Comment by sho_hn
6 months ago
So both of the other big two desktop OSs now have official mechanisms to run Linux VMs to host Linux-native applications.
You can make some kind of argument from this that Linux has won; certainly the Linux syscall API is now perhaps the most ubiquitous application API.
> Linux has won
Needing two of the most famous non-Linux operating systems for the layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems is not particularly a victory if you look at it from that perspective. Just highlights the piss-poor state of Linux desktop even after all these years. For the average person, it's still terrible on every front and something I still have a hard time recommending when things so often go belly up.
Before you jump on me, every year, I install the latest Fedora/Ubuntu (supposedly the noob-friendly recommendations) on a relatively modern PC/Laptop and not once have I stopped and thought "huh, this is actually pretty usable and stable".
I am ux designer and forever Mac user. I also try Fedora on random stuff. I am not sure why but last time tried it i got Blender circa 10 years ago vibes from desktop linux gnome.
Everybody has been making fun of Blender forever but they consistently made things better step by step and suddenly few UX enhancements the wind started shift. It completely flipped and now everybody is using it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if desktop Linux days are still ahead. It’s not only Valve and gaming. Many things seems start to work in tandem. Wayland, Pipewire, Flatpack, atomic distros… hey even Gnome is starting to look pretty.
It definitely could happen, but there are two things standing in the way of it:
- there's not one desktop Linux that everyone uses (or even uses by default), and it's not resolving any time soon
- I use Ubuntu+Gnome by default, and I wouldn't say it looks great at all, other than the nice Ubuntu desktop background, and the large pretty sidebar icons
- open source needs UX people to make their stuff look professional. I'm looking at you, LibreOffice
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Atomic distros (fedora’s specifically) are what got me to stick to desktop Linux. That was after seeing how well the Steam Deck worked, and therefore Proton. I haven’t reinstalled in almost 2 years. Not even got the distro itch once.
I've been hearing that for 20 years though...
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The problem with the Linux desktop isn't usability, it's the lack of corporate control software. Without corporate MDM and antivirus, you'll find it rather annoying to get a native Linux desktop in many companies.
For Windows and MacOS you can throw a few quick bucks over the wall and tick a whole bunch of ISO checkboxes. For Linux, you need more bespoke software customized to your specific needs, and that requires more work. Sure, the mindless checkboxes add nothing to whatever compliance you're actually trying to achieve, but in the end the auditor is coming over with a list of checkboxes that determine whether you pass or not.
I haven't had a Linux system collapse on me for years now thanks to Flatpak and all the other tools that remove the need for scarcely maintained external repositories in my package manager. I find Windows to be an incredible drag to install compared to any other operating system, though. Setup takes forever, updates take even longer, there's a pretty much mandatory cloud login now, and the desktop looks like a KDE distro tweaked to hell (in a bad way).
Gnome's "who needs a start button when there's one on the keyboard" approach may take some getting used to, but Valve's SteamOS shows that if you prevent users from mucking about with the system internals because gary0x136 on Arch Forums said you need to remove all editors but vi, you end up with a pretty stable system.
In defense of MDM, those checkboxes aren’t even entirely useless. It’s so nice being able to demonstrate that every laptop in the company has an encrypted hard drive, which you should be doing anyway. It turns a lost or stolen laptop from a major situation to a minor financial loss and inconvenience.
Yes, a lot of MDM feature are just there to check ISOwhatever boxes. Some are legitimately great, though. And yes, even though I’m personally totally comfortable running a Linux laptop, come SOC2 audit time it’s way harder to prove that a bunch of Linux boxes meet required controls when you can’t just screenshot the Jamf admin page and call it good.
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I'd say that's a fairly web development-centric take. I work at an embedded shop that happily puts a few million cars running Linux on the road every year, and we have hundreds of devs mainly running Linux to develop for Linux.
The average person is not dishing out software that runs on millions of cars from the average PC/laptop they got off the shelves from their bestbuy equivalent. I’d say the same for the average developer. I’d also guess if given a choice and unless there are technical limitations that prevent it from being so, even the devs in your shop would rather prefer to switch to a usable daily driver OS to get things done.
The desktop marketshare stats back me up on the earlier point and last I checked, no distro got anywhere close?
Sure, Android is the exception (if we agree to consider) but until we get serious dev going there and until Android morphs into a full-fledged desktop OS, my point stands.
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> Before you jump on me, every year, I install the latest Fedora/Ubuntu (supposedly the noob-friendly recommendations) on a relatively modern PC/Laptop and not once have I stopped and thought "huh, this is actually pretty usable and stable".
Funnily enough that's how I feel every time I use Windows or Mac. Yet I'm not bold enough to call them "piss poor". I'm pretty sure I - mostly - feel like that because they are different from what I'm used to.
As someone who grew up running Microsoft OSes, starting with DOS, then Windows and who has used a Mac laptop since the Windows Vista days, my perspective on the usability of Linux Desktop is unrelated to it simply being "different from what I'm used to."
Transitioning from Windows to Mac was much more of an adjustment than Linux Desktop. It's just that Linux has too many rough edges. While it's possible I've simply been unlucky, everytime I've tried Linux it's been small niggling issue after small niggling issue that I have to work around and it feels like a death of a thousand paper cuts. (BTW I first tried Linux desktop back in the late 90s and most recently used it as my main work laptop for 9 months this past year.)
Note, I'm more than happy to use Linux as a server. I run Linux servers at home and have for decades. But the desktop environments I've tried have all been irksome.
Note that I'm not mentioning particular distros or desktop environments because I've tried various over the years.
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> Just highlights the piss-poor state of Linux desktop even after all these years.
What exactly is wrong with it? I prefer KDE to either Windows or MacOS. Obviously a Linux desktop is not going to be identical to whatever you use so there is a learning curve, but the same is true, and to a much greater extent, for moving from Windows to MacOS.
> layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems
> or the average person
The "layman" or "average person" does not develop software.
The average person has plenty of problems dealing with Windows. They are just used to putting up with being unable to get things to work. Ran into that (a multi-function printer/scanner not working fully) with someone just yesterday.
If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software (at any rate not developing software that matters to anyone).
I have switched a lot of people to Linux (my late dad, my ex-wife, my daughter's primary school principal) who preferred it to Windows and my kids grew up using it. No problems.
> What exactly is wrong with it? I prefer KDE to either Windows or MacOS.
KDE is my choice as well (Xfce #2) if I have to be stuck with a Linux distro for a long period but I'd rather not put myself in that position because it's still going to be a nightmare. My most recent install from this year of Kubuntu/KDE Fedora had strange bugs where applications froze and quitting them were more painful than macOS/Windows, or that software updates through their app store thingy end up in some weird state that won't reset no matter how many times I reboot, hard crashes and so on on a relatively modern PC (5900X, RTX 3080, 32G RAM). I had to figure out the commands to force reset/clean up things surrounding the package management in order to continue to install/update packages. This is the kind of thing I never face with Silicon macs or even Windows 10/11.
This is a dealbreaker for the vast majority of people but let's come to your more interesting take:
> If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software
And that sums up the vast majority of Linux users who still think every other year is the year of "Linux desktop". It's that deeply ignorant attitude instead of acknowledging all these years of clusterfuck after clusterfuck of GUIs, desktop envs, underlying tech changes (Xorg, Wayland) and myriads of confusing package distribution choices (debs, rpms, snaps, flatpaks, appimages and so on), that no sane person is ever going to embrace a Linux distro as their daily driver.
You need a reality reset if you think getting used to Linux is a qualifier to making great software.
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If you're just kicking the tyres on Fedora or Ubuntu, you're not getting KDE. I love it myself, but I know it's there. The average curious person is going to get whatever Gnome thinks they deserve at that point in time.
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> If you find it hard to adjust to a Linux desktop you should not be developing software
For most it’s not a case of whether you can do it, it’s whether it’s worth doing it. For me Linux lacks the killer feature that makes any of that adjustment worth my (frankly, valuable) time. That’s doubly so for any of us that develop user facing software: our users aren’t going to be on Linux so we need to have a more mainstream OS to hand for testing anyway.
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Linux has not won on the desktop and probably never will, granted. But linux has won for running server-side / headless software, and has done so for years.
That said, counterpoint to my own, Android is Linux and has billions of installations, and SteamOS is Linux. I think the next logical step for SteamOS is desktop PCs, since (anecdotally) gaming PCs only really play games and use a browser or web-tech-based software like Discord. If that does happen, it'll be a huge boost to Linux on the consumer desktop.
> not once have I stopped and thought "huh, this is actually pretty usable and stable".
I think we need to have a specific audience in mind when saying whether or not it's stable. My Arch desktop (user: me) is actually really stable, despite the reputation. I have something that goes sideways maybe once a year or so, and it's a fairly easy fix for me when that does happen. But despite that, I would never give my non-techy parents an Arch desktop. Different users can have different ideas of stable.
My problem with Arch 12 years ago was exactly the fact that things would just randomly stop working and I often wouldn’t know until I needed it. What drew the line for me was when I needed to open a USB pendrive and it wouldn’t mount — if I remember correctly something related to udisk at the time and a race condition. I spent like 30 minutes looking into it and it was just embarrassing as I had someone over my shoulder waiting for those files.
This is when I gave up and switched to Apple. I am now moving back to Linux but Arch still seems like it’s too hacky and too little structured organizationally to be considered trustworthy. So, Ubuntu or Debian it is, but fully haven’t decided yet.
Still, I would be happy to be convinced otherwise. I’m particularly surprised Steam uses it for their OS.
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I'm not going to jump on you, but for me Linux is much more friendly than Windows or macOS. I tried to use macOS, just because their Apple silicone computers are so powerful, but in the end I abandoned it and switched back to Thinkpad with Linux. Windows is outright unusable and macOS is barely usable for me, while Linux just works.
In my experience, Linux is great for the type of user who would be well-suited with a Chromebook. Stick a browser, office suite and Zoom on it, and enable automatic updates, and they'll be good to go.
Linux is great for users on the extreme ends of the spectrum, with grandma who only needs email on one end and tiling WM terminal juggler on the other. Where it gets muddy is for everybody in the middle.
That’s not to say it can’t or doesn’t work for some people in the middle, but for this group it’s much more likely that there’s some kind of fly in the soup that’s preventing them from switching.
It’s where I’m at. I keep secondary/tertiary Linux boxes around and stay roughly apprised of the state of the Linux desktop but I don’t think I could ever use it as my “daily driver” unless I wrote my own desktop environment because nothing out there checks all of the right boxes.
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FOSS OS dev is slow but is built on cross collaboration so the foundation is strong. Corporate OS has the means to tune to end user usage and can move very fast when business interests align with user experience.
When you are a DE that’s embedded in FOSS no one has an appetite to fund user experience the same way as corporate OS can.
We do have examples where this can work, like with the steam deck/steamOS but it’s almost counter to market incentives because of how slow dev can become.
I see the same problem with chat and protocol adoption. IRC as a protocol is too slow for companies who want to move fast and provide excellent UX, so they ditch cross collaboration in order to move fast.
The moment I read "Needing two of the most famous non-Linux operating systems for the layman to sanely develop programs for Linux systems" I knew this comment would be a big pile of unfactual backed opinions.
Fedora/Debian + AMD ThinkPad here. Haven't had any crashes or instability in 5+ years.
Terrible on every front? I'm sorry, but it's hard to take this seriously. I've been daily driving Fedora with Cinnamon for the past 4 years and it works just fine. I use Mac and Windows on a regular basis and both are chock full of AI bloatware and random BS. On the same hardware, Linux absolutely runs circles around Windows 10 and Windows 11. If the application you need to use doesn't run on Linux; well, OK... not much you can do about that. But to promote that grievance to "terrible on every front" is ridiculous.
Meh, you're making the same mistake most do on this one. You're treating the Linux desktop like it's compatible even though these two non-linux operating systems are made by some of the biggest companies ever with allot of engineering hours paid to lock people in.
Plus, one could argue they've actually just established dominance through market lockin by ensuring the culture never had a chance and making operating system moves hard for the normal person.
But more importantly if we instead consider the context that this is largely a collection of small utilities made by volunteers vs huge companies with paid engineering teams, one should be amazed at how comparable they are at all.
I disagree. The only feature I miss on Linux is the ctrl-scroll to zoom feature of macOS.
If Gnome implemented that as well as macOS does I’d happily switch permanently.
The only feature? Like across the entire OS? Pretty broad. If you were right then adoption would be orders of magnitude higher.
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On the server room yes, but only in the sense UNIX has won, and Linux is the cheapest way to acquire UNIX, with the BSDs sadly looking from their little corner.
However on embedded, and desktop, the market belongs to others, like Zehyr, NutXX, Arduino, VxWorks, INTEGRITY,... and naturally Apple, Google and Microsoft offerings.
Also Linux is an implementation detail on serverless/lambda deployments, only relevant to infrastructure teams.
BSD has nothing to feel mournful about. Its derivatives are frequently found in the data center, but largely unremarked because it’s under the black box of storage and network appliances.
And it’s in incredible numbers - hundreds of millions of units - of game consoles.
The BSD family isn’t taking a bow in public, that’s all.
Orbis OS has very little of FreeBSD, if that is what you mean.
And outside NetFlix, there aren't many big shots talking about it nowadays.
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Well. It can also be argued that the other two platforms are finding ways to allow using Linux without leaving those platforms, which slows down market share of Linux on desktop as the primary OS.
> which slows down market share of Linux on desktop as the primary OS
I think what slows down market share of Linux on desktop is Linux on desktop itself.
I use Linux, and I understand that it's a very hard job to take it to the level of Windows or macOS, but it is what it is.
It makes Linux the common denominator between all platforms, which could potentially mean that it gets adopted as a base platform API like POSIX is/was.
More software gets developed for that base Linux platform API, which makes releasing Linux-native software easier/practically free, which in turn makes desktop Linux an even more viable daily driver platform because you can run the same apps you use on macOS or Windows.
As someone that was once upon a time a FOSS zealot with M$ on email signature and all, the only reason I care about Linux on the desktop is exactly Docker containers, everything else I use the native platform software.
Eventually I got practical and fed up with ways of Linux Desktop.
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That isn’t exactly new, the hypervisor underneath has been in macOS for years, but poorly exploited. It’s gained a few features but what’s really substantial today are the (much) enhanced ergonomics on top.
I know, but they've invested some effort into e.g. a custom Linux kernel config and vminitd+RPC for this, so the optimizations specific to running containerized Linux apps are new.
Fascinating to me how Windows and Linux have cross-pollinated each other through things like WSL and Proton. Platform convergence might become a thing within our lifetimes.
I made a "long bet" with a friend about a decade ago that by 2030 'Microsoft Windows' would just be a proprietary window manager running on Linux (similar - in broad strokes - to the MacOS model that has Darwin under the hood).
I don't think I'll make my 2030 date at this point but there might be some version of Windows like this at some point.
I also recognize that Windows' need to remain backwards compatible might prevent this, unless there's a Rosetta-style emulation layer to handle all the Win32 APIs etc..
I think Microsoft will let Windows slowly die over the years. I am certain that at the strategy level, they have already accepted that their time as a device platform vendor will not last. Windows will be on life support for a while, as MS slowly corrals its massive client base onto its SaaS platforms, before it becomes a relic of the past. Beyond that point, the historical x86 PC-compatible platform lineage will either die with it, or be fully overtaken by Desktop Linux whereupon it will slowly lose ground to non-x86 proprietary platforms over the years.
The average end user will be using some sort of Tivoized device, which will be running a closed-source fork of an open-source kernel, with state-of-the-art trusted computing modules making sure nobody can run any binaries that weren't digitally signed and distributed through an "app store" owned by the device vendor and from which they get something like a 25% cut of all sales.
In other words, everything will be a PlayStation, and Microsoft will be selling their SaaS services to enterprise users through those. That is my prediction.
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Linux has already won, in the form of Android and to an extent ChromeOS. Many people just don't recognize it as such because most of the system isn't the X11/Wayland desktop stack the "normal" Linux distros use.
Hell, Samsung is delivering Linux to the masses in the form of Wayland + PulseAudio under the brand name "Tizen". Unlike desktop land, Tizen has been all-in on Wayland since 2013 and it's been doing fine.
Google could replace Linux kernel with something else and no one would notice, other than OEMs and people rooting their devices.
Likewise with ChromeOS.
They are Pyrrhic victories.
As for Tizen, interesting that Samsung hasn't yet completely lost interest on it.
Ah yeah, isn't that the definition of something you don't directly depend on? Of course they "could just replace the OS", I can also just write a new web browser and use it to browse the web as it's supposedly a standard.
Except neither will support even a fraction of the originals' capabilities, at much worse performance and millions of incompatibilities at every corner.
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> Google could replace Linux kernel with something else and no one would notice, other than OEMs and people rooting their devices.
This would be better phrased If Google could replace Linux kernel with something else noone would notice,
Google have spent a decade trying to replace the Linux with something else (Fuschia), and don't seem to have gotten anywhere
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HarmonyOS has it's own non Linux Kernel so Linux now has a major competitor that will be present in a huge number of devices.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HarmonyOS_NEXT
"It" (aka the cloud providers) has won in the foobar POSIX department such that only a full Linux VM can run your idiosyncractic web apps despite or actually because of hundreds of package managers and dependency resolution and late binding mechanisms, yes.
Except for graphics, audio, and GUIs for which no good solutions exist
I'd consider revisiting this. These days you can do studio level video production, graphics and pro audio on Linux using native commercial software from a bare install on modern distributions.
I do pro audio on Linux, my commercial DAWs, VSTs, etc are all Linux-native these days. I don't have to think about anything sound-wise because Pipewire handles it all automatically. IMO, Linux has arrived when it comes to this niche recently, five years ago I'd have to fuck around with JACK, install/compile a realtime kernel and wouldn't have as many DAWs & VSTs available.
Similarly, I have a friend in video production and VFX whose studio uses Linux everywhere. Blender, DaVinci Resolve, etc make that easy.
There is a lack of options when it comes to pro illustration and raster graphics. The Adobe suite reigns supreme there.
Can you tell me more about the audio work you’re doing (sound design? instrument tracking? mixing? mastering? god help you live sound?) and the distro and applications you use?
I am more amateur/hobbyist than pro, but this is the primary reason I’m on macOS and I wouldn’t mind reasons to try Linux again (Ubuntu Studio ~8 years ago was my last foray).
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Affinity suite has decent Wine community support by the way for raster / vector graphics.
Is it winning if you are the only one playing the game?
Brag about this to an average Windows or Mac user and they will go "huh?" and "what is Linux?"
> Is it winning if you are the only one playing the game?
Depending on what you mean with "the game", I'd say even more so.
MS/Apple used to villify or ridicule Linux, now they need to distribute it to make their own product whole, because it turns out having an Open Source general purpose OS is so convenient and useful it's been utilized in lots of interesting ways - containers, for example - that the proprietary OS implementations simply weren't available for. I'd say it's a remarkable development.
By that logic, this feature and WSL shouldn't exist.
They exist because linux server developers would rather use windows or mac as their primary desktop OS rather than linux. That's not a flex for linux desktop. Quite the opposite.
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'Linux with macOS.'
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