> Despite the fact that I'm known for sometimes not being very polite to some of the desktop UI people, because I want to get my work done. Pretty is not my primary thing. I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled.
Pretty much sums up why it won't happen until someone starts imitating Steve Jobs and DICTATING how The Desktop should look like. And that means more pretty than functional.
Wow, this is such a difficult problem. Let's just get back to bragging about how many file systems Linux supports. "And how many file systems do Windows and Mac OS support?" "Yuck, yuck, yuck"
I started with amiga, windows (from 3.1 to 2000) and I've been using Linux as my main development and OS since more than 10 years now. I no longer use any other OS. I consider myself lucky I basically never interact with windows anymore. For the cross-os work that I have to do, python with qt covers me to the point that I just perform final testing. Amazing.
I used OSX around 10.4 for about four years, because it seemed like the best of both worlds: nice UX with an unix backend. That is, indeed, why OSX appealed to most geeks, right?
I became tired of OSX after a couple of years. What apple dictates might look good, but it's far from functional. It's eye candy with little substance. On the surface is pretty, but Finder under OSX was essentially a crapshot. Under Linux I could have virtual desktops, but not under OSX (that only arrived years later). Tweaking, even slightly, any default behavior is hard. That is also the reason why Gnome doesn't appeal to me. The basic OSX desktop doesn't offer anything beyond a current Gnome release. Things change if you need commercial programs, but the desktop itself is not inferior in both behavior, looks and general interaction. Gnome is, performance wise, slower, but the people that use gnome do not seem to notice.
Not to mention that what every developer does on OSX is install an external package manager, and by and large replace every single userland utility and library with an up-to-date variant from Brew, MacPorts, etc. This was a massive burden. Any linux distribution is far superior in that regard.
I don't think that Gnome today is far away from OSX. Sometimes OSX is smoother, sometimes Gnome actually is.
But, my desktop today is nowhere even remotely comparable to what gnome offers. I'm using a tiling window manager with pretty much any program customized to the point of being unrecognizable. It's incredibly efficient compared to a pretty desktop. I'm aggressively disabling eye candy and animations everywhere. I'm often using CLI versions of GUI programs because the actual user interface is superior. Some TUI programs have no rivals in GUI form.
The fact is, is that if you use your computer professionally and switch to linux, you start to understand what user interface efficiency is. At some point, eye candy becomes a second, third, fourth priority. This doesn't mean the program is any less usable though. I still value presentation. I'll take a nice UI any day over a crappy one, given the interaction is the same.
I've witnessed the same happening to many people that I've suggested linux. Many of those still use windows or mac, but with completely different habits.
> Tweaking, even slightly, any default behavior is hard.
I understand why they want to restrict tweaking - it makes support easier. Hide the tweaks in config files, make it clear that you're not going to support tweaked systems. But don't ban tweaks.
The fact is, if you use your computer professionally and switch to linux, you start to understand what user interface efficiency is
That highly depends on what you do with your computer professionally though. So it might be a fact for some, but completely false for others.
I'm using a tiling window manager with pretty much any program customized to the point of being unrecognizable.
I played that game for years but gave up afterwards. Maybe I was doing it wrong but I spent just too much time to my liking on it. Now I'm more in a mindest of 'if you can't build me software which I can use almost as-is, I'll look for something else'. Not always ideal either and sometimes there are no alternatives so you'r stuck with crap after all. And yeah maybe I'm not using my computer as efficiently as possible (looking at some collegues though, I'm a wizard compared to their 'let's use a mouse for everything and double-clik to make sure it hits'-style), but I'm getting work done.
Obviously do whatever works best for you. You don't have to spend a lot of time configuring your system to end up with something unrecognizable though. I've been running linux full time since 2003 and my $HOME directory can be traced directly back to then. Things start out as-is but then something would be mildly annoying so I'd spend 5 minutes reading the man page and change a setting. After a decade of that my environment evolved to suit me perfectly and even someone who knows the software I use would have trouble sitting in front of my PC and using it. However I never really spent days configuring anything. It was more of an accident.
>The fact is, is that if you use your computer professionally and switch to linux, you start to understand what user interface efficiency is. At some point, eye candy becomes a second, third, fourth priority. This doesn't mean the program is any less usable though. I still value presentation. I'll take a nice UI any day over a crappy one, given the interaction is the same.
Very true. Before starting my current position, i was a Visual studio die hard.While i still think it's the best single IDE, one thing thing i notice using linux CLI and vim in particular how much faster is it to do thing. And i seem to remember better how to do stuff instead of being lost in menus .
I think the current trend in UX is toward making them more intuitive (which i think linux/CLI could read do a be job at), but sadly we are sacrificing efficiency in the process.
Nope. I left the Linux desktop for OSX not because of aesthetics but because of the freedom from frustration that OS X gave me. Design isn't about making things more pretty, it is about improving the way a system works where the human part of it meets the machine part of it.
Linux distros just haven't put in the man-hours to make it a functional desktop for many.
a while back, years ago, I looked at switching to Linux but too many times instead of implementing a consistent interface and action set they would ape another OS (usually Windows) but only partially which leads to frustration as it almost works...
I am not sure the desktop needs conquering, we have more than one option and Linux won't make it unless it can get apps that people just have to have
> unless it can get apps that people just have to have.
Which is hard for it to get. Developing an app for desktop Linux means targeting a small group of people who are willing to endure frustration in order to run code whose source is available. Unless you are have some other revenue stream besides your customer, you can't make it more than a hobby.
I don't think this is the problem at all. Ubuntu, for example, is perfectly usable and a very good alternative to Windows.
The main problem, I'd say, is that there really isn't much of a reason to switch. People who buy a computer don't have any incentive to go through the with hassle.
If computers came with Ubuntu pre-installed I'm sure people would use those without a second thought.
However, the package management still needs to improve. One realizes that upon upgrading from one Ubuntu release to the other particularly if you have a bunch of software installed from PPAs. It would be unreasonable to expect a typical user to be able to fix the problems that it leads to.
While `apt-get` is great, you realize the limitations when you need to resort to `dpkg` when the package management is left in a broken state due to the occasional mess created upon removing a package.
I wish somebody from Canonical were looking at this thread.
Not really. I mean if you think about it, the original Macintosh looked like shit even compared to its predecessors; what was it, something like a nine inch screen in black and white, even greyscale it could only do with migraine-inducing dithering. But it could do desktop publishing when pretty much nothing else could, and Macintosh programs mostly used a consistent interface so you could figure out how to use them, and these functional advantages got people to buy the computer.
Linux Mint looks as pretty as Windows or Mac OS, and Ubuntu would if they'd change the weird purple color scheme, but what happens when a client sends you an Excel spreadsheet? What happens when you want to plug in a second monitor? What happens when you want to play a triple-A video game? What's the battery life like on a laptop? Those are functional issues that need to be solved.
> but what happens when a client sends you an Excel spreadsheet?
WPS Office covers me on that area. I use spreadsheets every week.
> What happens when you want to plug in a second monitor?
It works. Beautifully. In fact, I got a Powerpoint presentation, opened it with WPS, and the presentation was shown in the second display, while showing the notes and the rest of the 'WPS Presentation' in the laptop display.
> What happens when you want to play a triple-A video game?
Now this depends more on how many triple-A video games get sold in Steam for Linux than anything else. The technology is already there. The market is still small.
> What's the battery life like on a laptop?
This is a serious issue, and it needs to be solved.
You can have aesthetically pleasing and functional at the same time - they aren't mutually exclusive. Making the interface attractive doesn't mean 'dumbing down' the interface either.
Ubuntu is arguably the most popular Linux Desktop distribution and their model of UX development is to have a dedicated UX team designing the Ubuntu desktop experience. Presumably they read feedback from the community of Ubuntu users but ultimately, they make the final call on UX decisions.
The model for open source code contributions just doesn't work for visual and interaction design. (Or if it does, I've yet to see a successful example that wasn't an exception rather than the rule).
When there are too many participants in the visual and interaction design of a program or OS, you end up with a project pulled in every direction and pleasing to no-one. But if you go the opposite route and limit design decisions to a dedicated UX team or sole designer, you end up generating resentment from contributors or users who feel their input is being ignored.
This is a very good point which i think is not really discuss much in the community.
UX/UI work is very different that base dev. work, and maybe should be approach differently.
My other though would that maybe the talent pool of UX designer is just too small in the Open Source world, and that most OSS tend not to treat UX design as a first class requirement.
"bringing the number of supported file systems to 35. (Remind me, how many file systems do Mac OS X and Windows support?)"
A bunch of fucking nerds who don't understand consumers are never going to take over the desktop. I've watched Linux for 25 years, basically since the beginning. Stop telling people you're going to take over the desktop and figure out how to get another 1%, then repeat. I'd recommend starting with "putting all your wood behind one arrow".
Your reasoning is flawed. GNU/Linux took over server and mobile. Nothing stops it to happen in desktop anytime soon. No need for a fucking stupid Steve Jobs (I agree with RMS, thanks god Jobs is gone).
Edit: this place should not be named "hacker News"
Android took over mobile. Google could switch out everything GNU or Linux in Android with BSD or whatever next year. There are no unique benefits to Linux outside server/HPC. Sure, it has a huge server ecosystem and is well-suited for HPC, but Google could probably make a replacement that is just as good for smartphone purposes from scratch in 2-3 years.
He's trying to say that Android is something totally different from Linux.
Sure, it currently runs on Linux' kernel, but that's pretty much all.
You don't write your program against Linux/unix API, you write it against
Android. If Google was to replace Linux kernel in Android with, say, Windows
CE kernel, virtually nobody would notice, including most of the Android
programmers.
"GNU/Linux took over server and mobile. Nothing stops it to happen in desktop anytime soon."
Going off of first order logic, this is literally the textbook definition of flawed reasoning (at least without some compelling evidence that A implies B).
> I'd recommend starting with "putting all your wood behind one arrow".
I agree that that would make it more successfull... but what's the point in being successful if you do so by throwing out your unique benefits and cloning a product that already exists?
Linus has a serious problem understanding what products are, and what usability means.
The commands for git are an example of that -> they don't make sense. They are very poorly designed and counterintuitive.
Linus I think has this belief that 'technology & complexity = power' when really, it's 'products that do useful things' that matter.
Making seamless experiences matters. Consumers really don't care how many techies think something is cool, they don't care about drivers, or open-source, they just want it to work.
Linux could absolutely provide the foundation for the desktop, but whatever is on top of it will have to be equally innovative and provide a lot of value, so much so that I'd argue that the high level OS layer will be 'the hard part' not the kernel.
Here's an example: "system, orangeFS, bringing the number of supported file systems to 35. (Remind me, how many file systems do Mac OS X and Windows support?)"
Really? Who cares. You only need to support ONE, the right one, and support it well. Maybe there is an advantage in supporting a few others, but not really. This is a perfect example of 'engineering' that doesn't necessarily ad up to any end-user value.
"Pretty is not my primary thing." and here it is. Linux conflates 'aesthetics' with 'design'. A very common failure. They are not the same thing, not remotely.
Topic is Desktop computers. Not Development computers. Users of Desktop computers have specific requirements not necessary related to the development. Ignoring their requirements would definitely not allow you to take over the desktop.
> this place should not be named "hacker News"
Well couldn't you be a "hacker" in terms of UX, product design and other things as well?
What is "desktop" computers? In my vision, desktop computers are becoming "development" computers very fast. Day-to-day use with tablets and smartphones are already full of GNU/Linux. It's only a matter of time for it to take desktop too. But "hackers" from here have a little difficult to see it coming (and probably missed it happen in servers and mobile, and have NO IDEA how this impossible shit happened)
"Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel. People who erroneously think “Linux” refers to the entire GNU/Linux combination get tied in knots by these facts, and make paradoxical statements such as “Android contains Linux, but it isn't Linux.” Absent this confusion, the situation is simple: Android contains Linux, but not GNU; thus, Android and GNU/Linux are mostly different, because all they have in common is Linux."
I use git daily, and I'm comfortable and familiar with it.
Git commands are poorly designed.
My friend, I suggest you are part of the problem: smart people who grasp arcane things as a badge of honour and lord it over others in a demeaning way, totally lacking in self-awareness.
Git would be a better product if the commands were more coherent and structured. Some people - especially Linus - have no ability to grasp this.
Given what I've seen from Linux - he basically added commands and features will nilly, without much thought. There is no 'design' of the git command line 'api'.
There are some other bad flaws in git design.
Which is why Linux will never be on the desktop ... (again with the caveat that someone may build something on top of Linux that is good for the desktop)
> Which is why Linux will never be on the desktop ..
You would say the same before GNU/Linux took over mobile. Stop fucking with the results of Free Software. If someone appears to build a top GNU/LINUX desktop, it'll be based on the work of Linus and RMS. Forever.
GNU/Linux did not take over mobile. Google did. Linux was a tool but what really sold it to customers were the services and convenience.
That could have been done with FreeBSD or any other UNIX or nonUNIX clone.
People like you are toxic. But I can't blame you as you have been probably brainwashed in your 3rd world leftist oriented country.
Git, even for a command line system, is hardly an example of good UI. It's a very powerful system, but when you compare its commands and usage to something like Mercurial, for example (especially early in GIT's lifecycle) Mercurial had much better named commands, it was designed to be a lot easier for someone coming from the popular RCSes at the time, and did not have contradictory argument placements in different but related commands.
I think git has a wonderful UI and mainly UX. I don't think the quality of a sword should be discussed based on the easiness to use to an apprentice. It's good to be a great tool for the ones who master it. And someone can master a lot of things in life, but not everything that he is not able to master is because of a bad UI/UX.
That's exactly why I provided Mercurial as an example. Mercurial is as complex a system as GIT, yet the commands are not close to being as messy as GIT's (or as numerous, for that matter, but it can still achieve the same things, as far as RCS is concerned).
But you don't even have to compare it to anything else. GIT's lack of design and thought is completely evident at simply looking at how certain commands arbitrarily reverse the orders of source and dest params. This adds absolutely no value, and only makes things more difficult, even for experts. What it does do is display is a lack of thought and design.
Which, as is evident, may not be an issue in professional circles, but is a huge problem in achieving success on the desktop, which will necessarily require usage by a lot of newbies and people who don't want to know much more about their computers than the location of the on switch and how they can get to Facebook.
> "Pretty is not my primary thing." and here it is. Linux conflates 'aesthetics' with 'design'. A very common failure. They are not the same thing, not remotely.
Is it conflating the two? Or is it saying "I don't care about aesthetics as long as it's well designed (= comfortable to use)?" Linus is famous for rants about how the Linux Desktop requires to much technical detail to know for the average user.
> Linux could absolutely provide the foundation for the desktop, but whatever is on top of it will have to be equally innovative and provide a lot of value, so much so that I'd argue that the high level OS layer will be 'the hard part' not the kernel.
Did anyone argue that the hard part would be the kernel?
I understand your frustrations, but to me it seems you are picking an odd target for them. Linus opinion and knowledge about UX doesn't matter very much, because he doesn't work on anything that an end-user should have to see.
> Linus is famous for rants about how the Linux Desktop requires to much technical detail to know for the average user.
huh? Only thing i recall was him ranting at the Gnome/Freedesktop people over having to enter the root password to connect to a wifi hotspot (network manager and polkit not getting along).
I don't see why you make that comparison. Many distros (Ubuntu comes to mind) certainly cater to the same market as Windows and OS X, and do it very well.
You do not want to refine something, for the sake of simplicity, to the point where you can no longer easily understand what it's ingredients are. You need to be able to manipulate its ingredients (and the ingredients of others), at will, if you are true developer, inventor, creator.
I've also been using the Linux on the desktop since 1994 when Yggdrasil and Slackware got started, everyday as a developer.
Tech people fail to understand that what they do is in some way always connected to "real people's problems and needs". Yes you might be paid to solve abstract compsci problems but they do not directly turn into $$$. You create a new filesystem,programming language or a new operating system but none of it is technically needed.. Most of the people do not buy products because of their technical qualities. Most of the people buy powerful computers because they want to play games. Managers and company owners buy powerful servers to be able to serve content faster. But these servers and useful software does not directly contribute to their revenue. It's the content and its quality. It does not matter how good is your software if it can't solve people's problems. Because most of the people are not programmers,scientists etc
I wonder if Linus would consider a stable ABI for kernel drivers these days. Make it stable across one each major version.
So much of the kernel source code is driver code. The old approach was always to release the source code for your driver and they'll incorporate it in the major source tree.
WIFI- and GPU-drivers still are very much binary only and don't have source code released.
That would be the quickest way to allow Linux to be supplanted: being able to incorporate its drivers into your own operating system without constant maintenance would allow you to pass what's by far the highest hurdle in gaining acceptance, being able to run on "everyone's" hardware.
ADDED: it might also indeed fix one of the biggest problems with Linux on the desk/laptop. For example, in moving through Debian starting with lenny, skipping jessie (systemd) and moving to Ubuntu LTS 14.04, I've had both sound devices and my Wacom tablet stop working and start working again.
This was both severely annoying and expensive in the former case (had to buy a $$$ PCIe sound card to cover for inexpensive and utterly standard USB devices to use Skype (or any other VOIP system) and play music)). Still better than Windows, which I abandoned after XP, and still believe was the right move, but....
That was an USB 1.x issue, had nothing to do with the sound chip behind the USB interface. Yeah, that's right, the kernel crew broke something pretty fundamental in that primarily desktop device driver (servers are going do be doing heavy duty things with USB 2 and above), and nobody noticed and/or cared enough to not ship it with squeeze.
That's also the version that broke the Wacom support as I recall, it came back with wheezy or maybe Ubuntu Vivid's kernel.
Pulse Audio is pretty awful, but I've always been able to get it to do my bidding, modulo not being able to get the Ubuntu version I'm using to multiplex outputs (I can probably make that happen, it's not a Pulse Audio issue per se I'm pretty sure, but it's just easier to switch output from stereo system to headphones the few times I use Skype).
Ah yes, USB. Could be the powersave/suspend issue. Iirc, the kernel implemented it as if there was a upper limit on how long the device could take to get ready after a resume. But apparently the time mentioned in the spec was just a suggestion, not a hard limit. And many devices would take a minute or longer to come back once resumed. Lets just say that USB is a "fun" protocol, and the latest addition has not helped much.
It was as I recall a timing/time out issue, and very possibly the one you describe, it would just have to not effect the normal keyboard and mouse USB 1.x devices, and I'm pretty sure these USB 1.x sound devices had much better than "a minute or longer" times in resuming.
And, yeah, I can imagine how much of a zoo USB in the real world is....
Given that i have seen one driver work for a multitude of devices (like 20+ different brands of webcams, because they all use the same internals), i think i prefer the current method.
The larger problem is the number of "winmodem" style devices. That do as little as possible in hardware, and everything else in the driver.
And releasing source code is one thing, but companies like AMD are releasing the interface details that allow others to produce and maintain the driver. The problem there has been third party licenses and patents, particularly as GPUs do more than apply shaders to triangles (video codec acceleration being a big one).
In my world, Linux has also taken over the desktop. For my personal needs, I would never consider OSX or Windows for that task.
The desktop feels currently like a neglected area. OSX gets more iOSified with every release, whatever Microsoft does gets booed, regardless if it's good or bad.
Much functionality that used to be on the desktop has wandered into the browser. What desktop you're using isn't as important as it used to be.
steam OS looks promising as to get the gaming people to see that games run superior under open source Linux, specially when you need speed and accuracy in operating system functions , my hope that Linus and the linux foundation support valve breakthrough.
SteamOS is holding back the Linux community. SteamOS is still based on Debian 8 (Jessie). Steam software often clashes with existing libraries of a current system. When I benchmarked Steam games, they delivered only 65% of the Windows performance figures when run on Linux.
I am thankful that SteamOS is nothing more than a lab experiment. If that became popular, Valve will not pay any attention to us, regular Linux users.
In Ubuntu, the mouse pointer disappears after locking the screen or suspending [1], and the Fn button combo can take minutes to change screen brightness [2]. These bugs have been around for months and years, respectively. You simply cannot get non-power users to use an operating system with issues like this. Perhaps there's a more polished distro, but if the one that's touted as the beginner-friendly one has such obvious user-facing problems, it's just not feasible to get past 1% market share.
Your point is perhaps valid, but we're talking about an OS where people can even contribute bug fixes (agree that the percentage might be 0.1% or much less).
On the other hand, people get used to living with issues such as: 'High CPU use by taskhost.exe when Windows 8.1 user name contains "user"' [0]. Possibly because we've become so accustomed (slaves?) to a certain computing environment. Moreover, you can't even contribute a bug fix.
Ubuntu on Windows hasn't arrived as a service to Windows users. This is an acknowledgement of a growing threat (at least in a limited developer community).
--
That said, get rid of Unity and Ubuntu would suddenly so much better. Canonical might have damaged Linux lesser if it made Openbox the default WM.
That said, get rid of Unity and Ubuntu would suddenly so much better. Canonical might have damaged Linux lesser if it made Openbox the default WM.
I do not understand from where comes all this constant Unity bashing. I think that this is actually what creates the real damage.
I think that Unity is great user interface that takes the maximum out of the current distorted screens and I have used it for years as my main (and only) desktop.
I do not understand from where comes all this constant Unity bashing. I think that this is actually what creates the real damage.
It's not just Unity; anything even remotely disliked gets bashed (Gnome Shell has a history of getting criticised at every bit of news about it). I agree that it is poisonous behaviour that benefits no one, but I wonder what causes it.
Almost all the constant complaints I see fall into a couple categories:
1. forced reduced-functionality or questionable UI choices on a project
2. imported the buggy, unexpected behavior of previous Windows releases into the Linux world.
I also think it is a conflict inside a changing culture surrounding Linux.
I used Windows as my main desktop before (till Window 7) and I must say that its UI usability degraded constantly. Windows 8 and 10 have thier own problems, but my experience is just occasional with them. I have also occasionally used some other Linux desktop, or tried to use it, but Unity feels most polished and logical for me. I do not have much experience with OSX. Perhaps I would like it, but I do not like Apple hardware.
Yes, Unity has it problems, for example some processes start to run amok time to time, but I do not notice that compiz is one of them. Considering that I usually ran my Windows installations to the ground, Ubuntu has stand the test of time for me.
Same feeling here. Long time ubuntu user here. Unity is by no mean perfect, and quite frankly very buggy (as opposed to windows). But the level of hate just does not match my daily experience.
I do think that ubuntu could be better , and that with canonical heavy focus on convergence devices and servers, the desktop side is not improving as much as i hoped.
There is almost always a different distro that handles a specific issue better than the distro a given user is troubleshooting. If it were always the same distro, we would be in good shape...
Linux won't succeed on the desktop until someone takes a commercial interest in doing so. In order to have a motivation and ability to make Linux work for the masses you need to earn money off of desktop users. It's extremely unclear to me why such a commercial actor should choose Linux over something newer and shinier like Redox. Sure, there's a bit more work to be done with Redox, but not that much (you only need one file system for desktop) and in return they'd get technology from this side of the millennium as opposed to 1970s tech.
EDIT: What I mean is that without earning money off of the end-users, developers will develop a product for themselves, not normal users. That's fine. That's FOSS developers's prerogative. But it won't make Linux on the desktop take off.
This, 100 % this. Linux hasn't succeed on the desktop because the business case for it is weak. The success of ubuntu is in large part due to the financial input of Mark Shuttleworth/canonical. For linux on desktop to move to the next step we need a way to generate revenue out of it. I do think there is a market for it ( a small one), and but that the main hurdle to a commercial desktop linux distro are cultural as opposed to anything else.
I am not sure if i agree that something like redox would make more sense than using linux. The most lucrative market for linux desktop right now would be dev/front-end and backend. Going to redox you would lose all that ecosystem. I think microsoft is realizing that which is why they are pushing the linux on windows thing.
But definitly, an desktop os based on something more modern than unix would be awesome
There's Canonical (and their software store) and there are Steam machines.
The commercial interest is there.
I don't see what has Redox to do with your point, or if you are simply trying to leverage this thread to promote it, but I guess any downvote comes from that angle.
I believe the answer about why Linux isn't dominating on desktop is hidden in the answer about why it dominates for example, servers. And why that? Because many companies put much money into Linux and server software for it. This software is not direct source of income so their is no point to hide it from other, but it's better to develop it together. Of course, top companies can create great software.
Desktop is a different story. It's pretty hard to make the same amount of money on desktop open-source software. So profit from it - and thus desktop software is developed by enthusiasts. Enthusiasm is good, but it results in worse quality of software, even though these are the best developers in the world developing it. As soon as there is way to get profit not from selling software - it can get good open-source implementation - e.g. browsers (incomes from ad) or game engines (UE4 for example is not FOSS, but source code is published because you just can't publish game and not pay). Yet no altherntive for Photoshop, or CAD, or Chessbase.
That was a bit messy, but I hope you got my point. You want to promote Linux on desktops - just invent a method to earn on OSS same amount of money es from selling software - the wave of open sourcing will be enormous.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadPretty much sums up why it won't happen until someone starts imitating Steve Jobs and DICTATING how The Desktop should look like. And that means more pretty than functional.
But we have plenty of distros where the people behind it do just that?
Wow, this is such a difficult problem. Let's just get back to bragging about how many file systems Linux supports. "And how many file systems do Windows and Mac OS support?" "Yuck, yuck, yuck"
I used OSX around 10.4 for about four years, because it seemed like the best of both worlds: nice UX with an unix backend. That is, indeed, why OSX appealed to most geeks, right?
I became tired of OSX after a couple of years. What apple dictates might look good, but it's far from functional. It's eye candy with little substance. On the surface is pretty, but Finder under OSX was essentially a crapshot. Under Linux I could have virtual desktops, but not under OSX (that only arrived years later). Tweaking, even slightly, any default behavior is hard. That is also the reason why Gnome doesn't appeal to me. The basic OSX desktop doesn't offer anything beyond a current Gnome release. Things change if you need commercial programs, but the desktop itself is not inferior in both behavior, looks and general interaction. Gnome is, performance wise, slower, but the people that use gnome do not seem to notice.
Not to mention that what every developer does on OSX is install an external package manager, and by and large replace every single userland utility and library with an up-to-date variant from Brew, MacPorts, etc. This was a massive burden. Any linux distribution is far superior in that regard.
I don't think that Gnome today is far away from OSX. Sometimes OSX is smoother, sometimes Gnome actually is.
But, my desktop today is nowhere even remotely comparable to what gnome offers. I'm using a tiling window manager with pretty much any program customized to the point of being unrecognizable. It's incredibly efficient compared to a pretty desktop. I'm aggressively disabling eye candy and animations everywhere. I'm often using CLI versions of GUI programs because the actual user interface is superior. Some TUI programs have no rivals in GUI form.
The fact is, is that if you use your computer professionally and switch to linux, you start to understand what user interface efficiency is. At some point, eye candy becomes a second, third, fourth priority. This doesn't mean the program is any less usable though. I still value presentation. I'll take a nice UI any day over a crappy one, given the interaction is the same.
I've witnessed the same happening to many people that I've suggested linux. Many of those still use windows or mac, but with completely different habits.
> Tweaking, even slightly, any default behavior is hard.
I understand why they want to restrict tweaking - it makes support easier. Hide the tweaks in config files, make it clear that you're not going to support tweaked systems. But don't ban tweaks.
That highly depends on what you do with your computer professionally though. So it might be a fact for some, but completely false for others.
I'm using a tiling window manager with pretty much any program customized to the point of being unrecognizable.
I played that game for years but gave up afterwards. Maybe I was doing it wrong but I spent just too much time to my liking on it. Now I'm more in a mindest of 'if you can't build me software which I can use almost as-is, I'll look for something else'. Not always ideal either and sometimes there are no alternatives so you'r stuck with crap after all. And yeah maybe I'm not using my computer as efficiently as possible (looking at some collegues though, I'm a wizard compared to their 'let's use a mouse for everything and double-clik to make sure it hits'-style), but I'm getting work done.
I have my own list here, but I'm curious to hear yours to potentially add to my list. Thanks for the great post.
Very true. Before starting my current position, i was a Visual studio die hard.While i still think it's the best single IDE, one thing thing i notice using linux CLI and vim in particular how much faster is it to do thing. And i seem to remember better how to do stuff instead of being lost in menus .
I think the current trend in UX is toward making them more intuitive (which i think linux/CLI could read do a be job at), but sadly we are sacrificing efficiency in the process.
Nope. I left the Linux desktop for OSX not because of aesthetics but because of the freedom from frustration that OS X gave me. Design isn't about making things more pretty, it is about improving the way a system works where the human part of it meets the machine part of it.
Linux distros just haven't put in the man-hours to make it a functional desktop for many.
I am not sure the desktop needs conquering, we have more than one option and Linux won't make it unless it can get apps that people just have to have
Which is hard for it to get. Developing an app for desktop Linux means targeting a small group of people who are willing to endure frustration in order to run code whose source is available. Unless you are have some other revenue stream besides your customer, you can't make it more than a hobby.
The main problem, I'd say, is that there really isn't much of a reason to switch. People who buy a computer don't have any incentive to go through the with hassle.
If computers came with Ubuntu pre-installed I'm sure people would use those without a second thought.
However, the package management still needs to improve. One realizes that upon upgrading from one Ubuntu release to the other particularly if you have a bunch of software installed from PPAs. It would be unreasonable to expect a typical user to be able to fix the problems that it leads to.
While `apt-get` is great, you realize the limitations when you need to resort to `dpkg` when the package management is left in a broken state due to the occasional mess created upon removing a package.
I wish somebody from Canonical were looking at this thread.
Not really. I mean if you think about it, the original Macintosh looked like shit even compared to its predecessors; what was it, something like a nine inch screen in black and white, even greyscale it could only do with migraine-inducing dithering. But it could do desktop publishing when pretty much nothing else could, and Macintosh programs mostly used a consistent interface so you could figure out how to use them, and these functional advantages got people to buy the computer.
Linux Mint looks as pretty as Windows or Mac OS, and Ubuntu would if they'd change the weird purple color scheme, but what happens when a client sends you an Excel spreadsheet? What happens when you want to plug in a second monitor? What happens when you want to play a triple-A video game? What's the battery life like on a laptop? Those are functional issues that need to be solved.
WPS Office covers me on that area. I use spreadsheets every week.
> What happens when you want to plug in a second monitor?
It works. Beautifully. In fact, I got a Powerpoint presentation, opened it with WPS, and the presentation was shown in the second display, while showing the notes and the rest of the 'WPS Presentation' in the laptop display.
> What happens when you want to play a triple-A video game?
Now this depends more on how many triple-A video games get sold in Steam for Linux than anything else. The technology is already there. The market is still small.
> What's the battery life like on a laptop?
This is a serious issue, and it needs to be solved.
You can have aesthetically pleasing and functional at the same time - they aren't mutually exclusive. Making the interface attractive doesn't mean 'dumbing down' the interface either.
Ubuntu is arguably the most popular Linux Desktop distribution and their model of UX development is to have a dedicated UX team designing the Ubuntu desktop experience. Presumably they read feedback from the community of Ubuntu users but ultimately, they make the final call on UX decisions.
The model for open source code contributions just doesn't work for visual and interaction design. (Or if it does, I've yet to see a successful example that wasn't an exception rather than the rule).
When there are too many participants in the visual and interaction design of a program or OS, you end up with a project pulled in every direction and pleasing to no-one. But if you go the opposite route and limit design decisions to a dedicated UX team or sole designer, you end up generating resentment from contributors or users who feel their input is being ignored.
UX/UI work is very different that base dev. work, and maybe should be approach differently.
My other though would that maybe the talent pool of UX designer is just too small in the Open Source world, and that most OSS tend not to treat UX design as a first class requirement.
A bunch of fucking nerds who don't understand consumers are never going to take over the desktop. I've watched Linux for 25 years, basically since the beginning. Stop telling people you're going to take over the desktop and figure out how to get another 1%, then repeat. I'd recommend starting with "putting all your wood behind one arrow".
Edit: this place should not be named "hacker News"
What are you trying to say? You could make the same argument for any piece of software in existence.
You don't write your program against Linux/unix API, you write it against Android. If Google was to replace Linux kernel in Android with, say, Windows CE kernel, virtually nobody would notice, including most of the Android programmers.
"GNU/Linux took over server and mobile. Nothing stops it to happen in desktop anytime soon."
Going off of first order logic, this is literally the textbook definition of flawed reasoning (at least without some compelling evidence that A implies B).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I agree that that would make it more successfull... but what's the point in being successful if you do so by throwing out your unique benefits and cloning a product that already exists?
https://twitter.com/billgates/status/478693050404069377
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
He had a business goal and effectively followed though getting the job done:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/05/technology/bill-gates-email-...
The commands for git are an example of that -> they don't make sense. They are very poorly designed and counterintuitive.
Linus I think has this belief that 'technology & complexity = power' when really, it's 'products that do useful things' that matter.
Making seamless experiences matters. Consumers really don't care how many techies think something is cool, they don't care about drivers, or open-source, they just want it to work.
Linux could absolutely provide the foundation for the desktop, but whatever is on top of it will have to be equally innovative and provide a lot of value, so much so that I'd argue that the high level OS layer will be 'the hard part' not the kernel.
Here's an example: "system, orangeFS, bringing the number of supported file systems to 35. (Remind me, how many file systems do Mac OS X and Windows support?)"
Really? Who cares. You only need to support ONE, the right one, and support it well. Maybe there is an advantage in supporting a few others, but not really. This is a perfect example of 'engineering' that doesn't necessarily ad up to any end-user value.
"Pretty is not my primary thing." and here it is. Linux conflates 'aesthetics' with 'design'. A very common failure. They are not the same thing, not remotely.
Edit: this place should not be named "hacker News"
> this place should not be named "hacker News"
Well couldn't you be a "hacker" in terms of UX, product design and other things as well?
-- rms (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/android-and-users-freedom.en....)
Git commands are poorly designed.
My friend, I suggest you are part of the problem: smart people who grasp arcane things as a badge of honour and lord it over others in a demeaning way, totally lacking in self-awareness.
Git would be a better product if the commands were more coherent and structured. Some people - especially Linus - have no ability to grasp this.
Given what I've seen from Linux - he basically added commands and features will nilly, without much thought. There is no 'design' of the git command line 'api'.
There are some other bad flaws in git design.
Which is why Linux will never be on the desktop ... (again with the caveat that someone may build something on top of Linux that is good for the desktop)
You would say the same before GNU/Linux took over mobile. Stop fucking with the results of Free Software. If someone appears to build a top GNU/LINUX desktop, it'll be based on the work of Linus and RMS. Forever.
People like you are toxic. But I can't blame you as you have been probably brainwashed in your 3rd world leftist oriented country.
But you don't even have to compare it to anything else. GIT's lack of design and thought is completely evident at simply looking at how certain commands arbitrarily reverse the orders of source and dest params. This adds absolutely no value, and only makes things more difficult, even for experts. What it does do is display is a lack of thought and design.
Which, as is evident, may not be an issue in professional circles, but is a huge problem in achieving success on the desktop, which will necessarily require usage by a lot of newbies and people who don't want to know much more about their computers than the location of the on switch and how they can get to Facebook.
All other systems are more user friendly and make more sense.
Linus built git for his own needs and that's fine, but in reality git for the majority of devs is not necessary.
And there it is:
'Git' has some amazing things, but 90% of time time, you want to do simple things.
Git makes doing the simple, common things hard - and makes doing sophisticated things 'possible'.
A 'good product' makes doing the common things 'easy' and the sophisticated things 'possible'.
For what git does most of the time - there is absolutely no reason for the obfuscation and complexity. Hence - bad product design.
Most of the time it doesn't matter. But when it matters, it really matters.
Is it conflating the two? Or is it saying "I don't care about aesthetics as long as it's well designed (= comfortable to use)?" Linus is famous for rants about how the Linux Desktop requires to much technical detail to know for the average user.
> Linux could absolutely provide the foundation for the desktop, but whatever is on top of it will have to be equally innovative and provide a lot of value, so much so that I'd argue that the high level OS layer will be 'the hard part' not the kernel.
Did anyone argue that the hard part would be the kernel?
I understand your frustrations, but to me it seems you are picking an odd target for them. Linus opinion and knowledge about UX doesn't matter very much, because he doesn't work on anything that an end-user should have to see.
I think it's maybe better to think of the kernel as something like a 'chipset' in terms of it's relevance to the desktop.
Linux? BSD? It's like AMD vs. Intel. The user-based OS is so abstracted it almost doesn't matter. It's a technical detail.
huh? Only thing i recall was him ranting at the Gnome/Freedesktop people over having to enter the root password to connect to a wifi hotspot (network manager and polkit not getting along).
I've also been using the Linux on the desktop since 1994 when Yggdrasil and Slackware got started, everyday as a developer.
So much of the kernel source code is driver code. The old approach was always to release the source code for your driver and they'll incorporate it in the major source tree.
WIFI- and GPU-drivers still are very much binary only and don't have source code released.
ADDED: it might also indeed fix one of the biggest problems with Linux on the desk/laptop. For example, in moving through Debian starting with lenny, skipping jessie (systemd) and moving to Ubuntu LTS 14.04, I've had both sound devices and my Wacom tablet stop working and start working again.
This was both severely annoying and expensive in the former case (had to buy a $$$ PCIe sound card to cover for inexpensive and utterly standard USB devices to use Skype (or any other VOIP system) and play music)). Still better than Windows, which I abandoned after XP, and still believe was the right move, but....
That's also the version that broke the Wacom support as I recall, it came back with wheezy or maybe Ubuntu Vivid's kernel.
Pulse Audio is pretty awful, but I've always been able to get it to do my bidding, modulo not being able to get the Ubuntu version I'm using to multiplex outputs (I can probably make that happen, it's not a Pulse Audio issue per se I'm pretty sure, but it's just easier to switch output from stereo system to headphones the few times I use Skype).
And, yeah, I can imagine how much of a zoo USB in the real world is....
The larger problem is the number of "winmodem" style devices. That do as little as possible in hardware, and everything else in the driver.
And releasing source code is one thing, but companies like AMD are releasing the interface details that allow others to produce and maintain the driver. The problem there has been third party licenses and patents, particularly as GPUs do more than apply shaders to triangles (video codec acceleration being a big one).
The desktop feels currently like a neglected area. OSX gets more iOSified with every release, whatever Microsoft does gets booed, regardless if it's good or bad.
Much functionality that used to be on the desktop has wandered into the browser. What desktop you're using isn't as important as it used to be.
I wonder if that pendulum ever swings back.
The future of desktops I see is something like:
Chrome OS: 70% of computers for ordinary use
Windows: 20% of computers for gaming
OS X: 5% of computers for video editing
Linux: 5% of computers for development
2. Steam is still a proprietary platform, though I can see how their support would benefit all distros' gaming capabilities.
I am thankful that SteamOS is nothing more than a lab experiment. If that became popular, Valve will not pay any attention to us, regular Linux users.
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1573454 [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-power-manage...
On the other hand, people get used to living with issues such as: 'High CPU use by taskhost.exe when Windows 8.1 user name contains "user"' [0]. Possibly because we've become so accustomed (slaves?) to a certain computing environment. Moreover, you can't even contribute a bug fix.
Ubuntu on Windows hasn't arrived as a service to Windows users. This is an acknowledgement of a growing threat (at least in a limited developer community).
--
That said, get rid of Unity and Ubuntu would suddenly so much better. Canonical might have damaged Linux lesser if it made Openbox the default WM.
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3053711
I do not understand from where comes all this constant Unity bashing. I think that this is actually what creates the real damage.
I think that Unity is great user interface that takes the maximum out of the current distorted screens and I have used it for years as my main (and only) desktop.
It's not just Unity; anything even remotely disliked gets bashed (Gnome Shell has a history of getting criticised at every bit of news about it). I agree that it is poisonous behaviour that benefits no one, but I wonder what causes it.
1. forced reduced-functionality or questionable UI choices on a project 2. imported the buggy, unexpected behavior of previous Windows releases into the Linux world.
I also think it is a conflict inside a changing culture surrounding Linux.
Yes, the interface is good but it sucks the resources out of the system. Have you noticed how much CPU and memory does `compiz` consume?
> I have used it for years as my main (and only) desktop
Only if you tried using anything else!
Yes, Unity has it problems, for example some processes start to run amok time to time, but I do not notice that compiz is one of them. Considering that I usually ran my Windows installations to the ground, Ubuntu has stand the test of time for me.
It loads faster, but it lacks about half the keyboard shortcuts I use in Ubuntu.
ElementaryOS lacks even more. No menus in the applications (like Chrome) with lots of wasted screen state, and a broken launcher.
We have tried, and Unity was still superior for doing stuff.
I do think that ubuntu could be better , and that with canonical heavy focus on convergence devices and servers, the desktop side is not improving as much as i hoped.
Can you point to an option that reliably does?
[0] https://awesomewm.org/
[1] https://awesomewm.org/wiki/Main_Page
[2] https://awesomewm.org/wiki/Screenshots
There is almost always a different distro that handles a specific issue better than the distro a given user is troubleshooting. If it were always the same distro, we would be in good shape...
EDIT: What I mean is that without earning money off of the end-users, developers will develop a product for themselves, not normal users. That's fine. That's FOSS developers's prerogative. But it won't make Linux on the desktop take off.
I am not sure if i agree that something like redox would make more sense than using linux. The most lucrative market for linux desktop right now would be dev/front-end and backend. Going to redox you would lose all that ecosystem. I think microsoft is realizing that which is why they are pushing the linux on windows thing.
But definitly, an desktop os based on something more modern than unix would be awesome
The commercial interest is there.
I don't see what has Redox to do with your point, or if you are simply trying to leverage this thread to promote it, but I guess any downvote comes from that angle.
As a software developer, I'm fine with Linux,I think I can I live with a non-Windows system.
Of course the problem is I still play games on my laptop/PC :p
Desktop is a different story. It's pretty hard to make the same amount of money on desktop open-source software. So profit from it - and thus desktop software is developed by enthusiasts. Enthusiasm is good, but it results in worse quality of software, even though these are the best developers in the world developing it. As soon as there is way to get profit not from selling software - it can get good open-source implementation - e.g. browsers (incomes from ad) or game engines (UE4 for example is not FOSS, but source code is published because you just can't publish game and not pay). Yet no altherntive for Photoshop, or CAD, or Chessbase.
That was a bit messy, but I hope you got my point. You want to promote Linux on desktops - just invent a method to earn on OSS same amount of money es from selling software - the wave of open sourcing will be enormous.
A: bulk discounts.
B: bundling
C: embrace extend extinguish
All these combine to shore up the Windows presence on the desktop.