Item — HN Reader

This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to position themselves as real alternatives and actually gain ground.

MacOS Tahoe has been heavily criticized for its UI decisions, especially Liquid Glass, which many people feel actively hurts usability rather than improving it. On the other side, Windows keeps piling on user-hostile features, dark patterns, and friction that increasingly frustrate power users and regular users alike.

Distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, and others have mature desktops, solid performance, and fewer design decisions that get in the user’s way.

I honestly cannot remember another moment where both major desktop platforms were being questioned this openly at the same time. If Linux is ever going to take advantage of dissatisfaction at scale, this feels like it.

8 comments

>This feels like a surprisingly good moment for Linux desktops to...actually gain ground.

I agree, and its likely that both macOS and Windows will continue to get worse.

That said, it's important to be realistic because users can and will put up with quite a lot of discomfort before switching, and this is because for every bad feature or misstep, there are 100 others that are so good you don't even notice them. And when you switch, you start noticing all those others features you never noticed before, because they are now gone. Some of these features will be hardware, some OS, some application support, and some of them you can fix and some you just have to get used to.

An approach I recommend is to add a linux laptop to the mix. You can buy a used, powerful laptop cheap, install Linux on it and try to use it for a time, keeping your other machines around. Chances are you'll find various trade-offs - Linux will NOT be a strict improvement, it will have downsides. Linux is particularly weak with power management and certain devices like fingerprint readers. Depending on the apps you use, it can be weak there, too. That said, Linux is very usable, easy to install, and you should try it. But I think it does people a disservice to imply its better on every axis. It's better on some, worse on others.

Well put. I dual booted because I still can't trust my CachyOS desktop not to do something surprising during important calls. But damn it is relieving to have full control again.

Linux desktops aren’t all immune to excessive minimalism and UI churn either. Just look at Gnome where they’ve decided it’s good in terms of usability to put all options in a hamburger menu and remove any sorts of sensible config options from the UI (a while back it was basic things like “show icons on the desktop”) to achieve this supposed sleekness.

Also Gnome disappeared after 2, got replaced with Unity in Ubuntu which was a whole new ugly thing, then that got replaced with Gnome3 which is very different from Gnome2, also Xorg got deprecated...

If you applied these standards of critique to Linux UIs, this post would be an entire encyclopedia, indexed by DE. I'd take even the worst modern Mac OS (Lion?) over that.

I feel like people who say this haven't seen KDE in a very long time. On a thinkpad it not only "just works", it works flawlessly, never demands attention without justification (i.e. no ads or superfluous items in notifications), every bit of hardware works, all the special keys, fingerprint reader and it's all recognized and usable and configurable from KDE.

Is there any particular distro you're using KDE on for this to work flawlessly on a Thinkpad? I have a Carbon Gen 6 on Windows 10 but one day will need to migrate. The device itself is sound and reliable.

CachyOS, it's basically a nice installer to jump into rolling arch. (I made sure it's a Ryzen thinkpad, might be relevant)

Thank you very much

fedora / fedora immutable (the aurora project under the universalblue umbrella has a really nice batteries included setup). Fingerprint reader, backlight, etc, everything works (at least for my thinkpads). I think any recent model everything should work out of the box.

Thank you

Yeah, I used whatever the default was, Gnome or Xfce. I'll seriously try KDE next time then.

GNOME has exactly the same quirky behavior with rounded windows, where the drop shadow is actually the clickable area to resize the window.

Exactly, I was reading this on CachyOS Gnome. I was like, wait a minute, I've this exact same issue for years on Gnome (maybe on KDE as well, not sure).

Also alternatives to Office, browsers, and pretty much anyone who can come along and say "we make tools that do what you want them to do."

All of these are longshots, but it really feels like we've hit a historic level of discontent.

Linux isn't there (on the desktop), and I doubt it'll ever be. It lacks so much: newbie support, drivers, easy configuration (user friendliness in general), and software. There's so much software that doesn't run on Linux. Linux also lacks mature frameworks that make development for macOS and .NET easy. The only thing desktop linux does well is browsing. That would be enough for most people, but they also have tablets and phones, and no need for a desktop.

User friendliness isnt that bad depending on distro, configuration is fine, but not great.

It's unusable even with the "user-friendly" distros like Mint and Ubuntu. Starting with the fact that Mint and Ubuntu don't even agree on what window system to use.

Why should they?

So you don't get a separate set of random video-related problems depending on which you use

I don't understand. First, how is that a problem? Second, why is it the default expectation that different operating systems will have the same set of flaws?

Fragmentation makes compatibility and help-finding more difficult. And newbies do get the expectation that the mainstream options aren't all that different, cause that's what everyone tells them.

The big problem isn't friendliness, it's that you don't buy a laptop with it installed. Most people are not realistically going to install a different operating system, they're going to use the one the laptop comes with.

https://system76.com

https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en

I am quite sympathetic towards Tuxedo, and am considering to replace my work laptop (a 6yr old MBP) with one of those when it stops working, but those are Apple and gaming laptop prices, not mass market prices.

> lacks mature frameworks that make development for macOS

Really? And windows does?

C#, or rather .NET, is pretty decent. I rate it lower than the macOS frameworks for UI development, but it brings a lot of functionality, which has been refined since the days of Visual Basic. Linux simply doesn't have that development effort. Completely understandable, but it holds Linux back, in particular on the desktop.

If you're not convinced: look at the difference between desktop Linux and Android. Although Android Studio seems to be a bit of a disaster nowadays, there's a lot of development support for Android, and it shows in the 1.6 million apps that have been built for it. Android has got what people crave: easy, slick, user-friendly apps, no technical hassle. It's an uphill battle, and at the same time, the focus is shifting away from desktop. So I think the year of Linux for the desktop will likely never come.

Absolutely

This won't happen until Microsoft Word is available on Linux.

It's like the console wars — different camps say "our console is better, it has more teraflops." In reality, nobody cares about that — buyers will get the console that has the games.

You guys still use Word?

Seriously, I think it depends if you're talking about business or home. For business, sure. For home—and this is quite relevant to the rest of your comment—I think it comes down more to gaming.

It is, it is copilot 365 now.

We're at the stage where almost any UI change no matter how small on Macs is heavily criticized. It seems a lot of people are getting very upset over a lot of micro detail. There's no way to please all of them. I've upgraded to Tahoe. Honestly, I barely notice any difference. It looks alright. There's very little for me to get upset over here. I'm pretty sure I'm in a bucket that describes the overwhelmingly large majority of users here: indifferent about the changes, overall not too upset, barely notice it.

As for Linux. I also have a Linux laptop with Gnome for light gaming (Manjaro). It's alright. But a bit of a mess from a ux point of view. Linux always was messy on that front. But it works reasonably well.

The point with the distributions that you mention is that they each do things slightly differently, and I would argue in ways that are mostly very superficial. Nobody seems to be able to agree on anything in the Linux world so all you get is a lot of opinionated takes on how stuff should behave and which side of the screen things should live. This package manager over that one.

I've been using Linux on and off for a few decades, so I mostly ignore all the window dressing and attempts to create the ultimate package manager UI, file managers and what not and just use the command line. These things come and go.

It seems many distros are mostly just exercises in creating some theme for Gnome or whatever and imitating whatever the creator liked (Windows 95, Beos, Early versions of OSX, CDE, etc.). There's a few decades of nostalgia to pick from here.

The changes in Tahoe do not fall under the bucket of "no matter how small". We have grown to accept many small, but very annoying changes, starting from disappearing scrollbars to not showing full URL in Safari, to name a few, which were all driven by smaller touchscreens on iPhone/iPad, but with Tahoe things became quite extreme.