It is in my opinion the most cohesive linux desktop especially if you are looking for the "classic" desktop experience (which isn't to say it's dated, it has all the new bells and whistles but it's not all about them either).
Yeah I get really confused and unsure as to whether or not it's working. I probably need to buy a laptop from a vendor with first-class Linux support TBH.
iCloud Photos / Photos.app is the hardest one to go without. I can't find any equivalent software that isn't less private that has an equivalent feature set as far as ML identification and collection creation.
The backend storage is easy, it's the front end / image processing that I'm struggling with.
Still I run Windows occasionally when I need some specific proprietary apps that are not available on other platforms (mostly electronic design suites).
The trackpad experience on MacBooks is unbeatable. Another comment here on HN described it as the trackpad completely disappearing from your mind. You don't have to fight it at all. You don't even think about it anymore. The cursor just becomes a natural extension of your hand.
Also, as a person working with PDF documents on a regular basis, I don't know of any application that can beat the feature set and UX of Preview.app.
These are the only two things keeping me back. If there were viable alternatives in the Linux ecosystem I'd switch in a heartbeat.
I recently upgraded from Debian 10 to 11 on my Thinkpad T490 and there are noticeable trackpad improvements. Maybe it reset my settings or maybe there are driver improvements, I’m not 100% sure. Either way the default out of the box experience is faster and snappier.
Still not on the same level as MacBooks though. But it is making progress.
I've been using a Magic Trackpad 2 on my Linux desktop for a year now and it's great. Two finger scroll and right click works, but it also does three finger middle click which is super convenient for opening and closing tabs in Firefox - it's something I miss when I'm on macOS.
Inertial scrolling depends on the app, but Firefox implements it well and that takes care of 80% of it for me.
Any idea on how to adjust the minimum steps? I can't figure out how to change it in firefox running on PureOS/Gnome Wayland. Also two finger swipe for back or forward doesn't work very well using the firefox extension SwipeToNavigate.
My Lenovo Flex 5 with Fedora 34 (GNOME) has an incredibly smooth trackpad experience. Also, GNOME sushi is a useful preview.app alternative, maybe not on the same level, but you should try it. I used Xfce before getting my new laptop, but on newish hardware, GNOME is great.
GNOME’s equivalent of Preview.app would be evince, which is strictly inferior to Preview, but for one singular feature: the hand tool.
In fact, GNOME is in fact my daily driver and I keep a Windows VM tucked away in case I ever need to manipulate a PDF. And even that is worse than Preview.
I'll always be a Linux enthusiast, but this is one of the key things that keeps me on macOS at least some of the time. To be honest I don't think there's a reason to nail your colours to the mast with any OS, there's no reason not to use two for different tasks. I juggle macOS, Linux, and to a lesser extent FreeBSD just fine, although the context switch is much more expensive adding Windows to the mix in my experience although I expect a lot of that is down to personal taste (I'm very set in my *nix ways).
> The trackpad experience on MacBooks is unbeatable
Only if you use it as your main OS. If you use a combination of Windows, Linux and MacOS, the latter's trackpad tends to do the opposite of what you expect. the first thing I do is change the vertical scroll direction so it behaves like the others.
The direction of scroll is one small part of it. The Mac trackpad is perfectly balanced in various important areas: knowing when to reject extraneous fingers, high DPI/resolution, just the right size and shape, the same height as the rest of the laptop, feels smooth rather than some weird studded plastic nonsense, etc.
My Pixelbook has a better trackpad experience than my M1 Macbook and it runs on Linux (ChromeOS).
The big problem is a lack of investment by either Linux or Windows. It's such a huge quality of life improvement that I really don't understand why there's not more focus.
The real downer on Linux for me (chromebook aside) is that it's hard to get good laptop battery life and even with all the tweaks, it generally still isn't as good as my macbook.
I'd give KDE and Okular a look. There are some rough edges, but I find myself missing it when I'm on my mac.
All my desktops run Linux though as it's a beast there.
It's kind of crazy how long Preview.app has been one the best at what it does. I remember it being a minor revolution back in the early 2000s, running like butter compared to the clunky-even-then Adobe Reader and handily sweeping up a few different format viewers into one app.
It's been 20 years and still no other desktop environment ships with a true equivalent.
Half the time I end up destroying my Linux installation to a point where I don’t feel like recovering it. I think one of the more recent times, after a botched Nvidia driver update, I ended up with some super fucked config on a LUKS encrypted volume that wouldn’t boot. Asking around, it was suggested to use an EFI shell to fix some config, but of course guess what the MB didn’t provide. I’ve managed to fuck some Windows installations as well, but it’s been some years.
There are also some things I like about Windows and I also need to have a Windows machine for work related reasons. Frankly I just don’t find myself as skilled with Linux as I should be. While I’m not going to claim to be some Windows domain expert, having used it for so long I’m normally relatively familiar with the tools/processes to go to when something goes wrong and the APIs available when I want to hack with something. On Linux I haven’t really taken the time to use and understand it to be as familiar and always have to look up what to do for simple tasks. I swear to god some systems service running a docket image/VM somehow managed to change the hostname configured in my machine and I have no idea how. All I did was run the service.
I have found myself using Linux a little more as, somewhat interestingly I have a lot of hardware that only ships Linux drivers I don’t care to try and port. Software is a different story. I recently thought I was going to get involved in a domain in which the only software available (especially for real world use) was Windows only, so I went back to Windows. That ultimately never happened though.
I'm using Windows 10. In the past year I've tried: Manjaro, Fedora, Linux Mint and some others.
Why I'm not switching?
Because every time I login there is something that needs a quick update or a quick fix.
After I've tried Fedora the last time, I turned on my PC and the resolution of my monitor switched to 800x600 from the 1920x1080. There was no way of setting it back to the correct resolution.
"Well, you know, you could just SUDO this, or SUDO that."
Yeah. I know. But I don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that.
I want a operating system that just works.
I installed Windows 10, took 10 minutes, everything works great.
Same experience. I have one Linux box set up because of a project I'm working on that needs access to USB ports and doesn't work well in virtual environments.
It's just used to compile and test some software. But I do run the recommended updates (it's a Ubuntu desktop distro) and about once a week, something breaks. (X Server and monitor support are a frequent one.) This is a very standard Supermicro Mobo with Xeon CPU.
My Windows 10 machine is extremely reliable. I set it up about 2.5 years ago and I've never had to reinstall the OS, or fix display problems, or wonder why audio stopped working, etc.
Weird how different people have different experiences. I've had way more cases of random things breaking on Win 10 than on Linux Mint. Especially corporate Win 10 on my working machine is utterly horrible, just endless problems.
Windows is slow af compared to Linux on the same hardware when I’m doing anything with Docker or Node.js/npm/yarn. The cli is incompatible with bash. I also can’t disable telemetry and other things I don’t want. It’s also missing features UI features that I get with XFCE.
That’s why I switched to Manjaro 3 years ago for work and never looked back. I still have Windows systems for games where it mostly works fine except for the occasional interruption to install updates while I’m in the middle of playing or watching something (which never happens on Linux since I have complete control there.)
The types of issues that Windows has can’t be fixed. An “unchangeable” resolution is fixable if it’s not a hardware issue. But I never have that type of issues at all on Linux. It just works for me and I have it on 3 desktops and a laptop. A lot of it comes down to picking the right distro and not being a cowboy. For instance, on Manjaro - just use the gui to install apps, not the command line - and restart when it tells you to. The gui does things that you won’t think to do on every update.
Performance for specific use cases is debatable (as in not everyone has your use case, and even your use case might not be as important as you think in comparison to cumulative effect of other performance differences). However, the comment was specifically talking about breaking issues:
I had Windows 7, which was then upgraded to Win10. Problem is, my computer doesn't support UEFI, so I cannot reinstall Win 10 from USB on an SSD even though it's gotten really, really slow (as in, 15sec for right click). I also cannot generate a recovery DVD because the generated image is too big and doesn't fit. As a result, the computer spends it's first 15+ minutes updating stuff I don't need. The only solution at this point is to throw away a perfectly good computer.
Plugging a PS3 USB controller the reboots Windows. This doesn't happen under Linux. I also need to reinstall the controller driver every time because Windows removes it.
Definitely! Was it an "optional update"? They recently stopped offering that because it was poorly presented: it was not actually an update rather installation of a different driver altogether.
No idea, wasn't my machine (been a linux user for >15 years), I just needed to fix it (which I did via a linux live usb). Yes to monitor driver (I don't even know why it needed one, removing the driver allowed it to work fine, it definitely wasn't the GPU driver), and if you plugged in a different monitor it worked fine (and if I recall, installing a old graphics card I had lying around and connecting the "bad" monitor to it still caused problems).
I'd have thought it was some kind of joke if I hadn't seen it myself (apparently this wasn't the first time)...
Don't remember if it was Windows 8 or 10, but I had an issue that I would say was at least in that magnitude when I for one reason or another temporarily needed a bare-metal Windows install a few years ago.
The actual install went fine and everything worked reasonably well during that part. However, when booting up the system for the first time after install, Windows realized that my USB controller was a USB 3 controller and asked me to provide drivers. Windows then helpfully disabled the controller, the one where I had my keyboard and mouse hooked up, for me until I had installed said drivers. I had to dig out an old PS/2 keyboard out of the closet and navigate without mouse to install the drivers.
I was at my parents,and wanted to sketch out something for my dad. So I grabbed my mom's win10 laptop, went to the blender download location, downloaded, double clicked, got a popup about updates. Whatever, not my computer, not my problem. double click again. Again with the popup. Read it carefully this time. WTF? I NEED to update their store to install a third party package?
Not my computer, not my mandate.
It looked like I could install the stores' version, but of course, its not up to date. Then some more bullshit about updating.
I shut it down and went for paper and pencil.
Yeah. I know. You don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that. But I want a operating system that does what I tell it to do.
I would really like to have an OS that quietly keeps itself up to date without bugging me about it. My work Macbook and Windows laptops also bug me a lot and keep demanding reboots at inconvenient times, with popup notifications blocking things I need.
Just quietly download your updates, install them in the background, and quickly switch to the new version at some point when I'm not using it.
If I were to install a Linux distro for my father again I would probably use NixOS, because he won't be installing packages, and then just maintaining the config file, automatic upgrades and killing older generations just works. Staying with stable and possibly having to patch the config sligtly (to fix upgrades) every 6m.
The learning curve is higher once you wanna start building software that isn't packaged already, that's when you'll have to learn to write nix expressions.
I've been planning to package FRRouting for NixOS, It'd be the perfect OS for a router, atomic forward and backwards rolls. (Except for user data, but that could be solved with ZFS snapshots, NixOS makes it VERY easy to use ZOL).
Nix is super unique, you can set up your own Hydra (the Nix build bot), run your own package cache, fork and maintain your own stuff. It's really more like working with code than maintaining a system.
Another great thing is that with Nix, once a problem is solved once, It's solved forever (Since literally everything defining your system is under version control).
I love it, but i wish to learn the Nix language proper and contribute back.
That is pretty much what Windows 10 does. Okay, maybe not quickly switch to the new version as we all know that it can take 10 - 20 minutes sometimes, but here is the thing. By default it reboots and install the updates when I sleep so I don't notice this. It always puzzles me when I hear that Windows suddenly starts to install updated while you are doing something, because that is not the default. The default is to install and reboot outside of your normal working hours. Best guess is that many people turn off their computer when they don't use it. In that case it is only possible to install the updates while you use that machine.
Like others here I have the opposite experience: to such extend that I am actually installing Ubuntu instead of Windows10 on computers of friends who are not technical and they love that it works so well.
A lot of times when people say they've had no issues whatsoever what's really happened is that they've become so used to all the issues that crop up and have so much practice dealing with them that they aren't even conscious of them anymore. Same thing happens to Windows and Mac users.
It's a bit like how people who browse without an adblocker aren't even consciously aware of them anymore, but you use their computer for a second and want to rip your eyes out.
> A lot of times when people say they've had no issues whatsoever what's really happened is that they've become so used to all the issues that crop up and have so much practice dealing with them that they aren't even conscious of them anymore.
Or they forget how much time they spent tweaking their system to get it just right. My Linux systems are now good as gold. I can say I have no issues whatsoever. They work reliably for me day after day. But hell if I didn't spend hours/days setting up all sorts of crazy things you'd expect to just work out of the box like Sleep/Suspend, WiFi, and High-DPI displays.
Eh, after getting exhausted with forced Windows updates, I've run Ubuntu and Debian on a Lenovo X1C5 for years with basically no issues. The only thing that didn't work was the oddball fingerprint reader on the unit, which was disappointing but far from a dealbreaker.
Frankly, I was a little shocked it worked as well as it did. Hell, even my USB dock was plug-and-play, which really blew me away. I was used to Linux on laptops being a giant PITA, and yet...
I was attending my client conference when the invited speaker had his windows machine update right in the middle of his powerpoint presentation ! The whole room had to wait about 15 minutes for windows to finish its "important update".
(Of course he probably should have done it before and certainly ignored previous warnings. But it doesn't matter : the whole room of executive was wasting 15 minutes watching the speaker being angry at his machine)
Yep, which is clearly preferable in and of itself. But.
Windows is the haven of the uninformed. ITT we have the adept comparing update strategies - some arbitrary granny can't work like that. So Windows has to be engineered to maintain itself, even over the wishes of the user. And we've seen what happens if you allow the plebs to skip updating - many of them never update at all.
I've had the opposite experience with windows lately -- start menu type to search randomly stops working and I have to restart, windows will do this weird thing where you have to rapidly click their dock icon to get them to show up or they minimize. The pre-windows-11 updates have been nothing but bugs for me.
On my Ubuntu Budgie desktop I have none of these problems. Sure I have to deal with the occasional linux challenge but nothing "buggy" stuff either works or it doesn't.
A lot of these sorts of issues tend to spring up around specific hardware.
Point in case, proprietary drivers for Broadcom wifi/bluetooth and Nvidia GPUs. I had a problem where every N rounds of updates, Fedora would just eat the Broadcom drivers and I'd get stuck tethering from my phone over USB to fix it. Similar things happened albeit much less frequently with the Nvidia drivers on various distros.
Of course the best "solution" for this is to use hardware supported well by the FOSS drivers; Intel wifi/Bluetooth, Intel/AMD graphics, etc. For desktops and a shrinking number of laptops that's an option, but people using machines with soldered components are just stuck with a crappy experience and are probably better off running Windows/macOS.
I'm just a single anecdatum, but Ubuntu from the installer through the installed system has been pretty flawless on my hybrid-GPU laptop. The GPUs aren't even from the same vendor. It's an AMD APU and an nVidia discrete GPU. The right-click menu in Gnome for every program gives me the option to start the program with the discrete graphics.
At the time I tried, the Debian installer got very confused about the video situation. Fedora and Mint weren't really happy either. I didn't try Pop, Arch, or anything else.
My Linux machine nagged me to do a system-wide update (usually a language pack for Firefox, because they changed one word) every day. Windows 10 is a lot smarter about when to nag about updates.
> Yeah. I know. But I don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that.
This is an exceptionally good point. I've NEVER, in my life, tried to either install something, update something or, even literally open a random localhost port from a development test suite in VS Code without having to click through a UAC authorization dialog sequence on Windows.
/s
(I know that HN encourages the assumption of good faith, but when a poster just straight up lies through their teeth about the on-the-ground reality of user authorization, it's really hard not to push the (obviously correct, hanlon's razor be damned) corporate shill angle. (sorry, dang))
The first answer is great. That second answer is typical with every "how do I do anything in Linux" question. It's a chain of things I dread and I end up spending an hour because I forget to type "cd .scripts" and then get lost.
Copying and pasting a bunch of code also makes me wary. There's vague hardcoded stuff like 'Paste this in, and then change your mouse id from 11 to the number from the output of the "xinput list" command.'
Do you Linux users just apply random advice like that off the internets without seeing what every line means? Do you just sudo stuff because someone said so? Instead of a single possible security hole to check for by installing a thing, it's now multiple possible security holes to check on every line of code.
Worst of all, it probably doesn't do what I want it to do. I can't tell until I'm about half an hour into doing it. I just want to sort my windows neatly. This isn't worth it.
> Do you Linux users just apply random advice like that off the internets without seeing what every line means?
This isn't just a Linux issue. I've used Windows many years, and the vast majority of solutions to problems is inserting some cryptic string into the registry and rebooting.
Though I eventually dumped Linux, too, a few years ago as the solutions to the weekly show-stopping bugs, driver issues, and kernel glitches constantly required the same type of unintelligible shell commands copied and pasted from some random blog. Unlike earlier days of Linux, the commands now were completely foreign to even long-time users of Linux who understood most of the main components of a standard Linux install. It would require modifying some file in /etc or using some sub-component or binary that I'd never ever heard of and had no idea why it was even included into my "base" install of Fedora or Redhat or whatever distro was downstream.
I blame mostly RedHat for this change; Systemd may not have always been the problem, but its design and complexity (compared to traditional minimal Unix "do one thing and do it well") is a good metaphor for how modern Linux has been bastardized into just another black-box like Windows, where your only solution for many problems is some esoteric command which must be pasted off of some RHEL paid-license-required mailing list.
I haven't had to insert anything in the Windows registry in about a decade. That's also about the last time I used a Linux based OS, so I can't really compare. There was some point where Ubuntu was more user friendly than Windows Vista.
But the issue I have is that it's very difficult to mess up your computer as a Windows/Mac beginner, but you have to play with fire pretty frequently as a Linux beginner.
It can be mildly frustrating to find the flags in extremely large man pages. They tend to write them all over the place ('oh but this does this when you combine -r with -tr') so searches light up matches all over. This gets compounded when there are flags with two letters and you try to search for the first letter. (want -t but have to wade through 3000 mentions of -tr, -t1, -tz, -tmmm, -tt, -tttt, etc)
Maybe I just suck at searching man pages. Or I'm too impatient. Either way, https://explainshell.com/ has been a great website for explaining flags.
As others have said, it's funny how experiences differ. I have almost the same exact experience, only in reverse.
> After I've tried Fedora the last time, I turned on my PC and the resolution of my monitor switched to 800x600 from the 1920x1080. There was no way of setting it back to the correct resolution.
I have a 2560x1440 thunderbolt screen. For some reason, when if I let it go to sleep, it's very likely it won't wake up. Next, in order of probability is that it WILL wake up, but stuck at 1280x720. Sure, that's better than 800x600, at least it has the right format, but still. Display Preferences shows 1280x720 as the highest resolution. I can set it lower, though.
Then, even better, I have another screen, that does USB-C, with Display Port alternative mode. Everything works fine, at full resolution, all the way until the windows login screen. Here, it's extremely likely that the screen will go blank. In the rare event that it doesn't, as soon as I log in, the screen goes blank. I've tried reinstalling Windows from scratch, using the usb-c connection, no dice. The installer works, then on the last reboot, blank screen.
The computer in question is an HP EliteDesk with full Intel components, no exotic GPU or anything. Only "aftermarket" components are the RAM sticks.
Both screens work perfectly both on other computers and on the same computer under Linux (Arch), with no tweaking required.
Lack of quality apps that I can find on Mac, like Fantastical, Reeder, MindNode, and more.
But the single biggest one for me is I just want my devices to work and not have to fix them in my free time. Not to say Linux requires fixing all the time. It’s more that I’d just like things to work and Linux, last I used it, required I have to tinker and research things too much. It was fun then. But now I just want to live my life and not tinker with things when I want them to do what I want. For that reason my Macs do well enough at just continually working.
At least for me on macOS, it just works. It has one consistent desktop to work with and test and I can get on with my work without wasting time digging into dotfiles, init or rc scripts in a system folder just to get a basic task done.
I use my computer to get things done and make money and have no time to play around with verbose scripts and man files for basic tasks or the time try out tons of distros out there to "choose" which one I want.
Video games. I work on a company issued MBP and my own daily driver is an M1 MBP. My PC runs Windows mainly because of video games. Yes, I know about Steam's efforts and Proton, but Proton lacks DXR. I paid top dollar for a gaming video card and I want to see those rays traced! On a serious note once Linux allows me to play AAA titles with the same level of fidelity as I can on Windows, I am switching over to Ubuntu.
Generally unpolished quirkiness that requires time and attention to resolve. For example, in ten years of using Linux at work I've never experienced tear-free browser scrolling despite hours of fussing with X11 and compositor settings or graphics drivers. Or how my default file associations change unbidden all the time, frequently to poor choices like GIMP to open a JPEG. And more recently Internet Explorer through WINE for no clear reason.
I try every two years or so to daily drive Linux on my personal desktop. Between these kinds of rough edges and running CAD tools, I inevitably eventually go back to Windows no matter how much I enjoy my terminal emulator options in Linux.
> in ten years of using Linux at work I've never experienced tear-free browser scrolling
Sounds like a hardware/driver problem. How is this a fault of Linux? I guess your hardware came with Windows and the vendor never cared about Linux support.
I've had a lot of hardware over ten years, including workstations issued by my employer that were engineered for first-class Linux support. The problem is never ubiquitous - sometimes it's just one browser and not another. Further, this is just one example of dozens of rough edges that may-or-may-not be present on any given setup. Lots of people aren't visually sensitive enough to even notice. I've had to point to specific regions of the screen and describe the shape of the tear to get observers to be able to recognize them.
But your comment sort of makes the point for me. Hardware support and drivers (especially in-kernel ones) are absolutely a reason to judge an OS for suitability for desktop use. I run Arch on all my servers and it's great. But I struggle to get an acceptable user experience on the desktop.
There are, of course, tons of other rough edges. Inconsistent input grabbing behavior across desktop environments (KDE not working properly with Remmina, for example), volume controls being difficult to use or having strange response curves, compositors hanging on monitor reconnect, infinite audio and video decoding issues, etc etc etc. Sure, each of these is individually surmountable at the cost of some hours of searching the intertubes and fussing at the command line. But then you end up with a magic snowflake installation that is brittle and you're down a bunch of time. Not worth it.
I did use it for years, and still do for my personal work (though this message is typed on a Windows laptop... it was purchased to be linux-compatible, but haven't had the time to reformat and dance through the installation/teething problems.) Debian from 2001-present personally, 2005-2020 for work.
Switching out of academia to the "real world", my work environment runs on macOS, and hence my daily driving does too. The polish of macOS has been really nice for someone accustomed to fluxbox and CLI tools for sysadmin tasks.
If only macOS conformed to the DFSG, Debian's free-software guidelines... Free as in beer doesn't matter to me nearly as much as free as in speech.
I'm a developer that still works on a product that runs on DotNet 4.8, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Visual Studios's performance on large solutions has gotten so poor that I've switched to Rider fully, but I still need to be on the platform my stuff has to run on.
I used desktop Linux for like, a decade. A few years ago I switched to the Mac, and never looked back. The major difference honestly is that now I have real income ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ imo, macOS is the best desktop experience, and has the best software ecosystem hands down, if you can afford it. But for zero cost, Linux served me well for many many years
It served me well too. Unfortunately it gets in the way of work and I don't want to play around with the system files on my computer, just to get work done.
macOS seems to do this better with sane defaults and a consistent desktop experience.
Mostly buggy desktop environments and broken drivers (especially on laptops).
It's 2021, and it's still a miracle if we can achieve different scaling on different monitors, no tearing on multiple screens, and plug'n'play of an external monitor. Things that work on Windows/macOS out-of-the-box for the last N years.
> Mostly buggy desktop environments and broken drivers (especially on laptops).
Using Linux for years without any such issues. Consider trying a laptop designed for Linux. If you are using a Windows-certified laptop with Linux, it's your fault that it doesn't work well.
At work, I use Windows Subsystem for Linux extensively, but I need to run Windows for a proprietary IDE. I'd probably consider switching over if it weren't for that.
At home, I use music programs which only run on Windows. I also game a lot, and while I hear gaming on Linux is better these days, it's just zero friction on Windows.
I go back and forth. Currently I use windows for grad school work. It’s just easier to use Microsoft Office on windows. Oftentimes professors will email me very old doc files that open fine in Word but have incompatibilities or rendering issues in LibreOffice.
Also OneNote is my primary note taking tool. It’s really easy to get going and is able to search across other notes very well. Also free built in OCR scanning is a big plus too.
I lead a pretty mobile life so I flip my laptop open and closed probably 20 times a day and do loads of video conferencing in a professional setting. Even a small fraction of the time having it not wake, or Wifi isn't working, or sound and audio isn't right etc etc ... would just be a deal breaker. And every time I see these threads, people are STILL talking about all these things.
This experience is based on running whatever the latest LTS Ubuntu OS was in 2018 on a Huawei Matebook Pro, a very nice thin laptop I bought at the Microsoft store in San Francisco. I also tried Fedora. Initially I tried stock Gnome whatever, before heading off for Fluxbox, Sway/i3 etc sparse style window managers after growing frustration.
- battery life worse than a full screen VM running under Windows. Need to fight tooth and nail with drivers and config files for graphics that switch from low power intel to high power nvidia based on workload, for example.
- wifi throughout worse than a full screen VM running under Windows.
- worse UI performance under load than macOS or Windows. The whole UI, eg the compositor or X server can easily grind to a halt with no “beachball” style indicator. Crashes in that process are not uncommon, and effectively lose the whole session.
- somehow I managed to break my sound output with a routine software update in the year 2019
- browsers (eg Firefox) still buggy or blurry under Wayland
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 406 ms ] threadIt is in my opinion the most cohesive linux desktop especially if you are looking for the "classic" desktop experience (which isn't to say it's dated, it has all the new bells and whistles but it's not all about them either).
Have you tried using TLP ?
The backend storage is easy, it's the front end / image processing that I'm struggling with.
Still I run Windows occasionally when I need some specific proprietary apps that are not available on other platforms (mostly electronic design suites).
Also, as a person working with PDF documents on a regular basis, I don't know of any application that can beat the feature set and UX of Preview.app.
These are the only two things keeping me back. If there were viable alternatives in the Linux ecosystem I'd switch in a heartbeat.
Still not on the same level as MacBooks though. But it is making progress.
Inertial scrolling depends on the app, but Firefox implements it well and that takes care of 80% of it for me.
I can highly recommend BetterTouchTool, it has a wide range of features, but one of the easiest to use is map three-finger-tap to middle click
In fact, GNOME is in fact my daily driver and I keep a Windows VM tucked away in case I ever need to manipulate a PDF. And even that is worse than Preview.
Only if you use it as your main OS. If you use a combination of Windows, Linux and MacOS, the latter's trackpad tends to do the opposite of what you expect. the first thing I do is change the vertical scroll direction so it behaves like the others.
My Pixelbook has a better trackpad experience than my M1 Macbook and it runs on Linux (ChromeOS).
The big problem is a lack of investment by either Linux or Windows. It's such a huge quality of life improvement that I really don't understand why there's not more focus.
The real downer on Linux for me (chromebook aside) is that it's hard to get good laptop battery life and even with all the tweaks, it generally still isn't as good as my macbook.
I'd give KDE and Okular a look. There are some rough edges, but I find myself missing it when I'm on my mac.
All my desktops run Linux though as it's a beast there.
I've heard that GalliumOS (based on Xbuntu) uses the ChromeOS trackpad drivers and works well, but I've never had the time to mess with it.
It's been 20 years and still no other desktop environment ships with a true equivalent.
Like they couldn't have built in a PDF reader/editor?
Half the time I end up destroying my Linux installation to a point where I don’t feel like recovering it. I think one of the more recent times, after a botched Nvidia driver update, I ended up with some super fucked config on a LUKS encrypted volume that wouldn’t boot. Asking around, it was suggested to use an EFI shell to fix some config, but of course guess what the MB didn’t provide. I’ve managed to fuck some Windows installations as well, but it’s been some years.
There are also some things I like about Windows and I also need to have a Windows machine for work related reasons. Frankly I just don’t find myself as skilled with Linux as I should be. While I’m not going to claim to be some Windows domain expert, having used it for so long I’m normally relatively familiar with the tools/processes to go to when something goes wrong and the APIs available when I want to hack with something. On Linux I haven’t really taken the time to use and understand it to be as familiar and always have to look up what to do for simple tasks. I swear to god some systems service running a docket image/VM somehow managed to change the hostname configured in my machine and I have no idea how. All I did was run the service.
I have found myself using Linux a little more as, somewhat interestingly I have a lot of hardware that only ships Linux drivers I don’t care to try and port. Software is a different story. I recently thought I was going to get involved in a domain in which the only software available (especially for real world use) was Windows only, so I went back to Windows. That ultimately never happened though.
Why I'm not switching? Because every time I login there is something that needs a quick update or a quick fix.
After I've tried Fedora the last time, I turned on my PC and the resolution of my monitor switched to 800x600 from the 1920x1080. There was no way of setting it back to the correct resolution.
"Well, you know, you could just SUDO this, or SUDO that."
Yeah. I know. But I don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that. I want a operating system that just works.
I installed Windows 10, took 10 minutes, everything works great.
It's just used to compile and test some software. But I do run the recommended updates (it's a Ubuntu desktop distro) and about once a week, something breaks. (X Server and monitor support are a frequent one.) This is a very standard Supermicro Mobo with Xeon CPU.
My Windows 10 machine is extremely reliable. I set it up about 2.5 years ago and I've never had to reinstall the OS, or fix display problems, or wonder why audio stopped working, etc.
That’s why I switched to Manjaro 3 years ago for work and never looked back. I still have Windows systems for games where it mostly works fine except for the occasional interruption to install updates while I’m in the middle of playing or watching something (which never happens on Linux since I have complete control there.)
The types of issues that Windows has can’t be fixed. An “unchangeable” resolution is fixable if it’s not a hardware issue. But I never have that type of issues at all on Linux. It just works for me and I have it on 3 desktops and a laptop. A lot of it comes down to picking the right distro and not being a cowboy. For instance, on Manjaro - just use the gui to install apps, not the command line - and restart when it tells you to. The gui does things that you won’t think to do on every update.
> random things breaking on Win 10
Enjoy that!
I had Windows 7, which was then upgraded to Win10. Problem is, my computer doesn't support UEFI, so I cannot reinstall Win 10 from USB on an SSD even though it's gotten really, really slow (as in, 15sec for right click). I also cannot generate a recovery DVD because the generated image is too big and doesn't fit. As a result, the computer spends it's first 15+ minutes updating stuff I don't need. The only solution at this point is to throw away a perfectly good computer.
Plugging a PS3 USB controller the reboots Windows. This doesn't happen under Linux. I also need to reinstall the controller driver every time because Windows removes it.
Also, monitor driver? Are you sure?
I'd have thought it was some kind of joke if I hadn't seen it myself (apparently this wasn't the first time)...
The actual install went fine and everything worked reasonably well during that part. However, when booting up the system for the first time after install, Windows realized that my USB controller was a USB 3 controller and asked me to provide drivers. Windows then helpfully disabled the controller, the one where I had my keyboard and mouse hooked up, for me until I had installed said drivers. I had to dig out an old PS/2 keyboard out of the closet and navigate without mouse to install the drivers.
I was at my parents,and wanted to sketch out something for my dad. So I grabbed my mom's win10 laptop, went to the blender download location, downloaded, double clicked, got a popup about updates. Whatever, not my computer, not my problem. double click again. Again with the popup. Read it carefully this time. WTF? I NEED to update their store to install a third party package?
Not my computer, not my mandate.
It looked like I could install the stores' version, but of course, its not up to date. Then some more bullshit about updating.
I shut it down and went for paper and pencil.
Yeah. I know. You don't want to SUDO this or SUDO that. But I want a operating system that does what I tell it to do.
Just quietly download your updates, install them in the background, and quickly switch to the new version at some point when I'm not using it.
I run automatic updates nightly, sometimes when I get back to the machine it's in init waiting for me to input my ZFS password.
NixOS is the last system you install, which is really nice. It's the Linux dist I've run the longest consecutive at home.
The learning curve is higher once you wanna start building software that isn't packaged already, that's when you'll have to learn to write nix expressions.
I've been planning to package FRRouting for NixOS, It'd be the perfect OS for a router, atomic forward and backwards rolls. (Except for user data, but that could be solved with ZFS snapshots, NixOS makes it VERY easy to use ZOL).
Nix is super unique, you can set up your own Hydra (the Nix build bot), run your own package cache, fork and maintain your own stuff. It's really more like working with code than maintaining a system.
Another great thing is that with Nix, once a problem is solved once, It's solved forever (Since literally everything defining your system is under version control).
I love it, but i wish to learn the Nix language proper and contribute back.
If the update is fully downloaded, you have the option to "install & shutdown"
It's a bit like how people who browse without an adblocker aren't even consciously aware of them anymore, but you use their computer for a second and want to rip your eyes out.
Or they forget how much time they spent tweaking their system to get it just right. My Linux systems are now good as gold. I can say I have no issues whatsoever. They work reliably for me day after day. But hell if I didn't spend hours/days setting up all sorts of crazy things you'd expect to just work out of the box like Sleep/Suspend, WiFi, and High-DPI displays.
Frankly, I was a little shocked it worked as well as it did. Hell, even my USB dock was plug-and-play, which really blew me away. I was used to Linux on laptops being a giant PITA, and yet...
(Of course he probably should have done it before and certainly ignored previous warnings. But it doesn't matter : the whole room of executive was wasting 15 minutes watching the speaker being angry at his machine)
To my knowledge, Linux would not do such a thing.
Linux / OsX just rock solid
Windows is the haven of the uninformed. ITT we have the adept comparing update strategies - some arbitrary granny can't work like that. So Windows has to be engineered to maintain itself, even over the wishes of the user. And we've seen what happens if you allow the plebs to skip updating - many of them never update at all.
On my Ubuntu Budgie desktop I have none of these problems. Sure I have to deal with the occasional linux challenge but nothing "buggy" stuff either works or it doesn't.
Point in case, proprietary drivers for Broadcom wifi/bluetooth and Nvidia GPUs. I had a problem where every N rounds of updates, Fedora would just eat the Broadcom drivers and I'd get stuck tethering from my phone over USB to fix it. Similar things happened albeit much less frequently with the Nvidia drivers on various distros.
Of course the best "solution" for this is to use hardware supported well by the FOSS drivers; Intel wifi/Bluetooth, Intel/AMD graphics, etc. For desktops and a shrinking number of laptops that's an option, but people using machines with soldered components are just stuck with a crappy experience and are probably better off running Windows/macOS.
At the time I tried, the Debian installer got very confused about the video situation. Fedora and Mint weren't really happy either. I didn't try Pop, Arch, or anything else.
You mean every time you log into Windows 10, there is something to update, so you don't have time to switch?
You can't be serious that the updates aren't worst in Windows... I finally got my 80yo dad to Linux because of them being ridiculous in Windows.
This is an exceptionally good point. I've NEVER, in my life, tried to either install something, update something or, even literally open a random localhost port from a development test suite in VS Code without having to click through a UAC authorization dialog sequence on Windows.
/s
(I know that HN encourages the assumption of good faith, but when a poster just straight up lies through their teeth about the on-the-ground reality of user authorization, it's really hard not to push the (obviously correct, hanlon's razor be damned) corporate shill angle. (sorry, dang))
Linux, well, I do a search for it, and get this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/26346/how-to-use-window-snap...
The first answer is great. That second answer is typical with every "how do I do anything in Linux" question. It's a chain of things I dread and I end up spending an hour because I forget to type "cd .scripts" and then get lost.
Copying and pasting a bunch of code also makes me wary. There's vague hardcoded stuff like 'Paste this in, and then change your mouse id from 11 to the number from the output of the "xinput list" command.'
Do you Linux users just apply random advice like that off the internets without seeing what every line means? Do you just sudo stuff because someone said so? Instead of a single possible security hole to check for by installing a thing, it's now multiple possible security holes to check on every line of code.
Worst of all, it probably doesn't do what I want it to do. I can't tell until I'm about half an hour into doing it. I just want to sort my windows neatly. This isn't worth it.
This isn't just a Linux issue. I've used Windows many years, and the vast majority of solutions to problems is inserting some cryptic string into the registry and rebooting.
Though I eventually dumped Linux, too, a few years ago as the solutions to the weekly show-stopping bugs, driver issues, and kernel glitches constantly required the same type of unintelligible shell commands copied and pasted from some random blog. Unlike earlier days of Linux, the commands now were completely foreign to even long-time users of Linux who understood most of the main components of a standard Linux install. It would require modifying some file in /etc or using some sub-component or binary that I'd never ever heard of and had no idea why it was even included into my "base" install of Fedora or Redhat or whatever distro was downstream.
I blame mostly RedHat for this change; Systemd may not have always been the problem, but its design and complexity (compared to traditional minimal Unix "do one thing and do it well") is a good metaphor for how modern Linux has been bastardized into just another black-box like Windows, where your only solution for many problems is some esoteric command which must be pasted off of some RHEL paid-license-required mailing list.
But the issue I have is that it's very difficult to mess up your computer as a Windows/Mac beginner, but you have to play with fire pretty frequently as a Linux beginner.
Maybe I just suck at searching man pages. Or I'm too impatient. Either way, https://explainshell.com/ has been a great website for explaining flags.
Rectangle for macOS
https://rectangleapp.com/
> After I've tried Fedora the last time, I turned on my PC and the resolution of my monitor switched to 800x600 from the 1920x1080. There was no way of setting it back to the correct resolution.
I have a 2560x1440 thunderbolt screen. For some reason, when if I let it go to sleep, it's very likely it won't wake up. Next, in order of probability is that it WILL wake up, but stuck at 1280x720. Sure, that's better than 800x600, at least it has the right format, but still. Display Preferences shows 1280x720 as the highest resolution. I can set it lower, though.
Then, even better, I have another screen, that does USB-C, with Display Port alternative mode. Everything works fine, at full resolution, all the way until the windows login screen. Here, it's extremely likely that the screen will go blank. In the rare event that it doesn't, as soon as I log in, the screen goes blank. I've tried reinstalling Windows from scratch, using the usb-c connection, no dice. The installer works, then on the last reboot, blank screen.
The computer in question is an HP EliteDesk with full Intel components, no exotic GPU or anything. Only "aftermarket" components are the RAM sticks.
Both screens work perfectly both on other computers and on the same computer under Linux (Arch), with no tweaking required.
Lack of quality apps that I can find on Mac, like Fantastical, Reeder, MindNode, and more.
But the single biggest one for me is I just want my devices to work and not have to fix them in my free time. Not to say Linux requires fixing all the time. It’s more that I’d just like things to work and Linux, last I used it, required I have to tinker and research things too much. It was fun then. But now I just want to live my life and not tinker with things when I want them to do what I want. For that reason my Macs do well enough at just continually working.
I use my computer to get things done and make money and have no time to play around with verbose scripts and man files for basic tasks or the time try out tons of distros out there to "choose" which one I want.
I try every two years or so to daily drive Linux on my personal desktop. Between these kinds of rough edges and running CAD tools, I inevitably eventually go back to Windows no matter how much I enjoy my terminal emulator options in Linux.
Sounds like a hardware/driver problem. How is this a fault of Linux? I guess your hardware came with Windows and the vendor never cared about Linux support.
But your comment sort of makes the point for me. Hardware support and drivers (especially in-kernel ones) are absolutely a reason to judge an OS for suitability for desktop use. I run Arch on all my servers and it's great. But I struggle to get an acceptable user experience on the desktop.
There are, of course, tons of other rough edges. Inconsistent input grabbing behavior across desktop environments (KDE not working properly with Remmina, for example), volume controls being difficult to use or having strange response curves, compositors hanging on monitor reconnect, infinite audio and video decoding issues, etc etc etc. Sure, each of these is individually surmountable at the cost of some hours of searching the intertubes and fussing at the command line. But then you end up with a magic snowflake installation that is brittle and you're down a bunch of time. Not worth it.
As I understand, making something completely tear-free is impossible with X11, which is one of the reasons for Wayland.
Switching out of academia to the "real world", my work environment runs on macOS, and hence my daily driving does too. The polish of macOS has been really nice for someone accustomed to fluxbox and CLI tools for sysadmin tasks.
If only macOS conformed to the DFSG, Debian's free-software guidelines... Free as in beer doesn't matter to me nearly as much as free as in speech.
Visual Studios's performance on large solutions has gotten so poor that I've switched to Rider fully, but I still need to be on the platform my stuff has to run on.
macOS seems to do this better with sane defaults and a consistent desktop experience.
It's 2021, and it's still a miracle if we can achieve different scaling on different monitors, no tearing on multiple screens, and plug'n'play of an external monitor. Things that work on Windows/macOS out-of-the-box for the last N years.
Using Linux for years without any such issues. Consider trying a laptop designed for Linux. If you are using a Windows-certified laptop with Linux, it's your fault that it doesn't work well.
At home, I use music programs which only run on Windows. I also game a lot, and while I hear gaming on Linux is better these days, it's just zero friction on Windows.
2. In case something broke in Linux I would spend a lot of time looking how to fix it. I use Windows since 3.1 and I know it inside out.
Also OneNote is my primary note taking tool. It’s really easy to get going and is able to search across other notes very well. Also free built in OCR scanning is a big plus too.
- reliably working hardware
- microsoft office
I lead a pretty mobile life so I flip my laptop open and closed probably 20 times a day and do loads of video conferencing in a professional setting. Even a small fraction of the time having it not wake, or Wifi isn't working, or sound and audio isn't right etc etc ... would just be a deal breaker. And every time I see these threads, people are STILL talking about all these things.
- battery life worse than a full screen VM running under Windows. Need to fight tooth and nail with drivers and config files for graphics that switch from low power intel to high power nvidia based on workload, for example.
- wifi throughout worse than a full screen VM running under Windows.
- worse UI performance under load than macOS or Windows. The whole UI, eg the compositor or X server can easily grind to a halt with no “beachball” style indicator. Crashes in that process are not uncommon, and effectively lose the whole session.
- somehow I managed to break my sound output with a routine software update in the year 2019
- browsers (eg Firefox) still buggy or blurry under Wayland