> Linux has won
Needing two of the most famous non-Linux operating systems for the layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems is not particularly a victory if you look at it from that perspective. Just highlights the piss-poor state of Linux desktop even after all these years. For the average person, it's still terrible on every front and something I still have a hard time recommending when things so often go belly up.
Before you jump on me, every year, I install the latest Fedora/Ubuntu (supposedly the noob-friendly recommendations) on a relatively modern PC/Laptop and not once have I stopped and thought "huh, this is actually pretty usable and stable".
I am ux designer and forever Mac user. I also try Fedora on random stuff. I am not sure why but last time tried it i got Blender circa 10 years ago vibes from desktop linux gnome.
Everybody has been making fun of Blender forever but they consistently made things better step by step and suddenly few UX enhancements the wind started shift. It completely flipped and now everybody is using it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if desktop Linux days are still ahead. It’s not only Valve and gaming. Many things seems start to work in tandem. Wayland, Pipewire, Flatpack, atomic distros… hey even Gnome is starting to look pretty.
It definitely could happen, but there are two things standing in the way of it:
- there's not one desktop Linux that everyone uses (or even uses by default), and it's not resolving any time soon
- I use Ubuntu+Gnome by default, and I wouldn't say it looks great at all, other than the nice Ubuntu desktop background, and the large pretty sidebar icons
- open source needs UX people to make their stuff look professional. I'm looking at you, LibreOffice
Forget looks - I'd just be happy with rock solid.
The standard Ubuntu+Gnome desktop crashes far too often.
Now I have no idea whose fault that is ( graphics driver, window system, or desktop code - or all three ) - but it's been a persistent problem for linux 'desktops' over many many years.
Imho the bright side is that this has solutions and it is getting better. Linux can be very stable, look at servers to android or even steam deck. It's mostly hardware lottery that means it comes down to hw companies support.
The kernel is stable, the desktop ( in my experience ) is not.
I suspect a lot of the problem is in the graphics drivers - they just don't get the love and attention that happens for Windows, and definitely not the Mac ( where they intentionally keep the number of things they need to support low ).
Atomic distros (fedora’s specifically) are what got me to stick to desktop Linux. That was after seeing how well the Steam Deck worked, and therefore Proton. I haven’t reinstalled in almost 2 years. Not even got the distro itch once.
I've been hearing that for 20 years though...
The problem with the Linux desktop isn't usability, it's the lack of corporate control software. Without corporate MDM and antivirus, you'll find it rather annoying to get a native Linux desktop in many companies.
For Windows and MacOS you can throw a few quick bucks over the wall and tick a whole bunch of ISO checkboxes. For Linux, you need more bespoke software customized to your specific needs, and that requires more work. Sure, the mindless checkboxes add nothing to whatever compliance you're actually trying to achieve, but in the end the auditor is coming over with a list of checkboxes that determine whether you pass or not.
I haven't had a Linux system collapse on me for years now thanks to Flatpak and all the other tools that remove the need for scarcely maintained external repositories in my package manager. I find Windows to be an incredible drag to install compared to any other operating system, though. Setup takes forever, updates take even longer, there's a pretty much mandatory cloud login now, and the desktop looks like a KDE distro tweaked to hell (in a bad way).
Gnome's "who needs a start button when there's one on the keyboard" approach may take some getting used to, but Valve's SteamOS shows that if you prevent users from mucking about with the system internals because gary0x136 on Arch Forums said you need to remove all editors but vi, you end up with a pretty stable system.
In defense of MDM, those checkboxes aren’t even entirely useless. It’s so nice being able to demonstrate that every laptop in the company has an encrypted hard drive, which you should be doing anyway. It turns a lost or stolen laptop from a major situation to a minor financial loss and inconvenience.
Yes, a lot of MDM feature are just there to check ISOwhatever boxes. Some are legitimately great, though. And yes, even though I’m personally totally comfortable running a Linux laptop, come SOC2 audit time it’s way harder to prove that a bunch of Linux boxes meet required controls when you can’t just screenshot the Jamf admin page and call it good.
We introduced MDM for our Mac boxes early this year. Over half(!) had outdated mac versions and missed multiple major updates. Before that - it was always really obvious that you needed to run the newest version ASAP (asap=All dev tools run on the newest version, which was not a given, so a few weeks delay was ok). We have lots of linux boxes and I suspect their patch state is even worse - but how to check that? There are a dozen distros and a few self build systems...
Do those MDM solutions look into the Linux VMs? Because once I get one of those Rube Goldberg machine working-ish, I'm naturally going to do my best to never touch it/never update anything. Native Linux tends to Just Work and has easy rollbacks, so it's fine to update.
That was our experience, too. Sales people never update. They just don’t.
One day I asked our CFO something, and watched him log into his laptop with like 4 keypresses. And that’s how we got more complex password requirements deployed everywhere.
Having spent a few years as a CISO, I’m now understand much more about why we have all those pain in the neck controls. There’s a saying about OSHA regulations that each rule is written in blood. I don’t know what the SOC2 version of that is, but there should be one.
Yes, halfway decent security runs counter to most people's inclinations. Like osha or medecine rules. So enforcement is important, though it is annoying
I've gotten a lot of mileage out of explaining why we're enforcing controls. "OK, as an engineer, I'm not fond of this either, but here's why it's important..." goes a long way.
I'd say that's a fairly web development-centric take. I work at an embedded shop that happily puts a few million cars running Linux on the road every year, and we have hundreds of devs mainly running Linux to develop for Linux.
The average person is not dishing out software that runs on millions of cars from the average PC/laptop they got off the shelves from their bestbuy equivalent. I’d say the same for the average developer. I’d also guess if given a choice and unless there are technical limitations that prevent it from being so, even the devs in your shop would rather prefer to switch to a usable daily driver OS to get things done.
The desktop marketshare stats back me up on the earlier point and last I checked, no distro got anywhere close?
Sure, Android is the exception (if we agree to consider) but until we get serious dev going there and until Android morphs into a full-fledged desktop OS, my point stands.
well, don't forget there's a fully fledged console now too, which by the way, runs games made for windows on linux, with better performance.
And yes, that's bought by the 'average person'.
> I’d also guess if given a choice and unless there are technical limitations that prevent it from being so, even the devs in your shop would rather prefer to switch to a usable daily driver OS to get things done.
On the contrary, our devs generally clamor for expanded Linux support from company IT.
There's just no other OS that's anywhere near as useful for real software engineering that isn't on a web stack.
MacOS is a quirky almost-Linux where you have to fiddle with Homebrew to get useful tools. On Windows you end up installing three copies of half of Linux userspace via WSL, Cygwin and chocolatey to get things done. All real tools are generally the open source ones that run better on native Linux, with Windows equivalents often proprietary and dead/abandoned.
Let me give you a basic embedded SW example: Proxying a serial connection over a TCP or UDP socket. This is super trivial on Linux with standard tools you get in every distro. You can get similar tools for Windows (virtual COM port drivers, etc.), but they're harder to trust (pre-compiled binaries with no source), often half-abandoned (last release 2011 or something) and unreliable. And the Linux tools are fiddly to build on MacOS because it's just not the standard. This pattern replicates across many different problems. It's simply less headache to run the OS where things just work and are one package manager invocation away.
There's simply significant swaths of software development where Linux and Linux-friendly Open Source tools/projects have hands-down won, are the ubiquitous and well-maintained option, and on the other systems to have to jump through hoops and take extra steps to set up a pseudo-Linux to get things done.
Honestly, there's also the fact that MacOS and Windows users are equally used to their systems as Linux users are to theirs, and are equally blind to all the bugs, hoops and steps they have to take. If you're a regular, happy Linux user and attempt to switch (and I have done this just recently, actually, porting a library and GUI app to control/test/debug servo motors to Window), the amount of headache to endure on the other operating systems just to get set up with a productive environment is staggering, not to mention the amount of crap you have to click away. Granted, MacOS is a fair bit less annoying than Windows in the latter regard, though.
I'll happily claim that Linux today is the professional option for professional developers, anyhow. And you web folks would likely be surprised how much of the code of the browser engines your ecosystem relies on was written and continues to be written on Linux desktops (I was there :-), and ditto for a lot of the backend stuff you're building your apps on, and a fair amount of the high-end VFX/graphics and audio SW used to make the movies you're watching, and so on and so forth.
Are there more web devs churning out CRUD apps and their mobile wrappers on MacOS in the absolute? For sure, by orders of magnitude. But the real stuff happens on Linux, and my advice to young devs who want to get good and do stuff that matters (as someone who hires them) is to get familiar with that environment.
> Before you jump on me, every year, I install the latest Fedora/Ubuntu (supposedly the noob-friendly recommendations) on a relatively modern PC/Laptop and not once have I stopped and thought "huh, this is actually pretty usable and stable".
Funnily enough that's how I feel every time I use Windows or Mac. Yet I'm not bold enough to call them "piss poor". I'm pretty sure I - mostly - feel like that because they are different from what I'm used to.
As someone who grew up running Microsoft OSes, starting with DOS, then Windows and who has used a Mac laptop since the Windows Vista days, my perspective on the usability of Linux Desktop is unrelated to it simply being "different from what I'm used to."
Transitioning from Windows to Mac was much more of an adjustment than Linux Desktop. It's just that Linux has too many rough edges. While it's possible I've simply been unlucky, everytime I've tried Linux it's been small niggling issue after small niggling issue that I have to work around and it feels like a death of a thousand paper cuts. (BTW I first tried Linux desktop back in the late 90s and most recently used it as my main work laptop for 9 months this past year.)
Note, I'm more than happy to use Linux as a server. I run Linux servers at home and have for decades. But the desktop environments I've tried have all been irksome.
Note that I'm not mentioning particular distros or desktop environments because I've tried various over the years.
It's hard to guess why you have such an experience when you are not being more precise than "issue after issue", but it would seem plausible that you are using hardware with poor support.
After all there are plenty of people - including me - who do not share that experience at all.
Sure, part of the issue is bad hardware support, but most recently I had a Dell laptop for work with Ubuntu on it. It was officially supported, but refused to go to sleep properly, so each morning it would be nearly drained even if it was fully charged the night before.
I had other issues that were not hardware related though. The desktop environment was missing some basic features for things like mouse settings that I had to install community extensions for, which were buggy.
I also had issues with printers, HDMI output, keyboard settings, and more. The list goes on and on. Each was something I spent time on that I haven't had to spend time on with MacOS (it's been a decade and a half since I've used Windows, but I remember it having fewer issues).
BTW, I also dread OS updates on Linux, and that includes server-side. Definitely another pain point that feels more severe than on MacOS.
Anyway, I'm glad that Linux works for some people's usecases, but it feels like it's been in this limbo of quasi-usable for quite a while from my perspective.
> Just highlights the piss-poor state of Linux desktop even after all these years.
What exactly is wrong with it? I prefer KDE to either Windows or MacOS. Obviously a Linux desktop is not going to be identical to whatever you use so there is a learning curve, but the same is true, and to a much greater extent, for moving from Windows to MacOS.
> layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems
> or the average person
The "layman" or "average person" does not develop software.
The average person has plenty of problems dealing with Windows. They are just used to putting up with being unable to get things to work. Ran into that (a multi-function printer/scanner not working fully) with someone just yesterday.
If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software (at any rate not developing software that matters to anyone).
I have switched a lot of people to Linux (my late dad, my ex-wife, my daughter's primary school principal) who preferred it to Windows and my kids grew up using it. No problems.
> What exactly is wrong with it? I prefer KDE to either Windows or MacOS.
KDE is my choice as well (Xfce #2) if I have to be stuck with a Linux distro for a long period but I'd rather not put myself in that position because it's still going to be a nightmare. My most recent install from this year of Kubuntu/KDE Fedora had strange bugs where applications froze and quitting them were more painful than macOS/Windows, or that software updates through their app store thingy end up in some weird state that won't reset no matter how many times I reboot, hard crashes and so on on a relatively modern PC (5900X, RTX 3080, 32G RAM). I had to figure out the commands to force reset/clean up things surrounding the package management in order to continue to install/update packages. This is the kind of thing I never face with Silicon macs or even Windows 10/11.
This is a dealbreaker for the vast majority of people but let's come to your more interesting take:
> If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software
And that sums up the vast majority of Linux users who still think every other year is the year of "Linux desktop". It's that deeply ignorant attitude instead of acknowledging all these years of clusterfuck after clusterfuck of GUIs, desktop envs, underlying tech changes (Xorg, Wayland) and myriads of confusing package distribution choices (debs, rpms, snaps, flatpaks, appimages and so on), that no sane person is ever going to embrace a Linux distro as their daily driver.
You need a reality reset if you think getting used to Linux is a qualifier to making great software.
> KDE is my choice as well (Xfce #2) if I have to be stuck with a Linux distro for a long period but I'd rather not put myself in that position because it's still going to be a nightmare. My most recent install from this year of Kubuntu/KDE Fedora had strange bugs where applications froze and quitting them were more painful than macOS/Windows, or that software updates through their app store thingy end up in some weird state that won't reset no matter how many times I reboot, hard crashes and so on on a relatively modern PC (5900X, RTX 3080, 32G RAM).
A matter of your experience. Its not something that happens to me or anyone I know personally. Even using a less newbie friendly distro (I use Manjaro) its very rare.
I have not tried Fedora for many years, but the last time I did it was not a particularly easy distro to use. It is also a test distro for RHEL and Centos so should be expected to be a bit unstable.
> It's that deeply ignorant attitude instead of acknowledging all these years of clusterfuck after clusterfuck of GUIs, desktop envs, underlying tech changes (Xorg, Wayland) and myriads of confusing package distribution choices (debs, rpms, snaps, flatpaks, appimages and so on)
Most of which is hidden from the user behind appstores. The only thing non-geek users need to know is which DE they prefer (or they can let someone else pick it for them, or use the distro default).
Even a user who wants to tinker only needs to know one of the distribution formats, one desktop environment. You are free to learn about more, but there is absolutely no need to. You also need to learn these if you use WSL or some other container.
> You need a reality reset if you think getting used to Linux is a qualifier to making great software.
What I said is that the ability to cope with the tiny learning curve to adjust to a different desktop look and feel is a disqualifier for for being a developer.
Every non-technical user who switches from Windows to MacOS does it, so its very odd it is a barrier for a developer.
If you're just kicking the tyres on Fedora or Ubuntu, you're not getting KDE. I love it myself, but I know it's there. The average curious person is going to get whatever Gnome thinks they deserve at that point in time.
Gnome being the default does probably harm Linux desktop adoption.
On the other hand do people care that much about DEs? Most people just want to start their web browser or whatever.
> If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software
For most it’s not a case of whether you can do it, it’s whether it’s worth doing it. For me Linux lacks the killer feature that makes any of that adjustment worth my (frankly, valuable) time. That’s doubly so for any of us that develop user facing software: our users aren’t going to be on Linux so we need to have a more mainstream OS to hand for testing anyway.
If you're developing server software (presumably you are if using containers), it's going to run on Linux, so desktop Linux is by far the sanest choice with the least moving parts.
Certainly, but then that is also a valid objection (and one I have heard) for switching from Windows to MacOS.
The objection is really I do not want to use anything different, which is fine. After many years of using Linux I feel the same about using Windows or MacOS
> For me Linux lacks the killer feature that makes any of that adjustment worth my (frankly, valuable) time
It lacks all the irritants in Windows 11 every Windows user seems to complain of?
> That’s doubly so for any of us that develop user facing software: our users aren’t going to be on Linux so we need to have a more mainstream OS to hand for testing anyway.
SO for desktop software, that is not cross platform, yes. If you are developing Windows software you need Windows.
If you are developing server software it will probably be deployed to Linux, if you are developing web apps the platform is the browser and the OS is irrelevant, and if you are developing cross platform desktop apps then you need to test on all of them so you need all.
Linux has not won on the desktop and probably never will, granted. But linux has won for running server-side / headless software, and has done so for years.
That said, counterpoint to my own, Android is Linux and has billions of installations, and SteamOS is Linux. I think the next logical step for SteamOS is desktop PCs, since (anecdotally) gaming PCs only really play games and use a browser or web-tech-based software like Discord. If that does happen, it'll be a huge boost to Linux on the consumer desktop.
> not once have I stopped and thought "huh, this is actually pretty usable and stable".
I think we need to have a specific audience in mind when saying whether or not it's stable. My Arch desktop (user: me) is actually really stable, despite the reputation. I have something that goes sideways maybe once a year or so, and it's a fairly easy fix for me when that does happen. But despite that, I would never give my non-techy parents an Arch desktop. Different users can have different ideas of stable.
My problem with Arch 12 years ago was exactly the fact that things would just randomly stop working and I often wouldn’t know until I needed it. What drew the line for me was when I needed to open a USB pendrive and it wouldn’t mount — if I remember correctly something related to udisk at the time and a race condition. I spent like 30 minutes looking into it and it was just embarrassing as I had someone over my shoulder waiting for those files.
This is when I gave up and switched to Apple. I am now moving back to Linux but Arch still seems like it’s too hacky and too little structured organizationally to be considered trustworthy. So, Ubuntu or Debian it is, but fully haven’t decided yet.
Still, I would be happy to be convinced otherwise. I’m particularly surprised Steam uses it for their OS.
I have been using arch for about a year now.
I've crapped my system on install, or when trying to reconfigure core features.
Updates? 0 issues. Like genuinely, none.
I've used Ubuntu and Mint before and Arch "just works" more then either of them in my experience.
I had awful experiences with arch over a decade ago. I started using it again last year and it's been completely solid and the least problematic Linux distribution that I've used in ages.
I'm not going to jump on you, but for me Linux is much more friendly than Windows or macOS. I tried to use macOS, just because their Apple silicone computers are so powerful, but in the end I abandoned it and switched back to Thinkpad with Linux. Windows is outright unusable and macOS is barely usable for me, while Linux just works.
FOSS OS dev is slow but is built on cross collaboration so the foundation is strong. Corporate OS has the means to tune to end user usage and can move very fast when business interests align with user experience.
When you are a DE that’s embedded in FOSS no one has an appetite to fund user experience the same way as corporate OS can.
We do have examples where this can work, like with the steam deck/steamOS but it’s almost counter to market incentives because of how slow dev can become.
I see the same problem with chat and protocol adoption. IRC as a protocol is too slow for companies who want to move fast and provide excellent UX, so they ditch cross collaboration in order to move fast.
The moment I read "Needing two of the most famous non-Linux operating systems for the layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems" I knew this comment would be a big pile of unfactual backed opinions.
In my experience, Linux is great for the type of user who would be well-suited with a Chromebook. Stick a browser, office suite and Zoom on it, and enable automatic updates, and they'll be good to go.
Linux is great for users on the extreme ends of the spectrum, with grandma who only needs email on one end and tiling WM terminal juggler on the other. Where it gets muddy is for everybody in the middle.
That’s not to say it can’t or doesn’t work for some people in the middle, but for this group it’s much more likely that there’s some kind of fly in the soup that’s preventing them from switching.
It’s where I’m at. I keep secondary/tertiary Linux boxes around and stay roughly apprised of the state of the Linux desktop but I don’t think I could ever use it as my “daily driver” unless I wrote my own desktop environment because nothing out there checks all of the right boxes.
> Linux is great for users on the extreme ends of the spectrum, with grandma who only needs email on one end and tiling WM terminal juggler on the other.
> That’s not to say it can’t or doesn’t work for some people in the middle, but for this group it’s much more likely that there’s some kind of fly in the soup that’s preventing them from switching.
Generally agree with these points with some caveats when it comes to "extremes".
I think for middle to power users, as long as their apps and workflows have a happy path on Linux, their needs are served. That happy path necessarily has to exist either by default or provisioned by employers/OEMs, and excludes anything that requires more than a button push like the terminal.
This is just based on my own experience, I know several people ranging from paralegals working on RHEL without even knowing they're running Linux, to people in VFX who are technically skilled in their niche, but certainly aren't sys admins or tiling window manager users.
Then there are the ~dozen casual gamers with Steam Decks who are served well by KDE on their handhelds, a couple moved over to Linux to play games seemingly without issue.
Using Linux is definitely easier when there’s just one thing you’re doing primarily, as is often the case in corporate settings. When things start to fall apart for me is with heavier multitasking (more than 2-3 windows) and doing a wide variety of things, as one might with their primary home machine.
Well-observed. I come back to check out the state of the Linux desktop every 2-3 years, and I always find that the latest layer/s of instrumentality and GUI are thin as frosting on a cake - as soon as you need anything that's not in the box, you're immediately in Sudo-land.
Fedora/Debian + AMD ThinkPad here. Haven't had any crashes or instability in 5+ years.
Terrible on every front? I'm sorry, but it's hard to take this seriously. I've been daily driving Fedora with Cinnamon for the past 4 years and it works just fine. I use Mac and Windows on a regular basis and both are chock full of AI bloatware and random BS. On the same hardware, Linux absolutely runs circles around Windows 10 and Windows 11. If the application you need to use doesn't run on Linux; well, OK... not much you can do about that. But to promote that grievance to "terrible on every front" is ridiculous.
Meh, you're making the same mistake most do on this one. You're treating the Linux desktop like it's compatible even though these two non-linux operating systems are made by some of the biggest companies ever with allot of engineering hours paid to lock people in.
Plus, one could argue they've actually just established dominance through market lockin by ensuring the culture never had a chance and making operating system moves hard for the normal person.
But more importantly if we instead consider the context that this is largely a collection of small utilities made by volunteers vs huge companies with paid engineering teams, one should be amazed at how comparable they are at all.
I disagree. The only feature I miss on Linux is the ctrl-scroll to zoom feature of macOS.
If Gnome implemented that as well as macOS does I’d happily switch permanently.
The only feature? Like across the entire OS? Pretty broad. If you were right then adoption would be orders of magnitude higher.
It's the only feature I missed. That doesn't mean that you won't be looking for something else. I run almost the same FOSS day to day on both Mac and Linux.
I've worked in jobs that only used Linux as the day to day desktop operating system. I currently work on macOS.
What features do you think are missing?