[_8j50]

I have found time to be the biggest factor. I use to have hours every day to tinker with Linux, I enjoy the tinkering personally and I can endure the lack of features. But at some point I began spending more than 8h on average on my work and really needed a break each day to not get burned out and take care of *health,on top of which I have a backlog of things to study up on for $work, any platform (including windows) that gets out of my way is welcome.

Not FOSS in general, but specifically the Linux desktop ecosystem is very chaotic. There is this rush to get a close-enough adoptation of features from other desktops which in itself adds chaos. I did learn a lot from dealing with the chaos but even when I had free time, practical things like editing government forms or sending a resume in a specific format (converting botches the formatting) made me almost pull my hair out.

Unpopular opinion: Linux desktops needs to be proprietary software friendly. As in accept blob installers that can install desktop applications that work well on any major DE and without consideration for package managers. Paid apps should also be a thing on Linux.

[vladvasiliu]

> Unpopular opinion: Linux desktops needs to be proprietary software friendly. As in accept blob installers that can install desktop applications that work well on any major DE and without consideration for package managers. Paid apps should also be a thing on Linux.

Isn't this already the case? I'm running Spotify and Steam games with no issues here.

While I agree with your greater point that a system that gets out of your way is nice, I always find myself swearing when using Windows and trying to bend macOS to do things the way I want. In the end I just gave up and went back to Linux on a "basic" PC (no Nvidia or multiple GPUs on my laptop).

The two major things I miss are HD streaming on PrimeVideo and Photoshop, both of which work well on Windows and macOS. For the former I bought I firetv stick and for the latter, I dual boot (I only need it occasionally).

[_8j50]

They have to do a lot of work coming up with custom installers or packages for distros. If you have gentoo+kde for example you can't just download a blob, open it and just have it work.

It depends on what you are doing I guess. I remember getting frustrated at windows too. Linux is the best at being configurable and controllable from an administrative workload perspective but not from a productivity or entertainment application UX.

[diffeomorphism]

> you can't just download a blob, open it and just have it work

Isn't that exactly what appimages are? E.g. download Krita, double click, done.

Also, I thought with mobile people finally realized that "download blobs" is much worse than just installing from stores/repos? Even Windows has winget by now.

[_8j50]

That's the problem with big picture thinking. You are right, in the grand scheme of things it is better. But as a consumer it sucks. Which repo? Now I have to maintain repos alongside apps? Why can't the app take care of its own compatibility and upgrade needs? Why am I involved? I just want to use the damn thing without interruption.

On mac, I don't use their appstore, I just get dmg images and get going. Same on windows. On linux, I try to stick to the package manager but man! The moment I touch python I regret not using venv and avoiding any interaction with the system's python almost every time. Or if a distro package lacks some feature because of distro decisions which should have been install time decisions and now I have to build from source and figure out aclocal dev packages,deps,ugh...I accept the pain, part of then package but I won't pretend it feels good.

[diffeomorphism]

> Which repo? Now I have to maintain repos alongside apps? Why can't the app take care of its own compatibility and upgrade needs? Why am I involved? I just want to use the damn thing without interruption.

Which is exactly why distros have very big repos, iOS has exactly one store and so does android (yeah, yeah amazon, fdroid...; few people install these). So that you never, ever have to care about that.

Simple rule of thumb as a consumer: If it is not in the repo/store/steam then it does not exist. Same for iOS or android by the way: If you need to jailbreak/root for an app, for the average user it might as well not exist.

> On mac, I don't use their appstore, I just get dmg images and get going. Same on windows.

Yeah, same for appimages. And you don't use the mac appstore because it currently is much worse than the comparable linux offering. Yet, both apple and MS are clearly pushing in that direction.

> and now I have to build from source and figure out aclocal dev packages,deps,ugh...

Er, no you don't. If the mac .dmg has those same issues you don't do that, if the windows .exe has those same issues you don't do that. You simply say "that sucks" and go on with your life and install the "fixed" one half a year later. In fact for windows software that seems so much more painful (compared to linux) that I would not even attempt it. It is nice that linux is so much better at that, but still as a user you simply don't do that.

[_8j50]

> Simple rule of thumb as a consumer: If it is not in the repo/store/steam then it does not exist. Same for iOS or android by the way: If you need to jailbreak/root for an app, for the average user it might as well not exist.

Forget all that. I am talking about gary's clipboard manager or something. This is crazy, you can't even install elasticsearch or Mongo without adding a repo!

My whole point was this approach works om servers but on desktops, the use case is different. I want random apps by random people on their random site. Not distro accepted and approved stuff that was digested through layers of bureaucracy and one size fits all crowdpleasing. That is obviously not working.

> Er, no you don't. If the mac .dmg has those same issues you don't do that, if the windows .exe has those same issues you don't do that.

I don't have those issues on mac and windows because the gatekeeping distro maintainers aren't choosing how to build or preconfigure it. It is a direct relationship between I the consumer and the developer. No middle man! No system deps (well.. except on mac with homebrew but not dmg)

[sph]

> custom installers or packages for distros

Heard of Flathub?

[smoldesu]

I really wish I hadn't.

[sph]

Yawn. You've told us about your hate for Flatpak multiple times—we discussed it before. Good bait though.

[smoldesu]

You've also suggested Flatpak as a panacea for packaging several times. There's really nothing to discuss here; I'm just letting people know that from a user perspective, dealing with Flatpak feels like a second job.

[nyanpasu64]

Funny, I've experienced breakage in "happy-path" operations on macOS, that I haven't had recently on Linux. On Arch, building SDL apps is accomplished by installing packages systemwide. On macOS, setting up Qt Creator with CMake and Ninja is accomplished by installing CMake and Ninja... oh wait CMake can't find Ninja because $PATH is only edited for apps launched from a terminal, not Qt Creator! And on M1 Mac, Homebrew installs libraries to /opt/homebrew/, so the average build system can't even find the SDL you install there. I haven't figured out yet how to make apps include that path.

On Linux, having gdb launch apps is easy, though debugging running apps needs sudo or tinkering with yama. On macOS, having lldb launch a release-mode app (eg. ls or cat) requires disabling SIP then entering your admin password or Touch ID. And Valgrind doesn't work on Mac.

True, editing government forms on Linux is a pain. Chrome is close to usable, though its formatting is iffy. Though I dread contaminating Windows installations with Adobe's bloatware.

And I've had Arch and Paru break sometimes, rebuilding software and such.

[kitsunesoba]

Getting Linux to a 100% satisfactory state has proven quite difficult for me. Admittedly, this is likely because I'm not shaping my hardware choices around using Linux, but it's proven difficult nonetheless.

Point in case, my Thinkpad X1 Nano which I was toying with the idea of flipping over to a pure Linux machine recently. Most of its hardware is supported well by Linux (Intel iGPU, Intel networking, etc and no bizarro components like you tend to see in cheaper laptops), but it comes with a display that's best run at 150% or 175% UI scale, which Linux still struggles to get right. Using the latest Fedora as a base so I'm not missing out on newer additions, I tried GNOME and KDE Plasma under both Wayland and X11 as well as Cinnamon under just X11 (since it lacks Wayland support) and none of them handled fractional scaling correctly/optimally across all the apps I need to use.

Meanwhile, Windows 10 and 11 on the same machine handle UI scaling fine, even with apps I wouldn't expect that from.

So to use Linux, I'd need to make a concession somewhere, whether that's with some apps not rendering their UI correctly or by using a laptop that has a "normal" DPI screen and probably the terribly low screen brightness that typically comes with those panels. That concession-making is not fun.

[awilfox]

Time is one of the big factors for me, too. One of my favourite stories to tell about my initial migration is when still had a laptop running Linux, I noticed that the Lock Screen was "stuck" for about 5 seconds every time I opened the lid. The Mac didn't do that; it was immediately ready for input when I opened it. Multiply that by three lid events per day and I wasted six hours of my life on a lock screen. I don't even want to think about all the time I wasted waiting for the lagging I had in i965 when scrolling pages in Firefox.

> desktop applications that work well on any major DE and without consideration for package managers

The ability to run proprietary software like that was a goal of the LSB. Everyone abandoned the LSB effort because it was preventing the CADT Model (https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html) from rewriting the stack every 12 months. (Sorry, I am a bit jaded in this regard.)

[_8j50]

That's a good point, it all adds up. Small inconveniences multiply over time.

Even windows vs mac, a mac with less resources than windows performs much better for me and I am so much more productive. On windows everything lags, crashes, freezes when monitors are plugged in, hardware changes, wakes up from sleep and it is horrible at the amount of disk i/o it uses. I constantly have to reboot it else it falls apart. I could go months without rebooting a mac.

[kaba0]

I still on the opinion that for development, linux is the superior option. Given it does change somewhat depending on programming language, but windows is:

slowish when it comes to file operations (so for example it will take eons to delete a node_modules folder, though that is only partially the fault of windows) and has “strange” file locking mechanisms where I will get insanely angry for not allowing me to delete that shitty file n levels deep because some software is using it. Also, not being UNIXy enough, which is the common target of dev tools.

I am currently using OSX for work, but first of all, I have to believe that the kernel is simply behind the linux one in terms of resource management. E.g. intellij can’t import one of the projects because it will choke on Too many open files. I have never ever had to change this kernel param on linux for example.. second, window management is quite bad and that changing desktops must take 0.1ms is really infuriating. Also, I do like their sandboxing (in that they have one at least compared to linux’s complete lack of security) but I would have expected it being able to handle runtime permission changes. Me having to go to settings to allow screen sharing and then restart the app is quite bad.

And finally, linux kernel-wise is much better than these I believe (which is not that surprising that it pretty much runs the internet with huge players investing in this aspect quite heavily). And while I don’t like every aspect of gnome, but the most recent version is buttery smooth, and desktop switching is actually as fast as my gesture is (which is strangely what iphones do best, yet osx’s animation is constant minimum duration..). On supported hardware bluetooth is quite good especially with pipewire, and wayland is a very welcome direction. My only gripe is the lack of security.

[vmception]

Time has been what I liked about MacOS. Just get right to business. I'm not sure how much of that is true any more, and most linux distributions that boot into a GUI have been nice enough for me too without having to tinker with settings, but I do know that Windows is still a cluster of immediately needing to go into settings before I get anything done, almost every time.