

End of an Era: No Linux Desktop at Home (after 17 years) - gherlein
http://blog.herlein.com/2011/01/end-of-an-era-no-linux-desktop-at-home/

======
cosgroveb
Interestingly enough, for me 2010 was the first time in 10 years that I
actually stuck with Linux on the desktop. Ubuntu really does Just Work for me,
on every machine I own.

You can't beat Apple's industrial design or the quality of parts they use but
I have never felt at home in their UI. I probably never will. That's too bad
because I'd rather be seen with a Macbook than pretty much any PC. But that's
just vanity :)

~~~
austinshea
A macbook can run Linux.

<https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook>

~~~
nailer
Dual booting here. The Mac constantly has the red optical light turned on
under Linux. Temperature control can be a little off too.

It works, but not seamlessly.

~~~
threedaymonk
You can turn the red light off with alsamixer (find the SPDIF column and hit M
to mute, as I recall). There must also be a way to automate this on boot,
though I don't know it off the top of my head.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
Alsa settings can be saved using `sudo alsactl store`; most distros have their
startup scripts configured to load up the generated config file when they
start.

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bryanlarsen
I find this to be strange timing. For the most part stuff just works on Linux
these days. I've had more trouble trying to get old printers working on
Windows machines than I have had on Linux boxes. I've also had more trouble
with buggy graphics drivers on Windows in the last 3 years than I've had on
Linux. (Civ 5 still doesn't display right after 4 driver updates). Linux also
seems to be the only place where innovation is happening on the desktop. We
get small refreshes every 6 months, whereas the last time Mac users got a
significant desktop refresh was for 10.5 in 2007, and Windows users get
updates even less frequently. We've had KDE4 in the meantime, and Gnome3 is
coming soon.

His real complaint seems to be that OpenOffice doesn't interact well Microsoft
Office. There are several different good ways of running Microsoft Office on
Linux (I recommend CrossOver).

~~~
m104
No, sorry, you missed the point of the author's post. Read the last part
again:

"My stress level of fighting machines to do basic things just got lower. And
for that, I’ll gladly pay Apple the premium over buying base hardware and
doing it all myself."

That's right, there are at least two things even more valuable to the author
than having more freedom or the saving a bit of money: His time and sanity.

If you've gotten a computer to, you know, actually get stuff _done_ , why
spend any time fiddling with the software and hardware and get stressed out
about it? Why even worry about drivers? Why not be able to double click and
have stuff just open properly? Why spend hours trying to configure anything?
Why not spend just a bit more cash and go from frustration to satisfaction?

This point is central to the reason why Linux, as it stands today, will
_never_ become a mainstream desktop alternative.

You sight Windows as having more troubles now than Linux. Fine. But where in
the article did the author ever mention Windows? That battle was 10 years ago.
The author is not even _considering_ Windows. OS X has been a great desktop
environment for years and now even the hardcore Linux enthusiasts are willing
to pay Apple to kick the "battle your desktop" habit.

As for meaningful desktop innovation, there's been _one_ _thing_ that Linux
desktops (Debian-based distributions, specifically) have that OS X doesn't.
One killer feature: Package management with aptitude/Synaptic. Like it or not,
aptitude/Synaptic is the best feature that Linux has been able to claim for
itself. A one-stop-shop for all of those thousands and thousands of packages.
And the upgrades. And the system upgrades. And the dependency management.
Graphical, fast, categorized. It has been a wonder to use, truly.

Unfortunately, Apple now has the App Store for OS X and you can actually _buy_
real, usable, curated, and user-rated apps for the desktop and get your
updates from the same place. Whoops. Linux doesn't have a killer feature for
the desktop anymore, if it ever did.

~~~
bryanlarsen
No I didn't miss the point. My point is that you don't need to fiddle with
Linux. You can, but you don't have to. You don't need to spend hours
configuring anything.

Why worry about drivers? In Linux, all drivers come bundled with the operating
system. On Windows or a Mac you have to install them yourself.

As for your App Store argument: what percentage of Mac applications are
available on the App store. Adobe apps are the reason many people run Macs --
what are the chances we'll ever see those there?

~~~
actf
"My point is that you don't need to fiddle with Linux. You can, but you don't
have to. You don't need to spend hours configuring anything."

What are you basing that claim on, just your own personal experience? It's a
pretty extraordinarily claim to say that linux on the desktop requires no
configuration, and I think such a claim deserves at least a little bit of
evidence above and beyond your own personal experience.

As a counter example to your claim, I just finished installing Ubuntu 10.10 on
an Asus EeePC 1015. In the process I ran into the following issues: 1)
Wireless doesn't work without additional drivers 2) Multitouch input doesn't
work 3) Samba sharing with a windows pc doesn't work. The Asus EeePC isn't
exactly an exotic piece of hardware, so it's difficult for me to comprehend
why ubuntu can't get wireless working, let alone the other issues. Rewind back
to Ubuntu 10.04, and in the default install, X won't even start.

"In Linux, all drivers come bundled with the operating system. On Windows or a
Mac you have to install them yourself." In my experience the complete opposite
is true. When installing linux I have to go download my wireless drivers using
a wired connection, same goes for my printer. On a fresh install of windows 7
(from a RTM version - i.e. not what the manufacturer includes on the machine)
everything works "out of the box", including wireless, the touchpad, and my
wireless printer.

Now I'm not disputing the fact that linux has made significant gains in
usability over the past 17 years, but I will strongly dispute the claim that
everything generally works without additional tinkering and configuration.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
_What are you basing that claim on, just your own personal experience? It's a
pretty extraordinarily claim to say that linux on the desktop requires no
configuration, and I think such a claim deserves at least a little bit of
evidence above and beyond your own personal experience._

Depends on the hardware, mostly. Our university LUG does an event called Free
Your Machine every quarter, and for most people, it's just defrag, install,
show 'em how to use Synaptic, and they're out.

It also depends on what you're trying to do. The basic things have been mostly
ironed out by now (wireless is still a bit iffy), but the more advanced
things, sure, they'll take some time and swearing.

~~~
actf
"it's just defrag, install, show 'em how to use Synaptic, and they're out."

I think it would be really interesting to see some statistics from this, for
example the % of computers on which the default install works without
additional configuration, the % of users who encounter problems a week later,
the % of users who give up and reinstall windows within a month, the technical
saviness of the users, etc. It seems like there's a lot of interesting data we
could learn from an install-fest.

"The basic things have been mostly ironed out by now (wireless is still a bit
iffy), but the more advanced things, sure, they'll take some time and
swearing."

This seems to confirm my objection to the original point, no? I wouldn't
consider wireless advanced. If my wireless connection, my printer, and my
touchpad don't work out of the box (nevermind my entire graphics subsystem in
10.04) that's a show-stopper in my opinion.

------
beej71
For me, it's continuation of an era: Still Linux Desktop at Home (for 17 years
--thanks Slackware 2.0!)

The good news, for me, is that Linux apparently doesn't seem to care if its
popular on the desktop or not. If my choices were Windows and OS X, my life
would not be nearly as easy.

At least that's my takeaway from this article. When the author wrote "Error
establishing database connection", I'm pretty sure that's what he was talking
about.

~~~
beej71
Edit: after reading the cached article, I guess he's more like me than I'd
anticipated. (Except I use a Mac to do iPhone dev, and I can't even begin to
imagine giving up my Linux desktop for that. I do as much work on the Linux
machine as I possibly can. But that's just me.)

Edit: reply/edit... man, I need more coffee.

------
mithaler
As an Ubuntu user running the exact same hardware he describes (Dell XPS
M1530), I don't understand his frustration, since literally everything in
Ubuntu Just Works for me on it. I haven't had a single bit of trouble on that
hardware in all the time I've run Ubuntu.

But then, Ubuntu has made tremendous strides in recent years on that front,
and I wouldn't be surprised if other distros haven't kept up (though he
doesn't say what distro he'd been using).

------
burgerbrain
Short version: Individual posts a story about how he personally doesn't use
linux as a desktop anymore, then the inclusive title is copied from a personal
blog to a news aggregator in a way that constitutes flamebait.

------
hexis
cache:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fblog.herlein.com%2F2011%2F01%2Fend-
of-an-era-no-linux-desktop-at-home%2F)

------
mahmoudimus
I have a 15" MacBook Pro at home, and I tried very hard to use it as my
primary Python/C++ development environment, but, it just felt completely
awkward and kludgy.

Ubuntu is the distro I use and it mostly Just Works.

1\. Window management for Linux is much more mature than MacOSX's -- XMonad,
dwm, Compiz' grid plugin, etc.

2\. emacs keybindings for everything in Linux actually works. kill-yank rings
work as expected. I've had serious setbacks when using MacOS's emacs
keybindings.

3\. apt for Debian based distros. (just phenomenal)

Sure, my sound may not work 1/2 of the time, flash applications may use all 4
cores of my crappy laptop, and wireless N is initially disabled by default,
but, I'm willing to put up with all of this so the operating system doesn't
get in my way when I am coding.

MacOS is there, but it's just not quite there, yet. Linux is making great
strides as well, so we'll see how it plays out.

~~~
beoba
I

 _LOVE_

GRID

------
DjDarkman
There is a problem with Macintosh-es too, you know, it's too damn expensive in
Europe, for no apparent reason, that's why I'm still using Linux. The price
difference is so huge that you might as well fly over to the US and buy one
there.

I will buy one later on, though.

But back to the critism: \- I doubt that OS X has better driver support than
Linux, for your setup maybe(good for you), but generally most stuff simply
just work with Linux, I plug in my mouse, and it loads even faster than on
Windows 7

\- You still(to my knowledge) can't tweak a Mac. Desktop the way you can tweak
KDE, GNOME and many others.

In the end my advice is load up an Ubuntu CD and be amazed that Linux is not
what you described.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
_I doubt that OS X has better driver support than Linux_

Apple knows exactly what hardware you're using if you buy a Mac, and thus are
able to accomodate you quite nicely. This of course doesn't count peripherals,
but it's still quite significant.

~~~
DjDarkman
You shouldn't compare the OS-es that way, otherwise Mac OS X is a clear loser,
because it only supports Apple hardware.

If we are comparing the two OS-es the only fair comparison we can make is the
peripherals, where again, I doubt that OS X would win, sure it has great
support from a lot of descent vendors, but again Linux support is huge, not
because of the companies interest but because the developer community does a
great job in writing drivers at an insane pace, heck they even managed to make
broadcom cards work using binary blobs created originally for windows.

------
pohl
Was the database instance on that box?

------
ramidarigaz
I dunno. I agree with some of the other posters here. I've been using Ubuntu
pretty much exclusively for 2.5 years, and it's been great. I just research
the hardware I buy to ensure that everything works out of the box. There are a
few glitches, but nothing that really gets in my way. I keep Windows around
for the games that don't work well with Wine, but other than that, Ubuntu
works great.

------
pgroves
IMO, the reason desktop linux never took off is that you need to draw
developers to the platform, and developing desktop linux apps completely
sucks. I recently wrote my first large gtk app and was appalled at how painful
it was. Gtk has been around for like 15 years and half of it's widgets are
unuseable and the api is clunky.

I don't understand why kde/qt lost so decisively to gnome in terms of support
by the distributions, although I will admit gtk apps tend to look better.
Things may have been better if QT had gotten more community support, or at
least more designers working on pretty themes.

There can't be many experienced linux desktop developers who would voluntarily
do their next project on that platform. As Steve Ballmer famously bellowed in
his drunken rant, "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!"

------
charlesju
The big bottleneck for mass Linux adoption is that most of the mavens (tech
nerds and early adopters) are Mac users. And since Mac is BSD-based, a lot of
the draw of Linux (customizations, scripts, programming, etc.) is gone.

I find almost no reason to switch from a Mac to Linux. It's actually a lot
easier to use Mac to develop for work (Rails) because I know every Mac has the
same standard configurations and I do not need to make a configuration script
to give to all the new kids.

------
zdw
Same here... all Mac and Solaris here for the last few years, with VM's for
the rest.

Linux boot/utility disks are still really nice to have around though, and my
routers and other embedded devices run Linux.

