
Why hasn’t the Year of the Linux Desktop happened yet? - pjmlp
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/12/19/why-hasnt-the-year-of-the-linux-desktop-happened-yet/
======
Someone1234
\- Poor backwards compatibility

\- Needlessly complex UI APIs (e.g. X Window System)

\- Fragmentation

\- Lack of a singular UI vision

\- Bad UI design, bad UX

\- Lack of accessibility support

\- Complex interfaces designed for 1% of users

I could go on...

The only successful UNIX interfaces dropped X Window, dropped most of the
community's ideas and APIs, and started afresh. Look at Quartz (Apple),
ChromeOS (Google), and Android (Google). They're much simpler at every layer,
have a singular vision, and designed for normal users rather than by
programmers for programmers.

But no doubt this thread will somehow find a way to blame Microsoft as is the
tired song of the Linux community.

~~~
nxsynonym
>>...designed for normal users rather than by programmers for programmers

This is the crux of the issue. The Linux ecosystem philosophy is rooted in
choice. Normal users don't want and/or need that much choice.

Average Joe doesn't care what an operating system stands for, or how involved
the developer community is, or how customization a system is. They need a
spreadsheet/internet browser/email machine that can run some misc. business
software, but most importantly they need something that just works.

For all of the benefits of using Linux, the one thing it has never nailed down
is intuitiveness. Say what you want about the (many) flaws of Windows, but you
can't deny that one of the easiest out-of-the-box-this-thing-just-works
experiences. It's also the same experience every single time you use a Windows
machine.

Try explaining the difference between Arch, Ubunutu, and Debian to a normal
consumer and their eyes glaze over before you even begin.

~~~
AlexeyBrin
> It's also the same experience every single time you use a Windows machine.

Recently I helped a small company migrate their PCs from Windows 7 to Windows
10. Trust me, it is not the _same experience_ at all for the end users. They
(the users) will get used to the new interface and way of interacting with the
OS not because it is more _intuitive_ but because they will use it and gain
experience with it.

~~~
cm2187
I will never get used to have ads being displayed in the OS or to have random
junk apps appearing in my start menu every couple of months.

Microsoft sabotaged their main platform. It would have a major opportunity for
other OS.

~~~
navjack27
That actually doesn't happen. You make it sound like there are straight up
random ads. You install Windows 10 and there are shortcuts to popular Windows
store apps that you can right click and remove. Not any different than
installing, it was either Fedora or Debian, I think Fedora, and getting 'ads'
for apps.

~~~
kasabali
Yeah not straight up random ads, just promotions for random apps, auto
installing some random games, random promotions in notification area and then
OneDrive and Office 365 ads in File Explorer. Totally and honestly like in
Debian and Fedora I swear.

-

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-
window...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14956540/microsoft-
windows-10-ads-taskbar-file-explorer)

------
darrmit
I'm sure this might be an unpopular opinion here, but my experience has been
that when you do normal business collaboration - WebEx, etc. - in Linux, you
spend more time fighting to make things work than you do actually working.
Chrome and the proliferation of webapps has helped this somewhat, but it
always ends up being _something_.

Scott Lowe did a pretty interesting series of blog posts [1] on it and
ultimately ended up back on a Mac because it just killed his productivity and
called it "death by a thousand cuts". This mirrors my experience. I want to be
on Linux and there's a lot to love, but it's just not..stable? evolved?
polished? (not sure what the right word is) enough to be a daily driver for
most non-development oriented people.

[1] [https://blog.scottlowe.org/2017/10/25/linux-migration-
wrap-u...](https://blog.scottlowe.org/2017/10/25/linux-migration-wrap-up/)

~~~
stephenr
Anecdotally I see the same.

One of the developers at a client uses Ubuntu desktop (I use macOS). The
issues at her end with voip calls have been crazy. We've been through Skype,
Discord and now Slack. Nothing has been reliable.

Edit, because I'm sick of "i can save the reputation of Linux" responses:

Its never a network issue its never even a _protocol_ issue. Its a
"application detects no input from microphone" issue.

So please stop telling me how its everything except a shitty desktop
experience.

~~~
Someone123456
Try Telegram, Linphone or a WebRTC service. Skype is truly bad on linux but
Discord served me and my friends well so, check your developer's internet
connection.

~~~
stephenr
Internet connection doesnt affect her microphone.

~~~
ac29
But a lousy internet connection will certainly make VOIP unreliable.

I would ditto the recomendation to try SIP-based or web-based VOIP. I've never
had an issue on Linux. Haven't used Skype, Discord, or Slack, so can't comment
there.

~~~
stephenr
Maybe you misunderstood.

The problem isnt that the quality is poor. The problem is that the client
application fails to recognise microphone input.

The calls are fine _if_ it works, but when it doesn't its a one way call.

Again: this whole thread is why linux on desktop is a fucking fantasy. Any
problem and the mere idea that its because of unreliable software is avoided
like a hooker with an eye patch, lest people have to recognise "yeah this shit
just doesn't work well"

------
alkonaut
It's a tough time for desktops generally. If the question had been "when will
be the year of mass market GUI linux?" then it would have happened already
with Android.

The author lists all the reasons traditional desktop linux failed and keeps
failing, but the short form of the argument can be summed up like this:

Linus Torvalds, who knows a bit about Linux, also makes his own desktop app
(perhaps not as famous as the kernel and git), a scuba log app. He would
_like_ to release the damn thing built for Mac, Windows and Linux. But can he?
Of course not. He releases it compiled for Windows and Mac, and then as source
for Linux.

Linux on the desktop might succeed when Linux _has_ a desktop. As in, at the
OS level, a developer can make assumptions about how the clipboard, resolution
scaling, sound, notifications, application install/uninstall etc works. Until
then, no.

~~~
ChrisSD
The trouble is "Linux" isn't a desktop OS. Ubuntu, Fedora and openSUSE are
desktop OSes. They're separate OSes even if they are related.

There is hope however. Modern application containers like Flatpak aim to
bridge the differences between Linux OSes by being self contained.

~~~
alkonaut
Right. And that’s exactly the problem. Another problem is that ALL those
desktop distributions chose application (package) managers that are ill suited
to desktop. You don’t want shared libraries for desktop. That might be good
for server (central patching, fairly stable environment once set up).

On desktop you need to be able to install and uninstall apps by the dozen
every week and never ever worry that your “system” can’t run the app, or that
the app will ruin it for some other app. This requires duplicating libs or
statically compiling. However package systems tend to dislike packages that
include a private copy of 100 libs. That’s broken.

Flatpak is exactly what’s needed. And it needs to grow to encompass APIs on
the same level as Windows and OS X (e.g good notification apis, dpi change
events for multi monitor across all window managers etc etc). Modern desktop
APIs are pretty intricate on win/mac, so Linux needs to catch up. The problem
with catching up is that design by committee is never quick to drop old cruft,
unite on standards etc. This is why I think Mozilla, Valve, Google etc has a
better chance of making _the_ successful Linux desktop, than the OSS community
has. Just like the OSS community won’t ever make a AAA game.

~~~
stephenr
macOS and Windows have shared libraries.

Packaging third party libraries with your binary is just going to lead to a
race to see which fucks a user first: running out of disk space or that one
app with an unpatched TLS library that allows RCE for an attacker.

~~~
alkonaut
Exactly. And yet for 99% I’d desktop use I’ll rather buy disks and risk
security holes, than suffer shared library hell. I have been screwed by
library compatibility hell 100 times for every time I suffered a disk space
issue or a vulnerability issue. At the end of the day if it’s a hard
requirement that you want to be able to just run binary packages that were
created by idiots - then the smartphone app model is the only viable one.

It’s important that components that _do_ have significant attack surface such
as TLS are provided and patched by the OS.

The shared libraries of e.g windows come in pretty well defined tiers. Things
that the OS provides, various optional runtimes that must or _can_ be shared
such as msvcrt and then there is not much else. No app is going to install a
“system wide” image decoder or other utility lib (In the past, it was a thing
to dump a dll into the OS folder, often overwriting older ones, which is where
the term “DLL hell” comes from. Luckily that doesn’t happen these days).

------
notacoward
This is kind of the "last mile" problem with open-source software. The last
few bits of bug fixing and documentation and - most especially - interface
polish can be unpleasant. Developers who started a project because of an
interest in its core problem domain generally don't want to do those kinds of
chores. Sometimes it's because they lack the specific skills to do them well,
and don't want to invest lots of time learning how to do something that's
still medium reward (at best) for them. Sometimes it's because they just don't
want to even if they have the skills, because some other much more interesting
problem beckons. They have to be paid to go that last mile.

In the case of web apps, developers get paid to go the last mile - either by
an employer or via the market. In the case of Linux server software they also
get paid; in this case a Red Hat salary is the most common form. For Linux
desktop software, very few get paid. Not nearly enough. OpenOffice/LibreOffice
in particular needs and has always needed a _ton_ of work, and almost nobody's
paying for it. So it has always been a total tire fire. Random crashes, which
then leave a document in a "needs recovery" state permanently no matter how
many times it has already been recovered. Formatting and conversion glitches.
Features and options that are hard to use even if you can find them among the
smoldering dung-pile of other features and options that nobody anywhere has
used for years. Staggering memory abuse bogging down the whole system. I'm
sure the devs (at least some of them) would love to fix these things, but it's
going to be really hard work - often more political than technical in nature -
and nobody's paying them enough to go through that misery so they do more
rewarding things instead. The result is software that will _always_ lag behind
its proprietary competitors in terms of appeal to users - far enough behind
that people will actually pay for the difference.

If you want to compete effectively in a market, somebody has to be paid for
crossing that last mile, and that means somebody has to do the paying. Nobody
is.

~~~
kuro68k
This. I tried every major Linux distro recently, and every one had really
basic problems. For example, Ubuntu and Mint don't let you configure the mouse
wheel scroll speed. There are hacks but none work reliably. Do all Ubuntu
users really scroll web pages incredibly slowly?

And then there are the missing apps. Want a really good, free git GUI client?
Sorry, not on Linux. It's git FFS, Linux should have great dev tools. Same
with file managers.

I used to be an Amiga user, I'm a C developer and like tinkering. But I also
want something that just works for the basics. Sad to say but Windows, for all
its faults, does work. Visual Studio does work. And all the open source apps I
use like Kicad are on Windows.

I really want to move to Linux, but it's too much work to make it work. These
days I have better things to do with my computer.

~~~
eadmund
> For example, Ubuntu and Mint don't let you configure the mouse wheel scroll
> speed.

Since both are Debian derivatives, I imagine that both include synclient(1).
No, it's not a GUI — but that's better, because you can just put the right
command into your login scripts, and you _know_ that it'll execute, and never
get deleted because a desktop environment decided to change its config file
format.

> Want a really good, free git GUI client? Sorry, not on Linux.

Magit is awesome.

> Sad to say but Windows, for all its faults, does work.

I have a couple of Windows machines, and I don't feel that they work.
Swallowed keystrokes & clicks, ads — no thank you!

~~~
antisthenes
> because you can just put the right command into your login scripts, and you
> know that it'll execute, and never get deleted because a desktop environment
> decided to change its config file format.

You just lost 99% of the userbase.

------
alphadevx
From the article:

> Of course what happened here was that Steve Jobs returned to Apple and we
> suddenly had MacOSX come onto the scene taking at least some air out of the
> Linux Desktop space.

I really agree with that: if every engineer I know who uses a Mac "because
Bash" would use Linux instead, we would have arrived at a decent Linux desktop
market-share by now. Kudos Apple.

In saying that, as a desktop Linux user I really don't mind being part of a
small user community. I would never switch to MacOSX as it is not (fully) open
source, and Windows is nice for running Steam for gaming.

~~~
lj3
> Of course what happened here was that Steve Jobs returned to Apple and we
> suddenly had MacOSX come onto the scene taking at least some air out of the
> Linux Desktop space.

That might have been the case 10 years ago, but it isn't now. Desktop OS
dissatisfaction is at an all time high in both the Windows and Apple camps,
among both users and developers. If a linux distro got its act together it
could steal the show. But, to do that would require an overhaul to linux
similar to what Next did to create NextStep.

~~~
alphadevx
Good point, and I agree there is room for a disruption, as right now it's all
pretty bland with regards to innovation in the desktop space.

------
pge
These articles tend to focus on the technical reasons Linux has not been
adopted, and I think it is worth also exploring the business issues (I think
Linux desktops are mature enough technically that most average users can use
it just as easily as Windows).

How many computers ship with Linux installed from major distributors (i.e.
places where the average consumer or business would buy from)? Dell has one
model but you have to look hard to find it. Most consumers and businesses
think of the desktop world as having two options: windows or mac, with windows
as the default. No one is out there marketing and selling Linux desktop
machines. That's why they aren't out there.

The one exception is ChromeOS. It has actually taken off and is widely used in
schools (and anecdotally at least becoming a popular option for people to
install for their kids or parents). ChromeOS is heavily marketed by Google,
and there are lots of Chromebooks marketed and sold by major distributors.

I don't consider it a true "Linux Desktop" because it isn't a full-featured
OS, but the adoption nonetheless provides a contrasting case study that
demonstrates the importance of marketing and distribution that the full-
featured desktops lack.

------
larrydag
I've been using a Linux desktop for years (much to my wife's disapproval). I
don't believe any of these things are a the biggest reason.

Let's look a Linux success stories

1) Android. Perhaps this single biggest example of Linux success.

2) Internet of Things, Raspberry Pi, micro PCs. Linux runs the generic micro
PC appliances fairly well.

3) Chromebooks. Not a big market but a decent alternative to Macs and Windows
mini laptops.

In summary I would say its consumer market adoption. As mentioned already the
desktop is suffering. It's the appetite of the market that is going to drive
adoption. The Linux desktop still hasn't reach a critical mass that it can
replace a Windows or Mac with the consumer not noticing. Once you reach that
point that an average consumer will not notice a difference then you will see
a big push.

I believe Google has a big chance to make this happen. If they can get their
Google SaaS office suite seamless and adopted universally than I can see Linux
making a big push into laptops and notebook devices.

~~~
pjmlp
Android is all about Java, Google could replace Linux by *BSD or their future
Fucshia and hardly anyone would notice.

ChromeBooks are all about ChromeOS, that is what average Joe and Jane buy
them. For a web browser manager experience. They couldn't care less how their
browser instances are managed.

IoT is by definition not a desktop.

~~~
gsich
Not so easy I guess, as most drivers are either in the kernel, or provided as
blobs.

------
ChrisSD
I feel like Ubuntu had the opportunity to help the Linux desktop gain more
traction. However, they got side tracked from helping to polish existing open
source projects and started messing about reimplementing low-level wheels all
over the place.

I don't think a Linux desktop would have rivalled MS but it could have made
more gains than it has.

------
menacingly
Obviously, there's polish, which is undeniably lacking in every corner of the
linux desktop experience.

But even if it were polished, I think the phantom linux desktop is just
another manifestation of a programmer looking at instagram and thinking,
"what's the big deal? I could make this"

Sure, I have no doubt, but it's missing the other 90% of the magic that gets a
significant slice of the population on board. It's more than checking the
appropriate boxes. It requires much more effort, and requires much more of a
centralized figure, than checking the boxes.

This is why, among technical people, who _do_ only require that something
checks boxes, linux on the server is a smash hit.

------
cm2187
As a non-IT professional, I do not see the reasons why I did not switch
personally despite being increasing uncomfortable with Windows 10 and thinking
that I will need to do that one day.

1\. Poor driver support (it is mentioned last but I think it's a major
problem). It is a lottery to know if you install linux on a laptop which
functionality will work or not. Even on a dell laptop that came with linux
pre-installed I ended up with some functionalities not working correctly.

2\. Non self-discoverability of the OS. Outside of very basic tasks, you very
quickly end up writing command lines, much earlier than on Windows that gives
you a UI for quite sophisticated things. People who code every day don't
realise how difficult it is for someone who never coded to get into it. It is
the same for someone who doesn't use CLI extensively. There is so much to
learn before being to do simple things that I can do in a few clicks on
windows that this is a heavy investment. An investment I will probably do one
day but that I do not have the brain/time budget to make in the short term. I
appreciate the power of being able to do everything with command line (and to
automate everything). However don't underestimate the friction it creates when
you need to do something like 3-10 times a year, not often to learn the
command by heart but often to be seriously annoyed every time you do it and
spend a disproportionate amount of time. Not a problem for linux sysadmins who
do that all day. But if the target is 10% market share, it needs to be usable
by more than sysadmins.

------
sevensor
I see a lot of people discussing technical shortcomings and problems with user
experience, and I think these are all missing the point a bit. Constantly
changing APIs, inconsistent GUI paradigms, these are all side effects of the
key feature of the Linux desktop experience: freedom. Anyone who wants to can
write a window manager / Wayland compositor / GUI toolkit / terminal emulator
/ command shell that does things completely differently. Maybe a lot of this
stuff is terrible, but some of it is brilliant in a way that lines up
beautifully with how I want to use my computer.

The market for freedom on the desktop isn't huge. Freedom is challenging and
it's not worth the effort for most users. They have better things to do than
to fight with bad network drivers. For them, the cost of buying new hardware
every other year when planned obsolescence hits is worth not having to fight
it. But for some of us, freedom is worth the effort. I bought a netbook in
2011 that I love and still use. If it weren't for Linux, I would have had to
replace it in 2013 when Windows bogged down to the point of uselessness.

Why does Linux have to take over the world to succeed? It's a success if it's
there for those of us who want it.

------
jseliger
This might be implicitly covered under "In the first 10 years of Desktop linux
there was no doubt that Microsoft was working hard to try to nip any sign of
Desktop Linux gaining any kind of foothold or momentum," but I think the
biggest answer is path dependence:
[https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/paths.html](https://www.utdallas.edu/~liebowit/paths.html)
and network effects. Once most people used MS DOS and then Windows, it was
easiest for most other people to do so too. Activation energy in switching is
hard, and a strong ecosystem begets a stronger ecosystem.

In many domains, there's an early period of fermentation and experimentation.
Famously, there were hundreds of American car companies around the end of the
19th and early 20th centuries. Today there are three and prior to Tesla the
the last successful one was founded decades ago. And it remains to be seen if
Tesla is in it for the long term.

In phones, we have Apple and Android and that's likely it. Path dependence.

Lots of people are excited about AR/VR because those fields seem relatively
open. But if they turn out to be important, they too are likely to have two
big players.

------
nofilter
For me it's pretty simple; as a front-end developer who needs to run
Photoshop, the latest, and in a stable way (Wine is not stable nor does it run
the latest Photoshop on Linux) I had two choices, none of which were Linux.
Windows and MacOS, now since I don't really do any gaming, but I do need Bash
and Windows design decisions are questionable at best, the fact that you can't
turn off updates without command-line hacking or other absurd stuff (and that
updates often break drivers) I decided to go with a Mac. It's not perfect, of
course, nothing is, but I'm happy and I don't see myself ever going on Linux
because

\- Poor app ecosystem

\- You tell me "Use GIMP", but with virtually no PSD support I say no and tell
that to all the designers that hand me out PSD-s to cut and they will tell you
that's never happening

\- Poor design decisions

\- Poor driver support

\- I don't want to hack in the command-line a full day to set up the thing,
like I've so far had to do when trying to use Linux

Of course, this is all subjective and I by no means am talking for everyone
else, but I'm quite sure my issues with Linux align with someone else's here
as well.

------
legulere
What is missing is that on the Linux desktop it does not simply “just work”.
You may not feel it anymore after you used Linux for a while. But if you leave
Linux for a year or two and come back you will see tons of small things that
are outright broken or where you need to fiddle with them to get them to work.

------
EdSharkey
The best (most productive, least off-the-wall) I can do year after year seems
to be to run an XFCE desktop. But its not polished (although the icon set got
refreshed recently which is nice.)

Poor UX for me seems to boil down to off-the-wall or geek fad UX decisions the
major desktop managers make with every new version that drive me back to XFCE.
Linux vendors, please focus on productivity and less on glitz/chasing the
unified mobile & desktop UX dragon. Please?!

Also, I can't pin exactly why I think this is, but linux desktop managers
always feel bolted on rather than integral to the experience - it doesn't
strike me as valued by the operating system vendor as much as the underlying
kernel. Maybe its an inconsistent frame rate thing or trackpad funkiness on my
underpowered HP laptop that has me so negative on the Linux feel.

------
megaman22
It's Office, silly. LibreOffice is, in a vacuum, a fine collection of
software, but stacked up against the juggernaut of the MS Office suite, it
can't compare. They're continually playing catch-up, since their mandate is to
be compatible with Office, with a fraction of the resources, and always having
to react to maintain compatibility. Likewise, businesses run on Outlook and
Exchange, to an overwhelming degree; most of the serious competitors have
faded away at this point - even five years ago, there were still a lot of
Domino shops, but IBM has divested their software divisions, and essentially
made that stack abandonware, and so everyone under the sun is moving to Office
365.

------
acomjean
For me its lack of desktop applications that may or may not work on the linux
distro I decide to use. I the lack of "it just works" is a huge problem. I own
a mac, and if I see an application supports apple I can be fairly certain it
works with my machine (hopefully my OS version) and it will be easy to install
and run.

Its fragmentation (so many distos...) that makes the app sales market quite
small so businesses can't (won't) make a go of making desktop apps.

Use linux servers everyday, its the desktop experience which was never really
polished.

I do want my next notebook to be a linux box though..

------
nickjj
I know this is controversial and you can call me crazy but, Microsoft is doing
a pretty damn good job at bringing Linux to the desktop.

Here me out for a second. Let's ignore how Windows 10 spies on you and other
side topics.

The real situation is this:

You're a developer who wants to run various Unix / Linux tools. This could be
anything from simple tools like grep, to entire development stacks (ruby,
python, postgresql, etc.). It could even be graphical tools like Sublime Text.

For that, you could just install any flavor of Linux but it's never that
simple.

Often times with web development you're also dealing with images, so now you
need a nice image editor. Sure GIMP exists, but it's not in the same league as
Photoshop, sorry. Sure, you could run a Windows VM inside of Linux but it's
also not as simple as that too.

A lot of us do other things with our computer besides web development. This
varies from person to person. Personally I like to play games on occasion and
a lot of games won't run on Linux, don't work with Wine and run terribly bad
inside of a VM. Dual booting is also an awful user experience.

Perhaps you're interested in creating videos too, or record podcasts, etc..
The audio and video tools on Linux are just no where near tools like Camtasia
and Screenflow. Unlike GIMP, there really isn't even a suitable audio or video
solution on Linux, and audio requires extremely low latency so you can't run
Camtasia in a VM. Dual booting also isn't an option because what if you want
to record Linux based web development videos?

Anyways, all of this is solved by Windows right now with the Windows Subsystem
for Linux. I can happily play games, record videos, process audio, run
Photoshop and do full time Linux based web development (with Docker too) all
from a single computer running Windows 10. No VMs or dual booting required,
and it's really fast.

If anyone is curious, here's how you can set all of that up:
[https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-wsl-and-mobaxterm-to-
cr...](https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-wsl-and-mobaxterm-to-create-a-
linux-dev-environment-on-windows)

~~~
Scarblac
Except that it's not actually Linux, it's the Linux userland.

Finally the year of GNU on the Desktop?

~~~
nickjj
Yep, but for most web / app development use cases that's really all you need.

For me, I'm more interested in what I can do with the computer I purchased.
WSL on Windows 10 gives me the ability to feel like I'm running both Windows
and Linux together.

If I could choose to run native Linux I would, but right now that's impossible
because Linux alone isn't suitable for the programs I run.

------
rbanffy
Why do we even expect Linux to have a dominant share of the desktop market?
Most computers are sold with Windows and most people don't care about what OS
they run. Not all people need a decent command line, the ability to easily
install and update software, a rich set of easily accessible language
interpreters and compilers, and an environment that is similar to the servers
most the internet runs on. Among those who would have an advantage from having
that, Linux and macOS are already the dominant OSs.

------
zzzcpan
> Canonical business model not working out

Well, failing to deliver a good product didn't really help neither their
business model, nor the Year of the Linux Desktop.

Polishing and repackaging existing software seems like a successful strategy,
but it can never make the Linux Desktop happen. On the other hand throwing it
all away and starting from scratch can, but needs exceptionally right people
to achieve. As far as I know no company like this exists today.

------
cpburns2009
Well, GNOME 3's lack of consistency and complete disregard for established UX
practices didn't help. Client side decorations are annoying and hurt
discoverability. Just give me a normal menubar and toolbar without fancy
animations and buttons that aren't the size of a postage stamps. GNOME 2 and
Windows XP/7 were the pinnacle of usable interfaces. It's all been downhill
from there.

------
jacobr
I switched from Linux (KDE) to Mac about 5 years ago, with some attempts to
switch back.

I recently got a laptop with Windows for some gaming for the kids, and I feel
Windows is actually less polished than Linux with KDE. Restarts, weird issues
with multiple users, sudden switches between Modern UI and something that
looks the same as the Windows 2000 I last used.

I really wonder when Windows will be usable enough for home users...

------
zimbatm
Because Linux is a kernel? It's just one piece in an ecosystem.

It would make more sense to ask why the Year of Gnome Desktop hasn't happened.
And the answer is easy if you compare the budget that Apple or Microsoft has
to create an integrated environment. Even with free helping hands, I bet that
RedHat is nowhere near the number of bodies that big corp can throw at it.

------
juancn
The experience is dismal, even basic crap still doesn't work. I installed mint
a couple of months ago (clean install), right after booting, the mouse doesn't
work. THE PS2 MOUSE DOESN'T WORK!!!

It's fine for servers, but for a desktop, you have to be masochistic to want
to use it, unless the only thing you use it for is to build software.

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jshaqaw
In my 20s and 30s I loved an OS I could hack around in and play with. Now I
just want my freaking email to work and the computer not to blow up every time
there is an upgrade. Most people are like that. Linux on desktop is neat and
all but not compelling as an alternative to “works well enough” for non-tech
obsessives.

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crehn
Terrible UX.

~~~
symlinkk
Not anymore.

GNOME on Fedora is more consistent and polished than Windows 10.

~~~
rantanplan
Unfortunately GNOME and consistency never went together.

From time to time I revisit the GNOME dektop to assess if it's a viable
alternative to my KDE.

What I still see is random, incoherent apps, meshed together, with the worst
possible default values set, for each one of them.

Also the idea that half-baked and ultimately broken extensions, could provide
basic functionality that should already be present in the first place, didn't
do them any favors. Even the plugin/extension installation mechanism is
broken!!

The general lack of configurability doesn't help either.

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oconnor663
[http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.th...](http://itvision.altervista.org/why.linux.is.not.ready.for.the.desktop.current.html)

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debacle
\- Ubuntu's approach was too fragmented + insular.

\- Microsoft is pushing hard in the consumer space.

