At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS, all the news about Windows is how they are making it worse for everyone.
And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bundled with the OS I paid for.
Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, so MacOS it is until Linux desktop gets to a more reliable state. I wouldn't be shocked it gets there - I believe Valve made relatively low investments and got a lot out of it, GPU vendors have an incentive to support it - for compute workloads and the gaming on Linux is becoming a thing. Also for office stuff the EU-US hostility could force EU to look for alternative software providers and move away from Microsoft.
Actually thinking about this just made me donate some $ to Gnome project.
I really want to like GNOME, but GNOME's developers have almost as much arrogance and contempt for their users as Microsoft.
As an example, the power button can no longer be configured to power off the machine, because this is "too destructive". I'm not talking about defaults -- they removed the ability for me to make this choice for myself. Not even Microsoft has done that.
On my machine, the power button is recessed and requires quite a bit of force to press. It is impossible to press accidentally, but the GNOME developers apparently know best.
My favorite GNOME developer's hill to die on is their refusal to implement a system tray or work with the rest of the Linux desktop community to create an alternative to the system tray. Don't get me wrong there has been a abuse of the system tray but the refusal to acknowledge that there is a use case for persistent notifications or status indicators is ridiculous. there suggestion is that notifications are the solution is so inadequate. It's pretty telling that their arguments aren't sound when they have chosen to implement traditional system tray items such as a battery indicator and volume indicator as built in items on the task bar but they dismiss the idea that a chat app status indicator would be useful.
I guess, those of us who actually like the idea should be more vocal. As otherwise the devs would read the comments and decide nobody likes what they do. Personally, I’m super happy about current Gnome. Coming after 10+ years of macOS. I don’t want to see that ugly mess of visual distractions on my screen all the time. Basic vitals like battery is okay for me. Distractions from apps, I don’t need them. They serve zero purpose to me, and being a computer user of 20+ years, I never interacted with those widgets. Even on Windows. So, kudos to Gnome team, I really like Gnome since 42 or when they started this radical simplicity thing. I enjoy the system each and every day I interact with it, and it does not wear off. It’s not like it looks cool, but after a couple of days I understand it isn’t.
Having to interact with them, even having to hide them, is forcing them upon me. I don’t understand a reason for them to exist. They’re simply useless to me and a sign of a complex design.
GNOME is open to adding a system tray. There are even designs for it.
There is just no one working on the technology. TingPing, an Igalia employee and GNOME contributor, was working on a new D-Bus protocol for it, but the work stopped. There is a PR up on the freedesktop xdg-specs repository.
So rather than disable the system tray, or use other applications that don't have inconsistent scaled and styled icons, you'd prefer that nobody who uses Gnome is able to have a system tray?
I prefer not having to worry about it at all, and I don't. Its tidy by default and stays tidy no matter what I install. Many other "deficiencies" in Gnome, like the lack of desktop filing, or the austere file manager contribute to this tidiness.
The first versions of Gnome 3 did indeed have a system tray for backwards compatibility, and it was hidden out of the way until you needed it. Eventually it was scrapped once enough software was updated to not rely on it.
If somebody insists on having a messy UI, they can use literally any other DE available for Linux.
It does a lot of things, though many are somewhat subtle, like screen locking timeout and stuff with networking and a bunch of utility programs and so on. I like to start off Xfce Debian and plaster i3wm over it, it's the best 'power user' setup I've come across.
I wouldn't hesitate to put a 'regular' computer user in front of Xfce, it strikes a nice combination of simple and discoverable with very few annoyances. It's also where I go when I want to use some many-windowed application that doesn't fit into tiling.
While it may seem overblown, it's absolutely RIDICULOUS how fast it flies on contemporary systems, and even older ones.
One can also omit most of their other apps, with the exception of KWIN, drawing the desktop and its window decorations, and konqueror, the filemanager, and the things managing the menu(bar(s)), applauncher.
Using modern apps for the rest, like anywhere else.
And have them styled, themed however you like. With a few mouseclicks.
I've never been big on the Windows UI patterns but I recently started using KDE on one of my machines and it feels more polished than the Windows desktop. It has a few quirks but it's one of the most satisfying out-of-the-box desktops I've used, and I primarily use a niche dynamic tiling wm on all my other machines.
KDE is great. It gets slept on because of its bad rap circa 2004, but it has low-key become the best DE by far. Sane defaults, nothing tries to fight you, everything is configurable.
If you don't have the time or inclination to tinker with things like tiling WMs - and more power to you if you do, but I don't - KDE is the best there is.
I've been using KDE for a good decade or so, and what a lot of people don't know is that not only is the desktop great, the applications are, too.
Everyone knows Dolphin is by far the best file manager, but not a lot of people know that Kate is fantastic. Konsole is really good too. The new System Monitor basically replaces a ton of programs. Spectacle is a great and snappy screenshot utility. Filelight is so useful.
There's definitely a few misses, though. kmail in particular. But, overtime the applications actually improve, both in performance and features. This seems to be in contrast in gnome, where apps like Nautilus have been getting worse for a long time. And in contrast to Windows.
System monitor can do all this stuff, pstree and all, and you can get really cool visualizations. Pi charts, line graphs, and my personal favorite, color grid. That one's really good for CPU utilization.
But the real icing is that it doesn't just work for processes, applications, CPU usage and whatnot. It works for any sensor, including temperature and fans. And, of course, it's all customizable.
Be that as it may, it is slow to start, or switch between different views. I tested that again just now. Furthermore, it's causing more load by running, than one btop++ or htop running in Konsole. Which btw. both show temperatures, and could also show the rpm of the little 'Miefquirl'...err.. fan if I wanted them to.
That's seems to be common for all the monitoring stuff running graphically, no matter if Gnome, XFCE, or even old KDE (Trinity).
That aside, htop and especially btop++ are heavily customizable, too.
Whatever. To each his own. It's a matter of taste.
Yeah it's pretty fast but it's still a full graphical application. It's probably written using QtQuick so it's fast... ish. Terminal applications are almost always going to be much faster. But, it's a neat application that doesn't get much competition on the GUI side.
Tiling WMs have more up front cost, but they don't require continuous tinkering if you don't want to tinker. I have been using the same SwayWM config for like 5 years now.
I started using KDE regularly after trying it out on the Steam Decks desktop mode. It works great! I had used it previously over a decade ago and was not impressed with it at first, but now it's my daily driver desktop enviornment.
At some point, the GNOME folks are going to have to hire people to go door-to-door and take hardware away from people, because they won't have any software left to remove features from.
I've always joked about the eventual evolution of the GNOME desktop converging to a single login screen followed by a full screen button labeled LOGOFF because they will claim anything else is too confusing for their users.
>> This is rather unfriendly and considerably more effort than editing logind.conf
> I don't like the tone in this sentence.
I am dumbstruck that someone can be so utterly full of themselves that they can smugly correct someone’s grammar, and an obvious acronym, only to turn around and clutch their pearls that their victim said mean things in the nicest way possible about their software.
I knew there was a reason I haven’t liked GNOME for years. XFCE is the way.
I currently use Gnome on my machine (plain vanilla Ubuntu with no mods). It's such a love hate relationship. On the one hand everything you said and everything the child comments mention are totally valid and very annoying. But on the other hand (at least in my experience), Gnome has been the only solid DE that is "consistent", the only other one that got close was XFCE.
I might eventually switch back to XFCE but for now I just need a DE that works and gets out of my way so I can write code, and for all it's faults Gnome still gets the job done.
No Linux desktop delivers what the user wants, needs or expect. Only what the developers think they need and find interesting to fix. It's more fun reinventing wheels badly than fixing shit generally. Some people are lucky this aligns with their needs, but for most it doesn't. It's jarring and unproductive.
It needs corporate (or government!) drive behind it or that won't change. I'm not talking about Redhat either who appears to just be a holding pen for the above.
+1 plasma is pretty nice and also lets you reconfigure things if you like. The rate of "we broke this and you were stupid for ever wanting it" is much lower than for gnome
That's what I thought for a long time, until I tried it on the Steam deck since they use it for its desktop mode. I now use it as my daily driver desktop environment
That's because you're not the target audience: both Windows and GNOME primarily target the computer illiterate. If you know what you're doing and understand how the computer works, these desktops at best are a nuisance and more than likely to get in your way.
My go-to comparison is power tools: there's a consumer line that's underpowered but pretty easy to use by anyone, and then there's the professional tools for people that know how to handle these tools properly: more power, versatile, and user serviceable.
Smartphones take this to the extreme: on both Android and iOS every user is illiterate, because the OS is deliberately opaque to the user.
I'm not a huge fan of this statement - just because some users prefer simplicity, doesn't make them "illiterate." I'm happy to be a pretty tech-savvy gnome user - everyone uses a computing device for different purposes (as a tool, not a hobby). For example, it's great that KDE offers 2 or 3 kick-off menus, multiple clock plasmoids, etc, but just because a user is fine with a single, well-refined option, doesn't mean they are less "computer literate."
Of all the reasons to be upset with Gnome, that's the silliest. I could not care less about their political opinions. It's their opinions on how a computer should look and work that are the problem.
> Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it,
I'm genuinely interested what Linux is missing for you? I've been daily driving it for years and do all my work and gaming on it. Is it specific software or?
It's just general polish. Like I was daily driving fedora last year and :
- fractional scaling did not work in Gnome with Wayland for X11 Apps
- I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1
- Screen sharing was very buggy - in Slack especially - it would constantly crash the slack app during calls, ditto for camera, but even in Google meet and Chrome I've had desktop crashes
- When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable
- Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay
- Guitar Amp simulator software I use does not support Linux, neither does Ableton (which supposedly can run on proton but with many glitches)
- The audio DAW situation was way too complicated and buggy
- I spent days to get the distro functional and usable with Ardour and it would still crash constantly - I just wanted to run some amp sims :(
It's just the little things and rough edges, but for example the fractional scaling stuff already improved because more apps that I use added Wayland support. And the emulation is getting better, with more users I could see larger DAWs supporting Linux as well. Not sure about the audio progress - JACK was a complete mess.
> Right now I upgraded my GPU to 9070XT - I'm still not sure if that would work on Linux yet because of driver support delay
You can install AMDs driver from their repo directly, it works just fine (using it every day).
> I still cannot use my LG C4 as a monitor in full capacity because AMD on Linux does not support HDMI 2.1
That will never be possible. To prevent pirates from breaking it (lol), HDMI has decided to keep HDMI 2.1 secret. No open source version of HDMI 2.1 can exist.
That said, AMD's driver repo includes both the open source drivers and some proprietary versions of the driver, maybe that'll work for you.
Another option would be using a displayport output and a DP to HDMI converter, as e.g. Intel is using for their GPUs.
- Fractional scaling: That's because X11 itself does not support it. Many older Windows apps also have problems with fractional scaling.
- HDMI 2.1: The HDMI Forum blocked it, as they don't want the details of HDMI 2.1 publically available. If you can, use DisplayPort, which is an actual open standard, and is better anyway. Nvidia works because they implemented it in closed-source firmware instead. https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected
Strangely enough Plasma was able to handle this regardless (guess it was misreporting the resolution to X11 app or something like that to make it work ?) it was a Gnome/Wayland thing.
DisplayPort isn't an option - the TV only has HDMI in and converters suck (they crash constantly, even the expensive ones)
If you're happy to dip your toes into another DAW, Reaper has excellent first-class Linux support, works with all your plugins, and has a 60 day trial* for you to get used to it.
* The free trial is enforced as heavily as WinRAR's, and it's pretty cheap (~$60) to buy a licence if the nag screen makes you feel bad enough
I tried that first but had trouble getting it to launch so I decided might as well goo with the OSS option. Boy was I in for a fun ride with getting the whole jackd and audio subsystems running.
The problem is not only the DAW support, but the support of low-latency audio interfaces in Linux. Audio interface makers rarely create a Linux driver, and a low-latency setup on Linux is its own hell, with real-time kernel patches.
On MacOS and Windows, it works out of the box.
> When I switched to KDE/Plasma 5 to get fractional scaling it was extremely unstable
KDE Plasma 6 made major improvements and has excellent fractional scaling, the best I've seen in a Linux desktop environment and comparable to scaling in Windows 10-11. I encourage you to give it a try.
you can use Carla in linux to run windows VSTs, i do it all the time. Works great. Midi and audio routing is also quite good. Ableton also runs with Wine.
Our 12 year old recently switched from Windows to Ubuntu…
and now I’m constantly getting these complaints “I can’t get screen capture to work under Wayland… I switched from lightdm to sddm and I can’t work out how to switch back… I accidentally started an i3 session and I can’t work out how to log out of it.”
It makes me kind of miss Windows, in a way. It is good he’s learning so much. But the downside is Linux gives him lots more ways to break things and then ask me to fix them for him. And a lot of this stuff I then have to learn myself before I can fix it, because most of my Linux experience is with using it as a server OS, where desktop environments aren’t even installed
Well, don't help him. People(me) grew up without the Internet or Smartphones and broke Windows on the family PC all the time. In 2000 when I got SuSE it only slowed down the breakdowns. He can always fix stuff himself by reinstalling the OS. As long as he doesn't format the /home partition he will not lose data. And he will learn his lessons.
12-year-old me installed Linux on an old desktop tower and I also broke things constantly. The difference is my parents were both humanities majors and I knew full well there was no point in asking them for help. Even at the time, the resources were all there for me to teach myself to Linux. Sure, I spent many many hours troubleshooting things instead of doing whatever it was I had as my end goal, but I was a kid—learning is the point!
It's harder as a parent to know that you're capable of solving their problem and still say no, but by age 12 that's pretty much your primary job: to find more and more things that they can start doing for themselves, express your confidence in them, and let them figure out how to adult bit by bit. Breaking a Linux install and fixing it again is among the lowest stakes ways that dynamic will play out from here on.
This is great, though, really. I broke our computer so many times growing up, I couldn’t possibly count. I don’t think I ever lost anything of import, other than some savegames of mine. I keep telling people who ask, “how do I learn Linux?” that they need to use it, tinker with it, break it, and fix it, ideally without anything other than man pages and distro docs. It is a shockingly effective way to learn how things work.
There is more to learn / do than anyone has time. My kid is supposed to spend an hour on his violin, half an hour an fitness, then some time on chess, then eat - including clean up and/or cook. somehow he needs to fit some free play in too. He doesn't have time for more.
It isn't that he could do that, but what else to give up?
I think for a lot of us that learned linux this way, it was firmly in the "fun time" category. We would have rather been tinkering than most other things.
I'd say that screen capture probably works under X11 no matter what your graphic card is. However this kind of confirm your general feeling: there is no only one blessed and enforced way to do things so everything can break because of combinations.
Examples (I've been on desktop Linux since 2009): shutdown actually reboots except for a few months with some lucky combination of kernel and nvidia driver. The brightness control keys didn't work for at least half of the years. They currently work. All of that has workarounds but I understand that some people legitimately fold and go using another OS.
I started with Linux installing it from floppy disks in about 1996.
In 1995, I was back on Windows 95 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2000, I was back on Windows 2000 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2005, I was back on Windows XP within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2012, I was back on Windows 7 within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2015, I was back on macOS within a week because I needed to get something done.
In 2020, I worked out I'm wasting my time on this.
I watch my colleagues and friend struggling with it. Lots of small papercuts. Lots of weirdness. Lots of regressions. Plus many years of server-side experience says to me "I should probably just use FreeBSD" in that space.
So couple of issues there. Never upgrade windows. Fresh install only. Never had a good day upgrading it.
Secondly, there isn't always a solution in Linux. I've got one now where something is utterly broken and it's 5 layers of maintainers down and no one gives a shit.
My experience is the opposite. Epgot a hold of a bunch of floppies in 1991. Dual booted so I could play Diablo. Some time around '98/99 got tired of dual booting.
Steam getting proton was a godsend, all those years of games became playable so now I have a huge back catalog.
Put him on debian stable with xfce and no sudo if he is such a bother. Sounds to me this is a people problem, not Linux problem. Do you miss windows or do you miss not having to spend time with kid on things that bother you?
Not the OP, but hibernate support is one thing that sent me back to windows on my Framework laptop.
In windows, I can just shut the lid and not worry about it, because it will sleep first, and eventually hibernate. Ubuntu would just sleep until the battery dies.
I found instructions for enabling hibernate in Ubuntu, and they did make it show up in the power menu, but it didn't seem to work. (Which is presumably why it was hidden to begin with.)
I also tried NixOS, but I couldn't even get it to boot the installer.
> In windows, I can just shut the lid and not worry about it, because it will sleep first, and eventually hibernate. Ubuntu would just sleep until the battery dies.
It's really funny because this is one of the things I absolutely do not like about Windows. I absolutely hate it that I put the computer to sleep and when I come back the next day it has hibernated. That said, I agree that hibernation has always been finicky on Linux, however, I would say Ubuntu is not the best distro for this use case. I have been using Fedora and they even publish official guides for it[0] that's how seriously they take it.
Just have it suspend to disk and shutdown on lid close.
I do this for arch Linux on my framework and it's fine. Startup time is under ten seconds, essentially zero battery drain, right back in your session with all apps/docs open.
Hibernate is definitely better but still finicky even on Mac/Windows, machines can and do fry themselves, or require a hard reset if you unplug a device at the wrong time. Or unexpectedly continue draining the battery.
It's a terrible, funky, poorly documented, exception filled world down in the low power states for hardware.
A computer is a tool - learn to use it like a tool. People spend far more time learning to drive than they do learning to use computers these days, but I'd wager the computer matters more.
But too many companies have discovered that a docile "user" who's fed constant dopamine hits and has no actionable way to use a device other than open their wallet and fork over cash to watch more cats dance, or shop on more stores is exactly what they want.
Why don't you just click here and pay for Onedrive. Or just click there and accept Apple's new ridiculous terms.
If you just want to watch cats dance... you do you. I'll just keep doing me over here.
Anti-cheats are not really compatible on Linux IIRC. Maybe there have been improvements on this front but I think this was the main issue for a lot of gamers. This and there were cases when they were getting banned for playing through Wine.
I once tried to set up a GPU passthrough setup to a Windows VM to play WoW but there were a ton of report that Blizzard just banned players for using QEMU VMs because they were marked as cheaters.
Could some game programmer say if it's true that kernel level anti cheat is just bad programming?
Primagean recently said that in a video commenting PewDiePie's "I switched to Linux" video. While he's apparently a good programmer (he worked at Netflix), he uses Vim, so I don't trust him.
Edit: part about vim is an edgy joke.
Weird reason not to trust someone, and I think prime is a decent programmer.
I work in AAA gamedev and have deployed kernel level anti-cheats before, and I’m aware how unpopular they are; so, sorry for that… you would also accuse us of “bad programming” if there was an overabundance of cheaters that went undetected and/or uncorrected.
The answer is unfortunately complicated, the kernel level anti-cheats themselves aren’t necessarily poorly written, but what they are trying to do is poorly defined, so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into userland code and then share information with the kernel component- but then it’s dangerous for the same reason that crowdstrike was.
Not doing endpoint detection is also a problem because some amount of client trust is necessary for a good experience with low input latency. You get about 8ms in most cases to make a decision about what you will display to the user, that’s not enough time to round-trip to a server about if what is happening is ok or not. Movement in particular will feel extremely sluggish.
So, its a combination of kernel level code being harder in general (malloc, file access etc; are things the kernel gives you in user land after all), the problem space being relatively undefined (find errant software packages and memory manipulation), not being able to break out of the kernel level environment for an easier programming and iteration experience and trying to not affect performance.
Lots of people think they can do it better, I’m happy to hire anyone who actually thinks they have a clue, it’s a really hard problem honestly and the whole gamedev industry is itching for something better: even us gamedevs don’t like kernel level anti-cheat, it makes debugging harder for ourselves too and introduces hard to reproduce bugs.
PS; sorry if I’m not being eloquent, I am on vacation and typing from my phone.
This is well written and quite easy to understand. (I only have cursory knowledge of programming.)
However, what if Primeagen meant that HAVING to IMPLEMENT kernel level anti cheat is a symptom of bad programming, and not the anti cheat per se? (that is, with good enough programming, it could somehow be avoided).
And kudos to you. I appreciate people in game dev, they can get a lot done in short time.
I haven't played mmo fps since battlefield 3, and it wasn't that bad then. But I've heard that without kernel level they would be unplayable.
The reason why you need kernel-level anti-cheat for it to be meaningful is because it necessarily needs to sit on a level lower than cheats themselves; and cheats can be very advanced these days.
Long term I'm kinda hopeful that this is something that will be mitigated through AI-based approaches working to detect the resulting patterns rather than trying to detect the cheat code itself. But this requires sufficiently advanced models running very fast locally, and we're still far from that.
The cheaters are very good these days. They will happily sit in the kernel space to hide from the game if needed, because people pay a lot of money to cheat developers to be able to cheat.
> so theres a temptation to put most of the logic into userland code and then share information with the kernel component- but then it’s dangerous for the same reason that crowdstrike was.
I don't understand, how could crowdstrike have avoided their issues by putting more code in the kernel? Or am I misreading your statement?
Good faith question: why is the server not the source of truth? With local interpolation for things like character movement, reconciled in heartbeat updates?
The two most widely used anti cheat application battle eye and easy anti cheat both natively support linux but game developer have to check a box to enable it.
About 40% of games that use anti cheat currently work on linux. Getting banned for using wine is very rare because anti cheat that don't support linux would complain about not running an prevent you from even joining a game to get banned.
Compile sure, but they really had some bad ideas in those days. Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.
OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.
Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)
There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)
You and I must have had very different experiences in those times.
> Remember MDI Multiple Document Interface? Having Windows within windows. It was a terrible idea.
It was definitely overused - nobody needs Microsoft word to be a window manager for every doc file. But it ends up growing into something really nice where you get to build out the sub windows of your IDE wherever you want them.
> OLE? Sure, let every application talk to the DLL components of every other application! What could go wrong? Data wants to be free right? Spread the love.
This was also incredible. I built one of the first tabbed web browsers by embedding instances of the IE 4 DLL into my tabs. OLE and OCX extended object-oriented programming across program and language boundaries.
> Making the desktop into a live webpage? And of course let any webpage happily load whatever binaries it wants from the internet. Super handy stuff. For some people more handy than others (really how this did not cause a mega Wannacry-event back in the day I don't understand)
This was terrific for pranks. Yeah what were they thinking on this one.
> There is a reason this stuff is legacy. The only reason it still compiles is because some companies have spent millions on custom developments 20 years ago that nobody remembers how it still works. Not because you should still be using it :)
Maybe as I've aged the novelty of building programs has worn off. For some things I don't want to have to port or even recompile it. I just want it to run. If Win32 is the only stable Linux ABI, GDI is the only stable Linux GUI toolkit.
For me its the UX. It just feels off, amaturish, messy. I can't really put my finger on it. I think the frankly crap fonts a lot of distro's choose to have as default dont help. And then the very "designed by a developer" feel to a lot of the UI.
And I know someones franticly typing away right now - yes, I am fully aware you can customise things, but out of the box it should be pretty damn well polished so that you don't need to.
Ubuntu's probably got the closest but it still just doesn't quite feel like they've nailed the experience.
One of the things I wonder about recently is whether there's too many distros, which is dividing effort and there's less drive to find consensus on certain issues when everyone has the freedom to do things their own way and experiment to explore their niche. That freedom is the point of free software to a large extent, but there's costs to it. It also divides the userbase so when something doesn't work you may need to dive deeper into the details than you'd like to see if there's anything particular about your species of the linux animal kingdom.
It'd be interesting if there was a "Ubuntu v2" type effort, over 20 years later. Before ubuntu it's not as though desktop linux was an impossible dream or there was a lack of distros, but Canonical cleaned up a lot of rough edges to the extent it became a lingua franca. It's to the extent you can rely on ubuntu being in instructions for linux software, for example if there's any differences to required package names it'll be the ubuntu names over debian's.
Yes, exactly. To be fair, projects like GNOME and distros like Ubuntu do publish human interface guidelines, but I dont think there is any enforcement and so jankiness creeps in. I suppose it's no different from Windows 11 still having programs that have UIs dating from Win2K. But at least the icons and colors and window chrome are professional looking.
I am extremely experienced with Linux. Every single one of my servers is running RHEL/Rocky. I daily drove Linux back in the early 2000s. I have spent more time in sysctl.conf testing tunables than I have spent with my family, so it seems.
1. My capture card doesn't work reliably in any distro. I'm not a gamer so I can't use a cheap and ubiquitous USB V4L card, I capture retro computing screens at weird resolutions and refresh rates so I have to use an enterprise-grade solution that can handle strange things like sync-on-green from 13w3 connectors and extremely rare outputs from UNIX workstations from the 80s and 90s.
2. If someone sends me a link on my phone it is difficult to copy and paste it to a Linux system.
3. Battery life on laptops, despite decades of improvements, is atrocious on Linux. If my laptop gets twelve hours of real-world use under OS A and six hours under OS B, I've got to use OS A.
4. All of my screens are 4K. Today, in 2025, a full decade after 4K became standard, the way various DE/WMs handle scaling is embarrassing.
5. Nvidia. Yeah, it "works" for about 2-3 kernel upgrades then you're greeted with a blinking cursor upon boot because of DKMS or some random reason like patching the system and not rebooting for a couple of days and then patching again.
6. There's little consistency across devices. When I log in to system A I want every single icon, file, and application to be the same as system B. iCloud/Onedrive do this. You can do this on Linux while on a LAN with remote home folders. I don't work exclusively on a LAN. Or I can set up puppet/ansible for my non-infrastructure systems and that makes me throw up in my mouth.
Almost none of that is the fault of the kernel. That's irrelevant.
Regarding 3. Battery life - I’ve had a ThinkPad Nano for several years that, on Windows 11 would get roughly 4-6 hours battery, and this was optimized (very few running apps, no junk on startup, power saving settings on, etc). I switched it to Ubuntu (I was surprised that everything worked out of the box too, all of the hot keys and everything), and it will get about 8-10 hours doing the same tasks (primarily Chrome). So there is something to be said about Linux in general just being so much more “light weight” so to speak vs windows, which has become such a bloated mess.
But the main issue I had was your point 4, since the thinkpads screen is 2K, everything was either too small (with no scaling) or too big (with scaling on).
Fully agree that Desktop Linux isn’t nearly there. If I need a Linux DE for something, I spin up a Debian VM with XFCE, because that seems to suck the least, and I already have prebaked Debian images.
For headless servers, I want nothing else. For a daily driver, as much as it pains me, nothing comes close to the Apple ecosystem. Apple Silicon is years ahead of everyone, and their interop with (admittedly only their own) other hardware is incredible. Universal Clipboard is magic. The fact that I can do nothing more than open an AirPod case and my phone registers it is magic. Finally, the fact that MacOS is *nix is absolutely icing on the cake.
to me it's such a crime that for all the crowing in the world about the need for operational sovergnity, MacOs is the only OS that can offer such a high standard of operation. I've seen some countries try their hand at modifying android to compete but the lack of a competitive monolith to them has allowed them to become complacent
I'll echo archvile here, in that I get excellent battery life running Linux. I've been getting 10-12 hours of battery life from the assortment of Asus and Thinkpad laptops I've had the past 15 years.
To give a very concrete example, I have two identical Thinkpad T14 at work, one running Linux (Debian Bookworm with KDE) and one running Windows 11. When doing normal office work, the Linux laptop easily lasts a whole workday with >20% battery left at the end. The Windows laptop runs out of battery in less than 2 hours.
> Today, in 2025, a full decade after 4K became standard, the way various DE/WMs handle scaling is embarrassing.
Generally, I agree, but Qt (KDE) is the standout to me, primarily because it is "commercial first, and open source second" in my mind. Do you have HiDPI scaling issues with Qt apps?
Not OP but for me it's a solid remote desktop alternative that can compete with Windows' remote desktop experience. There's been some movement there, so perhaps in 5 years time.
Also I really dislike how out of memory conditions just causes everything to grind to a halt for 5 minutes before something, typically Firefox, crashes. On Windows at least just Firefox gets very slow, but usually I can just nuke the process that eats too much memory. Not so on Linux as the whole desktop becomes unresponsive.
And every now and then I still need to fiddle with some config files or whatnot. Not game breaking but annoying.
Not OP, but my experience with Linux is that seemingly absurd usability issues just keep piling up the more you use it and at some you just kind of give up and abandon any expectation of even a decent level of common sense from whoever is developing the system.
I've listed some of which I encountered on Mint here https://www.virtualcuriosities.com/folders/273/usability-iss... Among them: AppImages just don't run unless you know how to make them run. This could be fixed with literally a single dialog box. There is no way to install fonts by default other than knowing where to put them and knowing how to get there. Every app that uses Alt+Click, e.g. for picking a color, won't work because that's bound by default by the DE.
These issues may sound small at first but think of it this way: did nobody making this OS think about how users were going to install fonts? Or ever used an application that used the Alt key? Or did they just assume everyone would know what to do when they download an appimage and double click on it and nothing happens?
And you can just feel that the whole thing is going to be like this. Every single time in the future you want to do something that isn't very extremely obvious, you'll find a hurdle.
I even had issues configuring my clock because somebody thought it was a good idea to just tell users to use a strftime code to format the taskbar clock. I actually had to type "%Y-%m-%d%n%H:%M" to get it to look the way I want. And this isn't an advanced setting. This is right clicking on the clock and clicking "Configure." When I realized what to do I actually laughed out loud because it felt like a joke. Fellas, only programmers know these codes. Make some GUIs for the normal people.
Not to argue with you, but is that Linux Mint specifically? I never used it, and its DE looked very unprofessional to my liking. Personally, I prefer modern Gnome, but I also like KDE. Everything else looks very unfriendly to an average user, I won’t ever install it. I’d go Gnome for Mac users and KDE for Windows refugees.
This is why Linux will always be a terrible OS. Every time someone says "Linux is bad because XYZ" someone will tell you "actually that's your distro, if you used distro ABC you wouldn't have that problem." But ABC has a different set of problems, which if you wasted 2 months to realize them and start complaining about, someone would just direct you to distro JKL.
The fragmentation of Linux leads to a ping-pong of responsibilities. Linux can never be a bad OS because it isn't an OS.
On Windows, if the file manager is bad, that's Microsoft's fault. Period. Nobody tries to say "actually..." it's Microsoft's fault. Period. The same goes for the taskbar, for the control panel, for MS Paint, for even Microsoft Office. If Microsoft will fix it or make it worse depends on them, but nobody denies who is to blame and everyone know where the blame lies. Meanwhile I don't even know if the basic utilities that my distro distributes are under the responsibility of Mint's team or if they will just direct me to some random open source project's issue tracker if I start complaining about Celluloid or the "Drawing" app.
You can't talk about Linux thinking only about the good parts, or you aren't inviting people to try Linux, you're inviting them to try your distro. "Linux" means the whole ecosystem, including all of its problems.
Au contraire, I would say that Mint is probably the closest to stock Win11/macOS experience right now. Gnome, on the other hand, looks utterly alien and non-discoverable
They have been converging for some time now. The taskbar in Win11 is very much a macOS Dock wannabe, for example.
Personally, I find modern Gnome insufferable because it is non-customizable to the extent that even macOS only dreams of, and it doubles down on the modern trend of hiding important UI behind poorly discoverable gestures (active corners etc). Except their take on it is even worse in general for mouse users because of how much more "legwork" it adds - e.g. in a default Gnome setup on Fedora, you need to move mouse cursor in the top left corner for the dock to show up (so that you can switch apps or launch a new one)... but then it shows on the bottom of the screen, so now you need to move the cursor all the way there across the screen.
But that's all subjective and not really my point. The point, rather, is that Gnome looks and behaves very different from Win11 and macOS both, in ways that don't make it easy for users to migrate (and in fact they specifically state that their UX design does not consider that a goal).
I never thought of this, the excessive mouse movements, like top left to bottom. What I thought of is that it killed this silly minimise and full screen option, even when everyone and their granny trained for those three buttons.
I like they ditched all the unnecessary things from the settings. I think all the pro-level settings must be dealt with via terminal. That way, it’s both of two worlds. Me, I don’t mind it. But if I manage the computer for someone, I want them to have only the minimum things, so they won’t be overwhelmed. That’s very wise, and unfortunately all these Win3.1 geeks are complaining it’s bad. Yeah, okay, keep using your favourite XFCE then, or whatever.
I’d install Gnome for elderly, even if they have some previous Windows experience. Because they can afford to just ignore it. My mum, she has no computer, and last time she used Windows was like, idk, a decade ago. Explaining Gnome to her is easy: here is the Windows (or CMD) button, you press it once, you have this iPad like interface. Here is the Dock, you have all the necessary apps in there. More of them if you press that Windows button one more time. But actually you don’t need it 99% of the time, so you can survive with top left corner pressed once. Two times press is for me. Closing the app is that X button. What else does she need?
Now, try to explain the [any other DE basically] to elders the same way. Considering most of these people have iPads. And if they’re not, well, I don’t really get why, they should. My guess is that their interface appeal to that audience. And to me that’s a great thing, that’s most of non-tech people now.
However, I’m (being an obviously pro user) able to use the default Gnome productively. Almost as productively as I use SwayWM. To me, that’s very impressive.
I just installed Pop!_OS about 4 days ago since I had some money to spend and managed to get a new SSD on the cheap, dual booting with Win10 (I would rather get beheaded than ever use W11 again, I don't care if I get ransomwared every day for the rest of my W10 life once support ends).
Honestly, there's literally nothing missing from the experience for me. Dev tooling works way better (obviously), it feels much faster than both W10 and especially W11, I can still play Factorio and most other games in my 900-game Steam library (minus MP games with rootki- err, "advanced" anticheats), GPU and CPU drivers were a non-issue and bundled with the install, speakers work, bluetooth works, Wifi works (I'm on LAN but still).
The only thing is that it's kinda ugly (personal taste, I actually like W10 aesthetics :p), but one GNOME Tweaks install later and I got it looking more like how I like it, plus they're (System76) working on Cosmos or whatever they're calling it and it's looking promising. Also text is a bit blurry/hard to read for me, but it could also just be my shitty monitors (and me being used to the excellent Macbook screens)
Now, if you have some software you rely on like the Adobe suite, understandable, but I think for most people it's honestly the superior OS compared to Windows. I'm sure the experience on other friendly distros like Mint are similar, too.
The toolkit inconsistency between apps drives me crazy more than it should.
Loading up a GTK app and switching to a Qt app is jarring, especially with basic things like a file picker.
Daily driving desktop Linux feels like you are living in a lower-middle income family. Yes, you have some nice things, but you can usually tell they are cost-cut versions that have filler plates or missing features present on higher-end versions of the product (i.e. macOS).
Yeah but on the flip side if your usecase is not blessed by daddy Apple - or you're not a fan of their hardware design - there is zero variety in the ecosystem and full lockdown. Like iPad is great hardware - but they will never let you run unlocked OS on it because it cuts into their profit source. In fact I suspect they will try to push MacOS into that direction more.
So I'm hoping to be able to transition out of the ecosystem because I hate their model and like choice. But at the same time I have work to do and last time I tried it wasn't there yet. It was better than it was 3 years ago, and that was better than 5 years ago, etc. I would say not a lot left and the momentum is building, I just don't have the 20 year old energy to be the early adopter anymore :)
Linux is working great for me. AMD supposedly works better but my nvidia driver doesn’t crash for videos like windows does and games seem to be working fine. Possibly except kernel anti cheat games. I have dual boot available as a backup.
I had a 3060 12g in my daughters computer. It would freeze every couple of weeks for who knows what reason. Swapped out her mobo/CPU/ram with mine and it still froze. Put in an rx5709xt and it's all good now. The 3060 is now in a server. I would have gotten the card if someone at work hasn't sold it to me for 100$. What originally made me leave Nvidia was because of how quickly Nvidia dropped driver support for not very old cards but I can't remember what card I had at the time.
"Microsoft has a demonstrated history of pursuing litigation when that has been needed to protect the rights of our customers and other stakeholders. (...) When necessary, we’re prepared to go to court."
This is convincing. Or would be, if the present challenges wouldn't extend to the court system itself.
Idk, seems stupid, given that Europeans are very aware now of the Cloud Act and other similar shenanigans the USG wants to pull.
That being said, European bureaucrats are even stupider and will largely take these commitments at face value, allowing them to have a tighter leash on the market.
>At this point I view Windows as a legacy/compatibility OS
I literally thought about that yesterday as my Windows computer I was using for a legacy application froze/slowdown to the point of unusability. Not the first time this has happened. And nearly every day I have a UI issue with some programs not maximizing and staying behind old windows. I've had embarrassing moments when my OS/MS teams crashes during a meeting. Not to mention the literal ads scattered in multiple screens that sometimes are impossible to turn off(the bottom left button)
My Fedora computer... Every year I have to upgrade it. That sucks. But its way better than anything I deal with on Windows.
FYI, Fedora is so solid that I don't even lump it in with Linux. Linux has baggage from the Debian/Ubuntu fanboys who use a literally outdated OS and have either: No idea its outdated. Or confuse the word "Stable" with bug free, when it means version locked.
If you havent used Fedora, you don't know where the current OS market is at. Fedora stands alone and separate from the rest of the Linux Distros. Its literally better than Windows. It just works.
> My Fedora computer... Every year I have to upgrade it. That sucks. But its way better than anything I deal with on Windows.
It is just really one long reboot followed by a short one. The first one can be done while you are asleep. That is how I upgraded my daughters fedora from release 40 to 42.
If you really don't like 6 months or yearly upgrades, there are rolling release distros with more incremental updates or super long term releases like Almalinux/Rocky, ubuntu LTS or ... wait for it ... Slackware!
With flatpak and appimage, running a distro with an older kernel, desktop, libc and base libraries version is not that big of a deal as you can still use apps in their latest release
I can't agree more. Fedora is such an excellent piece of kit, and with the now edition-tier KDE variant, you have the most premium Linux desktop out there that has a fresh-enough update schedule and is rock-solid stable.
I even migrated from Arch to Fedora, just because I was getting tired of the occasional rolling update bricking my system.
The bottom left button can be turned off by going into the taskbar settings (by right-clicking on the taskbar) and disabling taskbar widgets. Too bad if you have widgets that you do want to use.
Wow yeah you just made me remember the Windows 10 mail app, which sure wasn't perfect but was ad-free and relatively snappy if I remember correctly. Then absolutely destroyed it and now I have to see Outlook 2016 and Outlook (new) as the results when I search "mail" from the taskbar
> outside from very specialist professional software (AutoCAD and Photoshop come toind), I think this is mostly about getting over the hump of inertia. Both myself (software Dec and ai) and even my parents (browser machine) use Linux for ages without hickups.
I don't know - it's way more unstable in day to day use than say MacOS. The amount of times I had Slack crash on me or Chrome lock up in windows during calls is too frequent for daily use IMO. You could say that's a Slack or Chrome problem, but I don't have those issues on MacOS.
Microsoft is never gonna give up on Windows NT "technology" no matter how bad it is and continues to be. They will continue to kick that dead horse until the company no longer exists. They genuinely port their UI (not the Windows 11 UI, it's horrible) and their apps to Linux. Release a Linux based OS, call it some shit like Windows Ultra not-shit edition. Accept Windows lost to Linux. God I hate Microsoft.
It would be really interesting for enterprise or gamedev software to start supporting steam OS, I know a fair amount of people planning on switching from Windows to Steam OS when 10 is EOL'd
The NT kernel/executive are the best parts of the OS, better than Linux in various places. I wouldn't give those up -- I'd give the userland up with a 100% bug compatible Win32 shim.
Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people.
> gui configurability
A bit confused by that. Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs.
Do you mean the sysadmins cannot configure as much in a GUI? I think that probably is a major barrier as it means a lot of retraining.
Also, when you do something different from everyone else, every problem will be blamed on you for doing that.
Codeweavers Crossover does an admirable job at filling the gap (shoutout for making AoE II run like it’s native), but yeah, there are some that you can’t get around using Windows for.
What you mean by sysadmin GUI things? Linux is so much simpler, you don’t need any GUI to configure it. And probably there’s no point in that. Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say).
I believe this way of configuring is much more efficient. Yes, you have to learn some new things, probably even new paradigm. But once you done, it stays mostly the same for long years, and is dead simple. I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread. And most Windows sysadmins I know personally, when I tell them about Linux, and they react like it’s some hidden obscure knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it. Which is vice-versa actually. I cannot imagine what that is, to be a Windows sysadmin, especially supporting all this mediocre engineering.
> Actually, there is a way to configure it using code (see Ansible), which is better (I’d say).
It may be better, but it needs change and retraining.
> I am, being Linux user for circa 15 years, see administrating Windows with dread.
Me too. I do not much like using Windows either and it seems to be getting worse.
> they react like it’s some hidden obscure knowledge they have to spend ten years studying it.
Partly FUD (lots of people make claims like "you have to compile your own software to use Linux") and partly because people hate change, and partly because it took them 10 years to learn Windows (many years ago) and they expect the same again.
It took me many years to accept Unix logic (macOS and Linux) too, but mostly because my first system was Windows.
For some reason, things like disks, C:\ and D:\ were logical to me, while I couldn’t grasp why cannot I put my files into root directory, and I’m forced to live in a subdirectory (/home/user) instead. It takes some time to re-learn, but I’m looking back with some dread. Things I accepted as simple, are actually unacceptably complex.
> Linux desktop environments tend to be more configurable, and you can configure most things end users want to configure in a GUI with the major DEs.
I was mostly thinking about the times I end up needing to tweak something through the terminal. I wouldn't expect most desktop users to want to do this. But maybe you're right that the most important stuff is covered by guis nowadays. There seem to be a lack of guardrails for low to semi-technical users though. I wonder if something like Nix could help with guardrails and being able to backtrack.
>Libre Office is more than sufficient for most people.
Buddy, I love Fedora, but this is nonsense.
The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called) doesnt have text size on the main screen. The reddit mods on the subreddit literally ban people for complaining about it.
> The UI for Libre Powerpoint(or whatever its called) doesnt have text size on the main screen.
I was curious, so opened Impress, typed some text, and saw that the font selection and size was by default open on the right-hand "Properties" panel, alongside all the various text configuration options. So that at least is not true.
Software compatibility in general. There’s still a lot of Windows-only software out there that people rely on.
Also, security-by-default for apps would be nice. Snap and Flatpak are great starts but it’s still to difficult to manage and too easy to install non-sandboxed software. Some random weather app should never have access to your photos, camera, file system, networking, etc… without the user explicitly granting permission.
There's Qubes, but even its enthusiasts are quick to say in its current incarnation it's not in any shape to be foisted on an end user. The other Linux flavor that sandboxes apps by default would be Android, which seems to have a few users.
Familiarity, Enterprise, last is hardware. If you buy a Windows machine first then you always run the risk of Linux having to play catch up hardware wise. I have not had a hardware problem with a new install since 2004.
Familiarity being used with workflows is the biggest killer, and why I become a stupid user on Windows. Enterprise makes having Linux installed hard mostly because of checkbox security being a thing that favour monopolies
Linux ships with more drivers than the proprietary OS out there.
There are office software and I would be interested to know what gui configurability do you need that doesn't exist already. More often than not when someone ask a question about linux in a forum he will gets answers using the command line. This is not because you can't do it with a gui. The reason is that copying and pasting text is much easier than showing people how to navigate into menus using screenshots and videos. Text based interface are just superior when it comes to support and message boards. People use cli a lot on linux because it is convenient.
My view is the opposite. Windows has always been a technical laggard, but it's getting better. I wouldn't have used it as my daily driver 10 years ago, but I do now. Though, I don't want to overstate this, it's still archaic, it's just that programming ecosystems brought better support for Windows, UI got better, and general QoL improvements smoothed out some of the roughest edges.
Explorer in windows 11 is truly death by a thousand needles.
Today I was manually sorting a bunch of files into folders that I had opened as tabs.
Drag file over tab, tab move and I now activate wrong tab.
Second try: drag file to where tab isn’t, such that the tab moves to where my mouse is. I now activate correct tab and can move the file to the designated folder. Single click the file and select a different file because file ends up at bottom of list when released, and then gets sorted after a second or two.
Click F2 to start renaming the file, click left to deselect and move cursor to the beginning of file name. Start adding text, only for the entire string to get selected and everything overwritten.
And using it now and then it feels like that too. Windows 10 Mail app had integration with system calendar, you would get itsycal built into the OS. Windows 11 removed that and made the OS Mail app spam infested shit, and they expect me to pay a subscription for something that comes bundled with the OS I paid for.
Linux desktop is getting better but I still wouldn't daily drive it, so MacOS it is until Linux desktop gets to a more reliable state. I wouldn't be shocked it gets there - I believe Valve made relatively low investments and got a lot out of it, GPU vendors have an incentive to support it - for compute workloads and the gaming on Linux is becoming a thing. Also for office stuff the EU-US hostility could force EU to look for alternative software providers and move away from Microsoft.
Actually thinking about this just made me donate some $ to Gnome project.