Archive.

You’ve heard the “prophecy”: next year is going to be the year of the Linux desktop, right? Linux is no longer the niche hobby of bearded sysadmins and free software evangelists that it was a decade ago! Modern distributions like Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, and Linux Mint are sleek, accessible, and — dare I say it — mainstream-adjacent.

Linux is ready for professional work, including video editing, and it even manages to maintain a slight market share advantage over macOS among gamers, according to the Steam Hardware & Software Survey.

However, it’s not ready to dethrone Windows. At least, not yet!

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    76·
    22 days ago

    These are probably the biggest reasons, but I think even after literally decades of development the actual desktop is still far behind Windows XP in many respects.

    For example today I wanted to add a “start menu” shortcut to a program I had downloaded. The most popular answer is to *manually create a .desktop file and copy it to some obscure dot directory! Hilarious. Even Windows 3.1 had a built-in GUI for this.

    Ok so there is a GUI to do it, but it isn’t actually integrated into desktops and isn’t installed by default. You have to install it separately.

    It’s the same for things like WiFi settings! There are some settings in GNOME but most are hidden in the third party nm-connection-editor (from memory) and of course GNOME doesn’t have an “advanced settings” button to open that.

    There are so many of these paper cuts I think Linux would be quite a frustrating experience for many people even if if had Windows-level hardware support.

    I also can’t see this changing any time soon. Not that many Linux devs actually care about this sort of thing and many of them don’t even understand that it is a problem in the first place. Cue replies.

    • bitcrafter@programming.dev
      61·
      22 days ago

      I cannot think of a single time I have manually created a .desktop file rather than using a GUI in the decades I have used Linux, and it has been a long time since I have even needed to edit the Start Menu at all installing packages takes care of it for me. Furthermore, even if this is a “paper cuts”, I doubt that people spend a lot of their time adding Start Menu items; by contrast, in Windows I get to experience the paper cuts of advertisements every single time I want to launch a program, and if I mistype the name of the program and press enter, then every single time I get to experience another paper cuts of launching Edge (which is not my default browser) to do a search in Bing (which is not my default search engine) for my typo.

      Likewise, for the last few years that I have been using WiFi with Linux, I have never once had to go outside of the GUI to adjust the settings.

      I won’t say that Linux has no annoyances, but I find using it to be a significantly more pleasant experience than using Windows overall, and my wife has never had a problem with it either.

      I really do not think that these “paper cuts” are representative of peoples’ general experiences with Linux.

      • nous@programming.devEnglish
        4·
        21 days ago

        Every OS has paper cuts. You learn to live with them over time as you have no other choice. When you switch OS it cuts in different ways and they feel fresher then the old ones you had gotten used to over time. It does not matter if you switch from Windows to Linux, Linux to Windows or to or from MacOS. They all have papercuts.

        • bitcrafter@programming.dev
          1·
          21 days ago

          That’s completely fair!

          Just to be clear, it’s not that I think that Linux is without problems or idiosyncrasies, but rather I think that they are more like the experience you are describing than evidence that Linux is fundamentally broken compared to Windows.

    • Colloidal@programming.dev
      4·
      21 days ago

      For example today I wanted to add a “start menu” shortcut to a program I had downloaded.

      I get what you’re saying, but this is like “I tried to use Linux like it was Windows, and it was hard.” It’s a different OS. Go on, move the taskbar of Windows 11 to the left or right edges of the screen. I can do that on Linux, why can’t I do that on Windows? It’s not even hard, it’s just plain impossible. If you try to do things manually in Linux, it’s not going to be intuitive. It will feel like editing the Registry in Windows. Unintuitive and like arcane magic.

      • JoshCodes@programming.devEnglish
        4·
        21 days ago

        Fuck yes. I switched to Linux after Windows got all control freaky over my task bar. On Linux I can have 30 task bars if I want, 100 task bars. I can setup a mouse-task bar that opens radially around my cursor. On mac I can put that shit left, right, bottom, which is something, and i can resize it which is the bare fucking minimum.

        On Windows? Bottom. Full width. Don’t like it? Fuck you. Shut up and cope.

        Oh but there’s a registry hack to… nope. Not dealing with that shit again after I tried to make the fucking icons smaller AND IT BROKE THE TASK BAR.

        Love that proprietary feeling, those crisp millions of dollars of development being used to innovate and develop a robust and perfected operating system.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
      2·
      22 days ago

      These are why I use FVWM and set up everything by hand, better this than feeling helpless in a supposedly user-friendly environment.

      But I think under normal usable desktops, like MATE, you can do such things easily enough.