[Nextgrid]

> What can the Linux Desktop ecosystem learn from this?

Usability and functionality trumps ideology.

The Linux world has spent (and is still spending) insane amounts of time & effort on ideological battles such as software freedom or the endless arguments against systemd while commercial OSes put that time towards actual functionality and end up ahead most of the time.

I don't care how "free" your thing is, none of that freedom is useful if I can't use the thing because it just can't do what I need it to do.

[nananana45]

Usability and functionality of linux beats osx for me though. I've been made do use mac in last two jobs, and on personal laptop I use plain ubuntu. IMO Ubuntu has the nicest UX, and even though I probably use mac:ubuntu 70:30 of time, I still didn't start liking mac, so it's not because lack of familiarity. And I don't think I've got kernel panic on my personal linux, and on every mac I've had I've got at least one.

The worst thing about mac for me is how the things are named, it is very often that I want to find some option and it's just named differently than I'd expect

[goosedragons]

Besides running the latest and greatest MS Office and Photoshop (which is entirely out of the hands of Linux developers) what can't you do? You can browse the modern web, do office and productivity tasks, develop, game, watch a movie etc.

Most of people's complaints with Linux are things entirely controlled by 3rd parties like specific software and DRM for crap like Blu-rays and 4K Netflix. Modern DEs like KDE and GNOME are extremely usable and functional.

[throwaway284534]

In my opinion as a Linux and Mac user, a lack of consistent user experience. And I’m not talking about raw functionality, but the character and demeanor of a Linux computer. Here’s a short laundry list of personal gripes:

I don’t know why HiDPI support is still so flakey, especially so with multi-monitor setups. Sometimes apps just work, and other times the UI is comically small or oversized. The only *nix adjacent OS I’ve ever seen address this ChromeOS and MacOS.

Sleeping, hibernation, deep snoozing or whatever the term is — I can’t trust a single Linux distro to not drain a laptop battery dry while the lid is closed. I’ve tried all the tricks and there’s always a catch, usually me opening the laptop to a kernel panic, ironically with 1% battery left and the processor underclocked to Celeron speeds.

Lastly and most certainly not least, the trackpad support. “Synaptics” is a synonym for unpleasant, bumbling, and janky. Granted, Windows laptops usually don’t do much better, but these clueless drivers make large trackpads basically unusable. True palm rejection seems to remain illusive, partially fixed with like dead zones, keypress timeouts, and other bandaids. And please don’t bring up Bill Harding. He’s doing his best, but the fact is that one single person carrying this responsibility speaks volumes for how much the community values this experience.

And yes, I’m aware that these things don’t just happen. I’m just saying what’s wrong. I can only send so many pull requests before giving up and buying a MacBook.

Edit:Two more things. Distros need to pick some better branding. Names like Ubuntu, Pop_OS, Elementary… It’s impossible for regular people to understand these things. And get rid of Tux on the boot screen. A penguin with a gut is unpleasant to look at and makes the whole OS seem like a niche interest for computer nerd tropes of the 90s.

[awilfox]

> I can only send so many pull requests before giving up and buying a MacBook.

It's funny because that was what happened to me, too. I believe my final set of contributions was an attempt at fixing some low-level thing in Mesa that was causing the entire X server to fail to start with some older Radeon GPU. The Mesa devs themselves were helpful, but the community around them were abusing me to just buy a newer Radeon. In 2020. With the chip shortage and crypto insanity.

> branding

Personally, I think Elementary is a fine name for an OS. I haven't seen Tux on a boot screen in over a decade, but I guess if you compile your own kernel and enable CONFIG_LOGO, you might.

[goosedragons]

Is Macintosh really a better name than Elementary, Ubuntu or Fedora? And what big distro has Tux anywhere still?

If you do a bit of research you can get a Linux laptop with working sleep and a good trackpad or just buy one from an OEM like System76 if you can't be bothered. You wouldn't expect a good macOS experience on a random $600 HP laptop so why do you expect that from Linux? The fact that so much DOES work is impressive.

[mbreese]

> You wouldn't expect a good macOS experience on a random $600 HP laptop so why do you expect that from Linux?

Because we are lead to believe that Linux will run on anything. And if it doesn’t, then because it’s open source we can just add support ourselves. One of the main avenues for Linux adoption is predicated on the notion that you can install it on hardware you already own.

But those two notions are wildly unrealistic. Mac provides an outstanding user experience because of the coupling of software and hardware. It’s a lot easier to support a select handful of hardware drivers. And because of that, the system tends to work better as a whole (quality trumps quantity).

“Doing a bit of research” to find a compatible Linux laptop is not something just anyone can do. But anyone can walk into an Apple store (or buy online) and be guaranteed to walk out with a working Mac.

The number of voices working for a “Linux desktop” is staggering and no one has a unifying vision. It has been this way for decades. That’s okay. Linux doesn’t need to “win” the desktop. It just has to be useful for those who decide that they are more productive (or just enjoy) using Linux over something else.

I’d even argue that the most successful user-facing Linux projects were done by a group completely outside of the traditional Linux desktop world: Android and ChromeOS. In both cases, they were driven by a single entity (Google) where they could be opinionated as to what to keep and how things should be designed.

[throwaway284534]

Respectfully, I believe we have different standards of a “good trackpad.” You’re absolutely right that a premium price would command a better experience. I’m just not seeing it. System76 is selling a rebranded Clevo shell with all the issues I expressed above, with all models starting around the $1,500 price range.

The closest thing to a Mac experience on Linux I’ve experienced was a Chromebook Pixel running a chroot, and even that has its own limitations.

[hnaccount_rng]

Agreed with everything except the last one. Tux is one of the main reasons I'd like to use Linux. And yes I just like the Mascot...

[TobyTheDog123]

You make a lot of points surrounding how it's not up to Linux developers.

Yeah, it's unfair, but as a user, I don't care at all whose fault it is. I don't care if Linux developers can't do something about it. If I can't do something using an OS, I'll switch to a different one.

Not all of the reasons OSX still wins out on UIX are based on design/dev/talent, but rather partnerships, and adoption/popularity.

[technobabbler]

IMHO, as a user first and dev second, "things entirely controlled by 3rd parties" aren't a bug, they're a feature. That means someone else gets to jump through the hoops to make it work, not me. The vast majority of useful & fun things on a computer are made by corporate 3rd parties, not GNU & Linux volunteers.

Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.

I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos.

MacOS, and to a much lesser extent, Windows, mostly stay out of the way and and let my apps and sites take center stage. Linux fails that basic test most of the time, favoring purity of ideology over basic user needs. When I have to jump through hoops to get some trivial device working or an app that takes 3 seconds to install on any other OS, that doesn't say to me "this is a great operating system, I can write my own hack to fix this", it says to me "this still isn't ready, two decades later".

I use Linux at work all the time and it's a great workhorse, but at home, I don't want an operating system whose primary selling point is that it requires even more of my time.

[prmoustache]

"Whether it's Netflix, games, Office/Photoshop, obscure drivers, whatever... I can just run an app and expect it to work, and if it doesn't, it's not my problem. I'll wait a while and someone else will fix it.

I don't have to tweak obscure config files or apply patches or sideload package manager repos."

I am not sure what you mean.

I have been a linux user for the last 25years and I haven't had to apply any patch manually for the last 15 at the very least, nor looking for obscure drivers.

A config file is the same as an option/settings menu, with the advantage that it is usually much better documented.

Nobody told you that you can watch netflix on Linux as well as running games, use office and powerful photo editing apps as well?

[technobabbler]

You probably don't run the same hardware or software, then. DRM doesn't quite work on Linux (so no 4k). MS Office, a business need, requires WINE or similar. No Adobe. There's Proton now for games, but only a tiny sliver of the full Steam library, especially for less-popular indie games (which is where most of the innovation is in PC gaming).

I've had bad drivers melt my dining table when the fan wouldn't kick in and the CPU didn't thermally throttle, during the Ubuntu install process. I've had to manually adjust display settings in the command line because various pieces of the UI couldn't agree with each other (Ubuntu's UI vs Gnome/KDE vs some other stuff), and hi-DPI, > 60 refresh rate, HDR, ultrawide, etc. were all a pain to set up, especially with multiple monitors. And some apps just don't exist for Linux, like the Sonos controller, motherboard firmware upgrade exes, commercial GIS software, Lightroom, etc.

All of that is just plug and play on Windows, and sometimes on Mac. With Linux it's always a multi-hour ordeal, all to end up with a poor ripoff of the Windows 7 UI or whatever Ubuntu's latest experiment is. Just, why?

The command-line is great, but zsh on macOS takes care of those needs 99% of the time. Among high-hassle tools, running WSL on Windows makes for overall less headaches than running a Windows VM or Wine on Linux. In between, Parallels on macOS is that sweet spot of usability and broad compatibility for me personally. There's nothing that I NEED on Linux on the desktop, so I'm happy to set it up on the server side and use something else at home.

Try as I might, every few years I install a few Linux distros to test them out, because people keep swearing they are better and totally ready. I'm sorry, but for an average lazy user like me, they're just not. ChromeOS is as close as any distro has come, and I'd happily install that if it didn't require a 3rd-party repackaging.

My next laptop might be a Chromebook, which is superficially and technically Linux I guess, but minus the regular chaos of the normal Linux ecosystem. I've never just never had a good experience with desktop Linux outside of Android and ChromeOS, sorry. Maybe you're lucky, or maybe I'm unlucky, but it's always been a hassle and never worth it...

[prmoustache]

Adobe softwares can be replaced by other tools and their licensing these day make it something you don't want regardless of the platform it would run on.

Office 365 works well enough on the web, calligra and libreoffice are compatible enough to make it a non issue. You can even upload and work on odf documents on office 365 these days.

I like having 4k in the living room and I have a chromecast for that but I'd rather not have my gf and kids play 4k content while I am working at home and they all have 1080p or lower laptop screen anyway. You don't miss retina if you never used it.

As for the rest of your experience, I guess it comes from poor buying skills. You don't buy a Dell to run MacOS on it. I purchase my laptops and hardware with linux compatibility in mind.

Saying Linux UI is a poor windows 7 ripoff is a lie. I am actually one of the - usually silent - happy gnome 3 user and I think it is a superior desktop UI to anything Microsoft and Apple have produced so far. You get a very focused window without any distraction from unneeded icons and information everywhere and everything can be piloted quickly with the keyboard but also work flawlessly with a touch screen in tablet mode when I flip my Lenovo Yoga.

[awilfox]

> You don't miss retina if you never used it.

This line of thinking baffles me. I should put up with subpar text-rendering and pixelated fonts and widgets because that's how we did things before?

> I guess it comes from poor buying skills.

I purposefully went out of my way to buy a Radeon that was explicitly supported by amdgpu.ko. I poured over driver code to see which USB Wi-Fi would work best. I gave up on 4K back in 2017 because neither Qt nor Gtk were "ready" for High-DPI and bought a 1080p panel instead.

None of this changes the fact that I had to patch things all the time because of bugs. Not hardware bugs, but software bugs. Thread safety bugs. GConf bugs. I found and fixed a bug in systemd because they had the GUID wrong for automatic root mount on IA-64. Firefox was doing swizzling wrong causing window tearing on some GPUs. I even fixed a damn bug in the Rust libc crate related to ioctl(3).

The reason your experience is so good is because people find these bugs and fix them. Like I used to do before I left the community, partially due to this mindset that if the user has a problem the user must be the problem.

[technobabbler]

I don't think it's fair to suggest that my use cases and priorities are less important than yours.

Maybe LibreOffice and GIMP are enough for you. They are not for me, especially in professional contexts where 90% similarity isn't the same as actually compatible, especially when I collaborate with other users and designers. And I actually appreciate the Creative Cloud subscription pricing, which is great for occasional users like me who can sub for a while and then cancel without having to spend thousands of dollars at a time. Software have network effects too, and I don't produce documents and graphics for my own gratification, but to satisfy team and client needs, and telling them "Oh, but it looks fine in LibreOffice, you need to use a real document standard and not some proprietary format" is not really an option. Maybe if you're Stallman and get to dictate the terms. I'm not. I need software that works with what other people use, and software that I can use to get jobs with employers that pay me in dollars and not ideals.

Maybe you don't care about anything but 1080p 16:9 displays. That's fine, but there are others who do. Whether for spreadsheets or vectors or photos, sometimes more pixels are better, and definitely having plug and play support for things like monitor brightness are nice too. It's fine if you don't care about any of that. You don't get to tell me what I care about. Shrug.

As for poor buying skills, eh, I'm perfectly happy running Linux on my phone and servers, Windows on my desktop, macOS on my laptop, and iOS on the iPad. And guess what, I don't even know or care what architecture my microwave runs on. I just don't feel the need to install Linux on everything. Each device has their specialty, whether that's cooking food or playing games or mobile apps or web dev or GIS.

I'm glad you like your Linux UI. I tried Ubuntu on a Yoga 2 a few years ago but didn't like it. To each their own, eh?

[awilfox]

> I haven't had to apply any patch manually for the last 15 at the very least

You're very lucky. I've had to apply patches manually for the majority of my Linux experience, to the point where I can literally recite you the package patch contribution instructions for Fedora, Gentoo, Debian, and Arch from memory.

[prmoustache]

Just buy hardware that is compatible from a start too.

[awilfox]

I can do office and productivity tasks, but not in a way that interops with the tools that others use. It's interesting because Pages can spit out a .docx that Word doesn't mangle too badly, but LibreOffice still can't.

I still haven't seen an answer to my use of AirPlay, either. Apparently Chrome can do this to a Chromecast, but… If I'm already giving my data to a horrible monopolistic company, I'd rather give it to the one that at least pretends to care about user privacy as a feature (Apple), rather than considering user privacy a bug (Google).

KDE has a lot of little nits, too, and it wore on me. Some of the ones I can think of are:

* When KWin crashed, the title bar font went from 12pt to 18pt. I could not fix this unless I ran some specific dbus command in Konsole and then immediately ran `kwin_x11 --replace` afterwards.

* Kickoff doesn't let you click "Applications" to go back to the beginning. I suggested it twice and even tried to implement it myself but they have layered everything so deep in QML I was lost. Apparently, they have redesigned the launcher again in 5.21, which released after I was gone, and now it looks like a bad copy of Windows 10 instead of being somewhat decent. Fabulous!

* KRunner took about four seconds to respond to input, even on a 16 CPU (Talos II) system.

There are plenty of things I loved about KDE too: Kate is amazing, Konsole is a fantastic terminal emulator, and I still use Tellico to this day – I even contributed the Homebrew formula so others can enjoy it on Mac OS. But the experience of using it as a full DE was just not all there for me.

[sofixa]

> It's interesting because Pages can spit out a .docx that Word doesn't mangle too badly, but LibreOffice still can't

While i haven't had any issues with LibreOffice created or edited .docx, last week i discovered Pages tries to force you to use their proprietary format ( which of course nobody supports). If you open a .docx with Pages, make an edit and save it, it wants to save in .pages. You have to export it to .docx.

That's the kind of user hostile bullshit that rarely makes it to Linux-first software, and when it does ( e.g. GNOME disallowing desktop icons or snaps auto-updating) there are alternatives. If Apple don't want you to do something, you're out of luck. Best case scenario someone has made a (usually paid) app that implements a workaround (like Karabiner for basic key combination remappings).

[awilfox]

I agree that it should save to the format it was previously saved in as a default, but it isn't necessarily user-hostile. "Normal" people coming over to a Mac probably want to use Pages, and might even appreciate the transparent conversion of their documents to the native format.

If the option to export was missing, that would be user-hostile IMO. Same with your example of GNOME disallowing desktop icons – the feature is missing, not just something you have to enable.

[Nextgrid]

> what can't you do?

Latest example: I can't install a proprietary driver for certain hardware. The problem isn't just the fact that there isn't a driver available, it's that the infrastructure (ABI or API) to make such a driver is not there for ideological reasons.

Software freedom should also be the freedom to decide whether I'd like to give up said freedom if needed.

[goosedragons]

You can install proprietary drivers for loads of shit. There just needs to be a driver. People do literally all the time for Nvidia cards, WiFi cards and the occasional printer or other thing. Most distros don't force Libre down you're throat.

It's no different on Mac or Windows. You can't slap a 3090 into a Mac Pro and expect macOS to do anything with it because there's no drivers nor can you do anything with an Asterisk PBX card on Windows.