- "The vast majority of applications exist only for Windows, and speaking of games, Linux hasn't seen any AAA titles for many years now,"
The vast majority of AAA titles run seamlessly on Linux. Per protondb[0], ≥80% of the top 10, top 100, and top 1000 are rated "platinum" or "gold" for Linux functioning (by users).
> Also, despite millions of players, it's hard to call CS2 an AAA title because it's based on Direct3D 11 (which is now more than a decade old) and lacks modern lighting techniques like ray tracing.
Some of the quotes from the OP's page border on parody. So, CS2 doesn't count as a AAA title because it's based on DX11 and doesn't have realtime ray tracing. But apparently this same person is oblivious to the fact that both real-time RT and DX12 translation have been completely usable on Linux for years now. Nvidia helped ship native RT to Linux clients in Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and Proton has supported the majority of DX12 games with RT since before the Steam Deck existed.
Kinda makes you glad that this is the final edition, if that's the sort of due diligence being exercised.
I don't think that will convince many people. Appealing to authority is one third of rhetoric, Aristotle would say that you need emotion or logic to convince me completely.
Speaking for myself, I'm mostly surprised that someone with such an intimate knowledge of Linux has ignored it's developments to this extent. This entire thread is mostly at the consensus that you have tortured many of the talking points in this article beyond taking seriously.
Many in this thread have also identified that MacOS and Windows are deficient in several of the criteria you listed. So what even is a desktop, really? An ideal, or a thing people use?
Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works.
Xorg is being deprecated and replaced with semi-broken something where tons of functions only work in KDE and Gnome. That's all you need to know about Linux.
You are calling the Xorg X11 server Xorg, which is wrong. As someone who has “contributed” to so many projects, you should know that. In any case, it is odd you are whining about this considering that the article’s author is a well known X11 hater and you seem to agree with everything he says.
By the way, “Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works” is both a non-sequitur and untrue. The guys who wrote the display servers used on those are users of those systems.
> You are calling the Xorg X11 Xorg, which is wrong
Xorg has been the de-facto X11 implementation on Linux for the past 25 years.
First XFree86, then it was superseded by Xorg.
You're being nit picky only that's not a counter argument. That's ad hominem.
> the article’s author is a well known X11 hater and you seem to agree with everything he says.
I'm the author of the article and I'm not a hater. Understanding the limitations of something is not "hatred". I guess the entire world is black or white to you, either I have to be deeply in love with Linux or "You're a hater" which is another ad hominem.
See you've stopped arguing and now switched to discussing me personally. I knew it would happen given how you never had any counter arguments in the first place, the problem is I've been here for over 25 years and know Linux inside out and EVERYTHING that is "claimed" in the article is the common truth.
> By the way, “Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works” is both a non-sequitur and untrue.
Yet another "counter argument" that lacks any validity because it's empty.
> The guys who wrote the display servers used on those are users of those systems.
This is an article about Linux _USERS_.
You still don't bloody understand that. I don't care about software engineers that can make anything work given enough time. I don't care who wrote Quartz or Surface Flinger. They are not end users.
End users use Operating Systems, buy them and buy software for them. Their developers are absolutely IRRELEVANT. There have been dozens of forgotten OSes that no one uses.
There is nothing “ad hominem” in what I said. I was discussing your remarks, rather than you. However, I will now discuss you. You exhibit severe deficits in logical reasoning skills. Some of your comments exhibit signs of disorganized thoughts, which are linked to schizophrenia.
To give an example, the sudden interjection of “Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works.” appears to be an example of disorganized thinking, since its connection to what was being discussed is superficial to an extreme. There are other comments by you that exhibit signs of disorganized thinking even more clearly.
You likely could benefit from seeing a psychiatrist.
I have commits in half the projects you mentioned and I think the article is FUD. There are technically wrong points in it, such as the claim that you cannot run old Linux binaries on modern Linux. People are able to run old binaries on Linux that are 30 years old, although it requires copies of the old libraries those binaries need. If the guy actually is involved with so many projects, he would know this.
The guy even contradicted himself:
> Linux is not an operating system
> While Linux is unrivaled on servers and has been the world's most popular operating system for over two decades, the situation on the desktop is quite bleak.
You've not read the article at all and it explains full well what constitutes an OS.
The Linux kernel is NOT an OS.
Any given Linux distro which is not compatible with any other Linux distro or even its own earlier or later versions couldn't be called an OS. It's a software compilation for a certain time period.
An OS implies everyone runs it, anyone can compile software for it and have it run on all devices with this OS. This is impossible with Linux outside of Snap/FlatPak/AppImage which themselves are lightweight virtualization solutions.
This is what Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android are. Linux is not.
Also, please don't throw FUD around without explaining yourself. You probably don't even know/remember what it means any more.
I read the article. It did correctly say that Linux is not an OS and that the distribution is the OS. Then it said Linux is an OS. The article author and you are the ones spreading FUD here. Much of what the two of you say is factually incorrect.
None of that fits the definition of an OS. As per Wikipedia, “An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs.”:
2. Does Wikipedia page buy operating systems and software for them? No? That's what I thought. Where's native commercial applications for Linux aside from very few specialized ones? Where's native Linux for Linux? Oh, wait, even Indie developers have abandoned Linux because why if there's Wine + DXVK.
3. Who cares about obscure something that pretends to provide APIs? How is it relevant for adoption and usage? Oh, wait, it's not. We've had dozens of dead wanna-be OSes that provide APIs. All dead. Linux on desktop is one of them as well.
Yeah, "I'm wrong".
Linux desktop market share proves it beyond reasonable doubt. LMAO.
The fact that absolute most people shy away from Linux is another proof that it's a "great OS" and "better than Windows".
Keep on living in your fantasy world. Sadly people around you don't share your ideals. They want shit to be done. They install Windows, use it for a decade without any issues, buy a new device. All good.
You response has almost nothing to do with the comment to which you replied. There is no sense in trying to address the moving target that are your replies since you are unable to stay on topic. I will however address the one on topic thing that you said. Wikipedia’s definition of an operating system is roughly what was taught in my university when I got my CS degree and I am in full agreement with it, so regardless of whether Wikipedia is an authority, the definition Wikipedia provides is correct.
CS2 is at most AA and mostly just facilitates skin gambling. The way that CS2 was kinda clumsily dropped, replacing a game with another game in kind of an unpolished state, also doesn't suggest that it could even be "AAA". It's low key a public playtest still. Early access. But that's besides that point.
Can't argue with that. I'm still not super worried for Valve though; between Alyx, Deadlock, the Deck, and Proton, it's pretty clear that CS2 is less of a new norm and more of an outlier too popular to be announced dead and buried yet. Counter Strike has always felt like the drunk uncle of Valve's IP, it would be nice to see him clean up for once but I'm also not upset having him at a holiday party or out at the bar with friends.
I would be worried for Valve if even with their infinite resources they cannot manage to do right by their most popular game on Steam. There's enough multiplayer shooter games from Valve that are also neglected (tf2, l4d, both have huge issues with bots and hackers) to suggest that it is the norm for them, be it due do disinterest, incompetence, or both.
I'm seeing a lot of endorsement of Wine ITT, which is strange to me because the Linux Mint forums constantly seem to trash it whenever it comes up. (I'm not particularly interested in any programs that would need it.)
You are probably seeing endorsements of proton rather than vanilla wine. Proton is more than just wine (although wine is the most importantly part) and it works much better than vanilla wine.
Anecdotal, but I've had maybe a 60% success rate running platinum-rated games under Proton, with an unremarkable Ryzen 3900/RTX 2070 desktop. I suspect the further you are from Steam Deck hardware the more trouble you're likely to have.
The M4 Mac mini finally convinced me to give up on a Linux desktop for now; the combination of native Mac games, Whisky, and Windows via VMWare works at least as well as Proton for me, and everything else including development is much more convenient, including running Linux VMs when useful.
Okay, that still leaves an insane amount of applications. Games aren't the only thing that people run on their PC. Plus, I think they meant that no native port of AAA games have been published on Linux recently, not that windows games can't run on Linux with additional tooling. though I'm not sure how true that is.
Outside of some games and relatively high-end multimedia apps and maybe some dev tools, basically no one cares about the OS. I probably spend 95% in a MacBook using it as a browser.
Steam also runs on Chromebook; which is easily showing that this is a very shallow victory for Linux on the desktop as a platform.
If you can survive with Proton, LibreOffice, and GIMP; you can much more comfortably survive with Proton on ChromeOS, Google Docs, and Photopea. Just hating Windows is not enough of a reason to be a Linux user, and as long as that is the case, Linux will remain niche.
I mean it's maybe "seamless" if you use a system provided by the top DRM platform. Using wine directly it's unfortunately not very seamless. I don't really play games much but my recent experience hasn't been great.
Last week I tried to run Witcher 3 using wine and it took a while to debug. The installer runs immediately and seemlessly - but then it got messy
It involved installing `winetricks` which seems to be some service that installs a multitude of driver, libs and software through a clunky unresponsive UI. (not clear where it's being installed from, but #yolo) The necessary libraries I had to deduce from reading forum posts and the errors I got on launch. You then had to go in and make sure to launch the directx 11 version of the game (ie the .exe) buried in a hidden directory (~/.wine/)
Is this was "Platinum" means.. i don't want to image what Gold entails
You seem to be kinda confused. ProtonDB does not reflect how well Wine runs a program, it reflects how well Proton runs it. If you try to create a Wine environment with the same featureset and patches that Proton has by default, you will waste a lot of time. A lot of things (eg. Powershell, d3d/DXVK, dotnet, C++ redistributables, etc.) come pre-packaged with Proton and therefore require no extra configuration to run a compatible game.
What you want is to use a program like Lutris or Bottles to manage your runtime for you, if you're not installing it through Steam. I don't know who put you up to installing Wild Hunt on a vanilla Wine prefix but they sound like someone with a good sense of humor.
I've only accidentally (via a GeForce Now trial before I gave Steam Remote Play another try) played a video game on a Windows computer in the past two years.
The only games that routinely cause problems are those with ridiculous kernel-level anticheat, and I am not interested in those games.
Are you saying Linux has "games" because it excels at ... emulating them?
What's the point of using/running Linux then when you have a much higher chance of running games successfully natively? What about dozens if not hundreds of games that use a kernel level anticheat? Pretty much none of them work in Linux.
What's the point of native Linux APIs then?
That's weird.
Wine + DXVK are so good, Linux is GREAT.
No, it shows how horrible Linux is when not a single vendor outside of Valve wants to touch it. And everyone who tried to port games to Linux went bankrupt.
Proton does such a good job that it is difficult to justify the cost of porting games when they already run on Linux in Proton. That said, Feral Interactive is still porting games to Linux and they have not gone bankrupt:
Proton often runs games better than the native ports, so there is not much of a loss if there are fewer native ports. Furthermore, in a number of cases, Windows games actually run better on Linux in Proton than on Windows.
Elden Ring is a fantastic example, as on day 1, it performed about 15% better on Linux in average FPS, and had substantially less stutter if I recall correctly.
World of Warcraft is another great example. It is well known to get about 20% better performance on Linux than on Windows:
If you use AMD GPUs, it is more often the case that Linux will outperform Windows in games, since Valve wrote the shader compiler used for them on Linux and it is fairly amazing:
I ran Quake II RTX on Linux on a GTX 1080 Ti with RTX on back when I still had one. Of course, the performance was bad, but it ran. Some sites have benchmarks:
I also no longer have one to try. It's pretty easy to find a video on YouTube of someone trying to start the game and failing with a GTX GPU. The specific Vulkan extension it's asking for is VK_KHR_ray_query.
You can't claim that Linux games running on Windows counts against Linux, but ignore that Windows games also run on Linux. You can't have it both ways.
Because those are ratings are based on consolidated user ratings, some of them are outdated and still marked Gold. Grand Theft Auto V is Gold, but online doesn't work anymore. Yet users are still giving it a thumbs up because singleplayer works. Apex Legends is also still Gold, and completely no longer works since there's no singleplayer
I've been patiently trying a distro of Linux every other year for the past 20... Someday. The general trend: Things work well from a native install. When you start installing software and drivers, the OS gets totalled, sooner or later.
> What's worse is that software compiled for the current version of Linux X will not necessarily work for the current version of Linux Y. Linux distros insist that all the software must be compiled for their current releases or provided as source code. The problem with source code is that normal users won't bother to compile anything, and secondly, it's not always possible to compile software because it may depend on a specific compiler or dependencies that your distro doesn't provide
This is at the core of it, I think. Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience; it often fails due to linking or other dependency-related errors.
But you don't install software and drivers on Linux, you edit your nix flake, switch and it always works. If it doesn't work up to your liking, you boot into the previous generation.
Also for some mysterious reasons, compiling C code under Nix always works and dependencies can't be missing.
Sure, if I want to spend weeks and months of time learning how to:
* move my arms again, so I can learn how to
* push myself up again, so I can learn how to
* move my legs again, so I can learn how to
* crawl, so I can learn how to
* walk.
Cost of entry is a very real issue with NixOS and many/most of us are not interested in taking that time, so until it's easy / reasonable to use for most people's lived experiences, it'll sit on the backburner of Linux installations.
In my case I managed to get working desktop in about 15 minutes without any prior Nix knowledge just by following their tutorial, then about 16 hours to read/learn/experiment and 8 more hours to complete my environment and 8 more to move my homelab to Nix. Since then I spend around two hours every six months to update and polish my flakes.
Although Nix knowledge helped me tremendously in managing heterogenous codebase with more than a million of LoC
This subthread started with “When you start installing software and drivers, the OS gets totalled, sooner or later.” Then came the objection that one wouldn’t do that with Nix. Then that yeah, but Nix is too difficult to use. Then that no, it isn’t that difficult after you spend a weekend or two learning it. Which isn’t for the average user. Now you say there are plenty of other options, presumably non-Nix. I feel we are back to where this subthread started.
In my experience, Nix makes some things very easy and other things very, very difficult.
I hope the situation has improved, but the last time I had to deal with Nvidia (kernel/driver/library dependencies/updates/etc.) under Nix it did not remotely work out of the box and it was a huge pain. (And switching to AMD or intel was not really an option.) Doing anything off the beaten path seems to be challenging even if you have experience with Nix.
The arcane Nix language doesn't help matters.
I think immutable is the future, and I wish I could recommend Nix (and other immutable systems) to normal people, but at this point I think you really need to be a Nix expert/fan to set it up and actually enjoy it.
> When you start installing software and drivers, the OS gets totalled
I have been using multiple Linux distros for over 20 years (and supporting other people) and this has simply never happened to me. Not even since I started using a distro that is supposedly less stable (Manjaro).
> Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience
That is why very few distros expect users to do it. Are you thinking of Gentoo or similar? I think its good that there are distros that cater for people who want to compile software, but why choose one of those distros unless you actually want to compile software?
From the point of view of most users, Linux is very similar to iOS or Android - you install software from the "store".
> From the point of view of most users, Linux is very similar to iOS or Android - you install software from the "store".
I believe the comment you're replying to is stating that Linux (and its app ecosystem) is much more fragmented than iOS and Android. Each distro has a "store" of apps that only reliably work on that distro.
It's a "distribution" of software. People taking care to make a number of programs works together well enough on top of the kernel in order for you to use your hardware. But the build scripts for one works well enough if you're trying to use a less common distro (I shamelessly copied from Debian and Arch for a few software on Alpine).
It's not supposedly, a "rolling distro" can't be stable because it has no stable ABI (upgrading a few dependencies is enough to change the ABI exposed to applications).
When your compiled binaries work one moment and then don't work after a system update, that's considered unstable and is one of the reasons people pay Red Hat to support old Linux versions for 20 years.
Some people think "stability" means crashes when it comes to distros, it does not.
I’ve been using Linux on the same timeline starting with RHEL3, then Gentoo, Ubuntu, and finally ArchLinux and I’ve had to arch-chroot from a live usb several times over the last five years to fix broken upgrades*. It hasn’t been more than an hour detour each time but it’s been far from painless. I just recently had to nuke and pave a Thinkpad X1 extreme to reset KDE/Plasma to a configuration that didn’t crash Plasma randomly or kernel panic when resuming from sleep (power management was especially bad for that old gen1 model until recently and I had to build a custom thermald or something). I’ve still got a problem with a monitor not working after power save - just monitor off, not even computer sleep - until I power cycle it. Some problems are even starting to crop up on my System76 Pangolin.
A significant fraction of the software I use is installed through yay’s extra packages which do frequently require building from source so it’s not just a Gentoo thing. It’s far from as seamless (or as limited) as Android/iOS app stores.
* and not even half of them can be blamed on NVIDIA
> A significant fraction of the software I use is installed through yay’s extra packages which do frequently require building from source so it’s not just a Gentoo thing.
Which is why I said "or similar". I actually had AUR in mind (as I use Manjaro).
Could you give examples for what bricked your system when you "start installing software and drivers" or when you were forced to compile C code as a user? Because this all sound so alien to me, I've been using Linux for over 20 years and everything has gotten so much smoother over the years that all this criticism feels completely ignorant to me.
I have been running Fedora as a daily driver for two years now. It’s even the Sway spin so it’s not the happy path. No issues at all. Been through at least one major version upgrade with zero issues. Maybe even two. It’s a total non-issue.
> This is at the core of it, I think. Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience; it often fails due to linking or other dependency-related errors.
Huh? If you’re compiling your own code in a mainstream Linux distribution then I’m not surprised you have to nuke and pave.
It’s a distribution, meaning they build and distribute the software for you.
Flatpak deals with all the applications that don’t need to be built into the operating system itself.
> Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience; it often fails due to linking or other dependency-related errors.
I've had no failures building major projects like CPython (multiple versions) as long as I RTFM and ensure that clearly identified build dependencies are installed first.
I used to run Ubuntu in a VM years before switching to installing a Linux distribution on my PC and the constant distro upgrades got on my nerves.
The way I started was by installing Arch Linux on a 32GB flash drive. No I did not write the ISO onto the flash drive. I used Virtualbox to load the arch Linux iso and mounted the flash drive into Virtualbox and installed onto the flash drive as if it was a regular HDD/SSD. The only annoyance was figuring out the bootloader for this particularly exotic way of installing Arch Linux.
After that I spent most of my time really just doing everything in a web browser for several months. I did this, because I wanted to have a less distracting computing environment where almost nothing was installed. The fact that games didn't run on Linux was supposed to be a feature, until I realized that they mostly run on Linux anyway. Then I bought a 512GB SSD and installed Arch Linux on it in 2018 and never even thought or cared about what Linux distribution I am using ever since.
With Proton, Wine, Lutris etc you certainly can also game on a Linux if you want. I was just playing Path of Exile 2 on the Steam Deck (a Linux desktop)
Games happen to be software, that hundreds of millions use, especially younger tech-oriented people. So yes, it IS essential if you want to make a PC people will use.
Besides proton/wine/VMs for gaming which are all very good, console/computer emulation for gaming is solid in Linux, including literal plug and play joystick support.
Games are particularly interesting though, because they're likely the only legacy software an average person might want to run, while also being the most likely to be closed source.
Anyway, desktop Linux keeps getting relatively better when you compare the increasing hell that a Windows user is subject to.
There are a lot of games that will never make it to consoles because they don't play well (or at all) without a keyboard and mouse. It's also easier (sometimes much easier) to develop games on PC.
That having been said, most games work fine on Linux nowadays anyway.
Same, well, earlier, but Warty was my first time going all in and not dual booting.
I don't game, so that doesn't bother me, though I read it works pretty well these days.
I've used nothing but Linux since, of various flavors. Use it for work, use it for home. Everything just works.
One thing I will note is that despite my general distaste for Electron, it's probably been the biggest recent accelerant for making this all easier. Slack, VSCode, Teams(yuck), MongoDB compass, Postman, etc all work flawlessly. Prior to it existing, we were stuck with Wine, open source alternatives in various states of disrepair, or missing out. I can't even remember the last time I had to 'miss out' because of Linux, I think it was some proprietary VPN blob around 2010 or so.
I've been using Linux on my desktop even longer, but I agree with at least the premise of the article (even though the arguments are poorly thought out and expressed most of the time).
No Linux-based OS has gained mainstream acceptance. You can try to blame that on marketing or corporations or whatever, but I don't buy that. I think open source software is the best way to make technically-superior software, but I think often it's a poor way to create the best user experiences, because the kinds of people who create open source software often don't care to focus on UX.
> That’s what consoles are for.
Millions (tens? hundreds? more?) of Windows gamers would disagree with you. You buy a console and do what you want, sure, go for it. But there is a market for Windows gaming, a very big one.
Gnome tries to focus on UX and does a pretty good job at it. But they're yet to make a regular user oriented distro, which I think could be a better bet at realizing that 'mainstream linux' idea, because at least they'd care enough to try and figure out the things that get in the way of users having linux running.
Some standard, good enough, apps would help further this idea. Right now, I can’t find a mail client for Gnome that’s as comfortable to use as Apple’s Mail app. I use Mailspring, and it comes really close, but still could be nicer. It’s also not part of Gnome.
Gnome is a very well managed project, but its resources aren’t infinite.
I don't agree with the author, but fair enough, he makes some good points. Where he really loses me though is in section 7. Now maybe I've just been miraculously fortunate, and found the best part of the Linux/Steam Deck community, but I've literally never been told to fix it myself, that I'm expecting too much, etc. What I have found is that people are almost overwhelmingly friendly and eager to help, they see a new person entering their beloved realm of Linux gaming and they want you to fall in love like they did.
Recently a friend of mine asked me to help him with his Surface laptop. He was unable to install Windows whatever he tried. I didn't believe him but it was exactly as he said - during the first boot the laptop would turn off and then show a generic error next boot. Ubuntu worked just fine.
What was the issue? Immediately after power management initialization during the first boot the system seen that the battery was in a bad condition and tried to hibernate but for some reason crashed instead. Out of warranty, the battery is extremely hard to replace, so a registry quirk injected through a Linux boot cd immediately after setup helped.
For example, Windows or Android software from ten years ago will still work in Windows 11 or Android 15 or whatever their current versions are. For Windows, software compatibility is actually excellent: a lot of 32-bit Windows 95 software still runs perfectly on Windows 11 64 almost 30 years later. Nothing remotely close exists for Linux.
I completely disagree.
Android applications made for older versions DO NOT work nowadays. Windows applications usually do not install and to run them you have to install them on old version and upgrade. Backward compatibility is no longer the key point for OS creators, and I would say they event want to break it somehow (like Android new set of permissions and removing old apps from the store)
Correct, there are some Gnu/Linux-en,
and there is Android/Linux.
Which may not be a classical desktop OS, but some platforms like Samsung phones emulate floating window management and multitasking, making it an okay desktop OS.
And Android has a huge market share, so perhaps "Linux won over Windows" already, just not on the desktop.
Did the author do any fact checking, proton (developed for Steam OS) runs so many games, it is unbelievable.
This is untrue. You can run old Linux binaries on modern Linux systems if you have the older libraries. You want to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to point to where the old libraries are located.
By the way, any Android applications using Google’s old messaging APIs no longer work and need to be rewritten to use fire base. I know people who were bitten by that multiple times since Google had to keep reinventing push notifications.
Use the other system’s elf interpreter (which is conveniently a library). Then it should work. Saying an ability to run older binaries does not exist is just wrong.
By the way, when someone makes an assertion that something is always true, it only takes 1 counter example to disprove it. The assertion that you cannot run old Linux binaries on a newer system has been disproven by a counter example.
> Saying an ability to run older binaries does not exist is just wrong.
For 99.99% of users this "ability" does not exist. End of story. Period.
I don't care about hacks on tops of tricks on top of hacks. People are not interested in this madness.
Every second comment in this discussion comes from a hardcore software developer who desperately tries to vindicate core Linux flaws by providing workarounds which would work only for people like you.
This is NOT how the world works. This is NOT what people care about or interested in. If cars, refrigerators, microwave ovens worked like that no one would buy them.
Then you acknowledge your previous claims about the capability not existing were wrong. You also contradict yourself by saying elsewhere that mostly geeks run Linux, which implies far more than 99.99% of users can do this. It is not a hack either. It is the way you are supposed to run old software by design.
I run Gentoo, not Ubuntu. I have run graphical software from Ubuntu on my machine in a chroot that spoke to my X11 server in the past. I did it to get a Windows game running whose anticheat had wine support that was incompatible with newer versions of glibc than 2.32. A similar process should work with an old Linux distribution binary.
That said, you refuse to recognize that you are wrong no matter how much evidence is presented and even go so far as to present evidence debunking what you say while claiming it supports what you say. If I were to run a graphical application from the 90s on my machine, you would accuse me of making up the result. Since you will say the same thing even if I did this exercise, why should I bother?
If the vast majority of applications and games are built for Windows, and that means I shouldn't use Linux, I suppose the same is true about this Macbook I'm on right now. You know what, I'm tossing it out the window the second after I post this message.
Very trollish. The second such article I have seen recently on the HN front page.
What does "not ready for the desktop" even mean? Its been ready for MY desktop for over 20 years. Points 1,2,3 and 4 are pretty much wrong. Point 5 is a problem for other OSes too (there are bugs in applications!), point 6 is only relevant if you have particular hardware you want to work with Linux, and point 7 is not my experience.
Hardware support is so much better in Linux it's not even funny. I mean you can't even install windows server on most PCs because there aren't any drivers ! This trolling is beyond ridiculous.
Seconded.
Back in 2015 I got a Toshiba Satellite Radius convertible laptop.
X11 ran there even with touchscreen support.
Plus, USB3 ran smoothly.
Now I'm using a Dell, and again, full hardware support with zero issues using Wayland and Pipewire.
And I use Slackware, not exactly a sophisticated distro, but one that just offers upstream software with no modification.
And don't forget all of the devices that become obsolete under windows and still "just work" with Linux, like old scanners, printers, cards and adapters of all kinds.
All I can say as a person using Linux exclusively for the last 10 years:
- You're using the wrong Linux distribution
- You're using the wrong Linux kernel version
- You have the wrong hardware
- You're using Linux incorrectly
- You're asking for too much
- Go debug or fix it yourself.
Edit: This is sarcasm by the way. These bullets come from the article.
In all seriousness though. I think another poster had the right idea. Linux requires a mindset shift. You must be willing to be a master of your own destiny. I've used Linux largely problem free for 10 years. I took some time to learn how to do things "the Linux way" but once I did it's been smooth sailing.
I recently have had to use Windows for work and it's annoying as hell. Every day after lunch one of my monitors just turns off and rearranges all my windows. On Linux, I could dig into the problem, and worse case just have a xrandr script to hack a solution together. On Windows I'm just SOL looking and dead Windows message board threads.
>and Stack Overflow's "Question Marked as Duplicate"
Based on my experience on Meta, and various random Reddit threads where people complain: in like 90% of cases where someone complains that a Stack Overflow question was unjustly marked as a duplicate, I could go take a look and then write out a clear step by step explanation of not only how it is very obviously a duplicate by Stack Overflow's standards, but exactly how to apply the advice from answers on the target to the original problem.
Even if I didn't previously know anything about the technologies involved.
Please keep in mind that it is not the purpose of Stack Overflow to solve the problem you are currently encountering. The purpose of Stack Overflow is to answer a question that can be useful to others. If your program doesn't work, it is explicitly, by policy, your responsibility to debug first; the point of creating a Minimal Reproducible Example is to demonstrate that you have found the problem and have a legitimate question about why it is a problem.
Someone who closes your question as a duplicate is doing you a kindness. You immediately get answers and don't have to wait for someone else to write one. Closing duplicates is also doing everyone else a kindness, by helping to make sure that, when people use a search engine to find an answer on Stack Overflow, they all end up at the right place with the best-stated version of the question and the best answers for it. In many cases, the person who identifies a duplicate has gone out of the way to figure out the problem (despite an unclear explanation or an attempt to sneak in side questions about unrelated matters).
It's a shame you can't downvote submissions here, and flagging is not appropriate. We've heard these tired arguments a million times, if all of this gets fixed, the author will find another reason why he can't or won't switch.
1. This section is basically pedantry. "you cant use the same software across multiple Linux distros". OK? And PC software doesn't run on a Mac. They are different OS's "Linux" being confused as it's own OS, is just, whatever.
2. Windows and Macs have plenty of bugs too. So much so that we don't do in-place server upgrades, it's a full rebuild each version. I mean look at the Windows 10-11 upgrade situation, it's not great.
3. Lack of general software and games - What? You can play AAA games on Steam on Linux out of the box for the most part. I will concede that industry specific software is likely going to be Windows only, but you can run Windows in a VM. There are options here.
4. Network file sharing isn't any different than on Windows, this is just nonsense.
5. Lack of funding - hand wavy and again, whatever.
6. Hardware support - I haven't really had hardware issues in years. Every Lenovo laptop I've installed Linux on works flawlessly, even Wifi drivers are present in setup.
7. Nonsense again. The Linux community is super helpful.
I've been working on a cross-platform Windows/MacOS/Linux application for the last 2 years. All three of them have very significant pain points. Linux isn't ready for the desktop, but neither are Windows and MacOS in significantly different ways.
I wonder who he keeps running into. Not only do I use Linux on a daily basis, I run about 20 virtual *nixs from that Linux desktop and everything runs really great, but when I run into problems, the Arch community (ie. colleagues, forums, mailing lists) have been nothing but extremely helpful and friendly. Without exception.
Some people really hate when they ask a question that's answered in TFM and are answered by a link to an entire TFM page. There's a huge demand for "please help me understand exactly how this applies in my exact situation", especially for less technically-minded people.
The Mint forums are helpful enough, but they tend to demand tons of ultimately irrelevant system info up front, commonly misdiagnose problems, and give blanket advice that often ignores more detailed concerns. (Also, the site has been very unstable lately.)
I'm using Linux as my main desktop for so long now (>15yrs) that I probably wouldn't be able to handle a modern Windows system anymore. I have not touched any Windows installation for years, and everytime I have to help my wife with some issue on her Windows laptop I just find it crazy how people can tolerate that.
It might not be on the same quality level as MacOS but I like the freedom of choice Linux gives me.
I actually just installed Ubuntu desktop on a spare mini PC I had to try out some cpp game development, and it is a surprisingly nice experience! I prefer it over my windows PC which seems plagued with weird occasional glitches. I still need windows for some things like CAD tools, but I think I'll stick with Ubuntu for most things!
I was thinking about adding a "Security" section but I wasn't convinced it was necessary. Security in Linux is horrible in general.
* People use `sudo` for anything and everything all the time.
* `git pull whatever_crap_from_the_web` and run it happily.
* Tens of thousands of pieces of malware via NPMs and other frameworks.
* No AV of any kind (the one that actually executes code in a sandbox and verifies its safe).
* Permissions/users/groups/pam.d/logind/selinux/apparmor - it's a huge intricate mess.
Verifying arbitrary code is safe is not possible for AV to do. If you know some way to do what you describe, you can commercialize it and become rich. Many would pay top dollar for such technology.
Windows gives a semblance of trusted code, also Microsoft sells certificates to developers.
Nothing (!) like that exists in the Linux world aside from PGP cross singing which barely any projects use because of its sheer complexity.
Don't lie about Windows and don't lie about Linux.
And Windows 10/11 both mandate that installers are signed before you can even launch them, so there's a very decent first line of defense which is TOTALLY missing in Linux.
Also, "trusted sources"? Who and why would you trust? Seasoned engineers in my company git pull any crap from the web and run it happily without thinking twice because AGILE and things like RoR. Who do you trust among thousands of modules?
God damn it.
Linux fans will make up all sorts of crappy pseudo-arguments to portray it as a decent/secure/stable OS and it's none of that.
On servers where you don't touch anything and never install third-party software? Yeah, surely. No one cares.
Distribution package maintainers generally vet the packages they make avaliable and updates to repositories are typically PGP signed with cryptographically secure hashes for the files. I say typically because I am only familiar with Gentoo and to a lesser extent, the Debian family.
As for Windows, there is no signing requirement according to Microsoft:
> Windows doesn't require software developers to digitally sign their code
Continue to use a crap pseudo-OS with no security and believe everyone around is a geek who is willing to learn CLI, bash, vi, git bisect, reading mans, etc. just to use it.
You have now accused me of saying something I'd never said, you crossed the line and goodbye.
> Finally, since drivers in Linux are generally part of the kernel (there are a few exceptions, including NVIDIA), you cannot upgrade them to the latest version or downgrade them to the version that worked for you on the fly. You have to boot into a different kernel. This is extremely inconvenient and not always possible
I mean, that's just false. Most drivers are done as kernel modules and you can push/pull them in without missing a beat.
if he's talking about graphics cards or similar subsystems - you might need a reboot, much like Windows does.
IMO, this reads like a gamer reviewing Linux because they thought it would be cool without knowing much about to use it as a workstation to get shit done.
> I mean, that's just false. Most drivers are done as kernel modules and you can push/pull them in without missing a beat.
0.1% of people in the world could that. 0.001% of people in the world would do that.
That's not false, your understanding of a decent OS is just lacking. In Windows you can swap drivers however you want given they support your Windows version.
Windows is installed on 2 billion PCs, give or take. It works great on them, too. Long gone are the days of malware waves or driver failures that break the system.
Linux is on 40 millions.
And the amount of pain I see daily on Linux-related forums trumps Windows' woes by an insane margin.
I would not call limping along from extreme levels of telemetry, AV and other bloat “works great”. Discussing “driver failures that break the system” is a strawman since bad drivers never really broke the system. They just crashed it such that it needed a reboot. That said, Microsoft lets garbage that has no business being in the kernel into the NT kernel, which resulted in this fiasco that actually broke Windows systems:
Windows systems often suffer from cryptolockers, which could be considered malware waves.
You have a stratification bias by looking at forums where people are asking for help. I have installed Linux for a number of non-computer people to solve Windows problems and it has served them well. They all like it better than Windows. The average person really is fine with a Ubuntu install. The only reason Windows has such usage is that it is installed by default due to history. If a Linux distribution were installed by default, there would not be many Windows users.
> I would not call limping along from extreme levels of telemetry, AV and other bloat “works great”
2 billion users don't notice too much "limping" and "telemetry".
1. This entire post is whataboutism, the article is about Linux
2. NSA/CIA/FBI and pretty much all governments of the world use Windows that is ostensibly riddled with spyware and telemetry
3. In the past 20 years not a single person with WireShark and MITM has proven that Windows leaks any personal data (e.g. files). This can be set up in less than 10 minutes. Go produce a single shred of effing evidence I dare you!!
Parroting BS on the Internet doesn't make your post any more valid.
That's disgusting coming from an "IT specialist". You have issues with basic logic.
> Parroting BS on the Internet doesn't make your post any more valid.
> That's disgusting coming from an "IT specialist". You have issues with basic logic.
I assume you are projecting here since I have never once in my life described myself as an “IT specialist”. This fits what you have been doing far better than it fits me.
It leaked a while ago that Microsoft Windows automatically uploads WiFi passwords to their servers, which are sensitive information. This was after the WiFi sense debacle.
As for not noticing limping, of course they would not notice it when they have never seen the machines run faster. Install a Linux distribution on the machine and they will be amazed by the speed. It happens every single time I do it.
I am not sure what you think the your TLA and governments remark achieves. It just seems to be the ravings of someone spreading FUD to me.
Knowing that Microsoft uploads WiFi passwords to its servers does not even need wireshark. You just need to log into the same Microsoft account on a different machine and observe that your WiFi passwords are synced. Given that the upload is likely encrypted, it would be difficult to observe the passwords being uploaded to Microsoft servers using wireshark. While you would see the packets, you would not know what they contain unless you somehow get the encryption keys out of the system encryption library.
Your prior remarks on running old Linux software did not require that things be easy, which is a matter of opinion, or graphical. It is possible with the right libraries as modern Linux systems (minus Android unless you install a X11 server) can display X11 applications.
When I see the articles I believe the title should be "Linux is not Windows so I do not like it".
I have used Linux for just shy of 30 years. It is different than Windows and far more powerful. It is just that people do not want to learn different things. Plus Linux has no spyware.
These days, you can do anything on Linux that you do on Windows, except for some 3d Gaming. And that is because hardware vendors refuse to support Linux in the way they support Windows. It is the fault of Video vendors, most notability Nvidia.
So off to my usual rant :) If I was the "ruler" of Linux, I would make sure no Nvidia GPUs would work under Linux until Nvidia opens up their GPU.
> It is just that people do not want to learn different things
The differences from Windows versions 7 to 10 to 11 are substantial. To me it seemed like a consistent desktop experience from Linux Mint is much better for those who do not want change at all.
Agreed. Going from Mint 20 to 22, the experience in Cinnamon (/ Muffin / LightDM / Nemo stack) is a ton more stable, and there's a lot more readily available customization that's a lot nicer to do overall (notwithstanding the bits that are hidden in a binary file designed for `dconf`).
>These days, you can do anything on Linux that you do on Windows, except for some 3d Gaming. And that is because hardware vendors refuse to support Linux in the way they support Windows. It is the fault of Video vendors, most notability Nvidia.
Even GPU drivers work fine for 90-99% of games on Linux. The biggest issue keeping certain games from running on Linux is actually anti-cheat support:
> And that is because hardware vendors refuse to support Linux in the way they support Windows
Because Linux does not support hardware (or at least new hardware) in the same Windows does.
AMD makes new graphics card, steps on Windows vs Linux to release an updated driver to support it
Windows - Update driver, release via Windows Update / Website etc
Linux - Send patches months in advance to the LKML using email, make sure any patches needed in Mesa are also sent in with a completely different system. Then, wait for your patches to be peer reviewed and land, then wait for a kernel release, then wait for distros to package said kernel and release it, which if you're on a distro that fixes to a kernel version, could be waiting 6 months.
> It is the fault of Video vendors, most notability Nvidia.
And even that's gotten better in recent years, too. Nvidia hasn't fixed everything, but two of the biggest concerns (not supporting Wayland and fighting community drivers) have began to be addressed recently. It's beginning to look like Nvidia is taking desktop Linux seriously, albeit slowly. Most of these changes landed in the 555-series drivers, which are still pretty fresh, maybe even still in beta iirc.
> When I see the articles I believe the title should be "Linux is not Windows so I do not like it".
I've used Linux for as much only I'm a tad more humble. Mentioned more than a dozen times in the kernel git log. Not a big achievement but kinda shows I'm not just a bystander.
You've never said how much time you've wasted fixing Linux or making software work. Must be a non-issue I guess.
> I'm a tad more humble. Mentioned more than a dozen times in the kernel git log.
Exceptionally humble, indeed.
> You've never said how much time you've wasted fixing Linux or making software work.
This comes up often and I'm always fascinated by the implied assumption that time isn't wasted fixing Windows or MacOS computers and making software work on those systems. The age-old "No, I will not fix your computer!" is not a Linux meme - in 99% of cases it refers to a Windows machine.
We can trade anecdata until the heat death of the universe, and in fact you've nicely listed many of the pro/con points in your articles. However having read both versions (current/technical and final), I must agree with parent. This is just a rant from someone who likes Windows more.
I also want to call out your "solving linux" section (in the technical article). You've listed basically the entire Ubuntu playbook (which is, btw, a UK company, not an African company). Mark "poached" debian developers (DDs), poured millions of his own money into it, spearheaded many of the desktop-specific innovations (now supplanted by other software, but Ubuntu provided the initial push), created an app store, did an enormous amount of work popularizing Linux specifically for the desktop, was the first to start "officially checked and approved" hardware list, etc.
And the results show even if we don't attribute them to Ubuntu today, and even if we're using alternatives: Linux desktop today is a much smoother experience than 20 years ago.
So, while I can sympathize with many of the points in your technical article (https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...) even if I do not agree with them, the linked one really seems like distillation to a "I like Windows more" rant.
Could you be specific about what constitutes "a rant"?
And no I've spent far less time "fixing" Windows. In fact I don't remember doing that ever. I've had multiple cases when Windows stopped booting and in absolute most of them I just had to reinstall the system from scratch. That's all "I've wasted".
Linux on the other hand?
"It works for you everything is made up in the article".
Never mind how once I had to fix a glaring issue in the Linux kernel which rendered tens of thousands of systems unbootable and which took me over 24 hours of hard work to unravel.
Yeah, indeed I've never had anything like that in Windows in 30+ years that I've been using it. Never once a Windows update rendered the system completely dead. And I'm not talking about my system, I talking about hundreds.
Lastly I'm just a poor Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer who actually overlooks a lot of stuff and sees a staggering number of fixes in every stable Linux release.
I follow way too many bug trackers and LKML as well. It's all good, please disperse.
> And no I've spent far less time "fixing" Windows. [...] I just had to reinstall the system from scratch.
That's one way of dealing with it.
> Never mind how once I had to fix a glaring issue in the Linux kernel which rendered tens of thousands of systems unbootable.
You didn't have to fix it, you could've booted the old kernel. You chose to debug the issue and help. That's commendable, but do you think people (who work on Windows or hardware, or in IT departments in any organization) don't do that for Windows as well?
> And I'm not talking about my system, I talking about hundreds.
Is it tens of thousands, or hundreds?
> Lastly I'm just a poor Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer who actually overlooks a lot of stuff and sees a staggering number of fixes in every stable Linux release. I follow way too many bug trackers and LKML as well.
Well if you're Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer, it's natural that you see many more Linux bugs than Windows or MacOS bugs. Again, commendable that you choose to participate, help, and make it better! You choose to live on the bleeding edge, and so you bleed. But that's far from typical Linux desktop user experience.
> Could you be specific about what constitutes "a rant"?
You're obviously very passionate about, and involved with, Linux. But you also seem to hate it so I'm confused why do it? Buy a Mac, be happy, live and let live, etc.
Windows can be reinstalled, Linux bugs never go away by themselves.
> You chose to debug the issue and help.
No, people don't do that in Windows because Microsoft has much better QA/QC. Not a single Windows update since 1998 has rendered my system unbootable. Microsoft is certainly not perfect and Windows sometimes has regression but those normally affect very few people.
> Is it tens of thousands, or hundreds?
Windows installation user base: 2 billion. Linux: 40 million. Have fun with mental gymnastics.
> You choose to live on the bleeding edge, and so you bleed.
There's a huge number of bugs affecting "stable" Linux distros that use "stable" software including the kernel. Linux bugs are not specific to the bleeding edge but they are more prominent.
This is not a counter argument and I will not waste any more of my time with you. Try using the dictionary argument with your children, "You are a retard, my boy! Why? Look it up in the Merriam Webster dictionary, that's why".
You literally have to reinstall windows because of how broken it got, and that's somehow okay?
The amount of BSOD I've seen and unfixable issues after spending hours googling and browsing windows shitty support sites are just the tip of the iceberg.
Windows is utter trash and the only reason it won is because of the monopoly it established, forcing everyone to use it, hardware manufacturers to support it and once the dominance was established, you can't escape it.
MacOS is literally only used with hardware lock-in. People don't choose it. It's forced onto whoever chooses to overpay for an Apple computer.
The only reason Linux won't win the desktop is because it doesn't have a monopoly to support it.
These discussions that pretend any of this is due to merits of one OS over the other are moot. It doesn't matter at all when it comes to who or how many people use it. These are all determined by external factors.
> You literally have to reinstall windows because of how broken it got, and that's somehow okay?
Last time I did it was in the Windows XP SP0 days.
> The amount of BSOD I've seen and unfixable issues after spending hours googling and browsing windows shitty support sites are just the tip of the iceberg.
When was the last time you got BSOD? I've not seen them after Vista.
> The only reason Linux won't win the desktop is because it doesn't have a monopoly to support it.
"Win"? Start with software compatibility. There's no one Linux, there's a billion of incompatible distros that make it impossible to run old software.
> These discussions that pretend any of this is due to merits of one OS over the other are moot.
API and ABI compatibility are swear words to you, I get it.
I'm sorry if you don't care about those, the world will shrug you off. No other OS has this madness.
> by external factors.
Yeah, for Linux fans it's always someone or something else. The fact that Linux is a bug-ridden mess of software with no compatibility and no stability isn't an issue of course. It's because Microsoft/Oracle/NVIDIA actively interfere with Linux. Or aliens? Must be aliens.
I've been running Linux exclusively since RedHat 5.0 (no, that's not RHEL, that's more than a decade earlier).
This entire article is 1000% true. Every word of it. You can "opine" and "disagree" with it as much as you want. It's become too damn popular in the western world lately to opine about anything.
Feel free to opine about gravity, just don't fall off the top of a 10-storey building.
BTW this is why the entire world is running "ad-ridden"/"privacy-invading" Windows.
People run it because
1. Windows doesn't get in the way and allows them to run their software.
2. Windows is rock stable and doesn't break randomly after every upgrade (sans occasional conflicts with third-party software here and there affecting ~0.05% of people).
3. Windows is simple.
Linux has no implied compatibility, it's full of regressions, it's complicated as hell and it still has poor HW support. Yes.
People run Windows because it comes installed in their machines.
> Windows is rock stable and doesn't break randomly after every upgrade (sans occasional conflicts with third-party software here and there affecting ~0.05% of people).
What? I've lost count of the amount of times that I've had to restore botched Windows updates. It has gotten better lately, but it still happened more times than I've had to deal with update issues on my Linux installation. And I run my Linux near the bleeding edge where, in theory, everything should break all the time, right? Well, it doesn't.
My point stands. People don't choose their OS. It's chosen by the hardware manufacturer, their employers or their requirements.
I'm gonna repeat this because it's extremely important: people don't spend a single second choosing their OS.
If you want to game, you have to use Windows (yes I know about Proton and love it, but mainstream online games require Windows).
If you want to use your computer for work, you need Office. Even with Google Docs, people in my country simply default to the Office suite. Again, not because they choose it, but because it was already chosen for them by the monopoly that is already in place.
Aside from Office, you have all of the other specialized tools like the Adobe suite and many others that force you to use Windows again.
Windows doesn't have anyone competing with them. Their monopoly guarantees they can get away with anything. It's not a competition.
Windows 11 is a great example of this. Nobody asked for it. It's garbage with more ads in it. It wasn't built to improve the system for users, it was built to sell ads and force people to buy new computers. Being the only option allows them to do all of this. Windows simply doesn't need to add, change or remove features because of competitors since there aren't any.
Of course in the unicorn land of Linux cultists it "works" too, but then you open any Linux related forum and multiple threads about something not working anymore are posted daily.
I invite you to r/Fedora for example.
> My point stands. People don't choose their OS.
There's no point.
There's an actual OS, Windows.
And then there's a software compilation X version N that comes with no warranties whatsoever, it's called Linux Distro X version N.
People choose to run an actual OS with the ability to create and run third-party software for at least a decade, in the case of Windows for up to three decades.
Linux offers NONE of that.
No stability, no quality, no QA/AC and no implied or enforced backward or forward compatibility.
Continue to OVERLOOK all of that and believe "But mom, Windows is preinstalled!"
I know a TON of people who have left Linux after a few years of struggling with it at every turn. They are all now running Windows or MacOS.
Reading your answers you seem unhinged. Calm down mate.
> Of course in the unicorn land of Linux cultists it "works" too, but then you open any Linux related forum and multiple threads about something not working anymore are posted daily.
As opposed to Windows where nothing ever breaks? That doesn't make any sense.
It's a known fact that Linux users report way more problems than Windows users because they are simply more technical, more in line with the open source spirit and dig deeper.
When I had issues on my Windows, it was extremely hard to find any solution online. Nobody goes to r/Windows for their troubles. From the few answers I've found, pretty much all of them ended up being "re-install Windows" or "re-install parts of Windows".
> People choose to run an actual OS with the ability to create and run third-party software for at least a decade, in the case of Windows for up to three decades.
Sorry but, that's simply not true for the average person. I'm not talking about the typical HN user here. The absolute vast majority of users *do not choose an OS*. Surely you can't argue with that, right?
> Continue to OVERLOOK all of that
No. I'm well aware that there are many things to improve on Linux (especially desktop linux), but my whole point is that it's utterly irrelevant until people actually get to choose an OS. Linux could have zero issues and work flawlessly everywhere and it would still have almost nobody using it outside of our tech savvy bubble.
If Linux as a whole was as bad as you say, it wouldn't be used in the majority of computers in the world. It's only desktop Linux that suffers from your complaints, and it's simply because it doesn't have companies with infinite money and monopolies behind it making it more seamless for the average user while forcing vendors to support it.
I've wasted several weeks of my life on broken Windows Updates. Windows Update is a horrible shit show. Meanwhile updates on Linux are so benign I don't have qualms about updating. The worst thing that can happen is that you're thrown into a major version update of whatever software you've gotten used to.
> Outside of the Linux kernel, there is very little shared technology between Android and the Linux desktops.
lol... so, all of it? Linux is a kernel.
Regardless, my point had absolutely nothing to do with technology. Android's popularity has absolutely nothing to do with Linux and/or what it shipped with or didn't ship with. Its popularity has everything to do with the fact that it shipped preinstalled on devices that people bought.
Linux isn't going to become popular on desktops until it is shipped on desktops.
A lot of netbooks back in the day did ship with a Linux distro pre-installed, and you know what people did?
Replaced them with Windows.
Because the Linux desktop is and continues to be a sup-bar experience for the average joe. GNOME requires a modification to even run Discord properly, but anyone who points this out gets shouted at.
I was those people. I bought the original eee 701 at launch. I ordered it online because local stores didn't stock them. Xandros sucked not because it ran linux, but just because it was some little-tikes toy OS. But Windows didn't even run correctly on the damn thing either, because the 480px vertical height of the screen wasn't tall enough to fit the minimum height of many windows. The device was basically a toy for nerds, no normal person would have picked up one of these devices and thought "this is a computer I can use for real things"
People don't not use Linux because they've considered it and found out that their applications won't run on it. They don't use it because they've not considered it at all, because 99%+ of people do not choose the OS on their computer. They go to the electronics store and buy a Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, or Apple. There's no Asus Eee running Xandros at my local Best Buy, and if there ever was, it wasn't on the shelf for very long.
> For everyone else, the reason they don't use Linux on their desktop is because it didn't come installed on it.
My experience lines up with this.
Both my elderly parents run Zorin OS on their separate laptops for the past 6 years, they understand as a kind of 'free windows'.
They don't care about the inner workings, they go online, check email, do shopping, make travel arrangements, print a ridiculous amount of paper. And I stopped getting calls because 'the printer is not working'.
Most people only have a few "essentials" applications they want to use (the browser in most cases) and don't care about the OS. Whatever can run these applications reliably will get a free pass. And for a lot of these use cases, if they have someone that can get Linux working well on their hardware, they only notice the speed and the lack of ads.
> If somebody does to desktops like what Google did for smartphones, then Linux will finally have its moment.
That's already happened, and Google did it. They are called Chromebooks. They are Linux underneath, use the GNU userspace stack and Wayland for GUI. They have a button that installs Debian, and GUI packages you "apt install" appear in the Chrome app launch folder.
Apparently ChromeOS is being swallowed by Android, which I suspect isn't a big move. Crosini, the LXC thingy that hosts Debian on ChromeOS, has already been ported. That means Android will be powering laptops. Does that make it a Desktop OS? If so, that does the we can count Android's 45% market share of all personal computing devices towards a Desktop OS? And if we do that, does that mean Linux has finally won the desktop wars? By any definition it's already won the personal computing devices wars.
Fair point, but I think we can measure the success of them in their respective device markets by their market shares. And while ChromeOS was a great attempt, it didn't really disrupt much beyond the US education market.
> That means Android will be powering laptops. Does that make it a Desktop OS? If so, that does the we can count Android's 45% market share of all personal computing devices towards a Desktop OS?
OS market share for a particular device type is typically measured as the respective portion of the OSes that run on that hardware. If you are looking at desktop/laptop market share, you'd only count that :)
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 375 ms ] threadThe vast majority of AAA titles run seamlessly on Linux. Per protondb[0], ≥80% of the top 10, top 100, and top 1000 are rated "platinum" or "gold" for Linux functioning (by users).
[0] https://www.protondb.com/
Some of the quotes from the OP's page border on parody. So, CS2 doesn't count as a AAA title because it's based on DX11 and doesn't have realtime ray tracing. But apparently this same person is oblivious to the fact that both real-time RT and DX12 translation have been completely usable on Linux for years now. Nvidia helped ship native RT to Linux clients in Wolfenstein: Youngblood, and Proton has supported the majority of DX12 games with RT since before the Steam Deck existed.
Kinda makes you glad that this is the final edition, if that's the sort of due diligence being exercised.
Look at their contributions to the Linux kernel, GCC, KDE, Wine, and many other projects.
A total clickbait for sure.
Speaking for myself, I'm mostly surprised that someone with such an intimate knowledge of Linux has ignored it's developments to this extent. This entire thread is mostly at the consensus that you have tortured many of the talking points in this article beyond taking seriously.
Many in this thread have also identified that MacOS and Windows are deficient in several of the criteria you listed. So what even is a desktop, really? An ideal, or a thing people use?
What have I ignored precisely?
Bugs? Regressions? Missing features? Lack of funding?
Xorg being deprecated, Wayland being all the rage while being usable only in Gnome and KDE?
> Many in this thread have also identified that MacOS and Windows are deficient in several of the criteria you listed.
Windows: 2 billion users with no technical background.
Linux: 40 million users most of whom are geeks.
End of story.
That said, Linux has more users than Windows:
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/
Android Linux is at 46%, while Windows is at 26%. Other Linux versions have 1%.
Xorg is being deprecated and replaced with semi-broken something where tons of functions only work in KDE and Gnome. That's all you need to know about Linux.
By the way, “Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works” is both a non-sequitur and untrue. The guys who wrote the display servers used on those are users of those systems.
Xorg has been the de-facto X11 implementation on Linux for the past 25 years.
First XFree86, then it was superseded by Xorg.
You're being nit picky only that's not a counter argument. That's ad hominem.
> the article’s author is a well known X11 hater and you seem to agree with everything he says.
I'm the author of the article and I'm not a hater. Understanding the limitations of something is not "hatred". I guess the entire world is black or white to you, either I have to be deeply in love with Linux or "You're a hater" which is another ad hominem.
See you've stopped arguing and now switched to discussing me personally. I knew it would happen given how you never had any counter arguments in the first place, the problem is I've been here for over 25 years and know Linux inside out and EVERYTHING that is "claimed" in the article is the common truth.
> By the way, “Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works” is both a non-sequitur and untrue.
Yet another "counter argument" that lacks any validity because it's empty.
> The guys who wrote the display servers used on those are users of those systems.
This is an article about Linux _USERS_.
You still don't bloody understand that. I don't care about software engineers that can make anything work given enough time. I don't care who wrote Quartz or Surface Flinger. They are not end users.
End users use Operating Systems, buy them and buy software for them. Their developers are absolutely IRRELEVANT. There have been dozens of forgotten OSes that no one uses.
To give an example, the sudden interjection of “Not a single Windows MacOS iOS Android user knows what their display server is and how it works.” appears to be an example of disorganized thinking, since its connection to what was being discussed is superficial to an extreme. There are other comments by you that exhibit signs of disorganized thinking even more clearly.
You likely could benefit from seeing a psychiatrist.
The guy even contradicted himself:
> Linux is not an operating system
> While Linux is unrivaled on servers and has been the world's most popular operating system for over two decades, the situation on the desktop is quite bleak.
Both cannot be true.
The Linux kernel is NOT an OS.
Any given Linux distro which is not compatible with any other Linux distro or even its own earlier or later versions couldn't be called an OS. It's a software compilation for a certain time period.
An OS implies everyone runs it, anyone can compile software for it and have it run on all devices with this OS. This is impossible with Linux outside of Snap/FlatPak/AppImage which themselves are lightweight virtualization solutions.
This is what Windows, MacOS, iOS and Android are. Linux is not.
Also, please don't throw FUD around without explaining yourself. You probably don't even know/remember what it means any more.
An OS must have:
Linux on desktop has none of that.E.g. the open source AMD driver, amdgpu, has a gazillion of regressions and issues for any kernel: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues
If it works for you, that's called "anecdotal evidence". That doesn't mean suddenly Linux has become an OS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system
The reason Linux is not an operating system is because it is just the kernel and you need more than a kernel to fit that definition.
The only thing you said that is correct is that amdgpu has issues. Everything else you just wrote is wrong.
1. Is Wikipedia _page_ an authority?
2. Does Wikipedia page buy operating systems and software for them? No? That's what I thought. Where's native commercial applications for Linux aside from very few specialized ones? Where's native Linux for Linux? Oh, wait, even Indie developers have abandoned Linux because why if there's Wine + DXVK.
3. Who cares about obscure something that pretends to provide APIs? How is it relevant for adoption and usage? Oh, wait, it's not. We've had dozens of dead wanna-be OSes that provide APIs. All dead. Linux on desktop is one of them as well.
Yeah, "I'm wrong".
Linux desktop market share proves it beyond reasonable doubt. LMAO.
The fact that absolute most people shy away from Linux is another proof that it's a "great OS" and "better than Windows".
Keep on living in your fantasy world. Sadly people around you don't share your ideals. They want shit to be done. They install Windows, use it for a decade without any issues, buy a new device. All good.
Somehow people think bundling half of /usr/lib is the solution.
The M4 Mac mini finally convinced me to give up on a Linux desktop for now; the combination of native Mac games, Whisky, and Windows via VMWare works at least as well as Proton for me, and everything else including development is much more convenient, including running Linux VMs when useful.
If you can survive with Proton, LibreOffice, and GIMP; you can much more comfortably survive with Proton on ChromeOS, Google Docs, and Photopea. Just hating Windows is not enough of a reason to be a Linux user, and as long as that is the case, Linux will remain niche.
Last week I tried to run Witcher 3 using wine and it took a while to debug. The installer runs immediately and seemlessly - but then it got messy
It involved installing `winetricks` which seems to be some service that installs a multitude of driver, libs and software through a clunky unresponsive UI. (not clear where it's being installed from, but #yolo) The necessary libraries I had to deduce from reading forum posts and the errors I got on launch. You then had to go in and make sure to launch the directx 11 version of the game (ie the .exe) buried in a hidden directory (~/.wine/)
Is this was "Platinum" means.. i don't want to image what Gold entails
What you want is to use a program like Lutris or Bottles to manage your runtime for you, if you're not installing it through Steam. I don't know who put you up to installing Wild Hunt on a vanilla Wine prefix but they sound like someone with a good sense of humor.
I will take a look at Lutris/Bottles. I just assumed Wine would work directly. It's worked for me most of the time in the past
The only games that routinely cause problems are those with ridiculous kernel-level anticheat, and I am not interested in those games.
Are you saying Linux has "games" because it excels at ... emulating them?
What's the point of using/running Linux then when you have a much higher chance of running games successfully natively? What about dozens if not hundreds of games that use a kernel level anticheat? Pretty much none of them work in Linux.
What's the point of native Linux APIs then?
That's weird.
Wine + DXVK are so good, Linux is GREAT.
No, it shows how horrible Linux is when not a single vendor outside of Valve wants to touch it. And everyone who tried to port games to Linux went bankrupt.
https://www.feralinteractive.com/en/news/?platform=linux
Proton often runs games better than the native ports, so there is not much of a loss if there are fewer native ports. Furthermore, in a number of cases, Windows games actually run better on Linux in Proton than on Windows.
Elden Ring is a fantastic example, as on day 1, it performed about 15% better on Linux in average FPS, and had substantially less stutter if I recall correctly.
World of Warcraft is another great example. It is well known to get about 20% better performance on Linux than on Windows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2_LlSaYNUo
Minecraft is another such game:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytgDMgYL0eo
If you use AMD GPUs, it is more often the case that Linux will outperform Windows in games, since Valve wrote the shader compiler used for them on Linux and it is fairly amazing:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...
Nvidia is working on improvements for the performance of Windows games running on Linux too. A recent driver release mentions a few such improvements:
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/237587/
Not all games perform better on Linux than on Windows, although Valve has people actively working on changing this:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Changelog
Though speaking of a 1080Ti, that's a GPU you don't want to run on Linux because it lacks some Vulkan features for good DX12 translation: https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/issues/465
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/ray-tracing-gtx-gpu-driver,news...
I ran Quake II RTX on Linux on a GTX 1080 Ti with RTX on back when I still had one. Of course, the performance was bad, but it ran. Some sites have benchmarks:
https://www.thefpsreview.com/2019/06/08/quake-ii-rtx-perform...
The RADV driver apparently did the same for ray tracing on Vega.
Looks like it was added to Vulkan spec in 2020, so after the Quake 2 RTX. It was implemented for GTX for about 2 versions and removed? https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listreports.php?extension=VK_KHR_...
From this comment that mentions downgrading to that driver version removes another required Vulkan extension for the game: https://www.reddit.com/r/vulkan/comments/kdzitt/comment/m114...
So it's not really ≥80% for top 10 at least.
> What's worse is that software compiled for the current version of Linux X will not necessarily work for the current version of Linux Y. Linux distros insist that all the software must be compiled for their current releases or provided as source code. The problem with source code is that normal users won't bother to compile anything, and secondly, it's not always possible to compile software because it may depend on a specific compiler or dependencies that your distro doesn't provide
This is at the core of it, I think. Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience; it often fails due to linking or other dependency-related errors.
Also for some mysterious reasons, compiling C code under Nix always works and dependencies can't be missing.
It feels a bit like "Emacs is my favorite operating system, if only it had a text editor"
NixOS's philosophy? amazing. Actually trying to use, install stuff to, make changes to, etc. NixOS with the currently existing tools? horrible.
Although Nix knowledge helped me tremendously in managing heterogenous codebase with more than a million of LoC
I hope the situation has improved, but the last time I had to deal with Nvidia (kernel/driver/library dependencies/updates/etc.) under Nix it did not remotely work out of the box and it was a huge pain. (And switching to AMD or intel was not really an option.) Doing anything off the beaten path seems to be challenging even if you have experience with Nix.
The arcane Nix language doesn't help matters.
I think immutable is the future, and I wish I could recommend Nix (and other immutable systems) to normal people, but at this point I think you really need to be a Nix expert/fan to set it up and actually enjoy it.
No
My experience with Windows, exactly.
I have been using multiple Linux distros for over 20 years (and supporting other people) and this has simply never happened to me. Not even since I started using a distro that is supposedly less stable (Manjaro).
> Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience
That is why very few distros expect users to do it. Are you thinking of Gentoo or similar? I think its good that there are distros that cater for people who want to compile software, but why choose one of those distros unless you actually want to compile software?
From the point of view of most users, Linux is very similar to iOS or Android - you install software from the "store".
I believe the comment you're replying to is stating that Linux (and its app ecosystem) is much more fragmented than iOS and Android. Each distro has a "store" of apps that only reliably work on that distro.
I knew rms at Berkeley, when he was still (considered) cool.
It's not supposedly, a "rolling distro" can't be stable because it has no stable ABI (upgrading a few dependencies is enough to change the ABI exposed to applications).
When your compiled binaries work one moment and then don't work after a system update, that's considered unstable and is one of the reasons people pay Red Hat to support old Linux versions for 20 years.
Some people think "stability" means crashes when it comes to distros, it does not.
I should have used a less ambiguous term in this context though.
A significant fraction of the software I use is installed through yay’s extra packages which do frequently require building from source so it’s not just a Gentoo thing. It’s far from as seamless (or as limited) as Android/iOS app stores.
* and not even half of them can be blamed on NVIDIA
Which is why I said "or similar". I actually had AUR in mind (as I use Manjaro).
> This is at the core of it, I think. Forcing a user to compile C code is a bad user experience; it often fails due to linking or other dependency-related errors.
Huh? If you’re compiling your own code in a mainstream Linux distribution then I’m not surprised you have to nuke and pave.
It’s a distribution, meaning they build and distribute the software for you.
Flatpak deals with all the applications that don’t need to be built into the operating system itself.
I've had no failures building major projects like CPython (multiple versions) as long as I RTFM and ensure that clearly identified build dependencies are installed first.
The way I started was by installing Arch Linux on a 32GB flash drive. No I did not write the ISO onto the flash drive. I used Virtualbox to load the arch Linux iso and mounted the flash drive into Virtualbox and installed onto the flash drive as if it was a regular HDD/SSD. The only annoyance was figuring out the bootloader for this particularly exotic way of installing Arch Linux.
After that I spent most of my time really just doing everything in a web browser for several months. I did this, because I wanted to have a less distracting computing environment where almost nothing was installed. The fact that games didn't run on Linux was supposed to be a feature, until I realized that they mostly run on Linux anyway. Then I bought a 512GB SSD and installed Arch Linux on it in 2018 and never even thought or cared about what Linux distribution I am using ever since.
I’ve been using Linux on my desktop since 2004 or so.
And lack of games is always brought up as if gaming was one essential feature of a computer. That’s what consoles are for.
Anyway, desktop Linux keeps getting relatively better when you compare the increasing hell that a Windows user is subject to.
(Hello hello Ricardo)
That having been said, most games work fine on Linux nowadays anyway.
I don't game, so that doesn't bother me, though I read it works pretty well these days.
I've used nothing but Linux since, of various flavors. Use it for work, use it for home. Everything just works.
One thing I will note is that despite my general distaste for Electron, it's probably been the biggest recent accelerant for making this all easier. Slack, VSCode, Teams(yuck), MongoDB compass, Postman, etc all work flawlessly. Prior to it existing, we were stuck with Wine, open source alternatives in various states of disrepair, or missing out. I can't even remember the last time I had to 'miss out' because of Linux, I think it was some proprietary VPN blob around 2010 or so.
No Linux-based OS has gained mainstream acceptance. You can try to blame that on marketing or corporations or whatever, but I don't buy that. I think open source software is the best way to make technically-superior software, but I think often it's a poor way to create the best user experiences, because the kinds of people who create open source software often don't care to focus on UX.
> That’s what consoles are for.
Millions (tens? hundreds? more?) of Windows gamers would disagree with you. You buy a console and do what you want, sure, go for it. But there is a market for Windows gaming, a very big one.
Gnome is a very well managed project, but its resources aren’t infinite.
Or they do, but it's not the average Windows user's UX they focus on.
They are, that's why I have to dual boot. If my games worked on Linux, I would never run Windows. DirectX is their lock-in.
The PC is more or less dead and Linux on desktop is even more dead.
I know I know it's been around 2 or even 3%. It's laughable. And 99% of its users are hackers (programmers/developers/engineers/scientists/etc).
What was the issue? Immediately after power management initialization during the first boot the system seen that the battery was in a bad condition and tried to hibernate but for some reason crashed instead. Out of warranty, the battery is extremely hard to replace, so a registry quirk injected through a Linux boot cd immediately after setup helped.
Is Windows actually ready for desktop?
Android applications made for older versions DO NOT work nowadays. Windows applications usually do not install and to run them you have to install them on old version and upgrade. Backward compatibility is no longer the key point for OS creators, and I would say they event want to break it somehow (like Android new set of permissions and removing old apps from the store)
Correct, there are some Gnu/Linux-en, and there is Android/Linux.
Which may not be a classical desktop OS, but some platforms like Samsung phones emulate floating window management and multitasking, making it an okay desktop OS. And Android has a huge market share, so perhaps "Linux won over Windows" already, just not on the desktop.
Did the author do any fact checking, proton (developed for Steam OS) runs so many games, it is unbelievable.
Trollish opinion piece behind the link.
In Wine/Windows I run Windows applications from the 90s. In Windows 11 64 you can install and use Office 97.
In Linux nothing even close is possible. People do care about old applications. They really do.
By the way, any Android applications using Google’s old messaging APIs no longer work and need to be rewritten to use fire base. I know people who were bitten by that multiple times since Google had to keep reinventing push notifications.
Again, 0.01% of people in the world could do it, 0.0001% would do it.
That's all you need to know about Linux compatibility.
And don't get me started on LD_LIBRARY_PATH not working for glibc but you conveniently "forgot" about that.
Compatibility "exists" except when it doesn't and it's extremely hard to achieve even if you're a professional.
In other words it doesn't exist.
By the way, when someone makes an assertion that something is always true, it only takes 1 counter example to disprove it. The assertion that you cannot run old Linux binaries on a newer system has been disproven by a counter example.
For 99.99% of users this "ability" does not exist. End of story. Period.
I don't care about hacks on tops of tricks on top of hacks. People are not interested in this madness.
Every second comment in this discussion comes from a hardcore software developer who desperately tries to vindicate core Linux flaws by providing workarounds which would work only for people like you.
This is NOT how the world works. This is NOT what people care about or interested in. If cars, refrigerators, microwave ovens worked like that no one would buy them.
If it's Linux? Ah, totally fine.
I'm done with this exercise in futility.
I dare you to grab a Linux distro from the late 90s/earlier 00s and run any application that uses GTK1 or Qt1/2 on your Ubuntu 24.
Without spending insurmountable amounts of time. You will fail miserably. Your 0.0001% example is pure BS.
That said, you refuse to recognize that you are wrong no matter how much evidence is presented and even go so far as to present evidence debunking what you say while claiming it supports what you say. If I were to run a graphical application from the 90s on my machine, you would accuse me of making up the result. Since you will say the same thing even if I did this exercise, why should I bother?
What does "not ready for the desktop" even mean? Its been ready for MY desktop for over 20 years. Points 1,2,3 and 4 are pretty much wrong. Point 5 is a problem for other OSes too (there are bugs in applications!), point 6 is only relevant if you have particular hardware you want to work with Linux, and point 7 is not my experience.
Now I'm using a Dell, and again, full hardware support with zero issues using Wayland and Pipewire. And I use Slackware, not exactly a sophisticated distro, but one that just offers upstream software with no modification.
- You're using the wrong Linux distribution
- You're using the wrong Linux kernel version
- You have the wrong hardware
- You're using Linux incorrectly
- You're asking for too much
- Go debug or fix it yourself.
Edit: This is sarcasm by the way. These bullets come from the article.
In all seriousness though. I think another poster had the right idea. Linux requires a mindset shift. You must be willing to be a master of your own destiny. I've used Linux largely problem free for 10 years. I took some time to learn how to do things "the Linux way" but once I did it's been smooth sailing.
I recently have had to use Windows for work and it's annoying as hell. Every day after lunch one of my monitors just turns off and rearranges all my windows. On Linux, I could dig into the problem, and worse case just have a xrandr script to hack a solution together. On Windows I'm just SOL looking and dead Windows message board threads.
It's giving a mix of "You're holding it wrong" and Stack Overflow's "Question Marked as Duplicate"
Based on my experience on Meta, and various random Reddit threads where people complain: in like 90% of cases where someone complains that a Stack Overflow question was unjustly marked as a duplicate, I could go take a look and then write out a clear step by step explanation of not only how it is very obviously a duplicate by Stack Overflow's standards, but exactly how to apply the advice from answers on the target to the original problem.
Even if I didn't previously know anything about the technologies involved.
Please keep in mind that it is not the purpose of Stack Overflow to solve the problem you are currently encountering. The purpose of Stack Overflow is to answer a question that can be useful to others. If your program doesn't work, it is explicitly, by policy, your responsibility to debug first; the point of creating a Minimal Reproducible Example is to demonstrate that you have found the problem and have a legitimate question about why it is a problem.
Someone who closes your question as a duplicate is doing you a kindness. You immediately get answers and don't have to wait for someone else to write one. Closing duplicates is also doing everyone else a kindness, by helping to make sure that, when people use a search engine to find an answer on Stack Overflow, they all end up at the right place with the best-stated version of the question and the best answers for it. In many cases, the person who identifies a duplicate has gone out of the way to figure out the problem (despite an unclear explanation or an attempt to sneak in side questions about unrelated matters).
It's a shame you can't downvote submissions here, and flagging is not appropriate. We've heard these tired arguments a million times, if all of this gets fixed, the author will find another reason why he can't or won't switch.
This is the reaction from Microsoft when I want my Windows clock to display this niche feature called 'seconds'
1. This section is basically pedantry. "you cant use the same software across multiple Linux distros". OK? And PC software doesn't run on a Mac. They are different OS's "Linux" being confused as it's own OS, is just, whatever.
2. Windows and Macs have plenty of bugs too. So much so that we don't do in-place server upgrades, it's a full rebuild each version. I mean look at the Windows 10-11 upgrade situation, it's not great.
3. Lack of general software and games - What? You can play AAA games on Steam on Linux out of the box for the most part. I will concede that industry specific software is likely going to be Windows only, but you can run Windows in a VM. There are options here.
4. Network file sharing isn't any different than on Windows, this is just nonsense.
5. Lack of funding - hand wavy and again, whatever.
6. Hardware support - I haven't really had hardware issues in years. Every Lenovo laptop I've installed Linux on works flawlessly, even Wifi drivers are present in setup.
7. Nonsense again. The Linux community is super helpful.
Is Arch the exception?
The Mint forums are helpful enough, but they tend to demand tons of ultimately irrelevant system info up front, commonly misdiagnose problems, and give blanket advice that often ignores more detailed concerns. (Also, the site has been very unstable lately.)
I was thinking about adding a "Security" section but I wasn't convinced it was necessary. Security in Linux is horrible in general.
* People use `sudo` for anything and everything all the time. * `git pull whatever_crap_from_the_web` and run it happily. * Tens of thousands of pieces of malware via NPMs and other frameworks. * No AV of any kind (the one that actually executes code in a sandbox and verifies its safe). * Permissions/users/groups/pam.d/logind/selinux/apparmor - it's a huge intricate mess.
Linux on the other hand has absolutely nothing and it's still "OK".
"Windows is not perfect and thus Linux is OK". I've heard that way too many times. Sorry, doesn't work for me.
Nothing (!) like that exists in the Linux world aside from PGP cross singing which barely any projects use because of its sheer complexity.
Don't lie about Windows and don't lie about Linux.
And Windows 10/11 both mandate that installers are signed before you can even launch them, so there's a very decent first line of defense which is TOTALLY missing in Linux.
Also, "trusted sources"? Who and why would you trust? Seasoned engineers in my company git pull any crap from the web and run it happily without thinking twice because AGILE and things like RoR. Who do you trust among thousands of modules?
God damn it.
Linux fans will make up all sorts of crappy pseudo-arguments to portray it as a decent/secure/stable OS and it's none of that.
On servers where you don't touch anything and never install third-party software? Yeah, surely. No one cares.
As for Windows, there is no signing requirement according to Microsoft:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...You are the one making stuff up.
This is how it works and looks:
https://docs.anythingllm.com/installation-desktop/windows
https://github.com/gitextensions/gitextensions/issues/7738
I never said it was a requirement.
What's more you can enable GPO policies to prevent the user from running any new/unknown apps.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/so...
Good luck implementing that in Linux.
Continue to use a crap pseudo-OS with no security and believe everyone around is a geek who is willing to learn CLI, bash, vi, git bisect, reading mans, etc. just to use it.
You have now accused me of saying something I'd never said, you crossed the line and goodbye.
I mean, that's just false. Most drivers are done as kernel modules and you can push/pull them in without missing a beat.
if he's talking about graphics cards or similar subsystems - you might need a reboot, much like Windows does.
IMO, this reads like a gamer reviewing Linux because they thought it would be cool without knowing much about to use it as a workstation to get shit done.
0.1% of people in the world could that. 0.001% of people in the world would do that.
That's not false, your understanding of a decent OS is just lacking. In Windows you can swap drivers however you want given they support your Windows version.
Windows is installed on 2 billion PCs, give or take. It works great on them, too. Long gone are the days of malware waves or driver failures that break the system.
Linux is on 40 millions.
And the amount of pain I see daily on Linux-related forums trumps Windows' woes by an insane margin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike-related_IT_ou...
Windows systems often suffer from cryptolockers, which could be considered malware waves.
You have a stratification bias by looking at forums where people are asking for help. I have installed Linux for a number of non-computer people to solve Windows problems and it has served them well. They all like it better than Windows. The average person really is fine with a Ubuntu install. The only reason Windows has such usage is that it is installed by default due to history. If a Linux distribution were installed by default, there would not be many Windows users.
2 billion users don't notice too much "limping" and "telemetry".
1. This entire post is whataboutism, the article is about Linux
2. NSA/CIA/FBI and pretty much all governments of the world use Windows that is ostensibly riddled with spyware and telemetry
3. In the past 20 years not a single person with WireShark and MITM has proven that Windows leaks any personal data (e.g. files). This can be set up in less than 10 minutes. Go produce a single shred of effing evidence I dare you!!
Parroting BS on the Internet doesn't make your post any more valid.
That's disgusting coming from an "IT specialist". You have issues with basic logic.
It leaked a while ago that Microsoft Windows automatically uploads WiFi passwords to their servers, which are sensitive information. This was after the WiFi sense debacle.
As for not noticing limping, of course they would not notice it when they have never seen the machines run faster. Install a Linux distribution on the machine and they will be amazed by the speed. It happens every single time I do it.
I am not sure what you think the your TLA and governments remark achieves. It just seems to be the ravings of someone spreading FUD to me.
I've challenged you a couple of times already. You keep writing walls of text without proving anything you claim.
You've not proven that you can "easily" run old graphical software in your modern Linux.
You've not proven that Windows is leaking data left and right.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42557373
Knowing that Microsoft uploads WiFi passwords to its servers does not even need wireshark. You just need to log into the same Microsoft account on a different machine and observe that your WiFi passwords are synced. Given that the upload is likely encrypted, it would be difficult to observe the passwords being uploaded to Microsoft servers using wireshark. While you would see the packets, you would not know what they contain unless you somehow get the encryption keys out of the system encryption library.
Your prior remarks on running old Linux software did not require that things be easy, which is a matter of opinion, or graphical. It is possible with the right libraries as modern Linux systems (minus Android unless you install a X11 server) can display X11 applications.
I have used Linux for just shy of 30 years. It is different than Windows and far more powerful. It is just that people do not want to learn different things. Plus Linux has no spyware.
These days, you can do anything on Linux that you do on Windows, except for some 3d Gaming. And that is because hardware vendors refuse to support Linux in the way they support Windows. It is the fault of Video vendors, most notability Nvidia.
So off to my usual rant :) If I was the "ruler" of Linux, I would make sure no Nvidia GPUs would work under Linux until Nvidia opens up their GPU.
The differences from Windows versions 7 to 10 to 11 are substantial. To me it seemed like a consistent desktop experience from Linux Mint is much better for those who do not want change at all.
Even GPU drivers work fine for 90-99% of games on Linux. The biggest issue keeping certain games from running on Linux is actually anti-cheat support:
https://areweanticheatyet.com/
Because Linux does not support hardware (or at least new hardware) in the same Windows does.
AMD makes new graphics card, steps on Windows vs Linux to release an updated driver to support it
Windows - Update driver, release via Windows Update / Website etc
Linux - Send patches months in advance to the LKML using email, make sure any patches needed in Mesa are also sent in with a completely different system. Then, wait for your patches to be peer reviewed and land, then wait for a kernel release, then wait for distros to package said kernel and release it, which if you're on a distro that fixes to a kernel version, could be waiting 6 months.
And even that's gotten better in recent years, too. Nvidia hasn't fixed everything, but two of the biggest concerns (not supporting Wayland and fighting community drivers) have began to be addressed recently. It's beginning to look like Nvidia is taking desktop Linux seriously, albeit slowly. Most of these changes landed in the 555-series drivers, which are still pretty fresh, maybe even still in beta iirc.
I've used Linux for as much only I'm a tad more humble. Mentioned more than a dozen times in the kernel git log. Not a big achievement but kinda shows I'm not just a bystander.
You've never said how much time you've wasted fixing Linux or making software work. Must be a non-issue I guess.
Exceptionally humble, indeed.
> You've never said how much time you've wasted fixing Linux or making software work.
This comes up often and I'm always fascinated by the implied assumption that time isn't wasted fixing Windows or MacOS computers and making software work on those systems. The age-old "No, I will not fix your computer!" is not a Linux meme - in 99% of cases it refers to a Windows machine.
We can trade anecdata until the heat death of the universe, and in fact you've nicely listed many of the pro/con points in your articles. However having read both versions (current/technical and final), I must agree with parent. This is just a rant from someone who likes Windows more.
I also want to call out your "solving linux" section (in the technical article). You've listed basically the entire Ubuntu playbook (which is, btw, a UK company, not an African company). Mark "poached" debian developers (DDs), poured millions of his own money into it, spearheaded many of the desktop-specific innovations (now supplanted by other software, but Ubuntu provided the initial push), created an app store, did an enormous amount of work popularizing Linux specifically for the desktop, was the first to start "officially checked and approved" hardware list, etc.
And the results show even if we don't attribute them to Ubuntu today, and even if we're using alternatives: Linux desktop today is a much smoother experience than 20 years ago.
So, while I can sympathize with many of the points in your technical article (https://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.t...) even if I do not agree with them, the linked one really seems like distillation to a "I like Windows more" rant.
And no I've spent far less time "fixing" Windows. In fact I don't remember doing that ever. I've had multiple cases when Windows stopped booting and in absolute most of them I just had to reinstall the system from scratch. That's all "I've wasted".
Linux on the other hand?
"It works for you everything is made up in the article".
Never mind how once I had to fix a glaring issue in the Linux kernel which rendered tens of thousands of systems unbootable and which took me over 24 hours of hard work to unravel.
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206175
Yeah, indeed I've never had anything like that in Windows in 30+ years that I've been using it. Never once a Windows update rendered the system completely dead. And I'm not talking about my system, I talking about hundreds.
Lastly I'm just a poor Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer who actually overlooks a lot of stuff and sees a staggering number of fixes in every stable Linux release.
I follow way too many bug trackers and LKML as well. It's all good, please disperse.
That's one way of dealing with it.
> Never mind how once I had to fix a glaring issue in the Linux kernel which rendered tens of thousands of systems unbootable.
You didn't have to fix it, you could've booted the old kernel. You chose to debug the issue and help. That's commendable, but do you think people (who work on Windows or hardware, or in IT departments in any organization) don't do that for Windows as well?
> And I'm not talking about my system, I talking about hundreds.
Is it tens of thousands, or hundreds?
> Lastly I'm just a poor Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer who actually overlooks a lot of stuff and sees a staggering number of fixes in every stable Linux release. I follow way too many bug trackers and LKML as well.
Well if you're Linux kernel bugzilla maintainer, it's natural that you see many more Linux bugs than Windows or MacOS bugs. Again, commendable that you choose to participate, help, and make it better! You choose to live on the bleeding edge, and so you bleed. But that's far from typical Linux desktop user experience.
> Could you be specific about what constitutes "a rant"?
Well, your entire comment is a rant: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rant
You're obviously very passionate about, and involved with, Linux. But you also seem to hate it so I'm confused why do it? Buy a Mac, be happy, live and let live, etc.
Windows can be reinstalled, Linux bugs never go away by themselves.
> You chose to debug the issue and help.
No, people don't do that in Windows because Microsoft has much better QA/QC. Not a single Windows update since 1998 has rendered my system unbootable. Microsoft is certainly not perfect and Windows sometimes has regression but those normally affect very few people.
> Is it tens of thousands, or hundreds?
Windows installation user base: 2 billion. Linux: 40 million. Have fun with mental gymnastics.
> You choose to live on the bleeding edge, and so you bleed.
There's a huge number of bugs affecting "stable" Linux distros that use "stable" software including the kernel. Linux bugs are not specific to the bleeding edge but they are more prominent.
Here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219638
> Well, your entire comment is a rant: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rant
This is not a counter argument and I will not waste any more of my time with you. Try using the dictionary argument with your children, "You are a retard, my boy! Why? Look it up in the Merriam Webster dictionary, that's why".
The amount of BSOD I've seen and unfixable issues after spending hours googling and browsing windows shitty support sites are just the tip of the iceberg.
Windows is utter trash and the only reason it won is because of the monopoly it established, forcing everyone to use it, hardware manufacturers to support it and once the dominance was established, you can't escape it.
MacOS is literally only used with hardware lock-in. People don't choose it. It's forced onto whoever chooses to overpay for an Apple computer.
The only reason Linux won't win the desktop is because it doesn't have a monopoly to support it.
These discussions that pretend any of this is due to merits of one OS over the other are moot. It doesn't matter at all when it comes to who or how many people use it. These are all determined by external factors.
Last time I did it was in the Windows XP SP0 days.
> The amount of BSOD I've seen and unfixable issues after spending hours googling and browsing windows shitty support sites are just the tip of the iceberg.
When was the last time you got BSOD? I've not seen them after Vista.
> The only reason Linux won't win the desktop is because it doesn't have a monopoly to support it.
"Win"? Start with software compatibility. There's no one Linux, there's a billion of incompatible distros that make it impossible to run old software.
> These discussions that pretend any of this is due to merits of one OS over the other are moot.
API and ABI compatibility are swear words to you, I get it.
I'm sorry if you don't care about those, the world will shrug you off. No other OS has this madness.
> by external factors.
Yeah, for Linux fans it's always someone or something else. The fact that Linux is a bug-ridden mess of software with no compatibility and no stability isn't an issue of course. It's because Microsoft/Oracle/NVIDIA actively interfere with Linux. Or aliens? Must be aliens.
Keep your ad ridden Windows mate, you clearly deserve it. Not worth my time to answer this low level of a reply.
I've been running Linux exclusively since RedHat 5.0 (no, that's not RHEL, that's more than a decade earlier).
This entire article is 1000% true. Every word of it. You can "opine" and "disagree" with it as much as you want. It's become too damn popular in the western world lately to opine about anything.
Feel free to opine about gravity, just don't fall off the top of a 10-storey building.
BTW this is why the entire world is running "ad-ridden"/"privacy-invading" Windows.
People run it because
1. Windows doesn't get in the way and allows them to run their software.
2. Windows is rock stable and doesn't break randomly after every upgrade (sans occasional conflicts with third-party software here and there affecting ~0.05% of people).
3. Windows is simple.
Linux has no implied compatibility, it's full of regressions, it's complicated as hell and it still has poor HW support. Yes.
> Windows is rock stable and doesn't break randomly after every upgrade (sans occasional conflicts with third-party software here and there affecting ~0.05% of people).
What? I've lost count of the amount of times that I've had to restore botched Windows updates. It has gotten better lately, but it still happened more times than I've had to deal with update issues on my Linux installation. And I run my Linux near the bleeding edge where, in theory, everything should break all the time, right? Well, it doesn't.
My point stands. People don't choose their OS. It's chosen by the hardware manufacturer, their employers or their requirements. I'm gonna repeat this because it's extremely important: people don't spend a single second choosing their OS.
If you want to game, you have to use Windows (yes I know about Proton and love it, but mainstream online games require Windows). If you want to use your computer for work, you need Office. Even with Google Docs, people in my country simply default to the Office suite. Again, not because they choose it, but because it was already chosen for them by the monopoly that is already in place.
Aside from Office, you have all of the other specialized tools like the Adobe suite and many others that force you to use Windows again.
Windows doesn't have anyone competing with them. Their monopoly guarantees they can get away with anything. It's not a competition.
Windows 11 is a great example of this. Nobody asked for it. It's garbage with more ads in it. It wasn't built to improve the system for users, it was built to sell ads and force people to buy new computers. Being the only option allows them to do all of this. Windows simply doesn't need to add, change or remove features because of competitors since there aren't any.
People run Windows because it works. FTFY.
The number of times something in Linux has broken over the past 25 years for me has been insane.
How about the Linux kernel failing to boot for three releases in a row, a regression that affected tens of thousands of laptops?
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=206175
Of course in the unicorn land of Linux cultists it "works" too, but then you open any Linux related forum and multiple threads about something not working anymore are posted daily.
I invite you to r/Fedora for example.
> My point stands. People don't choose their OS.
There's no point.
There's an actual OS, Windows.
And then there's a software compilation X version N that comes with no warranties whatsoever, it's called Linux Distro X version N.
People choose to run an actual OS with the ability to create and run third-party software for at least a decade, in the case of Windows for up to three decades.
Linux offers NONE of that.
No stability, no quality, no QA/AC and no implied or enforced backward or forward compatibility.
Continue to OVERLOOK all of that and believe "But mom, Windows is preinstalled!"
I know a TON of people who have left Linux after a few years of struggling with it at every turn. They are all now running Windows or MacOS.
> Of course in the unicorn land of Linux cultists it "works" too, but then you open any Linux related forum and multiple threads about something not working anymore are posted daily.
As opposed to Windows where nothing ever breaks? That doesn't make any sense. It's a known fact that Linux users report way more problems than Windows users because they are simply more technical, more in line with the open source spirit and dig deeper.
When I had issues on my Windows, it was extremely hard to find any solution online. Nobody goes to r/Windows for their troubles. From the few answers I've found, pretty much all of them ended up being "re-install Windows" or "re-install parts of Windows".
> People choose to run an actual OS with the ability to create and run third-party software for at least a decade, in the case of Windows for up to three decades.
Sorry but, that's simply not true for the average person. I'm not talking about the typical HN user here. The absolute vast majority of users *do not choose an OS*. Surely you can't argue with that, right?
> Continue to OVERLOOK all of that
No. I'm well aware that there are many things to improve on Linux (especially desktop linux), but my whole point is that it's utterly irrelevant until people actually get to choose an OS. Linux could have zero issues and work flawlessly everywhere and it would still have almost nobody using it outside of our tech savvy bubble.
If Linux as a whole was as bad as you say, it wouldn't be used in the majority of computers in the world. It's only desktop Linux that suffers from your complaints, and it's simply because it doesn't have companies with infinite money and monopolies behind it making it more seamless for the average user while forcing vendors to support it.
For everyone else, the reason they don't use Linux on their desktop is because it didn't come installed on it.
If somebody does to desktops like what Google did for smartphones, then Linux will finally have its moment.
Somebody does to desktops what Google did for smartphone. The company is called Microsoft, and the behaviour is called blatant monopoly abuse.
They didn't even use the same graphics drivers till late.
lol... so, all of it? Linux is a kernel.
Regardless, my point had absolutely nothing to do with technology. Android's popularity has absolutely nothing to do with Linux and/or what it shipped with or didn't ship with. Its popularity has everything to do with the fact that it shipped preinstalled on devices that people bought. Linux isn't going to become popular on desktops until it is shipped on desktops.
Replaced them with Windows.
Because the Linux desktop is and continues to be a sup-bar experience for the average joe. GNOME requires a modification to even run Discord properly, but anyone who points this out gets shouted at.
People don't not use Linux because they've considered it and found out that their applications won't run on it. They don't use it because they've not considered it at all, because 99%+ of people do not choose the OS on their computer. They go to the electronics store and buy a Dell, HP, Acer, Lenovo, or Apple. There's no Asus Eee running Xandros at my local Best Buy, and if there ever was, it wasn't on the shelf for very long.
My experience lines up with this.
Both my elderly parents run Zorin OS on their separate laptops for the past 6 years, they understand as a kind of 'free windows'.
They don't care about the inner workings, they go online, check email, do shopping, make travel arrangements, print a ridiculous amount of paper. And I stopped getting calls because 'the printer is not working'.
That's already happened, and Google did it. They are called Chromebooks. They are Linux underneath, use the GNU userspace stack and Wayland for GUI. They have a button that installs Debian, and GUI packages you "apt install" appear in the Chrome app launch folder.
Apparently ChromeOS is being swallowed by Android, which I suspect isn't a big move. Crosini, the LXC thingy that hosts Debian on ChromeOS, has already been ported. That means Android will be powering laptops. Does that make it a Desktop OS? If so, that does the we can count Android's 45% market share of all personal computing devices towards a Desktop OS? And if we do that, does that mean Linux has finally won the desktop wars? By any definition it's already won the personal computing devices wars.
> That means Android will be powering laptops. Does that make it a Desktop OS? If so, that does the we can count Android's 45% market share of all personal computing devices towards a Desktop OS?
OS market share for a particular device type is typically measured as the respective portion of the OSes that run on that hardware. If you are looking at desktop/laptop market share, you'd only count that :)