I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this post is. GNU/Linux is already ready for the desktop; I and others use it. The rest of the article is a mixture of 'X sucks because it's proprietary and doesn't work on Linux', which we already knew about and only the maker of X is to blame, and downright falsehoods such as 'Problems stemming from low Linux popularity and open source nature' -- the libre/oss nature of it is a problem? What?
The issue was never that Linux wasn't ready for the desktop. It's that the average user was never ready for the desktop. Perhaps evidenced by the fact that as soon as they were given the alternative of handheld computing appliances, they stopped even owning desktops in droves.
Don't worry though; those appliances are all powered by Linux or BSD at the end of the day anyway.
If there's somewhere Linux isn't quite ready for, it's the enterprise office environment...and it probably never will be, unless Microsoft really screws the pooch and Active Directory falls apart. With AS400's and DB2 still widely used across a variety of industries, I think it's plain to see that corporate America doesn't change much once it has a computing system established without having a REALLY good reason to do so.
> It's that the average user was never ready for the desktop.
Yeah. And we do little to educate in general, while MS and Google are busy selling Chromecrooks and Office licenses to kids to ensnare them in the corporate trench and profit from their data.
> the pooch and Active Directory falls apart
I suffer from this shitty 90s legacy code every day. MS has a good grip on corporate America.
I agree, most of the criticisms seem to concern overall unimportant technical issues. I'm using Linux since 2008 for all of my work and I haven't had any problems during the last ten years or so. I have no complaints about X, it just works fine.
What is hard in my opinion is migrating to a new machine or changing major hard drives. There is still no good migration assistant and so many things can go wrong with a major change. But that's pretty much my only complaint.
On the contrary, in my experience, unlike with Windows, migrating Linux to a new machine is trivial.
You can just move the SSD or HDD to another computer and there will be no problems because the OS has identified some change in hardware incompatible with your license and refuses to work.
Otherwise, you can just copy the old SSD/HDD to a new SSD/HDD, to clone the Linux installation, and all will work without problems (when copying, there are a few directories that must not be copied, e.g. /dev, /mnt, /proc, /sys, /tmp, but they must be created on the destination SSD/HDD; also the copy must be done with something like "/bin/cp --no-dereference --recursive --one-file-system --preserve=all", as the default cp loses data; I never use the default cp, but only an alias including the options mentioned above, to be sure that the copies are identical to the original).
The copying can also be done through the network, e.g. with rsync, while booting temporarily the destination computer from an USB stick or from a server via Ethernet.
With Windows, you cannot be sure that copying a SSD/HDD actually copies everything, and even if it would copy everything, the copy is unlikely to boot if the hardware is too different.
I have migrated or cloned Linux countless times, in a half of hour or whatever it takes to copy 1 or 2 terabytes of SSD, while with Windows I was forced to always do fresh installations and lose a lot of time to duplicate the old configurations. It is true however that I have not tried any commercial migration tool, as I would not pay for something that I only need infrequently.
>I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this post is. GNU/Linux is already ready for the desktop; I and others use it.
It's not exactly that you're not sure, it's more you've missed the point (or, rather, multiple points).
First, the article doesn't say that "Linux is not ready for the desktop" - or concern itself with this as an abstract question.
Second, a good chunk of it's literal purpose, it's to be a list of common annoyances in using Linux for the desktop. That's useful in itself.
Third, it doesn't even imply ONLY Linux has grievances. In fact, it explicitly states that you could have a similar list for Windows (and the author even goes on to list a few major and minor such issues).
Fourth, it's serves to let people considering to switch to Linux know that it's not all roses, as some advocates present it.
Also, I find the "GNU/Linux is already ready for the desktop; I and others use it" argument tired. I've used GNU/Linux for the desktop in 1998, but it sure as hell wasn't ready then. Using something on the Desktop (and even being satisfied with it) and it being ready for the Desktop are different things. In some ways it has matured a lot since 1998, but in other ways not so much.
Many use cases aside from "browsing, watching movies, writing some doc, and checking email" are miserable on Linux for the desktop. Case in point: someone is a vlogger (a category including hundreds of thousands today) and wants to edit video. They will immediately find that there are very limited proprietary options for NLEs (basically Resolve iirc), and very crude FOSS ones, which lack many features and crash a lot. They will also find that they might as well forget the plethora of supporting related software available on Windows and Mac.
> First, the article doesn't say that "Linux is not ready for the desktop" - or concern itself with this as an abstract question.
Well, it does, but in a sarcastic manner:
"Yeah, let's consider Linux an OS ready for the desktop :-)."
> Also, I find the "GNU/Linux is already ready for the desktop; I and others use it" argument tired. I've used GNU/Linux for the desktop in 1998, but it sure as hell wasn't ready then.
Conversely, that it doesn't work for certain people does not mean that "it is not ready", which the post does state (sarcastically) as I pointed out above.
> Many use cases aside...
I'm not sure how the browsing, docs and email is miserable, maybe you can expand on that. The video editing is indeed a bit limited from my experience too. However, I don't think "limited proprietary options" is a problem. The community largely and specifically avoids proprietary software. Proprietary incursions into the community are generally seen as a negative thing. And for the lack of codecs, software patents for the most part are to blame.
And then it just comes to my original statement; many things stated in the article are non-issues to most Linux users or just falsehoods:
- Neither Mozilla Firefox nor Google Chrome use video decoding and output acceleration in Linux.
Firefox does.
- NVIDIA Optimus technology is a pain
NVIDIA is a pain.
- You don't play games, do you?
I do.
- Linux still has very few native AAA games.
So "it's not ready" because it doesn't have AAA games? What a pitty.
- To be fair you can now run thousands of Windows games through DirectX to Vulkan/OpenGL translation (Wine, Proton, Steam for Linux) but this incurs translation costs and decreases performance sometimes significantly.
No, not 'significantly' for dxvk.
- Also, anti-cheat protection usually doesn't work in Linux.
For good reason. Blame the dev, and don't make it work on Linux.
- Microsoft Office is not available for Linux
Thankfully.
- LibreOffice often has major troubles properly opening, rendering or saving documents created in Microsoft Office.
And whose fault is this? Use ODT.
- Several crucial Windows applications are not available under Linux.
Thankfully. Also, 'crucial' is subjective.
- In 2022 there's still no alternative to Windows Network File Sharing.
As a GNU/Linux user for many years, I strongly disagree. This is a single thing which keeps millions of users away from Linux and hurts adoption dramatically. Of course it's intentionally done by the Micro$oft.
It's the same on Windows and it's what people use now, they're not gonna stay on office 2007 forever (although to be fair I have yet to work for/with someone who uses Office instead of Google docs or libreoffice, the only people I know who use "traditional" office are old people who got it with their computer)
They are sarcastic and rebuttals of the idea that 'Linux is not ready for the desktop' because it doesn't have things the author of the post considers necessary.
