Let's talk about how with iOS you can't change the default web browser, email, or calendar apps? If you remove Mail.app, install something like Airmail, and then click on a mail link, you're prompted to reinstall Mail.app.
I don't like this move by Microsoft, but they called out on shit like this more than other tech companies it seems.
For comparison, my Pixelbook lets me switch the default browser from Chrome to the Android version of Firefox. Considering that Chrome is basically the operating system itself, that's impressive.
It works reasonably well, and will expand to a vageuly-desktop-like look and feel (tabs on top, for example) automatically on tablets (or in this case laptop/tablet hybrids).
It doesn't integrate quite perfectly with ChromeOS, but that's not surprising. Supposedly Pixelbooks have built-in support for running normal Linux apps, so I might end up trying the desktop version of Firefox at some point.
One slight pro of it is that at least Chrome doesn't have 80% of mobile traffic as well due to iOS users being unable to switch default browser. I mean, that's the only pro.
Sure, but things are improving on that front. For example, they used to do the same thing with maps. Recently though they changed it so clicking on a map link asks you which map software you want to open it in.
That’s a solvable problem, if anyone cared enough to solve it. Write a 3rd party browser (yes I realize that it would be a shell over WebKit) and allow the user to choose which app handles third party urls like mailto and maps links.
Chrome for iOS already does something similar but you only get to choose between gmail and the native mail client.
This would only solve the problem of clicking mailto: links in one particular app (the custom browser), but it wouldn't help for all the other 999.999 apps that try to openURL a mailto:
They only collect data of the installation process. Once installation is complete, no additional data is collected. They've even publicly released the results.
>The collected data is not-personally-identifiable. Meaning that a user cannot be singled out or tracked based on the data he/she provided. Here’s what Ubuntu collects
> Version and flavor of Ubuntu you’re installing
> Whether you have network connectivity at install time
> Hardware statistics such as CPU, RAM, GPU, etc
> Device manufacturer
> Country
> Installation time
> Whether you choose auto login, installing third-party codecs, downloading updates during install
You can disable that very easily. And as far as I remember when I upgraded to Ubuntu 18.04 on my VM, it asked me whether I was ok with sending anonymous usage data (I believe the default choice was yes which is not ideal but was easy enough to turn off).
Even if you answer No, it will ping to their servers so that it can count users that did not want it. At least Canonical are honest about it and I'm sure you could at least prevent it with your firewall settings or maybe even by editing the hosts file.
Ubuntu comes with a shortcut to Amazon on the sidebar. Clicking it just opens Amazon.com in Firefox. It doesn't spy on you or anything, it's just a hyperlink.
> It doesn't spy on you or anything, it's just a hyperlink.
You are incorrect. It's much more than a hyperlink. It's an application which was installed in Ubuntu. It specifically runs:
The unity webapps runner manual says (among other things):
Application Options:
-a, --amazon Launch amazon (with geoclue store selection)
-i, --app-id Launch a webapp with a specific APP_ID
-c, --chrome Launch a webapp in default browser
Look at that. Amazon and Google. The --amazon switch tells amazon where you're at ("geoclue"), at the very least. And, Chrome being the "default" browser? That's funny, because Chrome isn't even installed.
Guess what that script does? If you even accidentally click the Amazon "hyperlink", you've now associated the _machine_ to a user.
Okay, ignore that. What else is default installed as webapps? Looking around the
/usr/share/unity-webapps directory shows only Google and Amazon.
> Such as?
In Ubuntu 16.04, the "Search your computer" will also search "sources" such as "Applications", "Dash plugins", "Files & Folders", "Google Drive".
Dash plugins include things like Facebook and Google Drive (again?)
At least the search bar has more applications than just the proprietary garbage. There's things like Flickr, Shotwell, Yelp, Picasa... hmmm.
I'm not a fan of that either, nor do I use Ubuntu (for other reasons).
However, in what.. 10 mins? you've been able to discover exactly what causes the "spying" and an idea on how to disable it. Perhaps in less than an hour you'll have a good idea on exactly what data is being sent.
Compare that to say, Windows, there we have no idea on exactly what data is being sent out or how to completely disable it (beyond being a company with volume licences or using firewall rules).
It doesn't compromise the users privacy in any meaningful way. Back in version 12.04 there was a scandal wherein searches on the desktop could return remote results from Amazon. Canonical countered that all data was going through them and no personal info was leaked but nobody actually wanted to see ads in their desktop search or share data about their files with Canonical thus this was changed in 14.04 or 14.10 if I recall correctly.
Essentially this hasn't been an issue in about 4 years.
> It doesn't compromise the users privacy in any meaningful way.
I would have to disagree. The mere fact that it's there and visible by default means it can be accidentally clicked on. Doing that opens a native application which loads an Amazon-provided javascript file. Cards are off the table after that loads.
> However, in what.. 10 mins? you've been able to discover exactly what causes the "spying" and an idea on how to disable it.
True, but that's only because I've been using the OS for a while. A lot of this is accumulated knowledge. There were a lot of gotchyas over the past 4.5 years (approx time I've been using Ubuntu .. coincides with my current employment time) that have been... eye opening.
Yes, it's still better than Windows as far as inspectability for the reasons you just identified. And it's still better than OS X as far as usability (my opinion). But it's still be very disappointing on many levels. I'm sure there are other things which could cause additional disappointments in Canonical that I have yet to discover.
Honestly I use Fedora at home. Even that isn't ideal -- I very much dislike the default GNOME environment and have repeatedly encountered trouble upgrading to different releases. I've been seriously thinking of just building my own personal distro.
Pity that 18.04 is basically a steaming turd, with plenty of broken things ootb. It's hardly surprising, because "you get what you pay for", and you pay exactly zero for it. Don't get me wrong, Linux purely from the command line is awesome, but the desktop experience sucks balls.
I feel like I'm getting a better experience for free than any that I paid for with Windows.
You get what you paid for is what ignorant people say about software. The entire software landscape is absolutely littered with very very expensive turds. Cost and quality don't seem to be terribly correlated.
> 18.04 is a steaming turd [...] the desktop experience sucks balls.
Based on your vocabulary, I'm assuming you don't install Ubuntu using the network installer and expert mode, and then create your own desktop environment starting with a good window manager like i3. A person like you is definitely better off using macOS or Windows.
> A person like you is definitely better off using macOS or Windows.
I'm not necessarily going to disagree with this - I switched from desktop Ubuntu to Mac and have hardly looked back because I really don't miss constantly dicking around with config files playing UI glitch whack-a-mole. Mac UI certainly has its own healthy share of warts - in fact I find it practically unusable without Divvy and Moom, for starters - but on the whole it's polished, functional, aesthetically pleasing, and usually doesn't get in the way of doing work. Those are all very important qualities to me as someone who spends a non-trivial amount of time doing things outside of a terminal.
Just because I'm capable of rolling my own desktop environment doesn't mean I want to or that it's a particularly good use of my time, and I imagine a lot of potential/would-be Linux users probably feel the same way. Being dismissive of that perspective is counterproductive if you believe that the world would be better off with more FOSS usage (as I do).
You could probably buy a laptop that comes with Linux. Set it to update on some regular schedule. Install whatever tools make you happy and have as little trouble as your mac.
"Rolling your own desktop environment" takes all of a few hours. I'm pretty sure you made as much of an investment learning tools for your new mac when you bought it.
I used Linux for a good number of years more than I've been using Mac. None of the things you are describing are as simple and hassle-free as you describe. You can get most things working smoothly enough with customization, but there is a baseline level of UI glitchiness in most distros that is very difficult, if not impossible, to overcome completely. It's not necessarily terrible but by comparison Mac is more psychologically ergonomic for me personally.
i3 + nixos + the same desktop follows with all my machines. With a simple declarative configuration. Nothing changes, nothing breaks. Emacs + st + firefox and all the programming languages just work.
Nope, I've got more important things to do than waste time on a near vertical learning curve. Apologies for not being a l33t h4x0r like you, but the situation is dire for ootb desktop Linux, which is a shame.
Hmm, how/when does that trigger? Right after reading this comment I started a screen recording in hopes of capturing the behaviour then installed Chrome and Firefox downloaded via Safari on a new Mac recently set up from scratch and saw no such notification.
I agree with you there. For the general population, be it family, grandma, or individuals that tend to operate outside the mindset of the general audience here, the learning curve is going to be a bit steeper if you were to put Ubuntu in front of them. However, every one of their newer releases has made strides in terms of ease of use and stability. Personally I think https://snapcraft.io/ lifts a HUGE burden off making popular software available to a non power user who might be new to linux.
I couldn't disagree more. Linux is fine for the kind of people who only use computers to consume content, but then again any personal web kiosk (like a phone or tablet) can easily serve that role so it isn't exactly a high bar.
The real problem areas are when people who want a personal computer try to color outside the lines of whatever the distro developer intended as a use case ("Why would you want to do that?" is a common and annoying response).
The point is that your Windows 10 drivers from a year ago still work with the Windows 10 update you did today. This is not true of Linux driver binaries.
I'm okay with directing "why would you want to do that?" at people that want to deliver binary drivers to their customers, since that makes them a lot harder to fix later.
But unless it's a gnome dev speaking, I don't think it's something commonly aimed at users.
> Linux is fine for the kind of people who only use computers to consume content
Consuming content these days often involves DRM, which rarely works on Linux. For example, if the context is books, good luck dealing with Adobe or Amazon DRM to read them on your Linux desktop (you can strip it, but it's a lot more technical than just clicking and opening it on Windows or Mac).
Or how about music? How do you sync your iPhone with your Linux desktop?
Consuming content consists of either connecting to services like Hulu Spotify Netflix Pandora or opening your favorite pirate site and downloading torrents to be consumed in any multimedia app.
Both strategies work fine under linux. Did you not know that Netflix and Hulu work on linux just fine?
Regarding iPhones I would imagine most people who run linux on the desktop just don't bother buying them. Did you know that Apple's global marketshare is only about 15%? More people actually buy just Samsung's android phones than iphones.
This is cherry picking. Yes, there are some services that work on Linux. There are many other popular services that do not, and I even gave specific examples.
Most people who run Linux on the desktop probably won't use iPhones, yeah. Which is because they're computer geeks. Which is to say, not the "kind of people who only use computers to consume content" at all.
In US, iOS market share is about 45% as of 2018. Globally, it's 20% (15% is counting smartphones only and ignoring tablets).
I'm not sure that's necessarily the reason to choose Android over iOS. Many use Linux on desktop because it is good enough or better than other choices, but might be ambivalent towards or disapproving of stock android. Android has its flaws and is far from being strictly better than iOS.
You can read amazon drm encumbered books with amazon cloud reader. You can run adobe digital editions via wine.
You can also read your ebooks on your nook, kindle, or tablet which would probably actually be a better experience.
You can buy dead tree books.
You can buy non drm encumbered books.
You can buy dead tree books and then go and download a digital version of the same work from library genesis knowing that you have supported the author but not drm. Then you can read on whatever device you like.
If you are poor you can skip the first step and just read the books.
Your local library still exists and is positively full of books.
Many libraries provide free access to technology books via Safari Books.
The claim that you can't enjoy books without windows is a curious claim when so many options exist.
"The real problem areas are when people who want a personal computer try to color outside the lines of whatever the distro developer intended as a use case ("Why would you want to do that?" is a common and annoying response)."
to be honest, put grandma in a XFCE distro with Windows 7/XP-like desktop and Chrome and she should be comfortable with anything.
Like Linux Lite distro[0], I'm running it right now and except for the inability of using super/windows key as part of multi-key shortcuts ala Windows 7, it's almost perfect as a drop-in replacement for the latter (for me personally and a couple of my friends)...
> to be honest, put grandma in a XFCE distro with Windows 7/XP-like desktop and Chrome and she should be comfortable with anything.
I did this awhile back. Grandma got upset that her library of Windows games, some of which she had been playing for over 15 years, weren't around anymore.
As more and more stuff has moved online, this is less of a problem, but my mother is still reliant upon Flash for certain online games.
Also those online experiences are, in general, inferior. They have lots of ads and pop-ups abound. The web pages are made as confusing as possible to try to entice viewers to click through to a "partner" and sign up for some service, etc etc.
Comparatively, the old Wheel of Fortune game my Grandma got 15 or more years ago (on a physical CD!) is better than anything available now.
Ha, that's what would happen with my dad. All he gives a crap about is his chess game. Hell, just moving to a new laptop with the latest version of Windows screwed up his access to that game for a bit and he had a meltdown.
If he weren't a grouchy old 85 year old man, not too receptive to fancy new technology, I'd buy him an iPad, put a nice chess game on it, and confiscate the PC.
Snap/Snapcraft is a perfect example of the pain points Linux ecosystem, because Snap and Flatpak are two different solutions to the same problem. What do you tell grandma if a Flatpak version of her application exists, but not a Snap one?
I've migrated multiple family members to Linux, and I've never had a single one ask how to install an apt. I just make sure all the applications they need (Libre office & Firefox mostly) are installed. This type of user isn't installing things on a regular basis, even on a windows machine.
IMO the real pain points are for more advanced users, I prefer to develop on a Linux box but I have always had to keep a windows installation maintained just for mech CAD software, there simply isn't anything decent avaliable for Linux.
What are the major annoyances offered by "the Linux Desktop"? That I have too many choices and what a headache it is to have to choose a working environment rather than have some particular paradigm forced upon me?
What model was it? Most manufacturers only test their hardware on Windows. Canonical maintains a list of devices that are certified to work with Ubuntu[1].
Be careful about trusting that certification. Note that the 3rd gen Thinkpad x1 Yoga[0] is "certified," however, there is a critical change in the BIOS that prevents the laptop from using s3 sleep mode, apparently to switch to some proprietary Windows sleep mode. Therefore, without any changes, when you close the lid, your battery will drain at about the same speed as if the laptop was running. This is obviously untenable.
The solution is to manually patch your BIOS, which doesn't always work and is extremely technical. It's also not a solution provided by Lenovo, so officially, there is no solution.
Ninjaedit: Hmm, it appears Lenovo may have finally issued a BIOS update to fix this issue.
I think the certification means, that all the hardware parts of the device are supported by the OS. The device itself might not even be tested to see if there are no other issues. Generally, it's a problem with newly released devices, that don't have many active users yet.
Sounds similar to my recent experience with Windows 10 - some of those things were fixed by manually installing vendor drivers, but one of them didn't work and figuring out why was a big challenge. On the same machine, GNU/Linux worked pretty much out of the box, you just had to configure the hidpi screen and install a daemon for automatic screen rotation (which was also something I couldn't get to work on Windows after a fresh installation).
> What are the major annoyances offered by "the Linux Desktop"?
Spend about 5 minutes poking around on the internet with your eyes open and you'll see. If you're too lazy for that, this guy has put together a convenient, but by no means complete, list [0].
> rather than have some particular paradigm forced upon me?
You have many paradigms forced upon you, they're just paradigms you happen to be comfortable with so you don't count them.
> Spend about 5 minutes poking around on the internet with your eyes open and you'll see. If you're too lazy for that, this guy has put together a convenient, but by no means complete, list.
Why don't you just say what they are, rather than trying to offload and displace the question?
> You have many paradigms forced upon you, they're just paradigms you happen to be comfortable with so you don't count them.
Such as what? Monolithic kernel vs microkernel? What paradigm is forced upon me?
> Such a Linux Desktop evangelist comment chain. Step one: ask what problems people are talking about. Step two: completely dismiss and downvote all responses.
Except what problems have you pointed out? You're just hand-waving and saying "Oh course the Linux Desktop is unusable. Just at random webpages - that proves it!"
> Why don't you try it instead of sealioning on HN about it.
I'll probably try searching for "sealioning" first.
> the Linux desktop UX
which is the Linux desktop UX? We're not talking about Windows Aero or Apple Aqua. There is no "Linux desktop UX". If you're thinking of Gnome in particular, I'd agree with you though, but there are lots of other viable choices.
On the other hand, I've never had my Linux desktop crash for decompressing a big ZIP archive. Of course, credit where credit is due, Explorer crashing isn't necessarily all that dramatic these days.
The funny thing is, even when decompression "works" on Windows 10 (that is, when you join hands in prayer and don't disturb the machine), you could theoretically just download the decompressed files faster over the internet. I can only guess the there's something fundamentally broken about Windows and file systems because many operations are so ridiculously slow no matter the hardware. It's perhaps my biggest gripe about modern Windows, aside from the actual desktop (working with multiple windows) being very bare and annoying to use, useless set of default applications, and that the built-in localized keyboard layout is obsolete and thus quite restricted as far as punctuation goes.
> On the other hand, I've never had my Linux desktop crash for decompressing a big ZIP archive.
Yeah but I have, on multiple occasions, installed updates through a Linux package manager and after a reboot been brought to the console.
> I can only guess the there's something fundamentally broken about Windows and file systems because many operations are so ridiculously slow no matter the hardware.
NTFS is bad handling a large number of small files.
> aside from the actual desktop (working with multiple windows) being very bare and annoying to use,
How so? I love the hotkeys for snapping Windows, and Windows also has hotkeys for moving windows between monitors.
Lots of third party utility apps exist that can extend this functionality out.
I haven't had any of those problems in the last decade.
I have, however, spent a whole day trying to install Windows 10 because of obscure "can't find drivers message" which turned out really meant "you should unplug your install usb and replug it into a different usb port and then I can find the drivers on it".
Or trying to work with students on a Swift project, only to find out that the MacOS file system pretends to understand Unicode file names, but really ignores them.
> Or trying to work with students on a Swift project, only to find out that the MacOS file system pretends to understand Unicode file names, but really ignores them.
Wait, really? HFS stores Unicode file names in (according to Wikipedia) the "Apple-modified variant of Unicode Normalization Format D)", but it really does store them, I think (unlike case, which it preserves but ignores, which basically means it guarantees wrong behaviour).
I recently tried to install antergos which is basically arch.
Graphics drivers didnt work during install, no big deal, I'll just use text mode. Except the text mode didnt work either for some reason. To fix the issue I would have had to compile my own image, or to trust some random guy on github that he didnt put a rootkit in his installer.
There are definitely annoyances like these which you dont have on windows/mac. You dont need to be a good programmer/hacker to fix issues like this, yet on linux, you sometimes do.
While I really love linux and its distributions, you cant expect endusers to run them without big issues
Who the hell would recommend an Arch flavor to ordinary users? Windows/MacOS should be compared to Ubuntu/Fedora(/Tubleweed). Arch is not ready for anyone who is not very interested in their OS.
I wouldnt recommend Arch to an enduser, that was me trying to install it and failing.
Can ubuntu nowadays install nvidia drivers or does that still not work? For an enduser "installing graphic drivers" is not particularely easy ("what is a driver, why do I need it", etc), yet something pretty basic ("why does this [linux compiled, opengl] game run at 1 fps?")
The work laptop I'm typing this on has NVidia graphics, but all the driver stuff was handled automatically in the installation process and I never even thought about it. I just checked and found the setting where I can stop using proprietary drivers but you have to go out of your way to find that sort of thing.
Arch is pretty much meant for people who are comfortable with this kind of failures. It even expects you it install it by yourself, with no installer, so well...
Such a Linux Desktop evangelist comment chain. Step one: ask what problems people are talking about. Step two: completely dismiss and downvote all responses.
Not really. The only problems I've encountered were problems with drivers for esoteric devices. Still really annoying, but whether that's worse or better than Windows' problems depends on what devices you use and what values you have.
The real problems for me are:
- outdated packages or unstable rolling-distro (OpenSuse Tumbleweed is surprisingly good, but not as well-supported as Ubuntu/Fedora)
- bad game support (few titles and shoddy Windows ports)
My only Apple computer is my iPad and I have the opposite complaint. I've never installed a browser and don't really want to as Safari works well enough for me. However, when an app goes to open a web page, it opens a dialog asking if the page should be opened in Safari or Chrome. I'll pick Safari and check the box that remembers this setting. Then, a few weeks later, it will ask me again.
Worse still, these options are a lie — it says Safari or Chrome but the "Safari" option doesn't actually open Safari, it just loads the requested page in an embedded web view. Assholes.
Are you sure it does that? I've always used Firefox and Chrome on my Macs and I can't remember ever seeing anything like that. This include my Mojave beta machine.
TBF, I automate my installs so both Firefox and Chrome are installed from the command line via brew cask. Maybe that's why.
Ah, right. Considering the first thing I do with a new mac is install Firefox and Chrome (front-end developer) then maybe it’s just been unlucky timing that it always pops the message up as I’m loading a competing browser.
