
Linux has matured into a robust desktop operating system - dnantes
http://liminality.xyz/year-of-the-linux-desktop/
======
sz4kerto
Unfortunately, no. I use Linux on a daily basis on my desktop, and while it's
great for development (if you develop for Linux), it sucks for everything else
(compared to Windows, for example).

> Linux is now a viable gaming platform, thanks in large part to the efforts
> of Valve and GOG.com. Six of the top ten games on Steam right now support
> Linux.

No. Look at the most recent SteamOS/PC review from Ars:
[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-
si...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-significant-
performance-hit-for-steamos-gaming/) \-- even the purpose-built PCs deliver
significantly lower performance with Linux than Windows.

> Hardware support is no longer a major issue. You can generally expect all
> your devices to work out of the box. Even your WiFi.

Not really. AMD GPUs are badly supported -- even the proprietary driver is
_very_ slow compared to the Windows version and it has very crude power
management (meaning that most of the time, your GPU runs loud and hot). The
NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on Windows or
OSX (things like WebGL are not 100% stable). Hybrid graphics is not supported
properly, so laptops like my ZBook 15 G2 can't run Linux well (there is no
solution that provides on-demand GPU switching AND proper external monitor
support at the same time).

In general, my biggest issue with Linux on the desktop is stability of things
related to graphics/display. My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU,
SATA SSDs) cannot boot with the most recent Ubuntu image. Fedora 23 installs
well, then the first software update breaks graphics (it turned out that GDM
cannot communicate with X due some SELinux misconfiguration). I could install
CentOS7 which is officially supported by the manufacturer but that has crappy
font rendering and obsolete packages.

And sadly, the situation in 2015 does not seem better than ~10 years ago, when
I was trying to install Linux on my X40. Everything worked well except the
graphics. Same in 2015.

Look at what Windows is doing with WDDM and DX12. It's really-really cutting
edge. Yes, Vulkan is coming sometime, but MS has actually delivered. But
still, as a Linux dev, that's not an alternative.

~~~
cdubzzz
> it sucks for everything else (compared to Windows, for example)

This is very, very broad. I moved from Windows 8 about a year ago and I find
it to be comparable and better for most of the stuff I do.

> even the purpose-built PCs deliver significantly lower performance with
> Linux than Windows.

I agree that those numbers are significant, but frankly everything there looks
acceptable to me. I have a custom build for gaming but am also a "patient
gamer" so I've been doing just fine in Linux. I have been playing through
Bioshock Infinite with no problem and enjoying the hell out of the recent
Linux release of my current favorite FPS, Insurgency. In fact, I had a long
standing stuttering issue in Insurgency under Windows 8 that ultimately led me
to just give up on the game, sadly. Under Linux, no issue at all and equal
performance. Anecdotal, of course, but just trying to illustrate that the
recent increase of gaming availability is very nice for casual gamers like
myself.

> The NVidia side is much better, but still tends to crash more than on
> Windows or OSX

Any source on this? I have a 780 and can't recall even a single issue with
crashing because of the graphics driver.

> My quite standard desktop (Xeons, NVidia GPU, SATA SSDs)

Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop? This is is a legitimate question, I
couldn't find anything quickly. Just thinking about market share vs Core and
how well this may be tested in Linux distros currently.

~~~
rbanffy
> Are Xeons really "standard" for desktop?

I use one (it's actually a server, running multiple VMs, but it seems to have
a decent GPU and has 1 VGA and two DisplayPort connectors on its back). I like
it a lot.

~~~
cdubzzz
Hah, I bet you do love it! That is the use case I suspect is more common for
Xeon - a server doing something like running multiple VMs.

~~~
rbanffy
I suspect the caches, larger than desktop processors, have a lot to do with
the perceived performance. One benchmark I've been using is the set of unit
tests on MAAS (dominantly CPython code). My laptop takes 20+ minutes to run
them. An i5 with SSD takes 17 minutes. A VM on this Xeon box with a spinning
hard disk takes 9 minutes to run them.

------
jarcane
My lily-white ass it has. If anything, my experience with the Linux distro
ecosystem in the last year is worse than I have ever had with Linux going back
some 20 years. I would frankly trade any of the dozens of broken "robust
desktop distros" for just Red Hat 7 or Mandrake or early 2000's Debian.

I have gone through any of nearly a dozen different distros in the last year,
Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, more I'm probably forgetting, and every single
one of them failed within weeks. Most wouldn't even boot on my hardware,
others had weird limitations, while still others just completely ate
themselves during routine updates or version changes.

At this point I'd sooner use FreeBSD, or swallow my annoyance with PC-BSD's
security model and give that another go.

~~~
branchless
I don't get this. I use debian and I use a lightweight window manager. I have
a ~/.xsession that starts up things I need (chrome/skype/emacs).

This works.

~~~
fernandotakai
same. i use arch with awesomewm and everything works quite fine. i only had
one kernel panic and that was due to the freaking wifi drivers (macbooks have
broadcom wifi and their linux support is just horrible).

other than that, everything is basically perfect.

~~~
branchless
I had one crash when I left a terminal open and my four-year-old came in and
began playing with the mouse, copying and pasting the same stuff over and over
rapidly.

I've not been able to reproduce it yet. He's still in there, it's been 2
months now for four hours each day. My wife says it's not good for him but the
needs of OSS must come first!

------
asdfghjklop
\- Linux is as far from a gaming platform as ever.

\- Hardware issues are major PITA, touchpads never work, when you have a
convertible laptop, keyboard doesn't disable when turning it into a tablet
mode and so on. Not to mention audio.

\- No distro has nice fonts.

\- In my case, Ubuntu took exactly an hour before throwing an error at me.

I use Linux every day and I prefer it to Windows or Mac OS X, but take your
pink glasses off, please.

~~~
Certhas
> Linux is as far from a gaming platform as ever.

This is obviously not true. While it may be far from Windows or from Consoles
the fact of the matter is that you can right now buy high end dedicated Linux
gaming machines backed by the premiere game distribution eco-system in
existence:
[http://store.steampowered.com/universe/machines/](http://store.steampowered.com/universe/machines/)

That's not enough, it's not all the way, but to pretend that this didn't
happen, or doesn't matter is stupid.

I agree on Hardware issues, I just installed openSUSE Leap, installed the
nVidia drivers, and my desktop promptly stopped working entirely. While
installing all Windows drivers on an empty box takes some time, too, it's a
vastly more robust process.

------
gumballhead
I feel like I've read an article like this every so often for the past 10
years. I run Linux on my laptop, but it's often a pain in the ass. To be fair
though, all operating systems suck in their own ways.

~~~
frozenport
Linux sucks time

MS sucks money

OS X sucks VC money

~~~
dTal
Linux sucks time

OSX sucks money

MS sucks

------
walkingolof
I agree, I love Fedora 23 and Gnome, except for those 2-3 times a month I
actually need to print a document and do not have 7 hours to spare....

~~~
hadrien01
I was actually impressed by GNOME the last time I had to print. It found the
required driver in seconds, downloaded it in a few instants, and I was ready
to print. Compared to Windows where I had to search during half an hour the
driver on the HP website and it installed 350 megabytes of crapware.

(of course it's not the same experience for all printers, my 15 years old
printer works perfectly on Windows and Linux, and I can't install a network
Ricoh printer on Windows or Linux)

~~~
acveilleux
The high water mark of Linux printers was the HP Laserjet 4...

------
efaref
I disagree. Hardy Heron marked the peak in Linux desktop quality: the out-of-
the-box user experience has gone consistently downhill since then.

It's all mostly irrelevant these days, though, as I simply run an LXDE-based
Linux VM on my Windows desktop.

------
roel_v
So what you're saying is - 2016 will be the Year of Linux on the Desktop?
/ducks

------
loudmax
"Robust" is a funny word choice here. Linux desktops in the early 2000's were
very robust in the sense that they were stable, predictable, and performed
decently under high workloads. They weren't easy to install and set up
correctly, but once you got sound and graphics working, you were good to go.
Until your next hardware upgrade.

A Linux desktop is a lot easier to install now, and software support isn't as
much of an issue as it used to be, largely because so much has moved to the
web. I wouldn't say it's more robust though. I ran an Xubuntu laptop for
several years. Even though it was the LTS version, a few times a year,
something major like sound or video would break on a system update, and I'd
spend a few hours getting it working again. This isn't something I'd recommend
to people who want something that just works.

My Chromebook has been _very_ reliable. I would say it's robust, but then
again, I can't run Steam or GOG games on it, as mentioned in the article.

------
janlukacs
For fun, i tried Linux last time early 2015 (ubuntu) and tried to play dota
(was really currious what was happening with Ubuntu). After 4 days of
tinkering i managed to play the game at half the framerate of Windows and then
gave up. Almost nothing worked out of the box, and i had to spent a lot of
time on arcaned forums trying to get basic things to work.

------
rantanplan
Heh, I read the comments and I feel that everyone is right and wrong at the
same time :)

The truth is all OSes suck, period. Well each one in their own unique ways at
least.

Where I work(software house) 99% of people have Macs. Most of them are one
release behind because of stability issues, in newer versions.

My primary OS for the past 15 years is Linux. I've used most of the distros.
My feeling is that 10 years ago things were more stable. On the other hand it
wasn't that supported by vendors so... you had less features to worry about.

Now I use Fedora. As an example, I never had a problem with bluetooth or
hibernation. After the latest kernel update I can't use my bluetooth keyboard
because it causes a kernel panic. Hibernation stopped working.

I bought my mother a new Dell laptop with Windows 8.1. When I plug my,
perfectly fine, external USB HD, sometimes it runs into amok and it takes
around 5 minutes for the system to become operational again.

Life is fun. OSes are not :(

------
hwstar
I dumped Windows when they clamped down on licensing when they released
Windows XP. I've been running Linux ever since.

Whoever solves the Linux program packaging issues is going to make the best
contribution to Linux in years.

When you install a distro, the packages are old. This is due to the way the
distro model works. When you have a lot of upstream distributions (e.g. Mint
has Ubuntu, then Debian), the installed packages are quite dated.

PPA's are a workaround to get the latest versions of programs installed on a
Debian distro. As an example: Jetbrains does this with the excellent PyCharm
community edition IDE. On the other extreme, if you want the latest version of
KiCad a schematic capture program, you need to compile it yourself.

Once someone comes up with an easy method for the users to install latest
versions of software applications, Linux will start to make more inroads on
the desktop.

~~~
greggyb
This depends entirely on the distribution you choose, not in any way on Linux.

As a sibling pointed out, Arch is a rolling release distribution, and is
consistently running the latest kernel along with the latest version of any
software. In the rare case that something is not maintained in the official
repositories, or you need a non-standard installation, there is the community
maintained Arch User Repository, with anything you might want. It is very
common to see builds in the AUR that are maintained directly against GitHub
main branches.

You only mention PPAs and Debian-based distributions. Debian is known to be
conservative in its release cycle, though testing is often quite up to date,
and unstable keeps you on par with Arch.

Fedora, with a 6-month release cycle, also keeps you quite up to date compared
with tracking Debian stable.

Package management is a fairly well solved problem in the Linux space. You
just need to find a distribution with a release cycle that aligns better with
your own needs.

~~~
pdimitar
Unless, god forbid, you need the latest ImageMagick on Debian. Or heckloads of
other software. I believe the commenter you replied to is much more correct
than you. Application packaging / tracking up-to-date system and user packages
is very far from a solved problem. On many Linuxes doing a system-wide upgrade
is 90% of the time guarantee that part of your system will stop working. This
has been mine, and many other people's, experience.

I tinker with Debian ever since [circa] 2005 and periodically try to install
it on an ancient laptop I keep around. Many commenters above are right in
saying that desktop Linux has actually been more stable years ago, and I agree
with them. I want to have a universal OS based on Linux but let's face it,
nobody has gotten it right just yet, and let's face even more harsher truth, I
don't think this generation of users will ever see anything even remotely
close to what it will eventually look like in the future.

------
Sami_Lehtinen
I've been using Linux desktop for last 10 years and I'm totally happy. I do
use Windows at work daily, so I've got up to date comparison. Doesn't really
make any difference if you're running Linux or Windows.

------
chrisdotcode
> We need a consistent way for third-parties to distribute software

Isn't this what package managers are all about? - a thing which, by the way, I
believe the notion of an "App Store" from the other two OSes took inspiration
from.

~~~
jodyribton
The problem is package managers aren't consistent across distributions. If you
want to provide a binary version of your app, you should be providing at least
.deb, .rpm and tarball packages.

In practice, everyone's just targeting Ubuntu and publishing .debs.

~~~
digi_owl
The basic problem there is that essencially all package formats are tar-balls,
bit each one use a different way to note dependencies (and none of them seem
to handle having multiple minor lib versions installed side by side).

Frankly though i no longer see the problem as most third parties are self
contained in terms of dependencies, and .desktop files takes care of desktop
integration.

After all, a binary do not need to sit in /bin to be executable.

------
rbanffy
I think this is old news. I've been using Linux as my main OS since 2004 or
so. People say it sucks for games, but I am not a gamer. Now, I spent a lot of
time on Windows between 2008 and 2011 (corporate issued laptop) and I can tell
you it really, really sucked for anything software development related
(software that would not run on Windows, that is). The only thing it could do
better than Linux was opening MS Office files, but that's kind of obvious.

------
lorenzfx
While I love (and use daily) i3-wm, I really wouldn't call it a "desktop
environment" (and dwm, which is very similar to i3, was already available in
2009).

------
ck2
I was very impressed with Linux Mint

I tried it for a week to see if I could live with it as my primary
environment.

Unfortunately not quite yet, at least for me, will try again in 5 years.

~~~
awful
I, as well. I decided to go with the Fedora with Cinnamon on a 6-core AMD. I
use my unix systems everyday, all day, going back to the Sun, SGIs, E&S, and
even Amiga days. Everything from small development, to keeping recipes, video,
audio, and electronics. Distaste for Gnome philosophy, this desktop system
works for me in every way (except Netflix and Chromecast as I never installed
Chrome). A few games on Steam I like (LFD2) run just fine (and every update
run better).

------
bshimmin
Well, I followed the link to /r/unixporn and was amused to see that most of
the screenshots (described as "at least on par with any other operating
system") look like people desperately trying to recreate "The Matrix". I mean,
sure, people on HN probably really do find evilwm a great productivity boost,
but I'm pretty sure my mother wouldn't.

------
mark_l_watson
Although my field is AI/machine learning, my life revolves around Linux.

That said, while Linux on the Laptop keeps getting better, so also does OS X.
Ignoring complaints about privacy for a minute, Windows 10 is also very nice
to use.

I am resigned to mostly just using Linux just on my servers.

Edit: that is, my Linux experience is now SSH shells on remote servers, which
is still good.

------
chronid
Oh god, no. Forgive me my ranting, but...

\- NetworkManager has to be restarted regularly because it breaks after too
many suspend cycles - and I have an intel wlan card. The last bug I've seen is
NetworkManager killing my ipv4 routes without reason - ipv6 keeps working
correctly. Wat?

\- The more we go forward, the more things get convoluted. Features get
removed because "streamlining" an so on, but at the same time the entire
system gets more opaque, layer upon layer upon layer.

\- Third party app support is still pretty bad. See spotify for a shining
example.

\- the 3D graphic stack is pretty horrible. No, absolutely horrible. There was
a MESA "revision" going on to fix some of the issues, but it's been a long
time since I've seen anything.

.. and I can go forward. I'm sorry, but Linux has not matured on the desktop.
It's usable, with a lot of warts all around, but is not "mature". And the
costant focus on building new shiny thingies instead of improving internals is
a problem. All in all, I've been using linux on my desktop/laptops for years,
and the older I get the less time I have to report bugs and find workaround or
write patches, maybe to be told by some nice _welcoming_ community that since
I'm not a developer I'm not an user.

------
murbard2
And yet as of 2015, getting sound to work properly is still a crapshoot. Artsd
was a major pain 13 years ago, I'm sure pulseaudio has more features today,
but it's still an intractable mess.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
What is on in your end that sound is _still_ such an issue?

Admittedly my system is PulseAudio-free with only one exception, that being
Skype. I should consider using a compatibility layer like apulse that just
multiplexes ALSA calls under the hood.

~~~
murbard2
I've been using Linux as my primary desktop OS for about 15 years, and sound
has always been a pain to deal with. I used S/PDIF on my last machine, and it
took me months of browsing through endless threads to get the thing to work
properly. Skype just won't play any sound as of my last install, I have no
idea why, I've given up on it.

To get my last monitor to work properly, I had to manually enter modelines in
xorg.conf. If the monitor goes in powersave mode, the full resolution won't be
available until I restart X. (It's a Seiki 4K TV, not standard by any means,
but hardly "exotic")

Honestly, at this point, I wouldn't recommend desktop Linux to anyone normal,
I just tell them to get an Apple computer.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
IIRC I remedied my Skype installation by uncommenting the hardware detection
modules (udev and static) in default.pa(5). You could try starting it from the
apulse shim, alternatively.

I'll agree PulseAudio is esoteric, but thankfully not that many client
applications have a hard dependency on it, though it is popular with
integrated DEs.

~~~
murbard2
Thanks for the Skype tip, I'll try that.

But the fact that I need a tip on HN to know which config files to edit to get
Skype working is precisely why Linux on the Desktop isn't quite there yet :)

(the fault may very well lie with Skype, but from a user experience
standpoint, that's irrelevant)

------
gamesbrainiac
A Desktop Operating System is so much more than what the author claims it to
be. Lets break down the arguments:

\- Viable Gaming Platform: Viable does not mean good.

\- Hardware: Things have improved massively, I'll give the author that much,
but is nowhere near where Windows is.

\- Software: The grade of commercial software for linux is laughable. Sure,
you can get plenty of free tools that are also available on other operating
systems as well. But you'll be in trouble if you want something as good as
Camtasia or Screenflow. Microsoft and Apple both have plenty of high grade
commercial apps that work on their platforms.

~~~
kagamine
All of which are not attributable to Linux per se, but to 3rd parties who
refuse to deal in Linux. Reverse engineering hardware to create a driver is
hard work, and all because vendors refuse to provide a stable driver for their
own hardware (trackpads and graphics cards being the obvious examples). Valve
has proven that there __IS __a gaming market for Linux when everyone said
there wasn 't, and proved it months in advance of the release of the first
SteamBox. How many other software vendors have been parroting that "there is
no market" reasoning without ever backing it up? And sometimes you have to
create a market, not wait for it to exist before trying to fill it.

------
ZanyProgrammer
I'd love to buy a Dell Ubuntu laptop as my next laptop, for hardware that
actually works with Linux. Though I'd be scared of updating.

------
werber
The only thing missing, for me, is a ~500$ dollar macbook air clone that ships
with a stable distro.

------
xaduha
That's hilarious.

------
DHJSH
Windows hasn't changed? He need to look at Windows 10! We love it here, and we
all used to run Macs and OS X.

We develop for Linux, in a virtualbox.

------
vpkaihla
With (at least currently) the worst security model of them all. Yay!

~~~
walkingolof
Care to elaborate ?

~~~
vpkaihla
Both OS X and modern Windows desktops have process sandboxing that is actually
used. Perhaps Linux will catch up, but it's not looking very good right now.

Linux desktop security is grounded on the notion that you'll be running only
programs that are written by your friends.

~~~
dmytrish
SELinux has means to handle desktop security, but yes, it is rather PITA.
Could you tell more about OS X process sandboxing?

~~~
pjmlp
I assume he means App Sandboxing

[https://developer.apple.com/app-sandboxing/](https://developer.apple.com/app-
sandboxing/)

~~~
vpkaihla
Yes, thank you.

