I... don't think that makes sense? Why can't you release something under the GPL and have it become popular worldwide? Or maybe you're using 'popular' in a sense I'm not accustomed to.
The Linux desktop is a lost cause and the author is better off moving to other things. Not only is desktop a dying segment, but it requires the largest amount of work on driver support (why is my six year old off brand printer not working?), is filled with proprietary apps and companies that make money selling software to end customers who have no incentive to port to Linux (Adobe/Serif are why I still have to keep a Windows VM sitting around), and it requires constant work to keep things working on top of every graphics stack, one of which is famously proprietary (NVIDIA please just open source your drivers already) which reduces the incentives of using Linux in the first place.
You also have GNOME shipping on Fedora and Ubuntu which most new users are going to download, which can't even get their stuff together enough to put a freaking dock and activity indicator on the desktop without having to completely switch to a different activities screen. Asking for a dock will literally get you hung in the village square as people assert that normal users want to use keyboard shortcuts. Everything on the Linux desktop has to either be old fashion or eclectic and tailored to the tech enthusiasts already using it (one of the things that Elementary was actually solving). I tried getting my dad to use GNOME and he gave up after five minutes to go back to his Mac (I can't even launch an app?). It's a mess. Every other distro is basically being held together by a scrappy group of volunteers that are supposed to compete against millions of dollars of investment and armys of full time employees.
I feel bad for Elementary. They made a good product that was actually sane for people coming from MS/A, but they were never going to turn it into something super profitable or even sway companies like Adobe etc. to get their apps running natively on Linux.
This isn't doom and gloom about Linux. Linux owns computing. It's more about how Desktop is niche and not even worth getting into at this point, and how the author has much to gain by just walking away and moving on to other ventures.
Edit:
You can downvote all you want if it brings you catharsis, but you know I'm right. The year of the Linux desktop isn't right around the corner, just like it wasn't right around the corner last year, or the year before that. Linux desktops will always be for enthusiasts, students who want to learn Linux, or people who have to use outdated hardware, which is honestly the way it should be so that Linux keeps its identity and doesn't become yet another replaceable component in a proprietary stack like it is on Android (I'm looking at you Fuchsia).
And no, it doesn't matter that you're reading this right now on Sway using lynx and your mother and sister are using Ubuntu that you installed for them. You are on HN. You are not the segment that makes Linux desktops a lucrative business idea. A software engineer needs to know how to think about market segments and the normal user use cases and not be completely self absorbed into how the world works for them.
Well I work on the kernel for a living, so I feel like I have at least some idea. The quality of a distro on your hardware has nothing to do with it. I don't think you understood anything I said about why it's a failed segment.
Saying desktop is "dying" implies it will go away to the point of becoming insignificant. This is ridiculous - what would fill the gap for gamers, creators, professionals, business, and engineers? Tablets, gaming consoles and phones?
Shrinking segment, absolutely. Especially for the casual home-user segment. But leading with exaggerated flamebait is not welcome here, as I'm sure you are aware.
Linux on the desktop works basically fine for people who are technically inclined and have any interest in Linux, less well for people who aren't and don't, and there doesn't appear to be any effective movement in changing the status quo.
Getting volunteer coders to work in the customer-service style that is required to make a desktop for non-technical people just doesn't seem to work. And turning a volunteer community into a profit seeking one usually seems to hit these roadblocks.
We should just accept that success for Linux on the desktop looks like what we have now. Which seems fine to me. Everyone who wants it has it. Unending lust for growth is a trait of megacoroprations and cancers, not great company to keep IMO.
This is patently and blatantly not true. I have installed Ubuntu to my mom and my wife's parents, and they are happily browsing internet ever after, without any malware or crapware. In the past few years I have spent ~0 hours on maintenance of these devices.
Previously, when they were using Windows, it was a never-ending nightmare.
You see, a well set up Ubuntu is perfect for people who need the computer to just work. They just can't break it!
Huh, last time I tried to help someone switch, they didn't really like it -- but that was a couple years ago (It was a switch to Mint, and it was long enough ago that this was probably the best pick).
"Not liking" != "Not working", especially when the user being introduced to a new system is expecting things to "just work like they use to"
My wife had an older laptop, which had a failing hdd and I used the opportunity to swap for a SSD and asked her to try Ubuntu.
Yeah, she had a lot of questions at first, but eventually she got used to it. She got a new laptop and had to go back to Windows due to her work, but whenever she is just browsing or videocalling anyone, she doesn't mind using the older laptop.
Also, guess which laptop always has issues with the printer?
> Also, guess which laptop always has issues with the printer?
In my experience any laptop on any system will have issues with the goddamn fucking printer :-)
I had an old dot-matrix printer connected to the parallel port for a very long time. Could "print" with just "cat file.txt >/dev/lpt0". It was great. Downside was I couldn't use it in the evening as it woke up the neighbours.
The obstacle that wasn't overcome in this case was the lack of MS Office and the unfamiliarity of Open/Libre Office, if I remember correctly. Personally I can't stand office suites, so I don't really see how this could be such a big deal, but "actually this kind of software is just destined to suck" is not very compelling.
My parents are in their 90s and have been using Linux Mint since I replaced their previous desktop about five years ago. Only for email and web browsing, and a little writing (Libre Office), but they have had few complaints. (I have had a huge amount of trouble getting newer kernels to use a USB wi-fi dongle, though. That's ridiculous.)
Linus Torvalds also has many criticisms of the Linux desktop.[1] None of the commercial applications I have bought will run on Linux without wasting time tinkering. For programming, I'm forced to use Xcode because it's required on the App Store. I couldn't use Linux even if I did want to use something worse than macOS.
Desktop segment is "dying" and "filled with proprietary apps"? While desktop PC is no longer common as a home entertainment device, there is no replacement for it as a workstation. It is also the only platform where the software and hardware are (at least somehow) independent. You can install custom software on SOME phones, but other than that, contemporary electronic devices just come with their proprietary software you're not allowed to touch.
Even as a workstation - I already pointed out that Adobe and Serif won't port their apps to Linux. And that's one example of a professional use case. Think about the doctors, lawyers, technicians, sound engineers, video engineers, who all need to use some proprietary app that only works on Windows or Mac. Sure, if you're a programmer then you have access to everything you need on Fedora, but we are the least interesting group for the desktop, we are all power users and not the segment that matters.
Adobe and Serif won't be around forever. The list of reasons why NOT to be on Linux in some form has been, and continues to, shrink as old proprietary software gives way to the new. While it's true that industry software is often restrictive when it comes to OS requirements and Linux is often not supported, I think we are seeing more and more platform-agnostic software especially in the for of web applications.
But Linux is being used in those professional environments in some capacity.
"More recently, Linux has also been used on the workstations used by animators for drawing and modeling their creations, as the leading producers of animation software have tailored their applications to run on Linux." [1]
[2] is a demo video of Pixar's use of linux for animation and rendering.
Ah, you are too optimistic about the desktop in general. Landlines and desktops failed in the developing world first. It is contracting back to workstation users of old (STEM academia, IT, graphics) and maybe Adobe will do their hold out again like refusing to properly support windows when Mac was in the hole but they should get pretty desperate as the gateway platforms to their products become unwanted by the general population.
You are entitled to prefer to use whatever you want to use, but you are only the dictator of reality in your own mind.
Also Docks are terrible UI. They are annoying, take up too much space, and you can never really find a good place to move them so they are out of the way.
The Apple Dock was something designed to look cool and fresh in order to sell a bunch of G3 and G4 iMacs back in the day, but it's a step backwards from even Windows 95's taskbar.
Gnome devs staying away from that is one of the more laudable decisions they made in terms of design.
There's a reason why the GNOME devs have screenshots of Apple UIs in their design docs. The GNOME devs are not secretly geniuses of good design at the mercy of an ignorant world.
If you don't like the Dock constantly being visible it's called autohiding and it's been around for awhile. If a user wants to switch apps they don't want to completely switch screens to make a trivial decision they make thousands of times a day. They don't want to guess what apps they have open. They want to move their cursor to the bottom of the screen and pick an app on a little bar that lets them continue to see what they were doing beforehand, lets them see what they have open while continuing to work on what they want to work on. GNOMEs visionary UI is a complete misunderstanding of desktop UX and they are simply too prideful to admit defeat and go with something that people are already familiar with and would actually make normal people happy.
I always agreed with you but 5 years ago I made the switch and I’ll never go back.
Using Ubuntu, Fedora or any other distro with either a large community or a clear funding path (like PopOS) is great. The “2 guys made a distro and have no funding or way to monetize their work” isn’t a Linux problem it’s a business model problem.
I've been daily-driving KDE/Plasma for... around 7 years now? And I have a really low tolerance for daily technical nuisances. There have been some issues over that period, but honestly not more than I would have to deal with on other platforms.
I also introduced a partner to Elementary a few years back and she has absolutely fallen in love with it despite the shifting set of glitches it has on every update (she calls "personality"). She's clever but not especially technical and had no Linux experience beforehand.
As I see it, there are essentially three desktop platforms to choose from: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Windows is moving in an ad-supported direction that I want no part of and there's even more that I dislike about what Apple is doing (and this from someone who was one of those weird die-hard Apple enthusiasts in the 90s).
So I didn't switch to Linux because I'm fanatical about it, but because it was my option of last resort for having a desktop environment that I felt like I could largely control and use the way I wanted to use it. And, it has turned out that I'm really happy with it, most of the time.
That's probably not going to be a persuasive argument for the average casual computer user. On the other hand, tired tirades against "the year of the Linux desktop" completely miss the fact that Linux is a completely reasonable desktop experience today.
I've tried to switch to Linux every year for the last decade, but I never manage to complete the switch. I tried again in January and this time I couldn't get Firefox to use GPU acceleration at all, making all web videos extremely choppy. "Yeah you shoudn't use an AMD GPU". The suggestion I got was to just use MPlayer to watch YouTube videos. Ohh well I guess I'll try again next year.
Yeah, GPU issues are absolutely an area that frustrates a lot of would-be Linux users. FWIW that was a consideration when I bought my last two laptops; I filtered out any candidates that didn't have known good Linux drivers for most of the important hardware. And, that took a lot more time reading blogs and forums and the like than I like spending.
In my opinion (disclaimer, I'm currently test driving Arch again in a VMWare installation) this phenomenon is one that is routinely glossed over in discussions about challenges of the Linux desktop. The fact that the most active people hanging out in supposed "community support" channels are the type of technophiles for whom the statement, "You should really just use mplayer to watch YouTube videos" is a completely acceptable solution. They love their home-rolled digital duct tape built system and you should too!
That's just not at all acceptable to the majority of people who want to know they can click a link in Firefox (or Chromium or whatever) and watch the damn video. Perhaps more important: it's a prime example of sidestepping the question that is so frequent in these communities where you don't get answers to your questions, you get told random things sort of related to your question that others have done.
I started this recent test drive after installing Arch on a secondary system intended to be a home server and, within an hour, I had Steam installed, a DualShock 4 controller connected via bluetooth, and I was playing a windows game (Final Fantasy 12 - The Zodiac Age) at 60FPS stable. I honestly couldn't believe how much "just worked."
yeah, i have basically the same opinion. i like my M1 mac, but it's got some rough edges that are no worse than the things people call dealbreakers if it happened on something other than an apple product.
and i tried using windows 10 shortly after it's release and just couldn't.
people like what they're used to. if you're used to windows, linux is a tough sell. but if you're used to linux, so is windows. linux people like to worry about how it is perceived by the average user, but the average user fails all the time on any operating system.
My problem with Linux as a desktop is that it invariably breaks, and when it does, I have to waste a day figuring out what the hell is wrong with it. Windows 11 Pro is close enough to the things I like about Macs to make the switch, and I can run Linux in the hypervisor so that I never have to touch a Windows shell. Hell, I can even run Linux desktop apps right next to my Windows apps.
I suspect that recent efforts to make virtualization even more seamless is going to have a big impact on how we do daily computing in the very near future.
My next system is going to be a lightweight Linux host with a pile of VMs and something like https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary, with juicy enough hardware to make it feel like I'm only running one OS.
You've got that backwards. You're going to want to run Windows in VM to protect yourself from Microsoft's bullshit spying. With Linux, at least you _can_ fix the problems.
my experience with windows has been that troubleshooting it is mostly a waste of time, and if it breaks the best course of action is to re-install from scratch.
which is the same as my troubleshooting procedure on ubuntu.
Huh. I just read a comment elsewhere on HN from somebody who said desktop on Linux has never been easier since most of what they do happens in the browser anyway.
I remember talking with a buddy of mine about Linux, and he said the same thing you did about any distro outside of Fedora or Ubuntu: That Linux is held together by a scrappy group of volunteers competing against millions of dollars of investment and armies full of full-time employees. That was 1998 and what do you know, Linux is doing just fine. Linux desktop is still innovating. GNOME might do stupid stuff (though they haven't "literally" hung anybody that I'm aware of) but they innovate. Marketshare hasn't changed much but the size of the market has grown massively. 3% now is a lot different from 3% in 2010, and there are tons of developers and sponsors helping to keep Linux alive on the desktop.
I was the only Linux desktop user in my office of 150 people for awhile. The absolute bullsh*t everybody had to eat from OSX (let alone windows) astounded me. And they just smile and gobble it up because they have a gui in front of their VPN. Let 'em I say. The Linux desktop will do fine without them.
> Linux is held together by a scrappy group of volunteers competing against millions of dollars of investment and armies full of full-time employees.
The best example I know of this is GIMP; it has just a few (4 IIRC, could be 3 or 5 too, but thereabouts) people working on it in their spare time. That's it.
Folks complain that it's not as good as Photoshop, and that's true, but if you consider the team size it's actually pretty darn impressive! How many people work on Photoshop? I betcha it's a few more than a handful.
Not all of the Linux ecosystem is just volunteers though; most kernel contributions come from various companies; Ubuntu and RedHat work on a lot of different things (cue systemd discussion), etc.
That's a great achievement for its developers but as a user it doesn't matter; if the tool doesn't do what I need I will use a different tool. Whether it has 2 developers or 2000 doesn't change that fact.
Sure, but the point is that Linux-the-ecosystem is largely written by a bunch of people in their spare time, not infrequently for their own reasons (fun, "I want this", etc.), with fairly impressive results, and that expecting this to be on-par with a paid for-profit product with hundreds if not thousands of people working on it is kind of an unreasonable comparison.
Seeing these things as "products" where "users" have to choose from in a "free market" is already a flawed outlook. That's not what people are doing or how they're thinking.
I have to disagree with you to a certain extent. Yes the Linux Desktop is a mess, but however I see these issues only when you try stitching things together. I used to do it when I was trying to use Xubuntu, Ubuntu MATE and Lubuntu etc. They are basically "light" distros so any compatibility and functionality you want that is not already present needs to be arranged by you. You have the entire system at your disposal. Now, make the call - whether you want to spend a lot of time figuring it out, or do you want to just go ahead and install one of the mainstream ones like Manjaro, Solus, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, KDE Neon is basically up to you. Sometimes it's only a matter of finding the right distro and you're golden once you get there.
I've been using OSX at work and I absolutely hate it. I keep asking myself..why the fuck is my 16GB/512GB Core i7 Mac taking 3 seconds to open the settings UI? Why does the "finder" app suck so much? How come OSX has got some basic usability gaps like windows jumping out of my screen and not having an "auto raise windows on hover" option..? and the list continues. Windows seems better at some of these UX departments in my POV.
Anyway, these proprietary Operating Systems are always a subject of corporate greed. They're never 100% in the user's control and can be remotely toyed with - The companies backing them can happily add/remove your software, send advertisements, spyware, bloatware down your throat and you'll just end up seeing your system resources being leeched away along this process. Apple could be better in this department but I cannot just stand the (subjectively) horrible UX of the entire system.
Anyway, linux can be what you want. I've run KDE Neon on my PC for years without having to deal with any problem whatsoever. It's been smooth and easy and KDE gave me way, way more features than Windows and Mac put together. I'm talking about KDE but on Linux you can get anything you want. All at the convenience of knowing that there is no commercial element behind these things. Since donations are how things usually get paid for in FOSS, you're welcome to donate to keep it lively and bustling. I do, from time to time.
> I've been using OSX at work and I absolutely hate it.
Are you being hyperbolic here? I move between Linux, Windows 10, iOS, macOS, and Android and they are all mostly fine. I can’t say I love or hate any of them although there are things that each seems to be best at.
I guess the UX is really subjective. I just switched to macOS from Windows (to be fair my first computer I owned was a PowerBook G4, so it wasn't completely new to it) and so far I prefer to UX to Windows.
The virtual desktops and full screen mode combined with separate program and window switching shortcuts were really easy to get used to and it feels a lot better to use than Windows. The M1 SoC is also a lot faster than anything I've used on Windows laptops in the last few years. On my old Windows laptop I had the same experience as you on macOS. The settings app sometimes taking ages to load and freeze randomly when installing updates.
If I am honest they all suck in different ways (or sometimes the same ways) and most people will be happy with any of them. Of course some people have software that require a certain OS but I guess that's the minority. The biggest advantages of Windows and macOS are Microsoft Office, Adobe Products and the bigger user base. But the first two matter way less because everything is a web app today.
Definitely agree that the UX is all subjective. I just like the convenience of Linux where I can arrange whatever I want, and there are generally tons of programs available. I'm glad that M1 SoC is performing better; hope to try it out at some point.
You are 100% spot on. I use Linux for 20 years and I have several Linux desktops around in my household. Rpi, small intel pcs, etc. The desktop experience is a joke at best. We ha to be honest about things we want to improve. Without honesty there cannot be any improvement.
> You know I'm right. The year of the Linux desktop isn't right around the corner, just like it wasn't right around the corner last year, or the year before that.
I don’t think you’re wrong, I think you’re missing the point. I can’t speak for the elementary developers but I don’t think you'd start a project like this hoping to take over the world. You start a project like elementary because you think something like elementary should exist.
I think Linux’s hardware agnosticism is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, you can run it anywhere, but it doesn’t run great anywhere.
I think that could change though. IMHO, Asahi Linux is one of the most interesting things going on in the world of Linux right now. They don’t have to support a lot of different hardware configurations so I think they have a good chance of really getting things dialed in and creating a super polished product.
Since you work on the kernel, maybe you can answer this - does Linux have something similar to timer coalescing? IIRC, that’s one of thing in macOS that helps them with battery life.
> I think Linux’s hardware agnosticism is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, you can run it anywhere, but it doesn’t run great anywhere.
Correct, and the drivers that get worked on are the ones that we kernel developers have access to. The situation has gotten better as more and more vendors have contributed drivers over the years and standards have allowed many devices to run on a single driver and we've become more focused on improving and adopting USB, PCI, etc. Plus kernel builds have become more automated as companies like Intel contribute lots of automated builds against tons of different hardware configurations. Still though, Linux is focused on the server and mobile market. That's what people like me get paid to work on, and so it's going to get the best support.
> Since you work on the kernel, maybe you can answer this - does Linux have something similar to timer coalescing?
Yes it does. Also Google has contributed tons, and tons, and tons of power management code (for Android of course). Power management on Linux has improved tremendously. There's still only so much that can be done, because we don't have as tight of an integration into the hardware stack on Desktop. We can't force vendors to implement certain features or make sure everyone implements certain low power state callbacks in drivers.
Well, I upvoted you, not because I agree, but because I think the downvotes are unjustified, you're just voicing your opinion, which I found interesting and well-reasoned.
There was another article posted a month or so back with the other founders perspective. As an outsider, Cassidy seems to be the more reasonable of the two, but I can't know that for sure when viewing the whole situation through a peephole. https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=...
Yeah just read that. Lunduke is apparently purposefully misgendering and dead naming Danielle Foré in that article, which is important context. But the tweets are still good background.
Lunduke has a long history of using negative clickbait titles (the Linux sucks series and HTTPS is bad) to gain views. I'm not surprised that he has somehow found a way to milk this controversy too!
I read the article, thanks very much, and it was completely unclear to me as well.
There's a lacuna between these two sentences:
> After confirming it would be an incredible fit while importantly allowing me to continue my work on elementary, I made the hard decision to cut back my hours at elementary, eliminate my salary (freeing it up for other initiatives), and to take this position for my wage.
> As a result, Dani has asked me to resign and completely step away from elementary.
In other words "I took a job with the idea that I would free up my salary while continuing to work on the project... then Dani asked me not to work on the project at all". The second part does not follow from the first. Either it's poorly told, or something has been left out of the story.
Absolutely. This is a response to the other co-founder's similarly one-sided post a few weeks ago. I don't think either of them come out looking good here.
One person didn’t discuss their plans with the other, and thought it would be fine to retain their shares after they got another job for the sake of the company (this sounds reasonable to me, by the time you choose to cut insurance benefits it’s time to think of a different solution).
The other felt it was unfair to retain any shares if you weren’t actively (full-time?) working on the company. Kind of funny, seeing how this would have pretty much guaranteed sinking the ship.
I wonder if the folks at Elementary targeted businesses with a "Elementary OS Professional" version. Is pretty hard to get regular people to pay for an operating system when they don't need to, either because the competition is fierce (Zorin, Ubuntu, Mint, Deepin, ...), or because they can choose to donate 0 dollars. I have never seen an app in their custom App Store that will attract me enough to pay for it. The OS itself is pretty neat. I think they should have tried to get government entities, schools, or hospitals to use their OS, so they can have a decent income stream.
It looks like the core Elementary team was just two people. The length of time between releases makes me think they were understaffed for a while.
A business would rather get support from a larger distro with a larger support team. That market already has a number of established vendors: Red Hat, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu server...
For me at least, the problem comes in with when you ask for a donation.
When I first downloaded Godot, I didn't donate because I had no idea if I'd even use it for long. After a year or so of using it, I came across various reminders to donate, and eventually I did (if I'm completely honest, literally just now). But most people will never come across that prompt again and will forget any need to. Its the same case with Elementary, or any other distro I've tried out. Why pay if I dont know if I'll even use it?
That being said, I can't think of any better way of asking without being obtrusive to the user. I guess you could have some really pointless badge or something you unlock by donating which could help prompt users later down the line, but I cant imagine the FOSS community would be a big supporter of that.
I would have happily paid them to add a "minimize window" button. Frankly, that's the only think I was ever missing while using E. on my main Linux laptop for the last two years.
It has been a pretty slick experience, and that's remarkable given the general state of Linux on the desktop (admittedly, I may be more of a command line person, but still).
So maybe instead of "donate", try "pay for getting your very own feature implemented"?
> So maybe instead of "donate", try "pay for getting your very own feature implemented"?
1. If you're effectively hiring a developer to work on a custom feature for you, including the future costs of maintenance and code complexity, the price is going to be very high.
2. The lack of a minimize button was a UX decision. You can disagree with the decision, but if elementary implemented every feature that people with money requested, you probably wouldn't like the resulting UI. Or maybe you would, but elementary would be a very different sort of distro.
elementary's daily/preview builds are only accessible to GitHub sponsors over a certain amount. I wonder how that worked out, because I like this pseudo-subscription model a lot better, and wish AppCenter could even figure out that I'm a supporter and redistribute some of my $$$ to apps that I often use.
if they do they will already have some competition from zorin. they released a thing last year that lets businesses/schools manage multiple machines remotely
From an admittedly quite outside perspective, the state of FOSS dev seems to be showing some cracks.
Spending some spare time developing something useful for others, great. Spending pretty much all your spare time doing so, seems unsustainable but you do you. Having that treated as a given rather than a special committment, with extra demands and workload placed on top, this is a problem. Having to get a second job to support your project, what the fuck is going on.
If you do that and you're happy with it, don't let me interfer. But this doesn't seem like such a happy post.
I'm not sure if this applies to this situation - this individual was working on it full time, as a co-founder of a startup. They wanted to continue working on it in their spare time after finding a new job, but their co-founder didn't want them involved anymore. I don't think the open source nature really comes into it, they wished to continue working on their baby, which is totally understandable.
Absolutely, if they're happy with their situation (or I guess, were happy with it), I'm in no place to say its wrong. But it does seem to place streinous demands on the people working on it. Afterall, the story does end with him being forced to abandon his own baby, not entirely of his own choice. That doesn't sound like a normal side project to me, but I'm likely out of touch with big FOSS
That is not necessarily quite what happened either. I was more convinced by the other developers position previously on this.
But that just means we and everyone else but these two people themselves are just picking sides, not necessarily actually seeing and evaluating right/wrong/good/bad/fair/unfair etc.
I don't mean to say I agree with that article. (Well, most of it is just reporting which is fine, but there are a few small added conclusions at the end) My own comment on that article was that I read it and arrived at an opposite conclusion from the author. And someone else supplied some enlightening background about history between these two and the author.
The "enlightening background about history between these two and the author" mentioned above:
>Keep in mind that the author [Bryan Lunduke] is not neutral here: Since he's expressed his position against trans people, and by doing that parted ways with Danielle Foré before (who previously identified as Daniel Foré and participated in his youtube videos), and also you can see that [the article] refuses to use the actual name for Danielle; it's not surprising that he wants to reach a conclusion against her.
Edit: Since there seems to be some confusion, this is about the author of the OP post linked in the comment above, not the OP link of this HN thread.
Given her twitter handle is DaniElainaFore I don't think it's unreasonable that Cassidy calls her Dani in this post, after working closely together for what, 7 years? Is there more context?
I was thinking about that article and how Lunduke deadnamed Danielle just the other day. I had no idea who these people were and I was shocked that I didn't even know Danielle was trans until I skimmed through the HN comments the next day. That's...yikes.
> Having that treated as a given rather than a special committment, with extra demands and workload placed on top, this is a problem.
That's never been an obligation wrt. FLOSS development. If you want a supported version of some FLOSS project for your own production use, you can pay someone to be a maintainer.
>state of FOSS dev seems to be showing some cracks
How do you figure? Companies like IBM/Redhat, Google, MS, Oracle, Amazon and others pay tons of devs to work on OSS. The state of OSS has never been better.
Just because some people can't figure out how to monetize doesn't mean the state of the ecosystem as a whole isn't great.
The problem is money, they could have set up a foundation instead of a company and while similar it already steers things into another direction that a for-profit company. They could have still benefitted from the foundations assets in the form of contractors, or even employees, I believe, but the whole topic of being acquired is sidestepped.
I wonder how much innovation in the US is constrained by the fact that people need health insurance, and it is generally expensive as hell.
I interviewed with a finance startup a few years back and everything was great until we got down to benefits. That's when they broke the news to me that even though they were being financed by a cadre of millionaires and billionaires with long histories in the finance and banking system, they didn't have enough money to offer benefits.
Fair point, I guess. The benefit generally accounts for ~$18,000/yr out of pocket so getting ~$30,000/yr in additional comp is fine. These numbers assuming $1500/mo for good coverage (which is what I paid in the past when I was funemployed), and a higher comp accounting for taxation.
All that said, I think employers are required by law to provide healthcare?
In a perfect world, basic coverage would be part of what you get for paying taxes by the government.
In a perfect world nobody would be forced with violence to make nonconsensual payments to anyone else, so there would be ~0 tax revenue from which to fund such a thing.
WOW. That's a special sort of asshole right there. I'm reminded of the time years ago talking to a couple of "VC" (really, smalltime angels) dudebros with Rolex's and Mises Institute wristbands who spent the whole pitch talking about how to make sure the startup employees got shafted on equity and how the wait staff at the restaurant didn't deserve tips because they were 'too stupid' to go to a 'real school' and get 'real jobs'.
> I wonder how much innovation in the US is constrained by the fact that people need health insurance, and it is generally expensive as hell.
Health insurance is expensive, but I don't think it's "expensive as hell", I've got an unsubsidized ACA plan for $1200/month for a family of three (two early 40s adults and a 10 year old child; Kitsap County, WA), plus $30/month for dental insurance for the kid. Past employers paid more for better coverage, but this covers the mandatory items, and none of the higher priced ACA plans appear to offer me more things covered or a meaningfully better network, so meh.
That's fine as long as nobody is sick and you never have to pay your deductible.
A single payer system with no deductible would have vastly better outcomes for employees in terms of costs, ability to seek healthcare before things become catastrophic, and income opportunities. There's literally almost no downside.
The family deductible is $12,700, and out of pocket max is $16,400. Premiums plus max is close to $31k/year. But my 2019 COBRA rate was $2,174.52/month or $26k/year. So if I was looking for work and they didn't want to pay for healthcare insurance, it wouldn't be a big deal, I'd just want them to pay at most $30k/year (well, grossed up, because I can't actually deduct anything) more than a company that would pay healthcare insurance; maybe a little less, because I don't expect to need much healthcare during the year (famous last words). It's expensive, but I don't expect it to hamper innovation, because knowledge workers are expensive too.
Also, you were complaining about the cost of healthcare insurance, and now you're complaining about the cost of healthcare. They're not the same thing, and yet the terms are used interchangeably. :P
Single payer would be nice, but I don't see how we'll get there, when nobody is proposing steps to get us there. I guess there was some push to reduce the medicare eligibility age to 60 last september, but I don't think it went anywhere; I'd like to see a phased in approach of moving the age down by one year ever year for 10 years, and at a faster pace after that, but you'd need to increase funding (which looks to be needed anyway) and pay attention to any other problems that come up.
Yep. Everything is roses and you can be a fierce supporter of the current system when you're healthy. Then you get sick and suddenly you run to GoFundMe because they're hitting you for ten grand and most don't have it.
Here are two things I feel I don't understand about a number of quite similar "desktop distributions".
One, what's the target user? Is it really every type of desktop computing? In that case you're competing with not only KDE but also GNOME, even if we confine ourselves to Linux based desktops. Two major desktops are already a bit much for such a narrow market. I totally get doing something for friends or for the joy of it, but any semi-commercial endeavour pretty much needs to outcompete them both.
It's not like GNOME's problem is too slow development which some healthy competition can fix. Seriously, I don't think I am a completely atypical user when I value most importantly my desktop to stick around for the next decade, and work with whatever new hardware changes that comes around without annoying me too much along the way.
Two, are you developing a desktop environment or a Linux distribution? In the latter case, you're competing with massive projects like Debian and Fedora. The testing required to release a general Linux distribution on just one architecture is enormous. Security response must bascially never sleep if users should be kept from risk. If the answer is "both" I don't know what to say really.
I'm not saying there should never be any more Linux distributions, or that the computing desktop is perfect as it is. Far from it. I'm just saying that competing with the established projects here is realistically going to take a decade or more, and maybe finding a niche other than a general desktop for everyone might be a good start.
The Linux world generally seems devoid of product-thinking people, and that is probably the main reason it hasn't taken over the desktop space IMO. Plenty of focus on technical matters, but not much thought given to whole user stories or holistic coordination happening.
Nice attempt there. However, I've been a user of Linux since circa 2004. (I think it'd be hard to exist here on HN long without doing so.) No, using Linux is not straightforward. Nearly every user-facing element has something broken about it.
And you sound like someone who has used Linux far too much and lost touch with what most people's experience with it is. Your remarks are similarly off base with reality.
I have done all those things. On Linux, Nvidia drivers are a royal pain, webcam and printer both worked without any effort other than hooking it up, and running a 32-bit application was not too difficult with instructions. On Windows, I've never messed with video drivers, but have had problems with the same webcam and printer requiring me to locate and install drivers, which were bundled with software I didn't want. 32-bit applications on Windows were of course a breeze.
So anecdotally, it's a mixed bag. Maybe if I had less Linux experience and more Windows, the story would be different.
I've had long experience with Linux, FreeBSD, and in the last 9 years with Windows too. On the whole I think you're right, it's always been a "mixed bag" when it comes to the gamut of installing, use, and upgrading an OS.
Don't know the vintage of Windows you referenced, but in recent experience (Win 10/11) installing a webcam was dead simple, just plug it into a USB port. Printers used to be a gigantic hassle, but at least for the 4 printers available to my Windows laptop little configuration and no added drivers were necessary. (No doubt certain webcams or printers out there could be a pain to install in Windows.)
One example: getting OBS Studio to work on Windows was pretty much a no brainer vs. Ubuntu which needed to have additional library support. While OBS works under Ubuntu using it is still a bit more of a hassle.
In any case Windows seems to have more bugs now than a few years back. I figure added "features" contribute to complexity. Who knows how many more LOC have been committed. I'd be a lot happier with simpler but more reliable systems. It's not the tradeoff Microsoft, and probably various Linux distributions, will be likely to accept.
However, on 20.04LTS apt installs OBS v25.0x, not the current version (27.2.x).
What I was talking about was installing v27.2.x on Ubuntu. FWIW the OBS site gives up-to-date installation info, so it's not really difficult for people familiar with unix/linux just some extra hassle. Also using OBS in Ubuntu requires entering a password each time, rather an annoyance. (Sure, ways to work around this exist but another minor hassle to deal with.)
No doubt all this would be a daunting task for users without experience with command-line admin.
nvidia drivers are not a pain. Most distributions package them.
And before you install the official driver, you at least get the noveau driver (community supported nvidia driver) by default, which is capable enough to do many, many things.
I think the problem is just that almost all prebuilt machines come with Windows and nobody ever gets exposed to alternatives. And most people just dont care.
Then Desktop Linux is a useless concept anyways, KDE and GNOME devs can all go home because Chromebooks are already everything 'most people' need or want, right?
Perhaps attitudes like this towards potential users are another reason Linux Desktop still doesn't have much buy in.
What attitude am i conveying? I really dont know, english is not my first language.
I just dont think that most people just care what the thing is running as long as it does the job. Computers are an appliance to many, just like a toaster. If the functionality is close to what theyre used to (windows or mac) then there shouldnt be big adaptility problems until they want to go deeper into the device than web browsing.
Youre right. But then again i dont believe many would care if they can get their basic things done.
I also understand there are people who just are not willing to learn new things.
I hope i dont sound like im trying to push linux to people. I want people to have choice of many instead of choice of two when they go buy a new PC. And maybe some would be curious enough to try something new.
I tried it with my fiancee, although not with windows skin. Just default plasma. She opened internet browser and used it just fine.
Of course she cant move to linux due to adobe software, not that i need her to do anything like that. Anyone can use what they want, my point was that most people dont even know theres other choices than windows and mac.
Also ive been using windows all of my life, recently switched to kubuntu because i got tired of the updates. Didnt take me long to learn to use the pc.
Yup! The moment you start installing proprietary software you start noticing it. I had the same experience. I thought it was obvious so i didnt mention it.
But most people, from what ive seen, only use the internet browser and maybe some built in apps. Keep it there and the lines between OS' start to blur.
Edit: to add, this is usually why i tell anyone interested to use linux is to try the tools available first, then if you get used to them, make the switch. Luckily i had already used same tools on windows (gimp, krita, blender) that also work on linux.
I find this claim is overstated almost all the time. People are sensitive to the small details even if they can’t explain why. Something as simple as the downloads being moved to a different place is enough to throw my parents off. And that isn’t even to get started about form filling, browser extensions, or browser window management. The chrome matters more than software people think.
I've never encountered an issue on Windows related to two library versions conflicting. That's something that happens all the time on Linux. As a Windows user, you don't even have to know what libraries are. As a user of Linux you need to be aware of a ton of different shared libraries and research various compatibility workarounds to keep using them with the growing pile of software you've installed. This isn't something the typical desktop user is up for.
The thing is, who exactly in the "Linux world" should be doing this thinking? Unlike Microsoft or Apple it's not a single organisation with a single leadership, but a whole bunch of small projects and individuals with different goals, preferences, styles, etc. Quite a lot of people doing open source stuff aren't really in the business of "building a product" in the first place.
That said, at least both KDE and Gnome have offered fairly comprehensive and complete desktop environment about on-par with a standard Windows or macOS installation for many years now. There's also things like XFCE, LDE, Cinnamon, and probably others – but I don't really keep up.
There are plenty of issues with "Linux on the desktop", but I don't think this is one of them.
Even the well-thought-out desktop environments, however, have massive glaring holes in them, e.g. the wifi utility on Ubuntu and Mint is totally broken, almost all the time, occasionally even lending itself to stroboscopic behavior, and I've never found a distro where the wifi utility actually did everything it was supposed to.
Yes, it's distributed ownership, and while that explains why the problem exists, I don't feel it's an excuse. There is definitely room for someone to come in with good product sense plus technical excellence and work to make a really great desktop OS on Linux, it just hasn't happened yet.
That last sentence is a multiple 6 figure salary's worth of job description.
The reason why the "year of the Linux desktop" has never happened is because nobody wants to work for free. As soon as you say the word "product" the word "salary" has to follow.
Most of the programming that happens in the Linux world would be compensated along those lines as well. The trick is that developers tend to be deeply aware of the value of contributing to open source and, well, product managers less so.
Disagreed; even if you get that person with a 6-figure salary they'll get bogged down in political and/or technical bikeshedding and won't be able to make any progress.
For the "year of the Linux desktop" to happen you'll need dozens/hundreds of these 6-figure employees at every level of the stack (from kernel to desktop environment to apps) to be able to build a coherent system from scratch and being able to ignore/work around all the BS and wastes of time that currently plagues the Linux distro world.
I do believe you'll be successful to an extent, though whether the result can still be called a "Linux desktop" as opposed to something more like Android (Linux kernel but non-standard GUI stack) will be up for debate.
I don't think you're wrong per se, but IMO elementary is among the more unique distros. They have a very particular user experience in mind, and there's nothing quite like it in the Linux world.
The problem with the distribution/DE divide is that there’s a lot that doesn’t fall squarely in the realm of one or the other, and so confining yourself to just being a DE means making a big pile of compromises and diluting the end product.
I don’t know specifically what those things are in the case of elementary, but for example one could imagine certain bits of design in a desktop’s file manager being tied to how the distribution’s filesystem is arranged. Sure the file manager would technically work with other filesystem designs, but then the file manager may as well not exist because it brings little to the table that other file managers haven’t already.
So I can see why someone who’s concerned with fine tuning details in the desktop experience they’re crafting wanting to also be a distribution. Unfortunately that’s also a massively tall order due to the time, personnel, and effort required to pull such a feat off.
Desktop distributions exist because users like and will pay for complete experiences and the effort to make yet another Ubuntu derivative lie virtually entirely in the parts that you choose to develop not in packing it up into Elementary.
It also means you can update your software on your own schedule with modifications where necessary instead of being sandbagged into working around someone else's limitations on their schedule.
Furthermore the general desktop for everyone space and the server space are literally the only ones on planet earth that have enough Linux users for a reasonably sized community.
> Two major desktops are already a bit much for such a narrow market.
Basically there needs to be at least one environment that isn't crap. Gnome
- Has a weirdly bad way of handling multiple monitors
- Requires twice as many steps to perform common operations via its graphical interface
- Relies on hot corners which are both possible to trigger by accident and hard to organically discover. It also makes a lot less sense with multiple monitors.
- Spent the first 8 years of gnome 3 constantly leaking memory until it fell over if you left it on too long. This was caused by a weird mismatch between its javascript desktop and its compiled code that was too hard to fix so they decided to just constantly run the garbage collector and marveled at how not horrible this performed in actuality.
- Deprecates features that people use without replacement. See tray icons for a literal decade
- Has repeatedly has major figures in its development promote the idea of removing themeing and extensions in favor of a vanilla gnome experience. An experience that is notably lackluster.
- Has no addon API forcing addons to monkey patch the javascript desktop ensuring such efforts can trivially fail on any version update and addons that aren't actively developed will stop working.
- Worse if they crash they especially under Wayland take down the entire session
- Lacks basic features in its file manager
I could go on.
The basic problem is confusing an ecosystem of compatible software for a company with labor resources that can be allocated to different tasks that is somehow needlessly wasted on developing two different desktops. Eliminate KDE and you don't get a stronger gnome you get a weaker one because someone passionate about KDE doesn't magically become a gnome developer because they aren't reallocated by their manager to work on a similar project you just lose incidental contributions to mutually useful parts of the open source ecosystem and less cross fertilization of ideas.
Some of your comments are valid and I agree with them, but some of them are a lot of nonsense.
>This was caused by a weird mismatch between its javascript desktop and its compiled code that was too hard to fix so they decided to just constantly run the garbage collector and marveled at how not horrible this performed in actuality.
No, this is not even close to what happened. There was never any weird mismatch, the refcounting is very similar in both of them. The bug was that the garbage collector wasn't running correctly. Please read the (now 4 years old) blog post: https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...
>Deprecates features that people use without replacement.
I would like to know about these desktops that are still under active development and have never removed or deprecated features. I've never seen one. I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find people complaining that Windows 11 doesn't support 8-bit color displays at 640x480.
>See tray icons for a literal decade
This never happened, there has been several extensions for tray icons for the entire decade. The real problem here is that all the APIs for tray icons are broken and nobody bothered to implement one correctly.
>Has no addon API forcing addons to monkey patch the javascript desktop ensuring such efforts can trivially fail on any version update and addons that aren't actively developed will stop working.
This has nothing to do with javascript or addons. In general code that isn't being developed has a high probability it will stop working at some point. And this presents a false choice too. I've heard this statement so many times but nobody has ever proposed what a real addons API should look like. AFAIK there are no desktop platforms or mobile platforms anywhere with an addons API that does everything that can be done with GNOME extensions. The closest I've ever seen are things like addon widgets for Android and KDE which aren't even close to being the same thing.
>Worse if they crash they especially under Wayland take down the entire session
That's not really important anywhere, the apps themselves are supposed to implement session management to insure against any system crash.
If I were you I would avoid commenting on these things again unless you have a proposal to make, they cheapen the rest of your comments. It's honestly tiring to keep seeing these long lists of random grievances where the ultimate suggestion is "just throw it away and start over while somehow avoiding all these issues in a way that is not explained". Do you really think having yet another choice is going to make a difference?
This is the weird mismatch between compiled and javascript code from your own link which I am familiar with however I do thank you for linking it here as I shall substantiate my argument based on your own link.
>--------------------------------------------------------------
Here’s the problem: C objects don’t track who owns them; instead, they only track how many owners they have. This is the traditional reference counting mechanism, and it works fine in C land because C is not garbage collected. To the garbage collector, however, the C objects would look like this:
The garbage collector has no means to know the relationships between C objects.
The garbage collector, then, will go there and destroy the root one. This object will be finalized, and the directly dependent objects will be marked for garbage collection.
Only the directly dependent objects are marked for the next garbage collection.
The “solution” is basically throwing a grenade to kill ants. We now queue a garbage collection every time an object is marked for destruction. So every single time an object becomes red, as in the example, we queue a GC. This is, of course, a very aggressive solution.
But it is not all bad. Some early tests shows that this has a small impact on performance – at least, it’s much smaller than what we were expecting.
This is basically garbage engineering that shouldn't have made it out of the design stage let alone been knocking over systems for 8 years.
Moving on.
In essence a substantial chunk of the Linux desktop crowd feels like gnome is crap and has correctly understood that they aren't welcome to fix it because project owners have a very opinionated vision on how the Linux desktop works.
This is probably why 60% of Linux Desktop users don't use it.
If Pop!_OS succeeds in replacing it and Ubuntu ends up adopting it will probably drop from 40% of users to closer to 5%. It would be in serious danger of irrelevancy at that point if it weren't Red Hats baby.
You are welcome to your own opinion on the utility of the gnome desktop but the idea expressed by the grand parent post that the Linux desktop space ought to just settle on a singular environment that cannot even convince the majority of users to use it despite having more corporate money spent on it in a year than other environments in history seems ill founded.
Edit:
> the apps themselves are supposed to implement session management to insure against any system crash
Well designed software environments don't crash in a way that causes the underlying OS or end user applications to die. One time in a decade would be one time too many.
Session management makes perfect sense as defense in depth for data loss not least of which because hardware failure, power loss, battery exhaustion happen but this isn't even remotely a defense against gnome's unreliable software design where features available in other environments as options require monkey patching gnome's javascript desktop wherein any addon up to and including a hokey little weather widget can somehow destroy the entire session because the underlying javascript changed between X.n and X.n+1.
For practical purposes such crashes can cause the loss of user data and punting responsibility to user apps is absolutely ridiculous.
>This is basically garbage engineering that shouldn't have made it out of the design stage let alone been knocking over systems for 8 years.
No, this makes no sense and you're still misunderstanding the problem. This issue occurs anywhere in any system where you connect a GC to an outside system. Every javascript implementation has to contend with it. It also can happen in a lot of other places, for example, if you bind a random C API to Python. It's not a weird mismatch. There are plenty of bad issues with mozjs right now but this is not one of them.
>In essence a substantial chunk of the Linux desktop crowd feels like gnome is crap and has correctly understood that they aren't welcome to fix it because project owners have a very opinionated vision on how the Linux desktop works.
Ok, so what? There are approximately zero projects in the Linux desktop that aren't opinionated, and there are approximately zero people in the Linux desktop crowd who don't think some other project is crap. You don't have to spend very long reading HN and slashdot comments to figure that one out. If you think GNOME was the first project to reject changes, then I have some very bad news for you.
>You are welcome to your own opinion on the utility of the gnome desktop
I don't care about the utility of GNOME. I actually think GNOME is very bad and I agree with some of your other criticisms. I just wish you wouldn't ruin your comment with these other same nonsensical criticisms that we've seen so many times that never go anywhere in a productive direction. Stick to the good criticisms, avoid these petty gripes unless you have something useful to add. Every time I can honestly pin these type of comments to people who aren't desktop developers because it's always the same refrain about how they should have designed it better the first time 20 years ago or something like that. That's a boring comment, it has no intellectual value. You can do better than this. And I'm sorry I don't have a time machine, I wish I did.
>Well designed software environments don't crash in a way that causes the underlying OS or end user applications to die. One time in a decade would be one time too many.
Then don't install badly designed extensions. If you think that is a nonsense response then please rethink what you're trying to say here. The worst offender for hard system crashes in Linux is still driver bugs. Do you really think driver developers want that to happen?
>this isn't even remotely a defense against gnome's unreliable software design
This doesn't follow. The problem here is not the design, the problem is rather a lack of design.
>any addon up to and including a hokey little weather widget can somehow destroy the entire session because the underlying javascript changed between X.n and X.n+1.
And small changes in the drivers can crash your whole kernel too. I still don't know what point you're trying to make here, besides asking for someone to fix the crash.
>For practical purposes such crashes can cause the loss of user data and punting responsibility to user apps is absolutely ridiculous.
No, it is not ridiculous at all. Nothing is being punted. The apps have always had this responsibility. Some crummy desktop applications are just slow to catch up here. Most of the "serious work" apps I've seen (like word processors, spreadsheets, photoshop, etc) have their own auto-backup and have had it for decades because that's the most reasonable thing to do. Almost all mobile apps are also designed this way because the OS can kill them at any time or the device can lose power at any time. But you knew that already?
Mobile apps are a whole different animal because phones especially earlier android phones were very ram limited and manual memory management by closing unwanted apps sucks ass as we learned on windows CE.
I had both a 90s hp windows pda and HTC sensation with 768MB of RAM.
Android apps have a defined point in the android lifecycle where they are supposed to save everything when they lose focus in case they have to fall on their sword which they indeed will have to do frequently.
Dying and being restarted as if nothing happened is part of normal operation because it happens a lot.
Your desktop session should never crash. Exiting unexpectedly should be a risk of battery exhaustion, users closing without saving, hardware failure, or power loss.
The idea of your desktop session just crashing out just shouldn't happen and indeed doesn't happen with i3wm KDE or windows.
The fact that extensions can crash is unremarkable the fact that they can crash the session itself is extraordinary. A windows 95 level of bad.
A common refrain in gnome land is
User: gnome lacks functionality
Gnomie: but it has powerful extensions
User: gnome extensions can crash the session!
Gnomie: You don't have to use extensions!
You either have to deal with potentially unstable extensions or limited functionality. Neither is particularly reasonable.
Characterization of the indefinite and indeterminant lifespan of objects as a normal part of gluing a compiled and garbage collected language is simply normalizing pathology.
It's like a smoker saying well sometimes people's lungs just fill up with fluid and shrivel up and die.
Well yes if you fill them continually with toxic smoke for several decades.
It seems painfully obvious that the dependency relationship expressed in the JavaScript should be mirrored in the c code allowing it to remove the garbage before the system falls over.
This seems painfully obvious when the memory is allocated for an ephemeral purpose like a frame of animation.
Can we not destroy everything related to frame n upon drawing it?
Happens to other JavaScript situations seems to be a special class of problem it's like the cigarette smoker telling you that the meth smoker also has problems with his lungs. Well yes yes he does.
>Exiting unexpectedly should be a risk of battery exhaustion, users closing without saving, hardware failure, or power loss.
Yes but all of these things still happen anywhere and the apps themselves are the only place that can be fully prepared for that, with cloud-synced web apps this is also not a problem. A lot of Linux users really seem to hate using cloud services though, for those users it's apparent that avoiding data loss is an exercise in self-flagellation.
>The idea of your desktop session just crashing out just shouldn't happen and indeed doesn't happen with i3wm KDE or windows.
Well again, that's a nonsense comparison because none of those have a comparable addons system.
>The fact that extensions can crash is unremarkable the fact that they can crash the session itself is extraordinary. A windows 95 level of bad.
No not really. You seem to think the alternative here to monkey patching is a system that doesn't crash. It's not. The alternative is to load binary plugins into the display server which is even worse and has a higher risk of causing crashes and memory leaks.
>User: gnome lacks functionality Gnomie: but it has powerful extensions User: gnome extensions can crash the session! Gnomie: You don't have to use extensions!
I've not seen anyone here saying that, I'm certainly not saying it. I wish you didn't ignore the part where I said to just fix the crashes in the extensions. I also wish you wouldn't turn this into a conversation with hypothetical users. You're talking to a real person here.
>You either have to deal with potentially unstable extensions or limited functionality. Neither is particularly reasonable.
Yes, welcome to engineering. It's the art of being forced to decide between two bad solutions because you don't have enough time to do it right. If you have a lot of spare time then I suggest you volunteer your time to do it, and figure out how to do it in a way that benefits everybody (not just gnome).
>Characterization of the indefinite and indeterminant lifespan of objects as a normal part of gluing a compiled and garbage collected language is simply normalizing pathology. It seems painfully obvious that the dependency relationship expressed in the JavaScript should be mirrored in the c code allowing it to remove the garbage before the system falls over. This seems painfully obvious when the memory is allocated for an ephemeral purpose like a frame of animation. Can we not destroy everything related to frame n upon drawing it?
This again is more nonsense. No, you can't because the longer you wait the longer your GC pauses will be. This is a problem with any stop-the-world generational GC and it's only made worse by plugging foreign objects into it. The solution would be of course to improve the GC (there are a lot of ways to do this) but then it becomes a mozjs problem. GNOME Shell is just a downstream and can't do anything about it. You're barking up the wrong tree here.
Please just avoid talking about this unless you can propose a solution to the problem, if you can come up with something good that works everywhere and is easy to use then a lot of other projects will benefit from it. If you can't then this discussion will go nowhere. The most that could be said otherwise is "don't use GNOME" but I think it's safe to assume you were already doing that.
> with cloud-synced web apps this is also not a problem. A lot of Linux users really seem to hate using cloud services though, for those users it's apparent that avoiding data loss is an exercise in self-flagellation.
This is where the entire dialog not only jumped the shark but blew it up while screaming Yippee Ki Yay.
When the complaint is that a system is unreliable the solution isn't to pair an inherently unstable system with cloud synced web apps its not run software that doesn't randomly shit the bed. For example fire up a KDE x11 session and simulate crashing software by shooting its window manager kwin_x11 in the face and marvel at the fact that the window manager died but your applications did not. One can return to normal by explicitly calling kwin_x11 or even a different window manager like compiz and continuing like normal.
I3wm doesn't have the same trick being only a wm but its also literally 1/10th of 1% as much code as the totality of the gnome project and it isn't monkey patched as the user is running it.
That is to say other people handle the issue by not randomly shitting the bed knowing that the orthogonal issue of losing user space state and data is known to be imperfect. The designer of gnome can't fix literally every app in existence and thus ought to pessimistically act as if every failure will result in user data.
> Well again, that's a nonsense comparison because none of those have a comparable addons system.
An addon system that is literally used virtually entirely to add back options that were present in gnome 2 and are present in other systems. Users of x11 can pick and choose different bar/dock applications, window managers, compositors, selection of user space applications. They don't need to monkey patch a javascript process insofar as it doesn't materially improve the power of their environment.
> The alternative is to load binary plugins into the display server which is even worse and has a higher risk of causing crashes and memory leaks.
The actual alternative is just not to remove functionality that you need to monkey patch a javascript program to add back.
> This again is more nonsense. No, you can't because the longer you wait the longer your GC pauses will be.
The traditional methodology is to just not write such code in a language with a GC. There is no real good reason to write your desktop in JavaScript in the first place if performance of the GC is a factor.
Elementary is interesting in the use of Vala to write apps. Most of the small number of tutorials and docs on the lang seem to come from there. Gnome and gtk are all written in c with their own language independent object system and reference counted memory management. Writing Gnome code using language bindings can be a bit awkward if your language has its own concept of objects and memory management. Vala looks kind of like c#/java and the gobject stuff is baked in and it emits c. The language never took off. People would rather use the language they know like Python or Rust I guess. Learning a language like Vala, Swift or Dart just for UI does seem kind of weird but with gnome/gtk perhaps it made sense. Not sure if Vala is still used much elsewhere or what sort of future it has.
> As a result, Dani has asked me to resign and completely step away from elementary. This was not my intention when seeking out another position, but Dani has been adamant. In the end, I have decided that the best course of action is indeed for me to move on; I’m giving up on my decade-plus passion for elementary, and have accepted an offer for Dani to be the sole, 100% owner of elementary, Inc. I’ve signed my resignation and as of today, she now owns the entirety of the company shares and responsibility. I wish her the best in continuing its legacy.
> In line with Dani’s wishes, I will no longer be involved in any way at elementary.
This seems just shy of a hostile takeover. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable in running an OS or supporting a company that is now solely owned by one person who felt it necessary to kick someone out who clearly was willing to work for free on the project.
Is there something I’m missing here? I would expect this if there was some huge scandal, but out of the blue this seems like it’s just toxic behavior from a cofounder?
> a company that is now solely owned by one person who felt it necessary to kick someone out who clearly was willing to work for free on the project.
I've no idea about this particular situation or what Dani's motivation was, but "work for free" isn't the right description if it involves retaining half of the company (which has revenue and aspires to be worth more).
> but "work for free" isn't the right description if it involves retaining half of the company (which has revenue and aspires to be worth more).
I suppose that's a fair interpretation of the situation. In my opinion, though, if the company is heading downwards in revenue enough to suggest sacrificing salaries, the ownership stake isn't worth much in the moment. The value might be earned by working on the project, but I personally value the shares of a company that can't pay its employees exceedingly low.
Shares are worth little until they aren't. If I'm the partner taking the major risk and the other is "I'll work on it when it doesn't interfere with $DAYJOB", then I'm going to protect my (possible) upside and try to recoup the equity. Just business.
I didn't say it was an equitable parting, and I agree with you that a founder should have something. But we don't know how the parting negotiations went down, nor what they were willing to fight for, nor how involved lawyers were (because lawyers == money lost and at some point you have to realize that sucking up your residual equity paying lawyers to fight for it is counterproductive (financially and personally)).
Not sure that's fair, the ownership of the company was earned in the past. Future work without additional compensation would be for free. I agree that it might be in their own financial self-interest, but it would still be free.
The remaining cofounder appears to have bought them out and the leaving one appears to have accepted. That's by mutual consent and the furthest thing from a hostile takeover.
Not a chance. Plenty of cases of people being kicked out of open source projects from formal CoC decisions to hostile forks to "X was being an asshole so we banned them from the issue tracker/mailing list"
They can write their name any way they want, but people writing text that includes the name is under no obligation to follow that.
I've noticed that that in English speaking media it's common to comply with companies wishes for weird ways of writing names, while in Sweden for example, media usually writes Iphone, as that is the correct way to write a name in Swedish (which also capitalises names)
An interesting observation: until now Elementary OS == Cassidy James. I'd never even heard of this other person. Every commit I looked at, every app I downloaded, every blog post I read, every Tweet, etc all had Cassidy's name on it. Even now I'm not even sure what this other person does. I haven't used Elementary OS in some years but I've always kept an eye on it.
So to me at least, elementary OS is functionally dead, even if it's not technically dead. I don't care about the drama or who said what or who owed what person what money - the person who did all the work left, and I expect to stop seeing news about elementary OS soon. That simple.
If you look at some PRs on elementary's GitHub, you will see that neither Cassidy James nor Danielle were cranking out mountains of code at any point in time. Both were involved in reviews and UX decisions, Cassidy seemed a bit more in charge of communications lately, but the majority of elementary OS code has come from volunteers for as long as I've followed its development.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadYou also have GNOME shipping on Fedora and Ubuntu which most new users are going to download, which can't even get their stuff together enough to put a freaking dock and activity indicator on the desktop without having to completely switch to a different activities screen. Asking for a dock will literally get you hung in the village square as people assert that normal users want to use keyboard shortcuts. Everything on the Linux desktop has to either be old fashion or eclectic and tailored to the tech enthusiasts already using it (one of the things that Elementary was actually solving). I tried getting my dad to use GNOME and he gave up after five minutes to go back to his Mac (I can't even launch an app?). It's a mess. Every other distro is basically being held together by a scrappy group of volunteers that are supposed to compete against millions of dollars of investment and armys of full time employees.
I feel bad for Elementary. They made a good product that was actually sane for people coming from MS/A, but they were never going to turn it into something super profitable or even sway companies like Adobe etc. to get their apps running natively on Linux.
This isn't doom and gloom about Linux. Linux owns computing. It's more about how Desktop is niche and not even worth getting into at this point, and how the author has much to gain by just walking away and moving on to other ventures.
Edit:
You can downvote all you want if it brings you catharsis, but you know I'm right. The year of the Linux desktop isn't right around the corner, just like it wasn't right around the corner last year, or the year before that. Linux desktops will always be for enthusiasts, students who want to learn Linux, or people who have to use outdated hardware, which is honestly the way it should be so that Linux keeps its identity and doesn't become yet another replaceable component in a proprietary stack like it is on Android (I'm looking at you Fuchsia).
And no, it doesn't matter that you're reading this right now on Sway using lynx and your mother and sister are using Ubuntu that you installed for them. You are on HN. You are not the segment that makes Linux desktops a lucrative business idea. A software engineer needs to know how to think about market segments and the normal user use cases and not be completely self absorbed into how the world works for them.
Shrinking segment, absolutely. Especially for the casual home-user segment. But leading with exaggerated flamebait is not welcome here, as I'm sure you are aware.
Getting volunteer coders to work in the customer-service style that is required to make a desktop for non-technical people just doesn't seem to work. And turning a volunteer community into a profit seeking one usually seems to hit these roadblocks.
We should just accept that success for Linux on the desktop looks like what we have now. Which seems fine to me. Everyone who wants it has it. Unending lust for growth is a trait of megacoroprations and cancers, not great company to keep IMO.
This is patently and blatantly not true. I have installed Ubuntu to my mom and my wife's parents, and they are happily browsing internet ever after, without any malware or crapware. In the past few years I have spent ~0 hours on maintenance of these devices.
Previously, when they were using Windows, it was a never-ending nightmare.
You see, a well set up Ubuntu is perfect for people who need the computer to just work. They just can't break it!
My wife had an older laptop, which had a failing hdd and I used the opportunity to swap for a SSD and asked her to try Ubuntu.
Yeah, she had a lot of questions at first, but eventually she got used to it. She got a new laptop and had to go back to Windows due to her work, but whenever she is just browsing or videocalling anyone, she doesn't mind using the older laptop.
Also, guess which laptop always has issues with the printer?
In my experience any laptop on any system will have issues with the goddamn fucking printer :-)
I had an old dot-matrix printer connected to the parallel port for a very long time. Could "print" with just "cat file.txt >/dev/lpt0". It was great. Downside was I couldn't use it in the evening as it woke up the neighbours.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzl1B7nB9Kc
"More recently, Linux has also been used on the workstations used by animators for drawing and modeling their creations, as the leading producers of animation software have tailored their applications to run on Linux." [1]
[2] is a demo video of Pixar's use of linux for animation and rendering.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/18/business/technology-disne...
[2] https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2016/09/pixar-film-production-...
[3] https://renderman.pixar.com/resources/RenderMan_20/installat...
Also Docks are terrible UI. They are annoying, take up too much space, and you can never really find a good place to move them so they are out of the way.
The Apple Dock was something designed to look cool and fresh in order to sell a bunch of G3 and G4 iMacs back in the day, but it's a step backwards from even Windows 95's taskbar.
Gnome devs staying away from that is one of the more laudable decisions they made in terms of design.
Using Ubuntu, Fedora or any other distro with either a large community or a clear funding path (like PopOS) is great. The “2 guys made a distro and have no funding or way to monetize their work” isn’t a Linux problem it’s a business model problem.
I've been daily-driving KDE/Plasma for... around 7 years now? And I have a really low tolerance for daily technical nuisances. There have been some issues over that period, but honestly not more than I would have to deal with on other platforms.
I also introduced a partner to Elementary a few years back and she has absolutely fallen in love with it despite the shifting set of glitches it has on every update (she calls "personality"). She's clever but not especially technical and had no Linux experience beforehand.
As I see it, there are essentially three desktop platforms to choose from: Windows, Mac, and Linux. Windows is moving in an ad-supported direction that I want no part of and there's even more that I dislike about what Apple is doing (and this from someone who was one of those weird die-hard Apple enthusiasts in the 90s).
So I didn't switch to Linux because I'm fanatical about it, but because it was my option of last resort for having a desktop environment that I felt like I could largely control and use the way I wanted to use it. And, it has turned out that I'm really happy with it, most of the time.
That's probably not going to be a persuasive argument for the average casual computer user. On the other hand, tired tirades against "the year of the Linux desktop" completely miss the fact that Linux is a completely reasonable desktop experience today.
That's just not at all acceptable to the majority of people who want to know they can click a link in Firefox (or Chromium or whatever) and watch the damn video. Perhaps more important: it's a prime example of sidestepping the question that is so frequent in these communities where you don't get answers to your questions, you get told random things sort of related to your question that others have done.
I started this recent test drive after installing Arch on a secondary system intended to be a home server and, within an hour, I had Steam installed, a DualShock 4 controller connected via bluetooth, and I was playing a windows game (Final Fantasy 12 - The Zodiac Age) at 60FPS stable. I honestly couldn't believe how much "just worked."
and i tried using windows 10 shortly after it's release and just couldn't.
people like what they're used to. if you're used to windows, linux is a tough sell. but if you're used to linux, so is windows. linux people like to worry about how it is perceived by the average user, but the average user fails all the time on any operating system.
My next system is going to be a lightweight Linux host with a pile of VMs and something like https://github.com/casualsnek/cassowary, with juicy enough hardware to make it feel like I'm only running one OS.
which is the same as my troubleshooting procedure on ubuntu.
I remember talking with a buddy of mine about Linux, and he said the same thing you did about any distro outside of Fedora or Ubuntu: That Linux is held together by a scrappy group of volunteers competing against millions of dollars of investment and armies full of full-time employees. That was 1998 and what do you know, Linux is doing just fine. Linux desktop is still innovating. GNOME might do stupid stuff (though they haven't "literally" hung anybody that I'm aware of) but they innovate. Marketshare hasn't changed much but the size of the market has grown massively. 3% now is a lot different from 3% in 2010, and there are tons of developers and sponsors helping to keep Linux alive on the desktop.
I was the only Linux desktop user in my office of 150 people for awhile. The absolute bullsh*t everybody had to eat from OSX (let alone windows) astounded me. And they just smile and gobble it up because they have a gui in front of their VPN. Let 'em I say. The Linux desktop will do fine without them.
The best example I know of this is GIMP; it has just a few (4 IIRC, could be 3 or 5 too, but thereabouts) people working on it in their spare time. That's it.
Folks complain that it's not as good as Photoshop, and that's true, but if you consider the team size it's actually pretty darn impressive! How many people work on Photoshop? I betcha it's a few more than a handful.
Not all of the Linux ecosystem is just volunteers though; most kernel contributions come from various companies; Ubuntu and RedHat work on a lot of different things (cue systemd discussion), etc.
Seeing these things as "products" where "users" have to choose from in a "free market" is already a flawed outlook. That's not what people are doing or how they're thinking.
I've been using OSX at work and I absolutely hate it. I keep asking myself..why the fuck is my 16GB/512GB Core i7 Mac taking 3 seconds to open the settings UI? Why does the "finder" app suck so much? How come OSX has got some basic usability gaps like windows jumping out of my screen and not having an "auto raise windows on hover" option..? and the list continues. Windows seems better at some of these UX departments in my POV. Anyway, these proprietary Operating Systems are always a subject of corporate greed. They're never 100% in the user's control and can be remotely toyed with - The companies backing them can happily add/remove your software, send advertisements, spyware, bloatware down your throat and you'll just end up seeing your system resources being leeched away along this process. Apple could be better in this department but I cannot just stand the (subjectively) horrible UX of the entire system.
Anyway, linux can be what you want. I've run KDE Neon on my PC for years without having to deal with any problem whatsoever. It's been smooth and easy and KDE gave me way, way more features than Windows and Mac put together. I'm talking about KDE but on Linux you can get anything you want. All at the convenience of knowing that there is no commercial element behind these things. Since donations are how things usually get paid for in FOSS, you're welcome to donate to keep it lively and bustling. I do, from time to time.
Are you being hyperbolic here? I move between Linux, Windows 10, iOS, macOS, and Android and they are all mostly fine. I can’t say I love or hate any of them although there are things that each seems to be best at.
The virtual desktops and full screen mode combined with separate program and window switching shortcuts were really easy to get used to and it feels a lot better to use than Windows. The M1 SoC is also a lot faster than anything I've used on Windows laptops in the last few years. On my old Windows laptop I had the same experience as you on macOS. The settings app sometimes taking ages to load and freeze randomly when installing updates.
If I am honest they all suck in different ways (or sometimes the same ways) and most people will be happy with any of them. Of course some people have software that require a certain OS but I guess that's the minority. The biggest advantages of Windows and macOS are Microsoft Office, Adobe Products and the bigger user base. But the first two matter way less because everything is a web app today.
I don’t think you’re wrong, I think you’re missing the point. I can’t speak for the elementary developers but I don’t think you'd start a project like this hoping to take over the world. You start a project like elementary because you think something like elementary should exist.
I think Linux’s hardware agnosticism is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, you can run it anywhere, but it doesn’t run great anywhere.
I think that could change though. IMHO, Asahi Linux is one of the most interesting things going on in the world of Linux right now. They don’t have to support a lot of different hardware configurations so I think they have a good chance of really getting things dialed in and creating a super polished product.
Since you work on the kernel, maybe you can answer this - does Linux have something similar to timer coalescing? IIRC, that’s one of thing in macOS that helps them with battery life.
Correct, and the drivers that get worked on are the ones that we kernel developers have access to. The situation has gotten better as more and more vendors have contributed drivers over the years and standards have allowed many devices to run on a single driver and we've become more focused on improving and adopting USB, PCI, etc. Plus kernel builds have become more automated as companies like Intel contribute lots of automated builds against tons of different hardware configurations. Still though, Linux is focused on the server and mobile market. That's what people like me get paid to work on, and so it's going to get the best support.
> Since you work on the kernel, maybe you can answer this - does Linux have something similar to timer coalescing?
Yes it does. Also Google has contributed tons, and tons, and tons of power management code (for Android of course). Power management on Linux has improved tremendously. There's still only so much that can be done, because we don't have as tight of an integration into the hardware stack on Desktop. We can't force vendors to implement certain features or make sure everyone implements certain low power state callbacks in drivers.
The HN discussion on that is more enlightening than the actual item.
My main takeaway: always have a pre-nup.
This is not a large amount of money and seems very, very fair for giving up 50% equity.
There's a lacuna between these two sentences:
> After confirming it would be an incredible fit while importantly allowing me to continue my work on elementary, I made the hard decision to cut back my hours at elementary, eliminate my salary (freeing it up for other initiatives), and to take this position for my wage.
> As a result, Dani has asked me to resign and completely step away from elementary.
In other words "I took a job with the idea that I would free up my salary while continuing to work on the project... then Dani asked me not to work on the project at all". The second part does not follow from the first. Either it's poorly told, or something has been left out of the story.
One person didn’t discuss their plans with the other, and thought it would be fine to retain their shares after they got another job for the sake of the company (this sounds reasonable to me, by the time you choose to cut insurance benefits it’s time to think of a different solution).
The other felt it was unfair to retain any shares if you weren’t actively (full-time?) working on the company. Kind of funny, seeing how this would have pretty much guaranteed sinking the ship.
It looks like the core Elementary team was just two people. The length of time between releases makes me think they were understaffed for a while.
A business would rather get support from a larger distro with a larger support team. That market already has a number of established vendors: Red Hat, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Amazon Linux, Ubuntu server...
When I first downloaded Godot, I didn't donate because I had no idea if I'd even use it for long. After a year or so of using it, I came across various reminders to donate, and eventually I did (if I'm completely honest, literally just now). But most people will never come across that prompt again and will forget any need to. Its the same case with Elementary, or any other distro I've tried out. Why pay if I dont know if I'll even use it?
That being said, I can't think of any better way of asking without being obtrusive to the user. I guess you could have some really pointless badge or something you unlock by donating which could help prompt users later down the line, but I cant imagine the FOSS community would be a big supporter of that.
It has been a pretty slick experience, and that's remarkable given the general state of Linux on the desktop (admittedly, I may be more of a command line person, but still).
So maybe instead of "donate", try "pay for getting your very own feature implemented"?
1. If you're effectively hiring a developer to work on a custom feature for you, including the future costs of maintenance and code complexity, the price is going to be very high.
2. The lack of a minimize button was a UX decision. You can disagree with the decision, but if elementary implemented every feature that people with money requested, you probably wouldn't like the resulting UI. Or maybe you would, but elementary would be a very different sort of distro.
https://zorin.com/grid
Spending some spare time developing something useful for others, great. Spending pretty much all your spare time doing so, seems unsustainable but you do you. Having that treated as a given rather than a special committment, with extra demands and workload placed on top, this is a problem. Having to get a second job to support your project, what the fuck is going on.
If you do that and you're happy with it, don't let me interfer. But this doesn't seem like such a happy post.
But that just means we and everyone else but these two people themselves are just picking sides, not necessarily actually seeing and evaluating right/wrong/good/bad/fair/unfair etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30611748
I don't mean to say I agree with that article. (Well, most of it is just reporting which is fine, but there are a few small added conclusions at the end) My own comment on that article was that I read it and arrived at an opposite conclusion from the author. And someone else supplied some enlightening background about history between these two and the author.
>Keep in mind that the author [Bryan Lunduke] is not neutral here: Since he's expressed his position against trans people, and by doing that parted ways with Danielle Foré before (who previously identified as Daniel Foré and participated in his youtube videos), and also you can see that [the article] refuses to use the actual name for Danielle; it's not surprising that he wants to reach a conclusion against her.
Edit: Since there seems to be some confusion, this is about the author of the OP post linked in the comment above, not the OP link of this HN thread.
(edit: nvm, found the tweetstorm from last month https://lunduke.substack.com/p/elementary-os-is-imploding?s=... that goes into some details)
That's never been an obligation wrt. FLOSS development. If you want a supported version of some FLOSS project for your own production use, you can pay someone to be a maintainer.
How do you figure? Companies like IBM/Redhat, Google, MS, Oracle, Amazon and others pay tons of devs to work on OSS. The state of OSS has never been better.
Just because some people can't figure out how to monetize doesn't mean the state of the ecosystem as a whole isn't great.
I interviewed with a finance startup a few years back and everything was great until we got down to benefits. That's when they broke the news to me that even though they were being financed by a cadre of millionaires and billionaires with long histories in the finance and banking system, they didn't have enough money to offer benefits.
LOL. No.
I agree with your sentiment, I’d never work for a place that didn’t offer a basic package.
All that said, I think employers are required by law to provide healthcare?
In a perfect world, basic coverage would be part of what you get for paying taxes by the government.
Health insurance is expensive, but I don't think it's "expensive as hell", I've got an unsubsidized ACA plan for $1200/month for a family of three (two early 40s adults and a 10 year old child; Kitsap County, WA), plus $30/month for dental insurance for the kid. Past employers paid more for better coverage, but this covers the mandatory items, and none of the higher priced ACA plans appear to offer me more things covered or a meaningfully better network, so meh.
A single payer system with no deductible would have vastly better outcomes for employees in terms of costs, ability to seek healthcare before things become catastrophic, and income opportunities. There's literally almost no downside.
Also, you were complaining about the cost of healthcare insurance, and now you're complaining about the cost of healthcare. They're not the same thing, and yet the terms are used interchangeably. :P
Single payer would be nice, but I don't see how we'll get there, when nobody is proposing steps to get us there. I guess there was some push to reduce the medicare eligibility age to 60 last september, but I don't think it went anywhere; I'd like to see a phased in approach of moving the age down by one year ever year for 10 years, and at a faster pace after that, but you'd need to increase funding (which looks to be needed anyway) and pay attention to any other problems that come up.
Wow, that's just so much money! No wonder people with health insurance go bankrupt in the US.
One, what's the target user? Is it really every type of desktop computing? In that case you're competing with not only KDE but also GNOME, even if we confine ourselves to Linux based desktops. Two major desktops are already a bit much for such a narrow market. I totally get doing something for friends or for the joy of it, but any semi-commercial endeavour pretty much needs to outcompete them both.
It's not like GNOME's problem is too slow development which some healthy competition can fix. Seriously, I don't think I am a completely atypical user when I value most importantly my desktop to stick around for the next decade, and work with whatever new hardware changes that comes around without annoying me too much along the way.
Two, are you developing a desktop environment or a Linux distribution? In the latter case, you're competing with massive projects like Debian and Fedora. The testing required to release a general Linux distribution on just one architecture is enormous. Security response must bascially never sleep if users should be kept from risk. If the answer is "both" I don't know what to say really.
I'm not saying there should never be any more Linux distributions, or that the computing desktop is perfect as it is. Far from it. I'm just saying that competing with the established projects here is realistically going to take a decade or more, and maybe finding a niche other than a general desktop for everyone might be a good start.
Installing Linux is the easiest experience among operating systems on supported hardware.
Updating Linux software is the easiest as well.
Using a desktop environment like Gnome is straightforward too.
Compared to Windows/Mac these simple tasks are hellish — and for nontechnical users, nearly impossible.
So anecdotally, it's a mixed bag. Maybe if I had less Linux experience and more Windows, the story would be different.
Don't know the vintage of Windows you referenced, but in recent experience (Win 10/11) installing a webcam was dead simple, just plug it into a USB port. Printers used to be a gigantic hassle, but at least for the 4 printers available to my Windows laptop little configuration and no added drivers were necessary. (No doubt certain webcams or printers out there could be a pain to install in Windows.)
One example: getting OBS Studio to work on Windows was pretty much a no brainer vs. Ubuntu which needed to have additional library support. While OBS works under Ubuntu using it is still a bit more of a hassle.
In any case Windows seems to have more bugs now than a few years back. I figure added "features" contribute to complexity. Who knows how many more LOC have been committed. I'd be a lot happier with simpler but more reliable systems. It's not the tradeoff Microsoft, and probably various Linux distributions, will be likely to accept.
https://packages.ubuntu.com/impish/obs-studio
You can install the package and the package manager will install all the dependencies. Nothing for you to do.
I am tired of all these fake tales of Linux hardship.
However, on 20.04LTS apt installs OBS v25.0x, not the current version (27.2.x).
What I was talking about was installing v27.2.x on Ubuntu. FWIW the OBS site gives up-to-date installation info, so it's not really difficult for people familiar with unix/linux just some extra hassle. Also using OBS in Ubuntu requires entering a password each time, rather an annoyance. (Sure, ways to work around this exist but another minor hassle to deal with.)
No doubt all this would be a daunting task for users without experience with command-line admin.
And before you install the official driver, you at least get the noveau driver (community supported nvidia driver) by default, which is capable enough to do many, many things.
> Updating Linux software is the easiest as well.
The ease of this stuff varies widely from one distro to another.
When you ask people to change something that they are fine with and used to,
* they think you’re making them do more work by relearning everything
* they’re quick to notice faults, and they’ll jump ship just as quickly as well
Perhaps attitudes like this towards potential users are another reason Linux Desktop still doesn't have much buy in.
I just dont think that most people just care what the thing is running as long as it does the job. Computers are an appliance to many, just like a toaster. If the functionality is close to what theyre used to (windows or mac) then there shouldnt be big adaptility problems until they want to go deeper into the device than web browsing.
The keyword in your statement is "close" but normal people who use the computer as an appliance have extremely low tolerance for "close."
I also understand there are people who just are not willing to learn new things.
I hope i dont sound like im trying to push linux to people. I want people to have choice of many instead of choice of two when they go buy a new PC. And maybe some would be curious enough to try something new.
Of course she cant move to linux due to adobe software, not that i need her to do anything like that. Anyone can use what they want, my point was that most people dont even know theres other choices than windows and mac.
Also ive been using windows all of my life, recently switched to kubuntu because i got tired of the updates. Didnt take me long to learn to use the pc.
In other words, she noticed.
But most people, from what ive seen, only use the internet browser and maybe some built in apps. Keep it there and the lines between OS' start to blur.
Edit: to add, this is usually why i tell anyone interested to use linux is to try the tools available first, then if you get used to them, make the switch. Luckily i had already used same tools on windows (gimp, krita, blender) that also work on linux.
That said, at least both KDE and Gnome have offered fairly comprehensive and complete desktop environment about on-par with a standard Windows or macOS installation for many years now. There's also things like XFCE, LDE, Cinnamon, and probably others – but I don't really keep up.
There are plenty of issues with "Linux on the desktop", but I don't think this is one of them.
Yes, it's distributed ownership, and while that explains why the problem exists, I don't feel it's an excuse. There is definitely room for someone to come in with good product sense plus technical excellence and work to make a really great desktop OS on Linux, it just hasn't happened yet.
The reason why the "year of the Linux desktop" has never happened is because nobody wants to work for free. As soon as you say the word "product" the word "salary" has to follow.
For the "year of the Linux desktop" to happen you'll need dozens/hundreds of these 6-figure employees at every level of the stack (from kernel to desktop environment to apps) to be able to build a coherent system from scratch and being able to ignore/work around all the BS and wastes of time that currently plagues the Linux distro world.
I do believe you'll be successful to an extent, though whether the result can still be called a "Linux desktop" as opposed to something more like Android (Linux kernel but non-standard GUI stack) will be up for debate.
I don’t know specifically what those things are in the case of elementary, but for example one could imagine certain bits of design in a desktop’s file manager being tied to how the distribution’s filesystem is arranged. Sure the file manager would technically work with other filesystem designs, but then the file manager may as well not exist because it brings little to the table that other file managers haven’t already.
So I can see why someone who’s concerned with fine tuning details in the desktop experience they’re crafting wanting to also be a distribution. Unfortunately that’s also a massively tall order due to the time, personnel, and effort required to pull such a feat off.
It also means you can update your software on your own schedule with modifications where necessary instead of being sandbagged into working around someone else's limitations on their schedule.
Furthermore the general desktop for everyone space and the server space are literally the only ones on planet earth that have enough Linux users for a reasonably sized community.
> Two major desktops are already a bit much for such a narrow market.
Basically there needs to be at least one environment that isn't crap. Gnome
- Has a weirdly bad way of handling multiple monitors
- Requires twice as many steps to perform common operations via its graphical interface
- Relies on hot corners which are both possible to trigger by accident and hard to organically discover. It also makes a lot less sense with multiple monitors.
- Spent the first 8 years of gnome 3 constantly leaking memory until it fell over if you left it on too long. This was caused by a weird mismatch between its javascript desktop and its compiled code that was too hard to fix so they decided to just constantly run the garbage collector and marveled at how not horrible this performed in actuality.
- Deprecates features that people use without replacement. See tray icons for a literal decade
- Has repeatedly has major figures in its development promote the idea of removing themeing and extensions in favor of a vanilla gnome experience. An experience that is notably lackluster.
- Has no addon API forcing addons to monkey patch the javascript desktop ensuring such efforts can trivially fail on any version update and addons that aren't actively developed will stop working.
- Worse if they crash they especially under Wayland take down the entire session
- Lacks basic features in its file manager
I could go on.
The basic problem is confusing an ecosystem of compatible software for a company with labor resources that can be allocated to different tasks that is somehow needlessly wasted on developing two different desktops. Eliminate KDE and you don't get a stronger gnome you get a weaker one because someone passionate about KDE doesn't magically become a gnome developer because they aren't reallocated by their manager to work on a similar project you just lose incidental contributions to mutually useful parts of the open source ecosystem and less cross fertilization of ideas.
>This was caused by a weird mismatch between its javascript desktop and its compiled code that was too hard to fix so they decided to just constantly run the garbage collector and marveled at how not horrible this performed in actuality.
No, this is not even close to what happened. There was never any weird mismatch, the refcounting is very similar in both of them. The bug was that the garbage collector wasn't running correctly. Please read the (now 4 years old) blog post: https://feaneron.com/2018/04/20/the-infamous-gnome-shell-mem...
>Deprecates features that people use without replacement.
I would like to know about these desktops that are still under active development and have never removed or deprecated features. I've never seen one. I'm sure if you look hard enough you can find people complaining that Windows 11 doesn't support 8-bit color displays at 640x480.
>See tray icons for a literal decade
This never happened, there has been several extensions for tray icons for the entire decade. The real problem here is that all the APIs for tray icons are broken and nobody bothered to implement one correctly.
>Has no addon API forcing addons to monkey patch the javascript desktop ensuring such efforts can trivially fail on any version update and addons that aren't actively developed will stop working.
This has nothing to do with javascript or addons. In general code that isn't being developed has a high probability it will stop working at some point. And this presents a false choice too. I've heard this statement so many times but nobody has ever proposed what a real addons API should look like. AFAIK there are no desktop platforms or mobile platforms anywhere with an addons API that does everything that can be done with GNOME extensions. The closest I've ever seen are things like addon widgets for Android and KDE which aren't even close to being the same thing.
>Worse if they crash they especially under Wayland take down the entire session
That's not really important anywhere, the apps themselves are supposed to implement session management to insure against any system crash.
If I were you I would avoid commenting on these things again unless you have a proposal to make, they cheapen the rest of your comments. It's honestly tiring to keep seeing these long lists of random grievances where the ultimate suggestion is "just throw it away and start over while somehow avoiding all these issues in a way that is not explained". Do you really think having yet another choice is going to make a difference?
>-------------------------------------------------------------- Here’s the problem: C objects don’t track who owns them; instead, they only track how many owners they have. This is the traditional reference counting mechanism, and it works fine in C land because C is not garbage collected. To the garbage collector, however, the C objects would look like this:
The garbage collector has no means to know the relationships between C objects.
The garbage collector, then, will go there and destroy the root one. This object will be finalized, and the directly dependent objects will be marked for garbage collection.
Only the directly dependent objects are marked for the next garbage collection.
The “solution” is basically throwing a grenade to kill ants. We now queue a garbage collection every time an object is marked for destruction. So every single time an object becomes red, as in the example, we queue a GC. This is, of course, a very aggressive solution.
But it is not all bad. Some early tests shows that this has a small impact on performance – at least, it’s much smaller than what we were expecting.
>--------------------------------------------------------------
This is basically garbage engineering that shouldn't have made it out of the design stage let alone been knocking over systems for 8 years.
Moving on.
In essence a substantial chunk of the Linux desktop crowd feels like gnome is crap and has correctly understood that they aren't welcome to fix it because project owners have a very opinionated vision on how the Linux desktop works.
This is probably why 60% of Linux Desktop users don't use it.
https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_de
If Pop!_OS succeeds in replacing it and Ubuntu ends up adopting it will probably drop from 40% of users to closer to 5%. It would be in serious danger of irrelevancy at that point if it weren't Red Hats baby.
You are welcome to your own opinion on the utility of the gnome desktop but the idea expressed by the grand parent post that the Linux desktop space ought to just settle on a singular environment that cannot even convince the majority of users to use it despite having more corporate money spent on it in a year than other environments in history seems ill founded.
Edit:
> the apps themselves are supposed to implement session management to insure against any system crash
Well designed software environments don't crash in a way that causes the underlying OS or end user applications to die. One time in a decade would be one time too many.
Session management makes perfect sense as defense in depth for data loss not least of which because hardware failure, power loss, battery exhaustion happen but this isn't even remotely a defense against gnome's unreliable software design where features available in other environments as options require monkey patching gnome's javascript desktop wherein any addon up to and including a hokey little weather widget can somehow destroy the entire session because the underlying javascript changed between X.n and X.n+1.
For practical purposes such crashes can cause the loss of user data and punting responsibility to user apps is absolutely ridiculous.
No, this makes no sense and you're still misunderstanding the problem. This issue occurs anywhere in any system where you connect a GC to an outside system. Every javascript implementation has to contend with it. It also can happen in a lot of other places, for example, if you bind a random C API to Python. It's not a weird mismatch. There are plenty of bad issues with mozjs right now but this is not one of them.
>In essence a substantial chunk of the Linux desktop crowd feels like gnome is crap and has correctly understood that they aren't welcome to fix it because project owners have a very opinionated vision on how the Linux desktop works.
Ok, so what? There are approximately zero projects in the Linux desktop that aren't opinionated, and there are approximately zero people in the Linux desktop crowd who don't think some other project is crap. You don't have to spend very long reading HN and slashdot comments to figure that one out. If you think GNOME was the first project to reject changes, then I have some very bad news for you.
>You are welcome to your own opinion on the utility of the gnome desktop
I don't care about the utility of GNOME. I actually think GNOME is very bad and I agree with some of your other criticisms. I just wish you wouldn't ruin your comment with these other same nonsensical criticisms that we've seen so many times that never go anywhere in a productive direction. Stick to the good criticisms, avoid these petty gripes unless you have something useful to add. Every time I can honestly pin these type of comments to people who aren't desktop developers because it's always the same refrain about how they should have designed it better the first time 20 years ago or something like that. That's a boring comment, it has no intellectual value. You can do better than this. And I'm sorry I don't have a time machine, I wish I did.
>Well designed software environments don't crash in a way that causes the underlying OS or end user applications to die. One time in a decade would be one time too many.
Then don't install badly designed extensions. If you think that is a nonsense response then please rethink what you're trying to say here. The worst offender for hard system crashes in Linux is still driver bugs. Do you really think driver developers want that to happen?
>this isn't even remotely a defense against gnome's unreliable software design
This doesn't follow. The problem here is not the design, the problem is rather a lack of design.
>any addon up to and including a hokey little weather widget can somehow destroy the entire session because the underlying javascript changed between X.n and X.n+1.
And small changes in the drivers can crash your whole kernel too. I still don't know what point you're trying to make here, besides asking for someone to fix the crash.
>For practical purposes such crashes can cause the loss of user data and punting responsibility to user apps is absolutely ridiculous.
No, it is not ridiculous at all. Nothing is being punted. The apps have always had this responsibility. Some crummy desktop applications are just slow to catch up here. Most of the "serious work" apps I've seen (like word processors, spreadsheets, photoshop, etc) have their own auto-backup and have had it for decades because that's the most reasonable thing to do. Almost all mobile apps are also designed this way because the OS can kill them at any time or the device can lose power at any time. But you knew that already?
I had both a 90s hp windows pda and HTC sensation with 768MB of RAM.
Android apps have a defined point in the android lifecycle where they are supposed to save everything when they lose focus in case they have to fall on their sword which they indeed will have to do frequently.
Dying and being restarted as if nothing happened is part of normal operation because it happens a lot.
Your desktop session should never crash. Exiting unexpectedly should be a risk of battery exhaustion, users closing without saving, hardware failure, or power loss.
The idea of your desktop session just crashing out just shouldn't happen and indeed doesn't happen with i3wm KDE or windows.
The fact that extensions can crash is unremarkable the fact that they can crash the session itself is extraordinary. A windows 95 level of bad.
A common refrain in gnome land is
User: gnome lacks functionality
Gnomie: but it has powerful extensions
User: gnome extensions can crash the session!
Gnomie: You don't have to use extensions!
You either have to deal with potentially unstable extensions or limited functionality. Neither is particularly reasonable.
Characterization of the indefinite and indeterminant lifespan of objects as a normal part of gluing a compiled and garbage collected language is simply normalizing pathology.
It's like a smoker saying well sometimes people's lungs just fill up with fluid and shrivel up and die.
Well yes if you fill them continually with toxic smoke for several decades.
It seems painfully obvious that the dependency relationship expressed in the JavaScript should be mirrored in the c code allowing it to remove the garbage before the system falls over.
This seems painfully obvious when the memory is allocated for an ephemeral purpose like a frame of animation.
Can we not destroy everything related to frame n upon drawing it?
Happens to other JavaScript situations seems to be a special class of problem it's like the cigarette smoker telling you that the meth smoker also has problems with his lungs. Well yes yes he does.
Yes but all of these things still happen anywhere and the apps themselves are the only place that can be fully prepared for that, with cloud-synced web apps this is also not a problem. A lot of Linux users really seem to hate using cloud services though, for those users it's apparent that avoiding data loss is an exercise in self-flagellation.
>The idea of your desktop session just crashing out just shouldn't happen and indeed doesn't happen with i3wm KDE or windows.
Well again, that's a nonsense comparison because none of those have a comparable addons system.
>The fact that extensions can crash is unremarkable the fact that they can crash the session itself is extraordinary. A windows 95 level of bad.
No not really. You seem to think the alternative here to monkey patching is a system that doesn't crash. It's not. The alternative is to load binary plugins into the display server which is even worse and has a higher risk of causing crashes and memory leaks.
>User: gnome lacks functionality Gnomie: but it has powerful extensions User: gnome extensions can crash the session! Gnomie: You don't have to use extensions!
I've not seen anyone here saying that, I'm certainly not saying it. I wish you didn't ignore the part where I said to just fix the crashes in the extensions. I also wish you wouldn't turn this into a conversation with hypothetical users. You're talking to a real person here.
>You either have to deal with potentially unstable extensions or limited functionality. Neither is particularly reasonable.
Yes, welcome to engineering. It's the art of being forced to decide between two bad solutions because you don't have enough time to do it right. If you have a lot of spare time then I suggest you volunteer your time to do it, and figure out how to do it in a way that benefits everybody (not just gnome).
>Characterization of the indefinite and indeterminant lifespan of objects as a normal part of gluing a compiled and garbage collected language is simply normalizing pathology. It seems painfully obvious that the dependency relationship expressed in the JavaScript should be mirrored in the c code allowing it to remove the garbage before the system falls over. This seems painfully obvious when the memory is allocated for an ephemeral purpose like a frame of animation. Can we not destroy everything related to frame n upon drawing it?
This again is more nonsense. No, you can't because the longer you wait the longer your GC pauses will be. This is a problem with any stop-the-world generational GC and it's only made worse by plugging foreign objects into it. The solution would be of course to improve the GC (there are a lot of ways to do this) but then it becomes a mozjs problem. GNOME Shell is just a downstream and can't do anything about it. You're barking up the wrong tree here.
Please just avoid talking about this unless you can propose a solution to the problem, if you can come up with something good that works everywhere and is easy to use then a lot of other projects will benefit from it. If you can't then this discussion will go nowhere. The most that could be said otherwise is "don't use GNOME" but I think it's safe to assume you were already doing that.
This is where the entire dialog not only jumped the shark but blew it up while screaming Yippee Ki Yay.
When the complaint is that a system is unreliable the solution isn't to pair an inherently unstable system with cloud synced web apps its not run software that doesn't randomly shit the bed. For example fire up a KDE x11 session and simulate crashing software by shooting its window manager kwin_x11 in the face and marvel at the fact that the window manager died but your applications did not. One can return to normal by explicitly calling kwin_x11 or even a different window manager like compiz and continuing like normal.
I3wm doesn't have the same trick being only a wm but its also literally 1/10th of 1% as much code as the totality of the gnome project and it isn't monkey patched as the user is running it.
That is to say other people handle the issue by not randomly shitting the bed knowing that the orthogonal issue of losing user space state and data is known to be imperfect. The designer of gnome can't fix literally every app in existence and thus ought to pessimistically act as if every failure will result in user data.
> Well again, that's a nonsense comparison because none of those have a comparable addons system.
An addon system that is literally used virtually entirely to add back options that were present in gnome 2 and are present in other systems. Users of x11 can pick and choose different bar/dock applications, window managers, compositors, selection of user space applications. They don't need to monkey patch a javascript process insofar as it doesn't materially improve the power of their environment.
> The alternative is to load binary plugins into the display server which is even worse and has a higher risk of causing crashes and memory leaks.
The actual alternative is just not to remove functionality that you need to monkey patch a javascript program to add back.
> This again is more nonsense. No, you can't because the longer you wait the longer your GC pauses will be.
The traditional methodology is to just not write such code in a language with a GC. There is no real good reason to write your desktop in JavaScript in the first place if performance of the GC is a factor.
Not every technology is worth adopting.
But you are correct in that it doesn't appear to have been widely adopted.
> In line with Dani’s wishes, I will no longer be involved in any way at elementary.
This seems just shy of a hostile takeover. I’m not sure I’d be comfortable in running an OS or supporting a company that is now solely owned by one person who felt it necessary to kick someone out who clearly was willing to work for free on the project.
Is there something I’m missing here? I would expect this if there was some huge scandal, but out of the blue this seems like it’s just toxic behavior from a cofounder?
I've no idea about this particular situation or what Dani's motivation was, but "work for free" isn't the right description if it involves retaining half of the company (which has revenue and aspires to be worth more).
I suppose that's a fair interpretation of the situation. In my opinion, though, if the company is heading downwards in revenue enough to suggest sacrificing salaries, the ownership stake isn't worth much in the moment. The value might be earned by working on the project, but I personally value the shares of a company that can't pay its employees exceedingly low.
We knew there was a disagreement on how to part ways. But this outcome seems totally unreasonable for an open source project.
I've noticed that that in English speaking media it's common to comply with companies wishes for weird ways of writing names, while in Sweden for example, media usually writes Iphone, as that is the correct way to write a name in Swedish (which also capitalises names)
So to me at least, elementary OS is functionally dead, even if it's not technically dead. I don't care about the drama or who said what or who owed what person what money - the person who did all the work left, and I expect to stop seeing news about elementary OS soon. That simple.