point she gave up and ended up going with WSL, she was up and running 30 mins later.

Maybe if you buy a dell developer edition or thinkpad, you will have no troubles.

The average user is not going to want to hear that they have to either return their NVIDIA card and get a AMD one (a nonquestion for people who need CUDA / tensorflow) or go read some wiki about how to resolve the issue. They will just go back to windows/mac.

freeone3000 2136 days ago

People who need cuda will be running the nv blob anyway, not the noveau driver. Linux's obsession with open-source is holding it back from usefulness.

djsumdog 2137 days ago

Same here, and I prefer Linux systems that give me more control, so I take the time to install Void and Gentoo on all my machines (and even my primary dedicated server runs Void).

But whenever I try to install Ubuntu or Fedora on a laptop, it just installs and boots fine.

m4rtink 2137 days ago

I recently noticed how severely is Android limitted in this during the recent Android Firefox update fiasco.

On desktop linux I could have just backed up the profile folder and downgraded the package & it might not have hit the repositories at all due to negative user feedback.

umanwizard 2137 days ago

Example from 2020: Running Ubuntu with two displays each of which has a different scaling factor requires switching to Wayland, because on X11, any window that touches the edge of one of the displays will run unusably slowly. (I don’t know why.) A non-technical “typical desktop user” would never have figured this out.

This is on a fully supported Linux machine (XPS 13 9300 Developer Edition).

m4rtink 2137 days ago

Well, thats mostly due to Ubuntu still defaulting to X. Fedora switched to Wayland by default back in 2016 and even RHEL 8 (released 2019) defaults to Wayland.

umanwizard 2137 days ago

I feel like that just reinforces my point. Figuring out which random unsupported distro to install on the Linux laptop you bought is even less feasible for non-technical users than choosing a different login session on Ubuntu.

This guy isn't looking for solutions.

StavrosK 2137 days ago

Is there a way to use Wayland in Ubuntu? I run Kubuntu, not sure if that comes with Wayland by default.

umanwizard 2137 days ago

Ubuntu ships with both, so you just need to choose a different desktop session at login time.

Install Linux Mint and be done with it

michaelmrose 2137 days ago

Linux desktop experience with tweaking is in my humble opinion best in class. The linux desktop experience out of the box is acceptable on systems where it works.

Fantastic is a matter of opinion and I have a feeling that the majority wouldn't share that opinion.

People with your opinion are most likely used to buying hardware that is supported or at least not buying stuff that almost certainly wont work and installing and moving on. You think the parent poster is full of it.

People with the parents opinion are used to buying something that works well with windows trying to install Linux finding 3 things that don't work well fixing 2 out of 3 and quitting in frustration. He thinks you are full of it or willing to devote far more time to fixing broken shit.

nickstinemates 2137 days ago

No it isn't. It's still garbage. Mutli-adapter, multi monitor setups are still a nightmare. Graphics performance is still atrocious.

I guess if you need a thin client to your cloud services, linux desktop is great. Not really for lots of other things.

dx87 2137 days ago

What distro are you using? I've been using multi-monitor setups for years, and it works with zero configuration on Ubuntu and Debian.

nickstinemates 2137 days ago

With more than 1 (high end) video card?

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-5700-xt-rx-5700-xt-t...

michaelmrose 2137 days ago

Graphic performance is excellent if you don't insist on say using Nvidia hardware with the open source Nouveau drivers everyone knows sucks. Open source AMD and closed source Nvidia both provide good performance.

Going with just US figures the average spent on a computer in 2020 is 632 usd total. A high end card on the other hand is $400 to $800 each. a 2000-3000 pc with 800-1600 in graphics hardware is probably somewhat up there in the 99th percentile of configurations its pretty niche even so I cannot imagine any even technical challenges whatsoever with all the monitors hooked to the same GPU whereas a high end card ought to support 3 monitors.

So now are we talking about a 2000-3000 dollar pc with 2 dedicated GPUS with 4+ monitors?

Brief research seems to suggest this is challenging. Improving it would also seem not to benefit many users. Even talking merely about windows gamers only 1% used crossfire or sli.

There is even a plausible solution for people who want lots of displays so long as they are ok with a single gpu.

Although supporting 2 to 3 monitors is incredibly common there are actually cards which support 4-6.

For example

There is probably no good solution for multiple GPUs + multiple displays because virtually nobody uses it now and longer term it seems even less will.

The logical decision is to go with the strongest single GPU with enough outputs for the monitors you plan to drive.

nickstinemates 2137 days ago

I appreciate you proving my point. High end desktops are not viable on Linux, which is a shame, because I really wanted it to work.

My experience aligns far more with parent's than yours. The Linux Desktop experience is still pretty garbage.

julienfr112 2137 days ago

Here is an example : take an Intel nuc : Ubuntu, everything works out of box. Win10 ? Let's download a WiFi driver on Intel site ! Let's hope you have Ethernet or a windows 10 supported wifi device. And no, the wifi dongle lying around is too old, windows 7 only...

What is your example ?

Nextgrid 2137 days ago

Bought an Intel NUC, installed Ubuntu, no hardware-accelerated video decoding on Firefox and Chromium needed to be compiled manually with a patch.

This functionality works out of the box on Windows (not that I installed it, as Windows 10 is a dealbreaker to me so I ended up returning the NUC and choosing something else).

yqot 2137 days ago

Here's a counter example. Buy a thinkpad and try to put whatever distro you want on it.

seanhunter 2136 days ago

Have a thinkpad X1 Carbon Pro and have run fedora, ubuntu and Qubes OS on it at various points. Have Ubuntu on it now (as that's the distro my company wants everyone to use). In all of those distros the install has been completely trouble-free and everything works completely fine.

Also I don't use wayland and don't have the scaling perf problem that someone else was talking about.

likeclockwork 2137 days ago

Have an X1 Yoga here with Arch on it, it was painless.

Bought an X390 for my mom last year, tossed Ubuntu on it after putting in a larger NVMe. (she prefers to use a more 'mainstream' distro so she can follow tutorials to setup new dev environments for things she's tinkering with) Her Macbook Air is weighing down paper now.

StavrosK 2137 days ago

The Air is actually a quite good Ubuntu machine, I used it for several years, years ago.

I just did. 202p Lenovo T490. Installed Linux Mint on all three of them, one for me and the rest for family members.

Everything works out of the box

Legogris 2137 days ago

My guess is the contrast in experience can come from difference in hardware. Drivers can be a big hassle for desktop if you're unlucky. Occasionally when I get new hardware that's not a laptop it can be frustrating with GPU or (curses) Bluetooth drivers. It's been improving a lot, though. Lenovo and Dell have really gotten better over the years.

Funnily enough, Windows is going to phase out drivers from Windows Update, so I can see the scales shift.

My pains with Linux rarely have to do with hardware. It is a gigantic complex incongruent mess of an operating system where software routinely requires hours of my time to make it work properly, google searches have a tendency to land you on 5 year old pages, which in Linux terms means they are now 3 major revisions out of date, and the community is full of condescending evangelists.

Shared404 2137 days ago

I'm thinking it's been a few years, and/or you and the parent decided to install arch/gentoo instead of ubuntu/fedora.

Maybe Linux would get wider adoption if its evangelists weren't so condescending? Maybe instead of assuming everyone who's had a bad experience with your OS must be missing something obvious, you should give the benefit of the doubt?

Until earlier this year I ran Lubuntu on 4/5 of the PCs I own. I've tried other distros but that one worked the best for me and it was still a giant pain in the ass. There's only 1 Linux PC left in my fleet now and it is mostly because I haven't turned it on in 6 months.

Shared404 2136 days ago

You are of course correct. I'm sorry about my outburst.

I've had too many experiences with "Haha linux on desktop bad nerd haha" people, and let it get to me. I apologize.

skinnymuch 2136 days ago

Not sure if the replier was only specifically talking to you. I don’t like Linux [on the desktop]. Most responses in geekier online communities do seem to be smug and/or assume you don’t know things.

That was happening in this thread too outside of you.

For reference, I too have spent a decent amount of time with Lubuntu. I doubt I’ll switch from Mac for foreseeable future.

Firehawke 2137 days ago

My experiences with Debian have been pretty clean outside of needing to pre-prepare the binary blob package for the ethernet and wifi drivers on the slightly older laptop that I wanted to install it on. This was expected due to Debian's stance on non-free packages on the install media.

Pretty much any other modern distro install has gone 100% cleanly with no prep-work needed.

Shared404 2137 days ago

That pretty closely matches my experiences as well. The only exception is that my first experience with Linux on something other than a raspberry pi was an optimus laptop.

NVIDIA issues aside, I've never had any issues with using a desktop oriented distro as a desktop. Way fewer issues than I've had with Windows.

symlinkk 2137 days ago

Let’s hear some specific examples.

Installing software that isn't in your distro's repo, either because it is too new, too old, or was just never adopted by a maintainer, is usually a pain in the ass.

Software routinely requires tiresome google searches that largely land you in out of date non-documentation in order to get basic functionality (like say, drag and drop) working.

Getting help from the community is basically impossible because whatever you're trying to do you're "using the wrong software/distro" or "don't really want that".

Oh yeah, and any time you bring up these sort of things someone like you shows up to do their damnedest to dismiss these complaints. Often by comparing these problems to similar problems in Windows, as though that is somehow changes anything.