Comment by malfist
5 days ago
Let's be honest, nobody is asking for android based desktops, google just wants to normalize rent seeking 30% of all software sales.
5 days ago
Let's be honest, nobody is asking for android based desktops, google just wants to normalize rent seeking 30% of all software sales.
For all the complaints against Windows, legit or not, I can't envision a world in which I want the world's largest advertiser to run my desktop OS.
Pixels and Chromebooks have never had any ads. Windows 11 is plastered with them.
They already gateway everything through Google servers, especially Chromebooks.
Pixels literally have unremovable Google ad right on the home screen. The search bar. Just because it has additional functionality, doesn't mean it's not an ad.
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That's hilarious. I never see ads on my Windows 11 PC.
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You don’t get a choice on that unless you’re running Linux/BSD or a Mac.
I'm asking for Android-based desktop.
Windows is so bad, that I've lost any hope for it to recover.
MacOS is not that bad, but it's tied to Apple hardware and I don't like it. Also it's not getting better either, new releases bring more bloat and features I didn't ask for.
Linux is what I use, but I also lost hope for it to ever become polished experience. Just recent months they introduced another bug to GNOME which probably will not be resolved in years. No big company wants to invest in desktop Linux and without investments it's just not good. I can navigate Linux bugs and workarounds, but I'd prefer not to.
Expecting some new unknown operating system to appear and be ready is foolish, it won't happen.
So Android is the only operating system that could realistically be ready in the foreseeable future. Linux have good support for desktop hardware. Android have good polished stack for applications. Developers know how to write apps for android. Security story for Android is miles ahead that of desktop Linux. So I totally see that Android Desktop could actually be a good thing, with Google sponsoring its development. And if Google will put too much bloat in it, its open source nature would allow for volunteers to build better distributions of it.
It's pretty openly known that GNOME is hostile to its own userbase and their preferences,, why continue to use it instead of KDE or any of the other 10 DE environments?
> It's pretty openly known that GNOME is hostile to its own userbase
It's pretty openly in bad faith to assign malice to open-source developers.
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Dunno, Gnome hasn't been hostile to me.
I'm sorry, but there are MANY users of GNOME who are happy with the direction. I'd personally choose GNOME over any desktop environment on any OS.
I don't want extensible software. KDE is terrible in that regards. They have miriads of options, that's too much for me. I want opinionated software. I don't like GNOME, but it's the lesser evil and I learned to deal with its issues.
Also I don't like that KDE does not have its native launcher. I need to install some SDDE stuff which works under Xorg or something like that and looks ugly. Pretty weird stuff all that. GNOME just have GDM which just works.
My ideal environment would be Windows 95-like WM with zero configuration options which just works out of the box the way I want. It doesn't exist, unfortunately. May be I should try to write is, as I complain about it so much. Just have no idea about scale of such a project.
There are no other 10 DE environments. GNOME and KDE are the only two mature ones. Rest are either obsolete, especially with Wayland conquering Linux desktop, or for weird use-cases, like tiling WMs. I'm used to traditional windows managers, I don't want tiling WMs.
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My pessimism is that with their coming clamp-down on external sources for -installing- "sideloading" apps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736479 this os may be somewhere between macos and ipados in terms of freedom in the coming years. I have hope that Valve's operating systems and unified platforms will provide a way not only for macos/windows users to move on while retaining compatibility, but for the company to make the transition to arm (as they are with deckard) and retain total binary freedom.
Home computers are inherently more open to sideloading. So I don't see a scenario where they would close it. But may be I'm spoiled by x86, wouldn't be surprised to find out that ARM computers would not be open to boot unlock and all that stuff.
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Depends what you mean by security, if by security you mean sanboxing of apps sure, if by security you mean that you trust what's in your OS and you can control it, it's worse than desktop Linux.
Security isn't just about technical features but also about trust, while I trust my Linux desktop, I don't trust my Android phone with the Play Store running as high privilege, advertising id in the OS and unknown manufacturer additions.
But that's more like talking about a particular distro, like I wouldn't trust North Korea's Linux distro either, compared to Debian.
Meanwhile something close to GrapheneOS running on desktop sounds fantastic.
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Windows is bad because it has opinions about advertisements and AI.
MacOS is bad because it has opinions about what hardware you should use.
Linux is bad because it doesn't have opinions.
No opinions? Have you ever read a code of conduct? :)
Isn’t Valve having a go at making Linux more consumer friendly?
> Just recent months they introduced another bug to GNOME which probably will not be resolved in years. No big company wants to invest in desktop Linux and without investments it's just not good.
Classic straw man: a single GNOME bug doesn’t mean all of desktop Linux isn’t worth investing in.
Developers have been writing Linux desktop apps successfully for decades. Moreover, who cares about polished desktop apps when most apps are just web apps that look the same on all platforms?
For the record, I despise web apps.
What's the GNOME bug?
I'm using shortcuts <Super>+1 ... <Super>+4 to switch between virtual desktops. Let's say there's Xwayland application launched on desktop 1 and I'm on desktop 4. Vscode for example. Now I press <Super>+1 to switch to desktop 1. At this point, vscode starts printing "11111111" until I press Esc.
This bug manifests both for vscode and Idea. I configured these apps to run under native wayland, but they're not ready and other bugs manifest (e.g. no border around vscode window), which are less annoying, but annoying nonetheless.
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Are you pretending android doesn't have bugs?
> So Android is the only operating system that could realistically be ready in the foreseeable future.
Ready for what ? Working with files on Android is ... interesting. Real app support on Android (shells, compilers, CAD/CAE) is ... interesting and the UX is... total crap.
> google just wants to normalize rent seeking 30% of all software sales
Most Android applications are free. Furthermore, Google allow you to install a separate store where you can buy from, allowing you to not have to pay those 30%, or to pay them to someone else other than Google.
And if anyone is trying to normalise 30% rent seeking on desktops, it's the incumbents already directing you towards their store (Microsoft, Apple).
> Google allow you to install a separate store where you can buy from
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028