Gnome changed some things with Gnome 3.x (which was not recently) and some people were dissatisfied with it, so they forked Gnome 2.x, created the Mate Desktop Environment and that's it. Nothing happened to Gnome, it's alive and kicking.
GNOME 3 got it right for me, one button/hand motion for everything, since starting it, I only moved between it and qtile because I like automatic tiling from time to time.
Has gnome 3 changed the way it does workspace management or something? The only difference I remember from Gnome 3's workspace management and virtually every other implementation was that it adjusted the number of virtual desktops dynamically. As opposed to the common case of a fixed number.
I like it because the basic tiling is good enough, the spotlight is pleasing, and it's mainstream and reliable (try it with Debian Jessie!). The workspace management is as good as Compiz 0.8.4 was, wouldn't say it's any better (now I'm curious!).
hmmh without trying to talk negatively about it, why is this on front page? am I missing something here?
What happened: people who were dissatisfied with gnome 3.x forked gnome 2 (a long time ago), created the Mate Desktop Environment, and that's pretty much it.
somewhat ancient history and the site has nothing of particular interest to offer... (no revolutionary milestone or anything of that sort)
It seems as though posting an old or ongoing project's web site on HN at any time is considered normal. You aren't the only one who's confused by it. It would make a bit more sense if these posts linked to some kind of new release or announcement of interest from the project ("news").
That just means you weren't one of the ten thousand[0] today. But rest assured, there were thousands of readers who weren't aware of Mate before and are now.
not at all my intention to poke fun at anyone though, it's hard to judge if something which is common knowledge for oneself might not be well known in general
lacking hardware support for new graphic cards and some weird wireless cards
printing is incredibly broken and sometimes cumbersome
some games and applications (photoshop, et cetera) people care for don't run or only with some work involved
it does not come pre-installed with computers people buy
not sure about power efficiency (power drain optimizations for notebooks and the like), but last I checked it's less efficient there
not necessarily a gui for everything
mere fact that there is so much choice (distributions, desktop environments, et cetera) that it is confusing
no central customer support
xorg is a mess, wayland afaik with some bad design decisions already
those were always the reasons weren't they?
your comment seems to imply it's not usable on the desktop, that's not the case, but for above reasons it has never gone mainstream (and will not in the near future) for the desktop.
but I am really an unsympathetic person to the whole linux-on-desktop mission. for me it's a server os or for specific use cases (ps4 based on freebsd, android, et cetera), that's where it shines, it's nice it works on the desktop, and I always use bsd/linux for my machines, but some think it apparently has to rival/beat windows/macos, don't agree with that. (in many ways it's particularly nice for developers/geeks because it's a server os working on the desktop, not another windows/macos - tell that to the systemd folks...)
I don't know what other people's issues are with it, but generally the experience isn't entirely smooth, and for some things there aren't fallback methods when problems arise things just go to shit.
My recent negative experience with graphics drivers. I had a Nvidia gpu set with a proprietary driver, switched to an AMD gpu, and then x server fails to start. I didn't know how to fix this on the command line. I had to pop the Nvidia gpu back in, switch to the open driver. After switching back to the AMD gpu there are serious graphical issues that make it impossible to accomplish anything; this same AMD gpu used to work just fine when side-by-side with the Nvidia card, only recently had this issue after the Nvidia card was removed. This experience is very grating. Windows handles gpu swapping with multiple driver installs very well, I didn't have any negative experiences with it on my desktop. I haven't touched Linux for weeks because I dread having to spend time fixing this when I can easily boot Windows and work without issue.
Desktop, I'm not sure. Being primarily a laptop user, I find myself missing the superior power management that comes with using the default OS and original drivers. I started with a Windows laptop with a short battery life, where ekeing out every little bit of extra juice was important, to a MacBook Pro that does very well at conserving battery. (Much better than stock Ubuntu/Linux Mint, at least.) The gestures in Mac OS and the HiDPI support are important to me too. I'm a pretty average laptop user, though, so I don't know that I'm the intended audience.
I do miss having a proper package manager. Homebrew is just okay.
If you cherry pick your laptop for Linux and use powertop (it now has a systemd service to implement all powersaving optimizations) its pretty easy to get very good power management.
Can't believe someone hasn't written this already: fonts. I've used Debian and Arch and had massive trouble a) figuring out what fonts are installed, b) how to install new fonts, c) getting them to not look like absolute shit. Example case: trying to use Adobe's "Source Code Pro" font with Debian's default terminal, at around 12-14px, on a 2560x1440 screen. I could get it to look good at 10px, and at 18px, but nowhere in between. One of the most frustrating experiences ever. To this day my font size is smaller than I'd like.
Another example: any font rendering in a web browser. Generally terrible.
Font is actually pretty much straight forward nowadays with most distros. You just need to enable lcd rgb subpixel rendering and thats it.
I use the Croscore set of fonts, the ones based on the Arial/Times/Courier that Google uses on the Chromebook and for me, it looks even better than on Windows or OSX.
Sound - it comes out of a random port sometimes with a sound source that dynamically appears (at a default of MAX volume in the mixer) that by the time you open the mixer app to turn it down is gone.
Multiple screens - multiple hells. So what happens when you go to sleep? Screens can swap, sometimes they change relative position, sometimes they simply become inaccessible. Multiple screens with multiple desktops? Now you're really playing with fire.
Fonts - mentioned elsewhere. You can go back and manually recompile FreeType to use the patented cleartype code (which I do, every damn time) and that code is long since clear to use.
Drivers - oh wait there is a blue tooth chip on your motherboard? Now all of a sudden the bluetooth daemon wants to mate with all your devices, whether are not you like it.
Networking? Passable if you want to use DHCP but what happens when one of your wired ports wants to be fixed address? It must be your primary port of course and gee it is configured but you can't NFS mount over it, oops, guess you didn't really want to automatically mount your NAS storage.
I can believe I'm over selling it but Kubuntu became unusable on my NUC when Plasma 5 came out, Xubuntu works ok but the screen switching is maddening. I went into the motherboard BIOS and had it disable the bluetooth in order to keep stuff from trying to bring it online and to mate with things. If I boot Windows 10 on this box (as challenged as that is) it is a better experience.
I'm really looking forward to Ubuntu on windows 10 kernel, that might have a shot at doing what I want.
Why can't you mount NFS shares over a statically configured ethernet port? And what do you mean by "it must be your primary port"? All of your other points sound reasonable and likely, but I'm curious what you meant by this one
I've got a hard wired IoT type network in my lab and a spare network port on my desktop is connected to it for debugging/testing. So in network/interfaces that port is 'iface eth1 inet static' versus 'auto eth0' for the port that connects to the house LAN. During boot, eth1 gets its IP address right away (it's static) and so all the mounts for NFS systems try to use it as the only connected network. Eventually the eth0 network is up but not after whining about booting in "restricted" mode.
There are too many to list, but I personally believe all problems come down to a complete lack of focus on the user by the development communities in general.
Don't get me wrong: most of them, like KDE and Gnome, focus on some user, but that user is themselves, developers, open-source enthusiasts, etc.
All Linux desktop environments look really, really bad by default. Even Gnome 3, Kde 4 and Unity have terrible defaults, like icons I would be ashamed to draw on a high school art class (not that I would do better, I'm no designer, far from it). Also, there's no way to get a consistent looking desktop if you don't stick to the default applications. Having GTK and QT apps to look well together involves a lot of forum-reading and googling, and it's never 100% decent.
Usability only fits a very narrow category of users. Both Gnome and Unity have completely disregarded the Desktop community and shifted to either "tabletish" or "keyboard-driven" interfaces, something too many users simply don't feel at home with. KDE, while choosing to stay more on the classic "windowish" desktop, have been a complete unfocused mess of a project.
Then, for a third and last example, there's the lack of decent apps. All the commonly used apps for a Linux desktop user are usually "good enough" for what they're supposed to do, but none are really, really great. LibreOffice does the job, but it's a decade behind even MS Office. Linux ports of commercial apps are usually hideous and lacking features.
Bottomline: Linux desktop environments have been playing catch up with the commercial desktops since forever, but keep doing the same mistakes. Most distro's tried to copy the "App Store" model, for instance, but have done so terribly enough that I still find myself installing "Yumex" or "Synaptics" everytime I build a new machine.
There are, however, people going in the right direction. I've been watching projects like Deepin, Elementary OS and Solus - and I honestly think they're trying hard to do what bigger projects have been failing at. Maybe they'll stand up, maybe their ideas will be merged into the bigger boys, but it's good to know someone's actually trying.
I can't speak for people in general, but I've been using Ubuntu on the desktop/laptop for years now and it's a breeze. For me, the Year of Linux on the Desktop came a few years ago.
Everything pretty much works; occasionally I have to tweak some config file or install 32 bit libraries to get a game working, but that's about it. Video drivers work. Audio works. Wireless printers are autodetected smoothlessly. I can pretty much do with Linux what I used to do with Windows ten years ago, and more. I'm happy enough that I would recommend it to my mother if she bought a new computer and didn't require any strict MS Office compliance.
I'd say MS Office is a huge weapon in Microsoft's arsenal. Even though I'm pretty happy with my occasional use of LibreOffice, I guess for people that really need exchanging MS Office documents with other people and have them look identical in both computers, Linux is problematic.
In software terms, nothing (though personally i feel it is slowly crapifying in recent years). What is needed, and has always been the problem, is physical products on physical store shelves, backed by support on par, or better, than current MS based products.
I've tried Ubuntu 15.04 for dev work last year and had two issues:
- I miss all the third-party Mac dev software. Git Tower, Kaleidoscope, Viscosity, Fantastical, OmniFocus... This is what has locked me into OS X for a decade now (starting with TextMate).
- The trackpad drivers for my MacBook Air are terrible. I couldn't get palm rejection to work. I think I wasn't happy with the Magic Trackpad either. I don't want to go back to mice...
The software issue sounds really hard to fix unless porting to Linux via OpenStep(?) becomes a thing.
Ignorance and lazyness stops people from using linux. The thing about linux is that it's the best free system we have. It does not matter how good it works or that there is no photoshop. It's important that you don't want to live with your operating-system-parents anymore. No eula clicking. No legal reminders. No forced out of your hands actions. You can change, improve and break the shitty system like you want to. That's much more valuable than anything these ultimately pathetic and full on consumerist corporate systems could ever offer.
Average users cannot be bothered with the plethora of custom options available. They "just want it to work" and not apply thoughts to how to navigate an unfamiliar UI.
I'd be quite confident in saying if there was a Windows 7/10 style UI for GNU/Linux, you'd have people more comfortable with making the switch. Ubuntu Linux has made strides in locking things down and simplifying the UI for average (non-power) users.
The first big step to making Linux the desktop platform of choice will involve simplification by a large margin, i.e., appealing to the lowest common denominator and then building up from there.
The last time I tried it, with Ubuntu Mate, I percieved it had more bugs than Xubuntu.
Xubuntu comes with xfce. I find that xfce looks very similar to mate but runs more smoothly and it feels more polished. At least I don't remember seeing errors related to the UI with xfce, unlike the experience with mate.
I believe the Ubuntu Mate fork is pretty new and Ubuntu does modify gtk quite a bit. I've been using it on Arch and haven't really had any problems with it.
I am also a big fan of mint, have been using 3-4 years (and before that Debian > Ubuntu > Gentoo > red hat > slackware). Mint with cinnamon is also interesting.
I'm thinking of trying Ubuntu mate in a new build though, there's a new version out that's supposedly very usable (previous versions have been strongly beta apparently). Clearly, distros rise and fall.
I can't use anything but MATE + Compiz and mostly because of Compiz'es fantastic functionality and customizability. I'm talking about color filters, grid plugin, and endless others that have no equivalent elsewhere.
Has Compiz improved in the last couple years? 0.8.4 was great, 0.9.8 was garbage. I wrote it off as garbage hijacked by Canonical exclusively to support Unity. (Gnome 3 is pretty much now a fine replacement for Compiz 0.8.4 imo)
I use the 0.8 series myself, and it does its job without making me pine for any particular improvements. As far as I can tell, there are occasional attempts at reviving development popping up every now and then, but none of them go far since the set of people who remain if you take out Ubuntu, GNOME 3 and KDE users (each of which has its own compositor) and then also remove all those who are using niche window managers for their minimalism and lower resource usage is very small.
"The name “MATE”, pronounced Ma-Tay, comes from yerba maté, a species of holly native to subtropical South America. Its leaves contain caffeine and are used to make infusions and a beverage called mate."
Neat! And here I've been pronouncing it like the English word "mate".
Furthermore, there's a mistake there. The plant name is not written "maté", which would be pronounced mah-TEH, but "mate", and it's pronounced MAH-teh.
I wish they had kept the GNOME application names (Nautilus, File-roller, ...) that I am familiar with instead of renaming them. Sure, they are forks, but spiritually similar. Perhaps "MATE Nautilus," etc., would have been fine.
Or just File Manager or whatever the other thing does. One of the things that isn't so great is dealing with every small piece of software having its own branding.
Please not. When I have a problem with a program I want to know what to type into Google. I'm using LXDE and in some apps you won't even see its name in the about window.
Yes, exactly. A unique name for a given codebase lets me google for documentation and source code. "Disk Utility" doesn't help nearly as much as "palimpsest."
My system's language is not English, so I would have to either guess what “Dokumentbetrachter” is called in English or get only results in German, which are probably not that many.
Sorry, but at best, this is just your personal experience. At worst, this is a damned lie. I don't mean to attack you, but I do mean to vehemently attack this sentiment. I feel I have to because this perspective is pushed so often with little push back from the other side...and believing it lead to my own personal detriment.
I recently bought a macbook after being a gnome 3 user for a few years. I had heard the anecodotes: many linux users, even some high profile ones like Miguel deGuza, had switched to mac, claiming that it was unix but with a better user experience, without the mess...cleaner, put together, smoother, etc, etc.
What a lie. Yes, some things are as smooth as they were on gnome 3, but the differences are to be very honest, not that significant. Gnome 3's window management, short cuts, everything was orders of magnitude better than mac os x. An interesting comparison, I've been using mac os x for 8 months, and it still feels like a kludge, I've adapted to it, rather than embracing it. For Gnome 3, I adapted to it within 2 months, and after that, I could use nothing else because of how fluid it is. Finally, workspaces on gnome 3 make me feel organized. On this macbook? My windows feels like a constant mess, and I still haven't figured it out. Again, it's not familiarity! Gnome 3 was weird at first but I fell in love after the initial hurdle. For this thing, if this is an initial hurdle, I still haven't found the valley after almost a year!
Oh, and the "it's unix", what a lie! I don't care if it's "unix(tm)", either I am so steeped in gnu-isms that I can't live without them, or the commandline on mac is so inferior it's not even funny. So yes, those "linux users" will tell you it's still unix, they won't tell you can't run gdb without signing it[0], they won't tell you that half of the super easy commands you find online will not be available because either the available versions are so old or they are bsd stuff. I was once open minded to using bsd but after having to suffer on apple garbage for a year I think I'll avoid BSD for the most part. Moreover, brew sucks, so bad. "Package management" (ie., dealing with conflicts between brew and the defaults that you'll sometimes have to fix manually) is just like the gui, pretty on the surface, but tending toward mess when you need control.
It was such a falsehood, to the point I either feel whoever bewitched me into thinking mac would be a "prettier" linux were either not the type of people I should have been listening to either way, or they were deliberately shills or something. Of course the latter is ridiculous, so I'll go with the well known maxim here[1] and pick the former.
Mac does one thing well, typefaces, although that's probably just the retina screen.
I personally find gnome 3's window and workspace management superior to osx's. The idea is that one gesture/motion gives you all windows and workspaces. Also, reassigning windows in gnome 3 to different workspaces is smoother than mac osx's.
That isn't a cli thing, that's a gui thing. A desktop savy user may care about such things...you're assuming very little about what desktop users can take advantage of.
Alright. One thing I admit is better is as I said, types just look better on os x although ubuntu's font rendering isn't that bad. Other than that, what UI polish are you talking about? I ask because I don't see it. Same goes compared to windows
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadGNOME 3 got it right for me, one button/hand motion for everything, since starting it, I only moved between it and qtile because I like automatic tiling from time to time.
Is there something else it's doing?
What happened: people who were dissatisfied with gnome 3.x forked gnome 2 (a long time ago), created the Mate Desktop Environment, and that's pretty much it.
somewhat ancient history and the site has nothing of particular interest to offer... (no revolutionary milestone or anything of that sort)
[0] https://xkcd.com/1053/
The submitter probably forgot that HN is for bleeding edge JS frameworks only.
What are the problems with Linux on the desktop?
printing is incredibly broken and sometimes cumbersome
some games and applications (photoshop, et cetera) people care for don't run or only with some work involved
it does not come pre-installed with computers people buy
not sure about power efficiency (power drain optimizations for notebooks and the like), but last I checked it's less efficient there
not necessarily a gui for everything
mere fact that there is so much choice (distributions, desktop environments, et cetera) that it is confusing
no central customer support
xorg is a mess, wayland afaik with some bad design decisions already
those were always the reasons weren't they?
your comment seems to imply it's not usable on the desktop, that's not the case, but for above reasons it has never gone mainstream (and will not in the near future) for the desktop.
but I am really an unsympathetic person to the whole linux-on-desktop mission. for me it's a server os or for specific use cases (ps4 based on freebsd, android, et cetera), that's where it shines, it's nice it works on the desktop, and I always use bsd/linux for my machines, but some think it apparently has to rival/beat windows/macos, don't agree with that. (in many ways it's particularly nice for developers/geeks because it's a server os working on the desktop, not another windows/macos - tell that to the systemd folks...)
My recent negative experience with graphics drivers. I had a Nvidia gpu set with a proprietary driver, switched to an AMD gpu, and then x server fails to start. I didn't know how to fix this on the command line. I had to pop the Nvidia gpu back in, switch to the open driver. After switching back to the AMD gpu there are serious graphical issues that make it impossible to accomplish anything; this same AMD gpu used to work just fine when side-by-side with the Nvidia card, only recently had this issue after the Nvidia card was removed. This experience is very grating. Windows handles gpu swapping with multiple driver installs very well, I didn't have any negative experiences with it on my desktop. I haven't touched Linux for weeks because I dread having to spend time fixing this when I can easily boot Windows and work without issue.
I do miss having a proper package manager. Homebrew is just okay.
Another example: any font rendering in a web browser. Generally terrible.
I use the Croscore set of fonts, the ones based on the Arial/Times/Courier that Google uses on the Chromebook and for me, it looks even better than on Windows or OSX.
This is my config: https://github.com/edgard/dotfiles/blob/master/config/fontco...
"X" is pretty great nowadays, you just need to enable some obscure option.
And that's the problem of linux. It's like that for everything.
I'd you are building your own desktop from building blocks in Arch or similar then configuring obscure options is what you chose to do.
Sound - it comes out of a random port sometimes with a sound source that dynamically appears (at a default of MAX volume in the mixer) that by the time you open the mixer app to turn it down is gone.
Multiple screens - multiple hells. So what happens when you go to sleep? Screens can swap, sometimes they change relative position, sometimes they simply become inaccessible. Multiple screens with multiple desktops? Now you're really playing with fire.
Fonts - mentioned elsewhere. You can go back and manually recompile FreeType to use the patented cleartype code (which I do, every damn time) and that code is long since clear to use.
Drivers - oh wait there is a blue tooth chip on your motherboard? Now all of a sudden the bluetooth daemon wants to mate with all your devices, whether are not you like it.
Networking? Passable if you want to use DHCP but what happens when one of your wired ports wants to be fixed address? It must be your primary port of course and gee it is configured but you can't NFS mount over it, oops, guess you didn't really want to automatically mount your NAS storage.
I can believe I'm over selling it but Kubuntu became unusable on my NUC when Plasma 5 came out, Xubuntu works ok but the screen switching is maddening. I went into the motherboard BIOS and had it disable the bluetooth in order to keep stuff from trying to bring it online and to mate with things. If I boot Windows 10 on this box (as challenged as that is) it is a better experience.
I'm really looking forward to Ubuntu on windows 10 kernel, that might have a shot at doing what I want.
Don't get me wrong: most of them, like KDE and Gnome, focus on some user, but that user is themselves, developers, open-source enthusiasts, etc.
All Linux desktop environments look really, really bad by default. Even Gnome 3, Kde 4 and Unity have terrible defaults, like icons I would be ashamed to draw on a high school art class (not that I would do better, I'm no designer, far from it). Also, there's no way to get a consistent looking desktop if you don't stick to the default applications. Having GTK and QT apps to look well together involves a lot of forum-reading and googling, and it's never 100% decent.
Usability only fits a very narrow category of users. Both Gnome and Unity have completely disregarded the Desktop community and shifted to either "tabletish" or "keyboard-driven" interfaces, something too many users simply don't feel at home with. KDE, while choosing to stay more on the classic "windowish" desktop, have been a complete unfocused mess of a project.
Then, for a third and last example, there's the lack of decent apps. All the commonly used apps for a Linux desktop user are usually "good enough" for what they're supposed to do, but none are really, really great. LibreOffice does the job, but it's a decade behind even MS Office. Linux ports of commercial apps are usually hideous and lacking features.
Bottomline: Linux desktop environments have been playing catch up with the commercial desktops since forever, but keep doing the same mistakes. Most distro's tried to copy the "App Store" model, for instance, but have done so terribly enough that I still find myself installing "Yumex" or "Synaptics" everytime I build a new machine.
There are, however, people going in the right direction. I've been watching projects like Deepin, Elementary OS and Solus - and I honestly think they're trying hard to do what bigger projects have been failing at. Maybe they'll stand up, maybe their ideas will be merged into the bigger boys, but it's good to know someone's actually trying.
Everything pretty much works; occasionally I have to tweak some config file or install 32 bit libraries to get a game working, but that's about it. Video drivers work. Audio works. Wireless printers are autodetected smoothlessly. I can pretty much do with Linux what I used to do with Windows ten years ago, and more. I'm happy enough that I would recommend it to my mother if she bought a new computer and didn't require any strict MS Office compliance.
I'd say MS Office is a huge weapon in Microsoft's arsenal. Even though I'm pretty happy with my occasional use of LibreOffice, I guess for people that really need exchanging MS Office documents with other people and have them look identical in both computers, Linux is problematic.
- I miss all the third-party Mac dev software. Git Tower, Kaleidoscope, Viscosity, Fantastical, OmniFocus... This is what has locked me into OS X for a decade now (starting with TextMate).
- The trackpad drivers for my MacBook Air are terrible. I couldn't get palm rejection to work. I think I wasn't happy with the Magic Trackpad either. I don't want to go back to mice...
The software issue sounds really hard to fix unless porting to Linux via OpenStep(?) becomes a thing.
I'd be quite confident in saying if there was a Windows 7/10 style UI for GNU/Linux, you'd have people more comfortable with making the switch. Ubuntu Linux has made strides in locking things down and simplifying the UI for average (non-power) users.
The first big step to making Linux the desktop platform of choice will involve simplification by a large margin, i.e., appealing to the lowest common denominator and then building up from there.
Most Linux desktops simply don't have that.
Would recommend for desktop.
I'm thinking of trying Ubuntu mate in a new build though, there's a new version out that's supposedly very usable (previous versions have been strongly beta apparently). Clearly, distros rise and fall.
Neat! And here I've been pronouncing it like the English word "mate".
My late father had oesophageal cancer from drinking up to a dozen cups of tea a day, with reflux.
I recently bought a macbook after being a gnome 3 user for a few years. I had heard the anecodotes: many linux users, even some high profile ones like Miguel deGuza, had switched to mac, claiming that it was unix but with a better user experience, without the mess...cleaner, put together, smoother, etc, etc.
What a lie. Yes, some things are as smooth as they were on gnome 3, but the differences are to be very honest, not that significant. Gnome 3's window management, short cuts, everything was orders of magnitude better than mac os x. An interesting comparison, I've been using mac os x for 8 months, and it still feels like a kludge, I've adapted to it, rather than embracing it. For Gnome 3, I adapted to it within 2 months, and after that, I could use nothing else because of how fluid it is. Finally, workspaces on gnome 3 make me feel organized. On this macbook? My windows feels like a constant mess, and I still haven't figured it out. Again, it's not familiarity! Gnome 3 was weird at first but I fell in love after the initial hurdle. For this thing, if this is an initial hurdle, I still haven't found the valley after almost a year!
Oh, and the "it's unix", what a lie! I don't care if it's "unix(tm)", either I am so steeped in gnu-isms that I can't live without them, or the commandline on mac is so inferior it's not even funny. So yes, those "linux users" will tell you it's still unix, they won't tell you can't run gdb without signing it[0], they won't tell you that half of the super easy commands you find online will not be available because either the available versions are so old or they are bsd stuff. I was once open minded to using bsd but after having to suffer on apple garbage for a year I think I'll avoid BSD for the most part. Moreover, brew sucks, so bad. "Package management" (ie., dealing with conflicts between brew and the defaults that you'll sometimes have to fix manually) is just like the gui, pretty on the surface, but tending toward mess when you need control.
It was such a falsehood, to the point I either feel whoever bewitched me into thinking mac would be a "prettier" linux were either not the type of people I should have been listening to either way, or they were deliberately shills or something. Of course the latter is ridiculous, so I'll go with the well known maxim here[1] and pick the former.
Mac does one thing well, typefaces, although that's probably just the retina screen.
[0] http://andresabino.com/2015/04/14/codesign-gdb-on-mac-os-x-y... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Apparently many seem to live in GNU/Linux land without trying one of those thousand variants of UNIX. What a change in regards to the early 2000's.
In any case, no desktop savy user will care about those issues.
That isn't a cli thing, that's a gui thing. A desktop savy user may care about such things...you're assuming very little about what desktop users can take advantage of.